I told a friend that I’m studying to be a qigong instructor. I paused, feeling the smooth curve of the teacup. How to explain?

Actually, what I want is to talk to people about their bodies. I want to poke them and ask: how does it feel to be in there?

Well, no, actually I want to check on their aliveness. I want to ask them when they wake up in the morning: Are you excited? Or do you yearn to return to unconsciousness?

Or, really—what I want to talk about is death. After they plug in their phone and turn off the light, I want to lean over and whisper in their ear: Does your life make sense, given that one day you will be out of mornings?

And… well, actually, I don’t want to talk to them. I want to talk to you. I want to come to your house and peer into your cabinets and toss out your hoarded collection of shoulds and maybes, so that all that’s left is those few possessions that anchor you to love and whatever god you wink at when you’re feeling lucky.

We’ll open your bedroom closet and look through your selves. The Professional in that jacket you wore before you got a raise and lost your confidence. Your Ideal Self looking sexy in two-sizes-too-small pants (tags still attached), and on and on until we get so deep in the closet we find a box you forgot existed.

We open it. And there, curled up in the fetal position, is the Buried Child, still hiding and shaking in a yellow striped shirt, and we gently stroke them on the back, saying shhhhh, honey. It’s okay, it’s okay.

We’ll go to the bathroom and pour your festering grief for the world out your eyeballs, and when you stand up from crying on the toilet I’ll give you a long deep hug in which I lean into your heart and plant a dandelion seed whose roots will eat your heavy darkness and turn it into yellow flowers.

Next we’ll go to the park.

We’ll lie on the grass and breathe sun through our pores and chuckle deep into our bone marrows. By now you’re feeling so liminal that a faint memory bubbles up. It’s of that time you thought to come out of the sleepy void and don a flesh-body, with all its aches and pains and pisses and poos, and come to this rock in the nowhere-neck of the universe, to be bound by gravity with billions of other scared flesh-bodies and their bad ideas and bombs and offensively linear buildings.

Why this seemed like a good idea, you can’t remember.

For here, being, just being, is so very hard, and over the decades there are so many scary things. But long ago you found a real neat trick to make it bearable, to block that torrent of terror that makes your heart shake:

Build a wall between you and Life.

So brick by brick you detached from life and it got less scary, except the more bricks you added the more hollow you felt, but you kept on building because the fear took on ever scarier shapes, like, I Like Them, Will They Like Me? and Your Rent Is Late and A New Heat Record for April and Did You Hear the News? And so you walked faster and faster through your days, hoping to make it out unscathed. You walked your safe routine until your ruts became walls too tall to leave.

You share this with me as we laze under a wide oak, the grass beneath us pressing patterns into our arms. I mention that if you’re walling off your aliveness you’re also walling off your joy—aliveness is the river, and joy comes when you stop fighting it.

When do you remember feeling joy?

You close your eyes. You remember dancing in the kitchen. When was that…?

Do you want to find that joy?

Yes, you say.

You close your eyes and follow my voice down a spiral staircase, your hand brushing the scraggly moss and cool stone. Down and down, deeper and deeper, until you come to a landing where the air is still.

And there it is: a wall.

You touch one of the bricks. You’re dancing in the kitchen, singing. Your mom, lying on the couch with another migraine, yells, DID YOU NOT HEAR ME, FOR THE LAST TIME, BE QUIET! You don’t want your laughter to disturb her anymore.

You touch another brick. You’re at your new school. You’re so happy to have found kids to sit with at lunch that you make the rawr rawr lion noises that made your old friends laugh. But these kids rumple their noses and ask: Are you retarded?

Brick by brick you hid Joy away to make sure you would always Get Love.

Now as you feel the feelings the bricks were blocking, they crumble to dust. More memories, more feelings, more bricks crumble. A small gap opens in the wall—enough to see Joy on the other side.

As Joy smiles, the light shines out your eyes, too.

I count you back up the staircase, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

When your eyes open, you blink at the afternoon sun and ask: Okay, well. How do I stop making fear-bricks?

It depends, I say. It might take you twelve years of sincere prayer punctuated by sporadic tours of rock bottom, or finding one person who truly believes in you and occasionally working up the courage to call them, or twenty-nine lifetimes of being so scared you abort your flesh-body to return to the sleepy void and twiddle your spirit-thumbs until you forget how scary it was and try again.

But I have done all of those things and I still make fear-bricks, I say with a shrug, so I’ve decided it’s simpler to just do qigong to melt the fear-bricks before they harden and get on with it. As the ancient Taoists said, “C’est la vie.”

Here, let me show you a qigong move that will help, I say. It’s called shaking the bones for joy.

It’s not actually called that, I admit, but trust me–qigong is thousands of years old and many things have been lost to time.

I start the shaking in my hips, building it up slowly until it vibrates down my limbs, up my spine, and out my head. I shake my butt back and forth, as if recalling what it feels like to wag a tail. You mirror my movements, albeit adding a dubious expression. You’re trying to trust me, trying to get into it, trying to shake loose from self-consciousness.

Together we shake, and shake, and shake. People in the park walk by and see us, weirdos shaking and jumping and waving our hands in the air like people used to do long ago, when the distance between past and future was still walkable.

A woman’s poofy white dog makes a beeline for us, yap yap yap yap yap yap yap, and for a moment she lets the leash go slack—something in her also attracted to us—before she clamps down on the leash and her jaw and marches on, because she can smell that what we’re doing threatens the walls inside of her, and she needs those walls, she’s spent her whole life perfecting those walls, she’s managing her cholesterol, she’s getting her steps in, she’s measuring her front yard’s tulip plantings so they won’t come up askew like last year, which bothered her more than she could explain.

A guy walks by with his girlfriend and he looks at our shaking and he says to her, I’ll bet that feels good, because he feels it too, and he’s gotten weary of his walls and sometimes late at night he wishes he could rent a psychic bulldozer and fuck it, just feel it all man, just feel it all.

Hearing him loosens you up. Now as you shake you notice a fresh spaciousness. The energy circulates, like a torrent of water through a dry riverbed. As you shake you loosen the fear-bricks you’ve been building. You shake hard and they crumble and those crumbles crumble into energy that recirculates into your lungs, which open to the world, and you become not a scared three-year-old in a yellow-striped shirt but one of the trillion mouths of god, all fed by a source which swirls through your open heart and dancing limbs, and rises out your mouth as a whoop.

Years later, you’re lying comatose in a hospital bed, as you have been for ten days. In a weary voice, your spouse tells the nurse: it’s time, switch off the ventilator.

The ventilator gives one unceremonious long loud BEEEEP.

Then your life flashes before your eyes.

You know how, when you watch a movie a second time, you notice new things? Viewing your life again, you notice that day in the park. The whoop that rose out of your mouth before you could stop it—that was the sound of when you stopped clinging to the riverbank of life and let its wild current take you.

You lift free from your body and hover over it, looking back at its blue lips and grey skin. You’re glad to be out of that cramped and complaining flesh-body, but you will miss shaking its bones for joy.

The sun of Lisbon was like heaven pouring down from a sublime gravy pot. It ricocheted off bright buildings, nowhere to go but into me. Despite being California-born, I had never known light so insistent.

When I lived in Lisbon several years ago, I lapped up the sun like a scurvy-riddled sailor sucking limes. I sought to be like the sun—to radiate, to be admired for my shining. I bleached my hair and dressed in gold, gleaming things.

I had left Berlin for Portugal for the sun.

Being in Berlin was like loving a manic depressive. I had arrived on the first day of spring and fell hard during the onset of her mania: canals flocked with beer drinkers, clubs emptying into daylight, bass vibrating whole city blocks.

Then came October: five months of winter, a gray sky so fixed it deserved its own Pantone.

