My Year of Accidental Wandering

By VAWAA guest, Flo Cheng

Flo Cheng shares reflections from her VAWAA apprenticeship with land artist Kees in Umecuaro, Mexico, where she explored the practice of land art and the unexpected lessons that come from wandering without a clear destination.

A couple months ago, my mother proudly claimed to me that she negotiated to go walking in the forest with my father if, and only if, he agreed to share where they were going. He agreed. Compromise. For context, my father loves walking in the forest (an OG forest bather, if you will) for gentle exercise and had been coaxing my mom to join him. His version of walking is more like a meandering: at times following a path, other times a tree catches his eye and pulls him another direction. She was proud because it was an effort (and success!) in setting boundaries–something, like most of us, she is working on. Curious, I asked her why that mattered (to be clear: where they were going, not the boundaries). And she seemed a bit agitated recalling the memory of my father’s wandering. It seemed to bother her to go somewhere with no destination in mind, or perhaps, it was the idea of doing something to no end.

It dawned on me that I spent the last year accidentally wandering. It, too, was deeply frustrating and I felt like I fought with myself the entire time. I made the decision in 2024 to finally give myself the space and time to explore ideas that had been percolating in my head for a while. Threads of ideas for books, art, workshops and many things I couldn’t even name but that felt urgent. My body needed space to breathe: to take in new experiences, new people, new energy.

Ideas sometimes feel like an intellectual experience where dots connect, fit together and form strategies and next steps. But ideas, I learned, can also be felt in our bodies. And sometimes, irritatingly deep. At the time, I felt it as migraines, as digestive issues, as muscle knots, as pendulum mood swings from ecstatic joy to bouts of depression. And then sometimes your body will show you a different way, one that doesn’t make sense logically but that feels right. And so you follow it.

That decision led me to my year of accidental wandering. My 2025 started out as a trip to Mexico as a corporate life detox, first in the mountains of Oaxaca, then to the countryside of Morelia and then back to the city in CDMX. But it was in the home and art studio of two artists outside of Morelia that I received my first lesson in wandering—though I didn’t recognize it as such at the time. I was there to apprentice with one of these artists and learn how to make “land art”. What is land art you ask? Making art out of things from the land. Obviously. Technically yes but respectfully no.

Wandering and creating with VAWAA artist Kees.

I was genuinely excited to walk the forests with him and make stuff. Our first walk began just outside the studio, a dirt road that appeared to draw a rough-edged perimeter around a lake. From the studio, we took a right and then we were off. We chatted about past artists that had visited and what they created. He shared stories of a guy that gathered the dried up corn husks from his neighbor’s field and constructed a large sun out of the pieces.

He told me about a quiet Japanese man who hauled large stones collected from along this same dirt road into the lake (which was at low tide during his stay), hoisting them precariously on top of thin metal beams like gigantic lollipops. He was quiet all but for really deep huffing exhales as he traveled back and forth between lake and road. I was completely taken by the stories and felt myself itching to start making stuff. When would we start? We kept walking and he eventually asked me if there was a spot I liked where I’d want to build something. Yes! We’re starting! We found a nook about 45 minutes or so walk down the road, although I should note that time is an unreliable metric here because we were moving slowly and stopped often.

At our spot, I looked around and was so proud of the artist I was becoming (lol). I was thinking to myself: I know exactly what I’m going to do here and I figured it out so quickly! My brilliant idea was to weave the shit out of the trees, using this straw-like grass we found lying by the road. The woven branches, I envisioned, would become a sort of a larger-than-life colored pencil drawing outlining shapes amongst the trees. Lol, I know.

We went back to the house for lunch and my mind was buzzing with ways to weave the branches. I started testing out knots and loops with the grass and while some bent, most were too brittle and snapped. I was determined though and figured out a way to keep the knots in place by resigning to accept some would just be shorter strands. My plan was to weave as many strands as possible this afternoon, string them around the branches and then, boop, masterpiece.

A masterpiece! Land art created by Flo during her VAWAA apprenticeship with Kees in Umecuaro, Mexico.

We took a few brittle strands to the site and they refused to wrap. Still determined, I hunted for new supplies and found yarn and string from my teacher’s supply bag (he knew, didn’t he). I played around and was able to more tightly wrap the strands together to make larger surfaces of color. Encouraged, I spent the rest of the afternoon winding string around and around branch after branch. When it started to get dark and time to walk back, we gathered our tools and took a quick glance at my work-in-progress before heading to the house. WTF. I couldn’t see anything. After all of that, the string just disappeared! At this point, I’m starting to feel like I made a mistake. That maybe I wasn’t cut out for this and that I suck at art. I wondered how I was going to last one more week. I cried that night.

