Maya Bachmann | nourishment, community, & acceptance

a conversation with someone I've admired for their lifestyle

I started this newsletter because I’d decided to start calling myself a creative. It was a word I shied from because it felt like it belonged to other people who maybe deserved it more, or were somehow born with it. I didn’t have to feel so distant, though. Some of these were people I knew and were not inaccessible to me. I had the idea to interview these friends and acquaintances to see what life and success and creation mean to them, and whether I and others like me can embody some of that in our own lives.

The first in mind to speak to was Maya Bachmann. We meet for lunch when the bout of LA rain finally ends and I tell her it wasn’t because I knew of her work as an artist, or that she would consider herself an artist at all (though I guessed, correctly, that she does). It was because nearly years ago, I was moved by an Instagram story of hers. Sat by the window of Joy (a restaurant in Highland Park—Maya’s turf since childhood), I described a vague scene of Maya living in the wilderness, talking about swimming in rivers and walking in the woods. Something about that lifestyle struck me. 

Across the table, Maya wears dangling beaded earrings and her hair down. She’s ordered a rice bowl I barely give her time to eat. That Instagram story, she tells me, was from when she lived in an ashram in Pennsylvania. “That was one of the happiest moments of my life,” she says. “I felt strong. I was a dedicated yogi. I was up at four AM, doing my practice, doing my prayers in the morning, being fully devoted to being of service.” 

Maya says she worked to help host retreats at the ashram, and that she volunteered at a farm in her bare feet, and played naked in a river like a child when it was summertime. “I’ve gotten to live in places and ways where I’ve been fully present, no phone, no cell service. And it’s the greatest thing. Because you’re literally confronting yourself and being yourself at all times.”

Now: back on the Eastside in Los Angeles where Maya and her mother moved from Mexico when she was eight. She says she’s actually battling a cell phone addiction. But Maya finds joy in the city through her building of community. 

She’s quite young—just celebrated her twenty-first in Bar Flores—and having decided not to pursue college, Maya’s spent the years since high school with a handful of jobs, all people-facing. Logistics coordinator at the ashram, a barista in her neighborhood; recently, an office assistant at a post-production company. When we met, at a nude dinner party hosted by Füde, Maya had helped organize the event then had welcomed each of us personally. 

I felt then and every time we met after, a startling warmness from Maya, memorable even though it’s only been a few times. I think of her fondly from even earlier today, jumping, waving hands overhead while I ran toward her from down the block (traffic from the Valley made me late). 

Maya says it’s taken her years, but she’s built a collection of friends in the world around her so that she can walk down the streets of Highland Park and run into someone and say, “Hey! Whattup! It’s been a while, how are you?”

“And I feel like that has filled my cup in ways I cannot describe.”

When it comes to her art and personal projects, things happen naturally for Maya. She was an only child who grew up around her creative mother’s friends and their conversations. “And I’ve had relationships in LA as a young kid, being around producers and creative models for artists. So, the creating aspect has always come easily to me. I wouldn’t say it’s like, my purpose or my pursuit of passion. But it’s part of my life. It’s part of being and expressing the moments I’m living or the hardships or challenges I’m confronting.” 

“What do you feel like your purpose is?” I ask. It’s my favorite sort of question.

“I think it all comes down to where I feel the feelings I want to be feeling,” says Maya. “I want to feel calm and I want to feel grounded in myself, to be capable of experiencing whatever comes my way.” She says she wants to feel useful in her community, feeding people and creating space—and that she wants to express herself! Inspired in part by her production company job, Maya has been working on a number of personal film projects, recording friends in intimate moments or her grandfather on a fly-fishing trip. She also (being a certified yoga teacher) hosts breathwork classes in a friend’s real estate office. 

“I feel like that’s part of my purpose,” Maya goes on. “It is not one thing, it is multiple things that have the underlying foundation of nourishment, inspiration,” she counts on her fingers, thinking about it, “love. Overall just acceptance, you know?” 

“Of yourself? Of the moment?” I say. The restaurant is loud, ever full. Something hip and beat-centric plays on the speakers. 

Maya nods. “Yeah,” she says, smiling. “Both.”

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Follow Maya on Instagram here. Thank you for reading.

Z