I stayed loyal for years, until months of covid lockdown beneath that unrelenting gray sky found me perusing Portuguese housing listings. I left Berlin for Portugal like a married man leaving his loyal but depressive wife for a flashy tan thing who smiles easily.

When the honeymoon wore off, I discovered my mistake—Portugal had a beautiful smile, but Berlin was like living inside a giant electric heart. I missed her.

The same stinginess that made me flee Berlin rather than pay the cost of winter led me to skip paying my lawyer another €1,200 and complete my Portuguese visa application myself. When my visa was denied, I rehired the lawyer to deduce my error: a single wrong checkbox.

The letter from the immigration office gave me six weeks to leave. When the time was up I began an international homelessness, drifting from country to country in a privileged nomadism that looked glamorous and felt lonely.

In Bangkok I admired the sun through a polluted haze. On a ferry to a Thai island, I listened to Moby’s God Moving Over the Face of the Waters and tried to photograph, well, God moving over the face of the waters.

I hoped God was there on those waters, because I didn’t know what I was doing.

In the bungalow next door, a smiling Irishman relaxed in a hammock. At first I bristled at his friendliness. I did not know that his inviting me to his dinner table would be the first plank in a delicate bridge of synchronicities leading me to my next life.

I imagined a latticework of hidden beings routing us toward our destinies, a quiet bureaucracy of fate. Sometimes they guided my hand to the wrong checkbox. Sometimes they placed obstacles that only later revealed themselves as doors.

I resented their every appearance. They were in the way of my plans.

When I inexplicably couldn’t log into my old German bank account, I returned to Berlin to sort it out.

The smiling Irishman had set a flurry of occurrences in motion, one of which was meeting Jesse, who just happened to be in Berlin then, too. Over miso soup, he mentioned he’d be going to Turkey for November.

“Can I join?”

“Sure.”

In Istanbul the calls to prayer ricocheted across the buildings the way the sun had in Lisbon. Jesse offered his hand as we walked through crowded marketplaces, like an electron offered to stabilize me. We fell into a secure covalent bond.

We settled in his home in North Carolina, where the sun took on a deeper meaning: life-giver. It sank into silicon leaves, feeding a flurry of instruments that converted sun into heat, cold, internet, light, and music. Sunlight cooked our food, sunlight hauled water from 150 feet underground, sunlight cooled us from sun itself. Sunlight even charged our car. I imagined riding a sunbeam as I drove to get sun-given groceries.

The sun went into me and put me to work—another instrument. I grew vegetables, hauled water, cooked food from scratch. Day by day I learned how to be one part of a life-growing community.

When I floated around the world, everything was exciting and optional. Local workers, paid far less than me, took care of my every whim. Everything was easy, and I was sad.

Here, I was the worker. I cooked and cleaned and carried water. I was no longer the sun demanding attention—I flowed where I was needed, nourishing quietly.

Old friends struggled to remember the off-brand state in which I now lived. “Tennessee? South Carolina?” Some charitably tried for the closest trendy place: “You’re in Asheville… right?”

They didn’t know the magic of low places.

Ordinary days spent in the woods slowly healed me. My fingers loosened their clutch on fear, trusting what life brought. I did not dress in gold, nor even look in the mirror. I learned from elders and watched children grow. Freed from excited bustling, I helped others.

One morning I woke to find growing inside me the very thing I had searched for across the world’s high and coveted places: a soft, whole joy.

Ursula Le Guin writes in her translation of the Tao Te Ching:

True goodness
is like water.
Water’s good
for everything.
It doesn’t compete.
It goes right
to the low loathsome places, and so
finds the Way.

I am glad those invisible beings led me here.

I wanted to be the sun, but I didn’t know how good it feels to be water.

I worried about my wonderful new partner having to take care of me through early onset dementia. Because surely that was what I had, or possibly a brain tumor?

After all, thinking often felt like driving a toothpick through molasses. And my energy would run out inexplicably. But what was possibly most scary was occasionally feeling like I didn’t know where my body was in space.

All of this seemed unfair given my devotion to a healthy lifestyle—home-cooked $$ organic clean food, daily exercise, and plenty of sleep.

The Microbiome Hunch

One day I decided to get serious about fixing my brain fog and fatigue. I had a hunch that it was microbiome related, so I ran an experiment.

I tried two things:

1. Taking a spore-forming probiotic (using the one that my partner said helped cure his IBS)

2. Eating homemade natto—a Japanese dish of fermented soybeans—first thing each morning

Why might this work?

The Brain Needs Butyrate and Spore-Forming Probiotics Bake It

Spore-forming probiotics are different from your normal probiotics and the strains found in yogurt. Their spore shell survives the stomach’s harsh acidic environment to spawn in your lower intestine. Once there, they go to work turning soluble fiber into butyrate, which you might think of as “miracle-gro” for your brain.

Butyrate does a whole buncha stuff for the brain:

• Fuels neurons

• Controls neuroinflammation

• Strengthens the blood-brain barrier

• Supports mitochondrial function

• Improves gut-brain communication

And when you don’t have much of it, you feel like I felt: fatigued and brain fogged.

All of this leads to what you would expect: Studies using spore-forming probiotics have shown improvements in brain fog, cognition, and mood.

So why would you need to take a probiotic? Why don’t you have these bacteria in you already?

Well, I’m not saying antibiotics are the villain but antibiotics are the villain. Don’t get me wrong—antibiotics are life saving and all that, and my recurring lung infections weren’t getting better without them. But I’m not sure having a cup of yogurt is all that’s needed to recover your inner rainforest of gut flora afterwards. So it makes sense that over the years of taking antibiotics, my probiotic population dwindled, and I suffered from the downstream effect.

Natto: The Stringy-Smelly-Alien-Spider-Eggs-Superfood That Could

During my experiment, I ate natto every day in addition to my spore-based probiotic supplement.

Natto makes spore-based probiotics work better, but it also has its own spore-based probiotic and is a badass superfood in its own right. During the fermentation process, natto’s bacteria makes a shit-ton of goodies. One of these is the enzyme nattokinase, which has been studied for its ability to improve spatial learning. Natto also has anti-bloodclot properties, helps build strong bones, is almost as high in protein as chicken, and tastes good (okay your mileage may vary on that one, but I love the taste—try it with mustard and soy sauce).

…So What Happened?

Well within two weeks my brain fog, fatigue, and weird spaciness went away. I’m not superhuman, but I feel good! I can focus for hours, and I don’t have weird deadzones in my awareness. Most of all, my brain and body don’t get in the way of what I want to do.

That was several months ago. I’ve continued to (off and on) take spore-based probiotics and eat natto, and I continue to feel good.

What’s interesting to me is how bad I felt before—dumb, incapable, potentially a burden—and how good I feel now, and how little it took to make the switch. I wonder how many people feel “dumb” when they actually have a solvable health issue. It would have been interesting to take an IQ test then and now.

You Gotta Feed Your Dudes

One note in case you do try spore-based probiotics: These organisms don’t make butyrate out of nothing–they need fermentable fiber to create butyrate.

This isn’t the wheat bran type of fiber that scrubs your colon. That’s insoluble fiber—that stuff’s important, but not useful fuel.

Fermentable fibers include:

• Resistant starch (think cooked-and-cooled potatoes and rice, green bananas, oats)

• Soluble fiber (find this stuff in onions, garlic, apples, berries, rye, barley, mushrooms, chia)

• Certain oligosaccharides (think beans and lentils)

• Some polyphenols that microbes convert indirectly (extra virgin olive oil, berries, green tea / matcha, dark chocolate, nuts, coffee, red cabbage)

This made me view my food choices differently: before I might think it most healthy to forego cooked-and-cooled potatoes or rice—just carbs, right? But now I see an important asset in those starches.