The next morning, it still stung so I sketched out a few ideas (insurance perhaps) convincing myself that having back up plans in my pocket could keep me on track should something not work again. He must have sensed my frustration from the day before and shifted our chat away from stories about the past artists and instead about an invasive vine. The vine had taken over a beautiful tree in their garden and forced them, reluctantly, to cut it down. I learned it was a type of grape vine that when wrapped around trees, suffocates them. Sometimes you can cut the vine in time to save the tree, but other times you can’t, he tells me. I wondered how it felt to be suffocated like that.

On our walk that day, he pointed out these vines curling around different trees. I noticed how cleverly camouflaged they were in color and contour. We kept walking and occasionally he would cut down a piece of vine for me and I giggled at the water squirting out of it like a leaky pipe. As we approached our site, my heart sank a bit, suddenly remembering our assignment (make something with the land) and realizing I already lost one day to a silly idea I had yesterday. Perhaps my mind spinning made my body freeze, but either way I think he could sense I was paralyzed. Always encouraging, he suggested I just pick something up and do something with it. And that something would lead to another thing. Relieved to have been given permission to start, I did just that. I picked up the first thing that came into view (a vine) and started playing with it.

I noticed how supple they were and how easily they bent in my hands. I also noticed how it wanted to bend a certain way, so I followed along. That bend led to a curve in a different direction and so on. I was braiding the vine but it was the vine showing me how to do it. Each one I played with wanted to move in its own way. It felt delightful to discover shapes emerging, shapes that started to look like new things: a treasure box, a dream catcher, a bird cage, a pendulum.

This is how I started to pay attention. I noticed cows roamed freely here and that they love nibbling on string (remember the supply bag?). I noticed a stone sculpture in the garden was their cat’s drinking bowl. I noticed the etching in other stones looked like constellations. I noticed that my room had the best view of the lake. I just started noticing things. Somehow, I allowed myself to forget why I was here and just be there instead.

Land art created by Flo during her VAWAA apprenticeship with Kees in Umecuaro, Mexico.

When I came back to NY after the trip, everyone asked me what I made at the studio. Show me the land art! It was funny and frustrating, not knowing quite how to explain what I did there since ultimately, what I learned was to stop making things.

NYC is a place that shouts and orders us to make things. Make shit happen to be exact. The New York minute is 60 seconds of pure productivity: multi-tasking, talking over people and walking really fast. So returning here was a jolt to my system. I was immediately faced with my new rhythm crashing into the pace of the city. Those initial ideas for books, art, workshops came flooding back to me like a tsunami of to-dos. My body felt like it was being pulled down under and in every direction. It was difficult to remember what it felt like to pay attention when everything was demanding my attention.

I went into problem-solving mode. I constructed a daily and weekly routine that would give me structure to hack away at everything I had to do. Every hour was pre-planned and thought through. Optimized. Time and energy are our most valuable currencies, is what they say. So my time and energy became my most optimized assets. I optimized the shit out of them. Even my morning meditations were organized. Cup of cacao. Candle. Crystal. Clock: 30 minutes. I fought my mind when it drifted. I fought my body when it wouldn’t sit still. I sat the 30 minutes, but it didn’t make me feel any more relaxed and definitely, not any more productive. The compound effect of my militarized organization was that my once bendy body (years of yoga) became really stiff. Instead of isolated muscle knots, it felt like my entire body seized into one large knot. I was cramming information into my system as though I was a metal box that could be plugged in and out.

It would work much more smoothly to say that I snapped. But I didn’t. It was a gradual stiffening and sitting in that rigidity without having any awareness of it. Luckily, I have large windows in my home that, despite the concrete, offered me an unobstructed view of the sky. Staring out the window every day somehow hacked away at something inside me. I was inside looking out and eventually I started breaking up my day spending more time outside. Sometimes I would walk around the block between calls or appointments. Sometimes I would loop further down towards the park. Sometimes I would just walk aimlessly for however much time I had that day between things.

Eventually, I began to crave this time outside. I began to carve out more time between things to allow for more blocks and bigger loops. Over time, I didn’t have to keep time as much and I could sense when I needed to go home.

Mark making through land art

The last trip my mother and I spent together, just us two, was the road trip in Oaxaca preceding my stay with the two artists. We drove from OAX airport to a tiny treehouse three hours deep in the mountains relying on shoddy reception to navigate us to our destination. Service was in and out, but we trusted the road was more or less leading us to where we needed to go. We laughed at how chaotically polite the drivers in this part of Mexico were. There was absolutely no respect for lanes and you had to really watch for cars coming at you from all sides. But we noticed that slower cars always respectfully drove closer to one side or another to allow faster cars to pass. It was unspoken, but we eventually fell into this same rhythm of swerving side to side, giggling to each other at how silly and psycho it was. Hours passed. At some point, we accidentally realized we arrived.

Written by Flo Cheng. 

Learn more about Kees’s land art apprenticeship in Umecuaro, Mexico.

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