Your Results May Vary

I’m not saying if you take a spore-based probiotic and natto every day that your brain fog and fatigue will vanish—your body and microbiome are unique. I’m no doctor and I’m not prescribing anything!

I wanted to share this story because we’re at the beginning of understanding how the microbiome affects our health, and anecdotes like mine may have helpful clues.

There’s More Magic in the Microbiome ✨💩

Solutions to brain fog and fatigue are just a few of the things we may find in the microbiome. A particular bacteria could be responsible for healthy cholesterol, and researchers have identified two strains of gut bacteria that may be directly involved in triggering multiple sclerosis.

If you want to read more about the cutting edge of microbiome research, check out Stephen Skolnick’s blog. And if you tried something that helped your brain fog and fatigue, I’d love to hear about it—message me or comment below!

1. Glucose management

I gave up sugar 1.5 years ago, and it's among the best decisions I've ever made. Recently I've gone beyond looking at sugar, noticing that glucose spikes in general are often the culprit for feeling irritable, tired, or hungry-but-not-really-hungry.

Though initially dubious, my partner found that glucose management removed the post-lunch slump. And a nice side effect of managing glucose is that you automatically gravitate towards your ideal weight, as you’re avoiding excess glucose, which is stored as fat.

Here's a YouTube on what glucose spikes are and how to avoid them.

2. Bodyweight exercises

I've never found any exercise protocol to be particularly effective, until I discovered the classic book Convict Conditioning. The book's prescribed bodyweight exercises take just ~15 minutes ~3x/week at home with little equipment, yet are giving me more strength and muscle than anything I’ve tried before.

The secret here is progressions—going from easier to more difficult versions of six exercises—so you're always working to the edge of your strength. (h/t Tasshin)

3. Jogen on Why Buddhism

At a meditation retreat, Jogen gave a “Why Buddhism” talk that helped unlock my motivation to consistently meditate. Rather than repeating Buddhist teachings—which often feel out of reach for me—he spoke from personal insight in plain language. See how it lands for you.

4. The Hidden Brain — Relationships 2.0

I loved Hidden Brain’s “Relationships 2.0” podcast series, especially the episode on keeping love alive, the episode on finding happiness in talking to strangers, and the episode on connection. (h/t my favorite food blogger, Rainbow Plant Life)

5. Meditations for Mortals

If you’re what Oliver Burkeman calls an “anxious overachiever,” reading Meditations for Mortals feels like he’s been quietly observing the inner workings of your mind. He sees your prison of self-flagellating striving and offers a way out. Startling in its simplicity, the key is: you actually can’t do it all.

As with his previous book, Four Thousand Weeks, I pretty much highlighted the whole thing. Here’s one of those highlights:

6. Wind, Sand and Stars

From The Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry comes this absolute gem of a memoir, first published in 1939. It recounts his work as a pioneering airmail pilot, navigating fragile aircraft across Europe, Africa, and South America during aviation’s heroic age. But this is more than an adventure tale: it’s a lyrical meditation on courage, wonder, and what it means to be human. I now understand why the person who recommended it returns to it every year.

7. Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

In Nine Lives, William Dalrymple journeys through the spiritual heart of contemporary India by telling the stories of nine remarkable individuals—each following a distinct religious path. Through these intimate portraits, he explores how devotion offers meaning and purpose amidst change and hardship.

8. Milk Oolong tea

I’ve discovered a nectar of the gods, and it is milk oolong tea. Somehow milky—as its name implies—it’s richly aromatic with a shortbread sweetness.

Here's the stuff I got, though all the Taiwanese teas I tried from that shop were sublime. Just take care to not under or over brew—sample while brewing to hone in on the sweet spot.

9. Barefoot shoes

Barefoot shoes help with ankle and knee pain and improving balance and proprioception (your body’s awareness of its position in space). I won’t be a trendsetter talking about barefoot shoes, but I’ve found a benefit I hadn’t heard before—wearing barefoot shoes put arches on my previously flat feet.

These are by far the best barefoot shoes I’ve tried—they’re like a grippy foot glove.

10. Endel ambient noise app

Endel is an ambient noise app for focus, sleep, and relaxation. I use it pretty much nonstop when working, and play the sleep track whenever sleeping in a noisy environment.

Bonus: Something for you!

MAY YOU BE HAPPY stickers

I've been enjoying mailing out MAY YOU BE HAPPY stickers (origin story). It's a bit of spiritual activism, born from the sense that maybe what the world needs is a little more love and well-wishing for our fellow human, no matter their views.

If you'd like a sticker, comment below and I’ll send you one. ❤️

What have you loved lately? I’d love to hear your recommendations! 🤗

I was 37, a number I could no longer mentally round to 30. In the mirror, the lines on my face whispered, “40.”

There would be nothing wrong with that, but I had just broken off an engagement, and my head spun with stories about men preferring younger women.

“Who is going to love this soon-infertile woman?” I asked my droopy reflection.

Desperate, I turned to Botox. I was not alone: in 2023, the U.S. recorded over 7 million Botox injections.

I feared I’d come out looking clownish, but I was delighted with my shiny new face. Feeling that my lease on youth had been renewed, I gallivanted around Lisbon like I was in my 20s.

But the price of Botox was steep:

1. The cost.
   
   I paid €550 for a small amount of Botox. Had I "needed" more, the price would have gone up. And it only lasts six months. So you're looking at a €1k/year+ habit, and that's just the beginning. Botox is a gateway drug to a world of beauty for money.
   
   

2. The night terrors.

   
   I’d awake in a panic, trying to lift my eyebrows, but my body wouldn't respond. Of course, my face was paralyzed. I had paid good money for that! Over time I unlearned my impulse to move my face or have an exaggerated facial expression.

   
   It is a great luxury to be able to lift one's eyebrows, I decided.
   
   

3. Mental dullness.

   
   I'm not sure if it was the Botox or not, but when it wore off I felt able to think better. Maybe facial muscle movement helps with blood flow to the brain? Maybe putting a neurotoxin in your head isn't a good idea?

Getting Botox gave me a surge of confidence, and that led me to showing up to lots of social events. At one of those, I met someone wonderful—someone who doesn’t care about smooth skin or conventional beauty.

“Who doesn’t like a weathered face?” he asked, confused when I brought up the topic.

So what had the Botox done? It healed an insecurity that the beauty industry had implanted in me to begin with. Had I been confident in who I was, I could’ve skipped the procedure entirely.

Maybe I should’ve spent that €550 on a therapist.

Look out your own eyes

When my partner and I moved to the woods to build a house, for the first time I lived without a mirror. Before, every bathroom visit was a moment to inspect my face and compare it to the billions of media images of “woman” I’d absorbed. My reflection was my sense of self. After all, the mirror was showing me who I was—wasn’t it?

But without my days punctuated with mirror checks, something strange happened: I started living from behind my own eyes.

The center of my identity became my felt experience—not my appearance. I stopped imagining how others saw me and started noticing how I felt. The "me" I now recognized was the embodied one, the one looking out—not the one being looked at.

From the perspective of how it felt to be me, paralyzing my face for beauty was absurd.

Maybe I hadn’t gotten Botox for a potential mate, but for the judgment in my own gaze.

Living without a mirror, I would go into town, have a nice interaction with people I met there, and then go to the bathroom to discover that my hair was completely disheveled. As far as I could tell, no one had treated me any differently. No one cared.

Or maybe they did judge and I didn't notice. But I decided to let people think whatever they wanted in the privacy of their own minds. Besides, if their thoughts are critical, doesn't that reflect more on them than on me?

Surely the most beautiful people are those who see beauty in everyone.

Curiously, I never held others to the standards I tried to meet myself. I don’t care if you look like a model. I care if you’re alive, present, kind. I care whether I feel safe being my full self around you.

When someone looks too perfect, I get uneasy—like they’re too self-focused to have space for me, or might expect me to match their standards.

Maybe what I needed to cure my neurotic narcissism was to break the feedback loop. Maybe I just needed to stop looking in the mirror.

Mirrors: a relatively new technology

Mirrors, as we know them, are relatively new. The silvered-glass mirror was invented in 1835, and it wasn’t until the early 20th century that mirrored bathroom cabinets became standard.

These days I’ll sometimes see a woman with false eyelashes, huge lips, and coats of makeup. “She looks so strange,” I think. But then I realize there’s a new mirror in town: all of that accouterment must look good to her in her Instagrammed reflection.

For most of human history, we didn’t stare at our own faces all day. Maybe, like Narcissus, we’d be better off tearing ourselves away from our own reflection.

Releasing the fixation on self

When I fixated on my reflection, I was doing so because I wanted to be loved. Media tells us a beautiful appearance will make us lovable, but in my experience, people love you because you love them back.

A thousand likes on a selfie won’t bring you soup when you’re sick.

Beauty marketing—and consumerism in general—wants us focused on ourselves. “Look better, live your best life.” But maybe it’s time to grow out of that. Maybe it’s irrelevant what I look like.

Maybe… it’s not about me at all.

In Buddhism there’s the notion that attachment to the sense of self - what we think of as "I," "me," and "mine" - is a fundamental source of suffering.

When I let go of the need for “me” to look a certain way, I feel free.

Becoming an Elder

Without Botox, my wrinkles tell me something important: I’m getting older.

And knowing that helps me know what season of life I’m in. Maybe it’s not the time to gallivant. Maybe it’s time to double down and focus on the people and things that matter.

But… how does one get old?

I didn’t know, especially not as a woman. Growing up in the '90s, I learned that to be accepted as a woman you needed to be young, thin, and beautiful. And today it seems that people are lauded for looking and acting younger than they are.

Is the only role for the aging to pantomime being young?

Other societies view aging differently:

• Many indigenous cultures view wrinkles as "story lines" – physical manifestations of accumulated wisdom and experience.

• In India, the traditional ashrama system divides life into stages, with the later years dedicated to spiritual growth and becoming a guide for younger generations.

• In Yoruba culture, aging means gaining power—becoming an elder grants one the right to participate in decision-making councils. Likewise, many Native American tribes traditionally grant special status to elders as decision-makers and knowledge keepers.

Perhaps aging's natural rhythm is simple: first we discover ourselves, then we guide others. Our youth is for finding our place, our later years for sharing learned wisdom and supporting those who follow. This evolution from self-focus to mentorship feels like aging's true purpose—one that's easily lost in our culture's obsession with appearing young.

I didn't have elder role models until recently, when I've had the great privilege of meeting many older women whom I admire. Brilliant and accomplished, present and wise, they are too busy living wonderful lives to fret over wrinkles. Having good role models makes it easy to age: I want to be like these women.

When I think of becoming an elder role model to younger women, I am happy with my wrinkles. They make me proud of all that I have learned and all that I can share.

I hope I can help these younger women to feel good in their own skin. I hope I can help them drop the burden of vanity.

I will tell them not to think of themselves as their reflections—and certainly not in comparison to media impressions—but as their experience looking out through their own eyes.

I will tell them to take all the money they are encouraged to spend on beauty products and save it for the rare things that make their soul sing.

I will tell them that the secret to being beautiful is to find the joy that makes you happy to be alive.

Related posts:

• Letter to My Younger Self

• Things You’re Allowed to Do, That I Would Recommend

It dawns on me: I’m nearly 40 and I have not yet found silverware better than my parents'. Every other utensil I have used is a subtle disappointment. Too chintzy, too heavy, too uncomfortable, too shiny.

Is it that the set that I grew up with is canonical in my mind because I grew up with it, or is there something else to the design?

Exasperated, I pick out a contemporary silverware set from my sea of tabs and tell myself, “This one. This will be fine. They’re just utensils.”

But there's something wrong with the design, I know. I just can’t put my finger on it.

I call my mom.

"It's nice," she agrees. "But I worry it's not weighted well and the rigid edges won't feel comfortable."

Ah, there it is. I've been looking at aesthetics, but it's the somatic I’m after: I've been using my eyes when what has been whispering in me is the sense of holding it, the fork becoming an effortless extension of my hand.

I recall a review on one set:

"We bought these for a party and the fork kept slipping out of everyone's hands. I've never heard so many fork drops in one night. Only the dog was delighted."

When I read the review I thought it was silly, but now I understand the issue: the weighting of the fork was wrong, causing people to drop it. I think of the awkward weighting of my AirPods—one part heavy and one part featherweight—and how I drop them constantly.

I recall my somatic memory of using my parents' silverware, the fork resting effortlessly in my hand. It's that perfect weighting that I've been searching for.

I look up my parents' set. It was designed in 1959 (!), and named Paul Revere after the revolutionary who was a renowned silversmith whose shop created over 2,400 pieces of silverware between 1761 and 1797.

I’m not the only person who appreciated the design: while exact numbers aren’t published, the long production run suggests millions of pieces of Paul Revere silverware have been sold over the decades. Oneida’s stainless utensils, especially patterns like Paul Revere and Twin Star, dominated the mid-century market. By some accounts, Paul Revere place settings were extremely common on American dinner tables by the 1970s.

I wonder how it is that we have not developed a better design for utensils since 1959. (Certainly someone must have, but I have not found it.)

I blame computers:

In the 1700s, Paul Revere himself would have designed, handcrafted, and held the piece, all in one go. He would get feedback on his design quickly.

In the 1950s, designers would have sketched out their designs and then developed a prototype directly in metal to test the weight, balance, and feel.

Nowadays, designers work first in CAD, then have a model 3D printed, and then finally a metal prototype might be created. No wonder designers are having difficulty getting the weight right! They’re trying to design without feeling.

Meanwhile, buyers are buying without feeling. In the past we would have gone to a store and picked up the utensils. But now that most of physical stores have closed, we shop online.

Online, our only clues are photos, description, and price. Scrolling through a sea of photos, our eyes fatigue quickly looking at similar-looking sets. Glazing over slight variations in styles, our eyes perk up when they see something unique. "Ah yes, I want silverware with handles shaped like twigs. How cool, what a statement."

But... is that what we really want?

Is silverware a design statement about your aesthetic preference specialness, or is it a tool for everyday life whose ergonomics are of utmost importance? We are, after all, using these items three times a day! Doesn't our experience of being a body using these tools matter most?

I recall a review of another set:

"Really beautiful set. But the small fork only has three prongs and it doesn't hold spaghetti well."

YOU HAD ONE JOB, FORK. And yet the designer dropped a prong so that the set would be pretty.

Our values are all wrong.

I don't want utensil-as-concept. I don't want a fork cutely pretending to be a twig. I want a tool that is saturated in its essence. I want the genuine thing, not a trend.

I want a fork because I want food to go into my mouth, not an accessory to show off to others. Who cares what other people might think for a quarter second, I am using this thing three times a day, 365 days a year, to EAT.

The final issue is our concept of price and value. Another reviewer says:

“I love the set—it seems more expensive than it really is!”

Really, that’s why you love it?

My parents have had their set for 45 years, and Oneida continues to offer a limited lifetime guarantee. What does another $40 matter if spread out over the course of 50 years?

But then again, maybe modern sets won't last that long. A reviewer of a supposedly high-quality German set complained the set started to rust after six months.

I think of the last set that I bought. It was a bit pricey, and I assumed that meant quality. The design was attractive, but the utensils turned out to be light and cheap-feeling. The manufacturer had sold me on a premium trend, not a timeless set. How was I to know the difference without being able to feel it in person?

I complain about all of this to my mom, who listens patiently.

"Well you can still buy the set we have. They still make it."

In this moment I accept defeat. I have been trying all my adult life to find silverware better than my parents', and I have not.

Despite economic stresses and bankruptcy of the original company, the Paul Revere line has never been out of print since 1959. I go to buy the new production of the set, but the reviews complain it's not quite the same as the original. Classic.

So I shell out $150 for a 47-piece set on eBay. It is scratched and worn. I imagine that likely it is from someone who has passed—who else would give it up?

I hope it will last me the rest of my life. And then who knows, maybe it will go to someone else who finally sees through trends to find the real thing.

My partner Jesse had a similar experience with drinking glasses. He grew up with a few glasses of a particular design and liked them. Never finding better glasses, he started buying them on eBay and at thrift stores.

When I first see the glasses, I balk at their old-fashioned look. But then I use one. And it's the same thing as with the silverware: the weighting. The base is a bit heavy; it feels good in your hand. And somehow it holds the perfect amount. It's human-centric.

Eventually my eyes catch up to my somatic knowing. Instead of seeing the glasses as granny, I see them as perfection—a classic standard unsurpassed in somatic experience.

Are we doomed to only buy increasingly rare vintage items designed before computers? I hope not. I hope designers will wake up and design things using all their senses for the experience of the human body, and that individuals will buy things for their full experience and not just for how something appears on a screen.

Mettā, which roughly translates to "loving-kindness," is a practice of deliberately cultivating warm and caring thoughts toward yourself and others.

The course was perfect for me:

What I thought I needed was to be BETTER. Better meant having a meditation habit.

But what I actually needed was LOVE: I needed to love myself and others. After all, the only reason I wanted to be better was because I wanted to be lovable.

The course planted a seed of Mettā that would later bloom in unexpected ways. During moments of anxiety or judgment, my mind would return to a simple Mettā mantra: "May you be happy." These words became an oasis, offering refuge from critical thoughts.

After the course, I connected with Tasshin’s micro-culture, a network of people where the norm is being kind, generous, and loving. People rooted for each other, asked meaningful questions, and shared resources they found helpful.

I called it “Kind Culture.” I loved it. It felt healing to my inner teenager who buried her soft heart beneath layers of irony and sarcasm in an attempt to be “cool.”

This micro-culture served as a safe space where I could practice being authentic and kind. Eventually I began carrying these ways of being beyond the community, becoming a little ambassador of Kind Culture.

When I moved back to the US to live in the woods, I had to get a car. Excited about fueling it with sunshine, I bought a used Tesla. I was grateful to Tesla for making electric cars a thing and opening a manufacturing plant near where I grew up—a place I thought would never see manufacturing return.

But unknowingly I had stumbled into a culture war. The very people I thought would be excited about green cars and local manufacturing disliked Teslas because they disliked the CEO. And then other people seemed upset that I liked to go the speed limit on country roads.

And I was driving around a swing state where the Harris and Trump signs yelled at each other from across the road. It felt like I was trapped in a maze of people yelling at each other.

I started saying “May you be happy” in my head, aiming the blessing at the cars and houses and people I passed.

“If only I had a bumper sticker that could say this, too,” I thought.

So I made one. I hoped the message and design would be received in a way where it wouldn’t be taken as another identity signal: “Oh, you’re one of those people.” I wanted people to absorb it as love, a love that transcends whatever stories we’ve found ourselves locked in.

I imagined the love beaming out of the bumper sticker. Loving everyone, no matter what state of mind they are in, no matter what their beliefs.

I hoped it would be a little oasis where we could rest beyond our ideas of right and wrong.

Healing a cultural rift is a bit much to ask of a bumper sticker, but it’s not too much to ask of love.

As far as I can tell, love is the only solution to hate.

I am reminded of a story of a tribe where, if a tribe member starts acting destructively, they don’t punish them but surround them with love, helping them because they see that they are sick, because they know that person would not act like this if they were well.

Anyway.

When I was designing the bumper sticker, I tried very hard to make it perfect.

But then I relaxed. When I relaxed I made these holographic stickers. They seem to resonate with people more. I think that says something about creative work.

If you want a holographic sticker or a bumper sticker, let me know and I’ll mail you one.

May you be happy. 💗

We've already been using 40-year-old panels to power our kitchen, proving that aging solar tech keeps on ticking.

And while our battery system to store our solar energy will need to be replaced sooner than our panels—in about 10-20 years—the total cost will average out to about $82.75/month for all our energy needs.

Compare that to what people spend just filling their gas tanks alone!

It feels good to lower our cost of living and be independent from the grid3, a grid still largely dependent on fossil fuels. And it’s more than just a personal win—it positions us to help others when the grid is down (just last month, 4.7 million people were without power after hurricane Helene).

Hope

Growing up in the US in the early 2000s, I felt alien to my own species that seemed unable to understand that we depend on the environment and should. not. destroy. it. Back then, renewables were for a fringe group of hippies, auto manufacturers' only innovation was increasing the size of gas guzzlers, and the government seemed to only intervene on behalf of corporations destroying the environment.

And look where we are now, two decades later:

Solar energy is on track to become the world’s largest source of electricity by 2027, with prices still dropping4. Energy-efficient heat pumps met about 10% of global heating needs in 2021. And even the American government has woken up to the importance of biodiversity—farmers in a dozen states now receive stipends to let regions of wild prairie grow back5.

Battery technology keeps improving and getting cheaper, too. Sodium-ion, nickel-hydrogen, and iron-air batteries are in the works, and will be far more durable than lithium-ion batteries. Electric vehicles are mainstream and last longer than their gas engine counterparts, with an estimated lifespan of 200,000 miles. And when EVs’ batteries degrade too much for driving, they can be repurposed to store solar energy.

Even lessening our addiction to factory farmed animals is on the horizon: an edible microbial protein is being developed that would be as flexible as wheat.

All of this has rekindled my faith in the future. Yes, we're up against huge challenges—species and habitat loss is a greater threat than ever, we have not learned how to exist without war, and climate disasters are on the rise.

And yet... hope is a precious resource and I feel nourished to sit and drink from its oasis. I hadn't realized how sad it was to believe that the future will be worse than the present.

But... what if it's not?

What if we’re the ones who can make the Anthropocene awesome—figuring out how to live in a way that will weather the coming storms, and how to foster spirits resilient in times of hardship?

Seeding a solarpunk micro-culture

As I literally chop wood and carry water, I wonder what the point of putting our energy into our small homestead is. Couldn't we do more by living in an apartment with all the modern amenities, outsourcing our food, utilities, and shelter to others so we can focus on building something that helps a greater proportion of people? Isn't that what Silicon Valley has told us what “changing the world” looks like?

But after working (and burning out) for “change-the-world” startups, I wonder if my newfound hope comes from directly sowing the seeds of a sustainable future. Each day here on the homestead seems to compost and feed a micro-culture of resilient, sustainable life.

The other day I stumbled across Wikipedia's definition of solarpunk.

Solarpunk is a literary and artistic movement […] that envisions and works toward actualizing a sustainable future interconnected with nature and community. The "solar" represents solar energy as a renewable energy source and an optimistic vision of the future that rejects climate doomerism, while the "punk" refers to do it yourself and the countercultural, post-capitalist, and sometimes decolonial aspects of creating such a future.

Turns out, we’ve been living that definition. We’re taking a literary movement and making it real.

Peace Pilgrim walked across North America for 28 years to speak to people about peace. She carried no money and would not ask for food or shelter, but simply accepted what was offered.

Can you imagine?

But here's what I find most interesting:

While walking for thousands of miles with nothing, she was happy, healthy, and filled with vibrant energy.

Which is funny, because society tells us that we need Lots of Things and Certain Conditions to be happy, healthy, and fulfilled.

So how is it that this penniless, homeless woman came to possess those rare treasures that even the rich and powerful cannot obtain?

The wisdom I applied

Peace wrote about how she went from living a normal life to being what I regard as a modern-day saint. She had no religious affiliation, and oriented from her own experience and insights.

What stood out to me from her story was:

1. She stopped doing the things she knew she shouldn't, and started doing the things she believed in.

2. As she lived the highest light given to her, higher light was given.

#1 is a practical instruction, as it can be acted upon in any life situation. I interpret #2 as “just do the best you can with the awareness you have, and then more awareness will come to you.” That feels comforting—like I don’t have to see the full path or have some big strategy, just do what is in reach.

Trying it out

When I heard "stop doing the things you know you shouldn't do," what first came up for me was that I had to stop eating sugar. It took me many months to do so, but I did it.

Several months later, it seemed the next thing I could do was cut out alcohol. I wasn't drinking much, but even the little I drank robbed beauty from those days, and so I stopped.

After that I reached a baseline of wellbeing where I was able to notice acute periods of brain fog. Then an herbalist friend helped me realize that I have a dairy allergy, so I cut that out too.

Now happiness periodically springs into me for no reason, and I feel healthy and clear-headed. What joy!

So just from following Peace Pilgrim's advice of stopping the things I knew I shouldn't, my life improved a great deal. But while Peace Pilgrim talks about purifying the body, that wasn't her focus—this was simply what came to my awareness as my first steps.

Other things I stopped and started:

I mostly stopped buying new clothes and started buying used (from thrift stores, ThredUp, and eBay). Because the clothes are more affordable, I feel like I have an abundance of wonderful clothes, and thus I feel less precious about the ones I have. So again, more freedom and feelings of peace.

I stopped being nomadic and started living more sustainably. I knew flying from country to country was bad for the planet, and I also felt that I was not a wholly good force on the communities I visited (adding to issues with gentrification and Airbnbs).

Now I am very fortunate to live off-grid and close to the land. I bought a used electric vehicle, and once our solar array is set up we'll be able to drive on solar power. Certainly my life still depends on industrial forces, but I am starting to live the way I believe in.

The move from being nomadic to living rooted in nature has deeply improved my wellbeing. So once again, stopping doing the things I know I shouldn't and starting doing the things I believe in has brought me peace and happiness.

Now just as Peace Pilgrim said that she wasn’t trying to inspire people to walk a pilgrimage, I’m not saying you should buy used clothes and life off the land. The point of Peace Pilgrim’s wisdom, in my opinion, is for you to act on whatever is your highest light.

Higher Light (next steps)

Peace Pilgrim said that as she lived the highest light she had, higher light was given to her. So now that I am feeling good in my body and grounded in place, a different part of Peace Pilgrim's wisdom calls to me.

Peace Pilgrim talks about purification of motive: to abandon any motive of greed, self-seeking, or wish for self-glorification, and only do that which is coming from service.

She calls being of service the secret of life, and certainly service does seem to work wonders:

• Businesses who genuinely exist to serve their customer prosper

• Marriage partners who devotedly serve each other have happy marriages

• Politicians who genuinely serve the people are highly regarded (e.g., Angela Merkel)

Come to think of it, the flourishing of our society and world depends on those genuinely coming from service 🤔

Here’s her writing on this topic:

My life has been primarily self-centered, so orienting to service feels daunting. However, I was also daunted by what appeared to me as my first step—giving up sugar—but I did that and was so much happier for it.

Convinced of the logic of orienting towards service, I take it up as a spiritual practice—a yoga that one may never hope to perfect but simply begin again and again with devotion.

Further resources

If any of this has appealed to you, you may enjoy reading Peace Pilgrim’s book, especially the chapter The Spiritual Growing Up: My Steps Towards Inner Peace, PDF pages 25-42, as something else there may speak to you.

Wishing you peace and happiness 💗

Thanks to Tasshin and Michael Curzi for this video on the words of Peace Pilgrim, which I used a still from to make the cover art. Like the video, the art is CC BY licensed.

“Don’t you have any happy songs?” I complain to Jesse. He is playing songs he wrote on his guitar, and I am tired of crying. 

He responds by playing “Toward the Sun.” While I still cry, I love it so much that when we are apart I demand he send me a recording of it. I spend the next four weeks tirelessly animating a music video for it. 

Frame-by-frame animation, it turns out, is slow and laborious. The animation in my mind is exquisite, but what I can pull off is clunky and childish. My enthusiasm dwindles. I leave it half-finished. 

When you have an idea for something, the idea is exciting and perfect. It is untouched by the constraints of reality. You see only the finished project. Your mind glosses over the labor it will take to bring it to form.

I get excited about a new project: designing our house. I spend months perfecting the layout, squeezing our needs into a tiny 512-square footprint. I see it in my mind’s eye so clearly, the view of the trees from the big windows on the south side. 

The first day of construction arrives. My job is to cart nineteen sixty-pound bags of concrete through the woods to our house site and split them open. 

This is when reality sets in. I balk at the weight, the heft, the tiresome labor. My negative mental chatter turns into a yell. I think about how nice it was when I was nomadic, traveling around affordable countries, eating out at every meal, and spending all my time on the screen, in the land of ideas, barely lifting a finger. 

But the downside of that life, that state of pristine optionality, is its shallowness. Don’t like the weather? Fly somewhere else. Feeling lonely? Go to the festival and meet some people. Don’t feel like finishing that project? It wasn’t meant to be. Everything is surface novelty and nothing is substance.

What is the difference between going one step on a thousand journeys and going a thousand steps on one journey?

I finish carting the concrete and we fill the first piers of the house foundation. Airbnb reservations inevitably end, but this concrete seems like it will stick around.

I feel the satisfaction of having accomplished something small but real. 

I pick up the animation again because I had committed to Give Your Gift to finish it. The song itself is about maturation: “We will be ripe in our time,” the chorus promises. 

And bit by bit, as I trade ideal potentials for hard-won imperfect realities, I feel I am maturing. 

I finish the animation. It is not as I dreamed it would be, but it is. 

And now I can show it to you: 

After seven years of traveling and living abroad, I find myself putting down roots in rural North Carolina, on the land Jesse's parents bought in the 70s. Now five decades later, Jesse and I are building a house on that land, living in the same bus that his parents lived in when they built their house.

For five decades his parents have eschewed society's unspoken mandate that we must make life increasingly comfortable: they still live with a meager solar electric budget and no running water. And they don't seem any worse off for it. Far from it, actually—they are well-spirited, fit, and content—qualities rare for even the owner of a five-bathroom mansion.

a tour of the hobbit house we spend our days in ^

At first, living so close to the land frustrates me. I chafe at how long it takes to wash dishes, I'm squeamish about peeing in the woods at night, and I definitely miss wifi that's fast enough to satiate my desire for distraction.

But slowly I adapt. In Berlin I had been getting 6-7 hours of fitful sleep per night, thinking that that was just how it is getting older. But here on the land I sleep deeply for 8-10 hours per night, falling asleep quickly, and remembering my dreams upon waking. My knees—a perpetual source of complaint—stop hurting, and I eat heartily without gaining weight. Indeed, without doing a lick of intentional exercise, my body grows stronger just from walking, squatting, carrying water, and adapting to the climate instead of controlling it.

My mental health, too, improves. Without constant social media interruptions, my mind quiets and focuses. And the land buffers against anxiety: The world may be going to hell in a hand basket, but it’s hard to believe it here. Here frogs croak in symphony, yellow tigertail butterflies flutter, long black rat snakes slither, five sizes of ants crawl, and a big blue sky hangs above it all.

Here it is evident: life wants to live.

Instead of being interrupted by texts and social media, I am regularly interrupted by unexpected doses of wonder:

In the midst of a torrential downpour I glance out the window to see a great blue heron—called great due to its six-foot wingspan—walking along the edge of the pond, enjoying its solitude, and giving zero fucks about a little water.

On the trail back to the bus at dusk I hear a rustling, and glimpse the tan form of a coyote in the distance. We stare at each other for a brief moment, sharing the awareness that we're both inhabitants of this forest.

Even peeing in the woods at night becomes a source of wonder. I stare at a young branch of a maple tree, marveling at its perfect canopy of tiny and large leaves. Had I ever really looked at a tree branch before? And above the inky black silhouettes of towering trees, the stars glow.

I wonder: is life supposed to be like this, imbued with unexpected moments of wonder?

And so life is less comfortable, yet my body and spirit are happier. I'm getting less done—less returned texts, less writing, less animation—but I am present more. I am not keeping up with online conversations, but I am receiving frequent updates from the warmth on the wind telling of summer's approach.

I write a poem about how it feels to be so offline:

   sorry i’ve missed your calls—
   the line’s been busy
   as the birds call all the time,
   and i pick up

When I visit the city, I am struck by how human-dominated the environment is. Everything is for the human, nothing for the squirrel or duck or ant or robin. Everything is made safe and convenient, but everything is bereft of wonder.

We have removed most other species from our habitat in order to make our lives more comfortable. But maybe we have removed a part of ourselves, too.

There's a trend I am seeing in friends. We are questioning the societal message that we must achieve achieve achieve.

Do more! Become better! We have played this game for many years. Now we are questioning:

What is the point of all this doing?

(Also, we are tired.)

Is the tree trying to be its best self?

I go to Australia for three weeks. At first I cram in every spare moment with learning animation. Even though I'm here I can still accomplish my goals! Then, slowly, I start to drop it. I become present with the reality, which is lovely: cooking for friends, hiking in lush wilderness, long conversations.

Jesse and I go backpacking. It is just us and a deep ravine for miles. We set up our tent, eat apples, and then there's nothing to do.

At home there's always more you feel you ought to do. There's dishes to clean, messages to respond to, plants to water, and the procrastinating doing all of that.

But out in the wilderness, outside of cell reception, we've done everything there is to do.

So we sit. We watch a water dragon swim and lie in the sun. We watch a bird hop from branch to branch. We watch the clouded sky turn to sun and then clouds again.

I look at the trees. The trees do not seem to be striving to be the best tree. They do not seem to be strategizing on how to get one up on each other, or how to finally realize their ideal self.

As far as I can tell, they are just being.

What is the point of this world?

Maybe the point is to be.

Striving for what?

My friends call this embrace of non-doing by different names. Fighting the colonialist mindset. Embracing yin in a world that values yang. Chilling out.

At first I am made anxious by my non-doing, an anxiety I’ll use another Oliver Burkeman quote to explain:

"As long as you're filling every hour of the day with some form of striving, you get to carry on believing that all this striving is leading you somewhere—to an imagined future state of perfection, a heavenly realm in which everything runs smoothly, your limited time causes you no pain, and you're free of the guilty sense that there's more you need to be doing in order to justify your existence."

What is the point of all this striving, anyway? We are surrounded by more stuff than ever. More content, more noise. We can do anything, it seems, and we want to, but we are busy checking our notifications.

We are told we must keep the economy thriving. We are told the birth rate is plummeting. We are told we must keep it up, keep it up at all costs.

I wonder about this. It seems that the Earth cannot sustain all this manufacturing, all this busyness, all this production. It feels to me that what the Earth needs is more people living simple lives, enjoying nature, enjoying each other’s company, marveling at finding ourselves overthinking apes stuck in time on a rock hurtling through space.

Success vs. contentment

I feel the societal pressure to achieve more, earn more, produce more, be more. Yet I envy not those who have climbed the ladders of achievement, but those who have figured out how not to give into the rush of more, more, more. I want to be, not the one with the nice house and shiny car, but the person who truly loves and enjoys their life. I want to be not the thin and beautiful woman, but she who loves and enjoys her body.

Those who are content with themselves, with what they have, with their lives—are these not the truly successful?

Paradoxically, contentment doesn’t come from finally getting what you want, but wanting what you’ve got. But how do you do that?

I think of the time at a Vipassana retreat when I realized that all I needed to be fulfilled was to be present. And in my experience, getting present requires slowing down and doing less. Ironically it is often the striving for a better future that causes us to miss our chance for contentment right here.

Slowing down, I arrive at the present moment and start to notice things: Conversing with friends one evening, I notice I'm holding tension in my body, slightly resisting the conversation. I allow myself to feel the discomfort and breathe into my stomach. Whoosh. Energy floods into my hands and I drop into the present moment. Present, the moment becomes alive. We have a conversation that I enjoy immensely. It is a wonderful evening.

After listening to a podcast on the importance of sleep, Abigail finally gives in to getting a smartwatch. She hopes the smartwatch will help her curb her wine habit by showing her how much it affects her sleep.

The watch arrives. That evening she skips her glass of wine, cognizant she is now being tracked.

She wakes up feeling refreshed. Excited, she checks her sleep stats. "Oh, only six hours." Her mood sours.

But she has other things to worry about today; she's hosting a party. She scurries about. Her watch chimes, congratulating her on her movement so far. "So many steps, just cleaning and grocery shopping." She feels glad about this, and she is glad for this gladness, as it offsets her pre-party nervousness.

She sets out an abundance of food and drinks, lights the candles. Everything looks perfect. Too perfect? She takes a photo and sends it to her family, trying to share a glimpse of her life. Her sister has kids. It's hard to compete with cute kid photos, but she tries.

The guests arrive. She busies herself fixing her guests drinks.

Eventually everyone settles in. She relaxes. A friend introduces her to someone she hasn't met before. She forgets his name immediately, but not his eyes. When his eyes lock with hers, it feels like they’re the only people in the flat. They drift to a corner. Though they talk about all the same topics always discussed—Berlin and Buddhism, IFS and effective altruism, war and hope—with Martin it feels different. Slowly she starts to share her real self—the self she really is, not the one she expects people will accept. She's telling a story she's never told before when—

Watch, speaking loudly: “Searching for ‘San Francisco.’"

She blushes, humiliated. What had she said to set that off? She hunts through the settings for mute. She turns it on and never turns it off again.

In about an hour the spike of cortisol finally leaves her bloodstream. Martin—she finally remembers his name—is leaving. He says he's had a great time, would she like to take a walk in the park?

Yes! Yes.

It's late by the time she gets to bed. She takes off her watch to avoid having to know how much sleep she won't get tonight, buzzed and lying in bed dreaming of Martin.

They meet in a park midway between their neighborhoods. As they walk, the conversation picks up where they left off. It's effortless, it's never felt so effortless with anyone before. She’s lost in the flow, laughing, sharing her private heart, when—

Her watch vibrates. She pulls her gaze away from him to check.

Watch: Do you want to record a workout?

She's turned off all the notifications she can, but she can't seem to turn off the prompt to record a workout.

Anyway, Martin is saying something. She reorients to his voice, catching the last bit of what he is saying.

They reach the end of the walk. He reaches out and hugs her. No kiss...?!

He leaves and she stays at the park checking her phone for a while, distracting herself from her disappointment. She taps her watch, confirming it to record her walk. At least she got some steps in.

In the evening she has a glass of wine. After rewriting the message a dozen times, she messages Martin: "Hey was fun walking at the park. Want to grab dinner sometime this week?"

She had turned off all notifications across devices to try to get her watch to stop vibrating, but she turns on notifications once more so she will be alerted as soon as he replies.

Her phone vibrates. Martin? Her pulse races.

No, it's just her phone. It's updated and there's a new native app available, a journaling app. Would she like to try it? Sure. After all, the podcast recommended journaling, it's supposed to be like free therapy. She taps yes, and allows app notifications.

Dinner goes well. They go back to Martin's place. He offers her a drink. They sit on the couch. Martin leans in. He kisses her. It's connected, it's passionate, it’s—

Her watch vibrates. She glances at it.

Watch: 10% battery. Charge immediately.

She tears the watch from her wrist and refocuses on this moment she’s been so long awaiting.

Weeks pass. Her watch says she gets worse sleep at Martin's, so she excuses herself back to her place instead of staying over.

The relationship begins to cool. What started as a rushing river of texts is now a dribble.

They mutually decide to see other people. Or, he brings it up and she agrees, as if she was thinking that already.

But she wasn’t thinking that already. What she was thinking about was the podcast ad for a mattress pad that allows for each person to adjust the bed temperature to their preference. Maybe her sleep score would be better at his place then?

They fully break up a few weeks later. She figures a sleeping pad wouldn’t have saved their relationship anyway.

She rides the subway after the final breakup talk when her phone vibrates. Martin? Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he—

No, it's the journaling app prompting her with the photo she took the evening of the party.

Phone: Here's a memory. Do you want to journal about it?

Several months ago I gave up eating sugar, a feat I thought could only be accomplished by some ideal self that was always in the future. So just in case I should relapse, I recorded how this habit finally clicked for me:

My inspiration came when I met two people who didn't eat sugar. I met the first at a friend's birthday party. When doling out the birthday cake, the host remarked: "Oh, she doesn't want cake. She doesn't eat sugar." Really, you can just... not have cake and people are fine with it? I didn't know that was an option.

So I was primed to be especially intrigued when I ran into another person, James, who informed me he didn't eat sugar. He also seemed especially fit and healthy. He described how he did it, and it seemed... not that hard? Inspired, I told him I was committing to not eating sugar for a month to see if I could replicate his magic.

Having that social commitment meant that I would have to tell him if I ate sugar. I find it easy to buy my own bullshit excuses ("I was stressed! There's no way I could make it out of that moment without a chocolate croissant!"), but having to make those sad excuses to James seemed too humiliating.

Sugar is actually physically addictive, so a lot of the addiction is just your body craving it. When I would say, "I could never give up sugar," a lot of that was me being on a drug and the drug speaking through me. The physical addiction passed in about three days, so after that point I was just faced with needing to reroute my habitual patterns.

Addiction wisdom advises that you should replace your vice with something that's similarly satisfying. So when I encountered situations where I was craving sugar, I figured out what I could eat that I wanted but wasn't sugar. One particularly challenging time I was in an airport. To me, being in an airport = chocolate croissant, and I also felt anxious about the trip, which cued my habitual pattern to use sugar to self-soothe. But I looked around and thought, "well, what is here that's not sugar?" There was... a Greek cheese pastry. Great! Totally satisfying. Is cheese pastry the healthiest thing? No, but I'm happy with making it out of that situation without queueing up additional sugar cravings.

People report that the benefits of not eating sugar are:

• more energy

• more stable mood

• more stable hunger

• feeling happier

• clearer skin

• better health

I have found all of those things to be true. Which is kinda crazy—that list is amazing! Who doesn't want more energy and happiness? But the #1 benefit for me is not craving sugar. To live without a constant jonesing for the sweet stuff is amazing.

I'll still get occasional cravings for sugar, especially if I happen to have eaten something with it. For example, the other day I ate a tomato sauce that was way too sweet, so I knew it was loaded with sugar. And the next day, low and behold, I craved sugar, because it was in my body. So I noticed it and ate something that felt satisfying. In this case I made myself a parfait of matcha, oat milk, chia seeds and protein powder, and then had an apple with hazelnut butter. It felt indulgent and sweet, but it kept me on track, as the next day I didn't have the craving.

After the initial month passed, I decided to commit to not eating sugar as a forever habit. I was luckily traveling with Jesse at that time, so again I had social accountability: I told him I don't eat sugar so he expected me to not eat sugar. We were in Turkey and every so often I'd eat a little bit in order to try something (after all, how could I be in Turkey without trying Turkish delight?). But the little bites didn't seem to set off the addictive pattern, and I was happy to not spend the trip shamefully ducking into baklava shops.

After not eating sugar for those few months, I got a bit loose about it. I ate some sugar that happened to be around after a party. I figured this was the inevitable fall back into my old way of being. But something happened that I didn't expect: I noticed that I didn't like the pull of the bottomless want that sugar does to me. Instead of perceiving that tug as irresistible, it felt unsatisfying to feel unsatisfied.

By that time I had also built up enough non-sugar habits to support me. If I was craving chocolate, I bought a 100% chocolate bar and dipped it into honey (honey doesn't trigger addictive behavior with me—for whatever reason, I'm able to have just a little).

My taste buds have also changed. I had a bite of my friend's dessert the other day. I could tell it was "good," but to me it tasted overly sweet and flat—not as flavorful as an orange. I felt satisfied having tried it and didn't want more.

In this way it seems the no sugar habit is self-sustainable because I'm now experiencing aversion to sugar as opposed to craving. This is good because sugar is inevitable in the world, and I'll likely end up eating it from time to time.

One of the strangest benefits that I've noticed is that I've also stopped craving alcohol. My theory is this may be because my microbiome has changed sans sugar. I still enjoy alcohol in social settings and as part of a celebratory meal, but I used to feel periodically compelled to drink a glass or two of wine. Now I don't, and it's easier for me to notice and dislike alcohol's dulling and depressive effect.

Anyway, that's my story. If you're also wanting to give up sugar but not sure that you can—I really believe that if I can give up sugar, so can you. :) A final word of advice: in the initial month that I was not eating sugar, I also was working out a lot. I often find it's much easier to make positive changes when building muscle. For whatever reason, muscle seems to equal willpower.

If you have experience not eating sugar or making other positive changes in your life, I'd love to hear about them!

Everyone's recruiting devoted subjects to the kingdom of their ego
Everyone's peddling their part-time coaching to those working full-time
Everyone's afraid of wrinkles but nobody’s worried about not becoming wise
Everyone's swiping left on their soulmate because they don't match their criteria
Everyone's buying health insurance and two big macs
Everyone's wanting to feel alive without feeling scared
Everyone's wanting enlightenment without a dark night of the soul
Everyone's planning an escape route just for themselves
Everyone's looking for the stars in city lights
Everyone's wanting true friends without being honest to false ones
Everyone's selling shortcuts to wisdom earned through lived experience
Everyone's wanting guidance from God without doing what they already know’s right
Everyone's exercising to look good naked but nobody’s cleaning their conscience
Everyone's wanting to help the old lady but now’s not a good time
Everyone's planning to get to their dreams once they finish checking notifications
Everyone's wanting the present moment to get on with it

(and by everyone, I mean me)
but also

I just want to hear the silence between the wanting
I just want to downsize my judgments until I can move free
I just want to watch a beautiful sunset without taking a picture
I just want to hold the okay-ness around it not being okay
I just want to want what I've got
I just want to praise God for how things are
I just want to meet the pain of being
and have her over for tea

Stepping outside my comfort zone

“I want all your messages. Send me everything. I'll read and listen to them when I have time,” my boyfriend Jesse said when I mentioned I was having trouble not inundating him with messages while he was away co-hosting Vibehole.

I wanted to give him space to focus on the event instead of the non-consequential happenings in my inner landscape. But not sharing felt torturous—it's like I needed to send him my insights so we would both be running the same worldview version.

When he seemed to genuinely not want me to hold back… I didn’t. I sent him walls of voice messages, which felt edgy to say the least. I was unrequitedly taking up space, a deep taboo in my psyche.

Givers and Takers

I read a blog that talks about how people tend to orient to either being givers or takers in conversation. Givers offer attention and ask questions to give opportunities for their conversation partner to share, and generally hold space and listen.

Takers are those who gravitate towards being the fire in a campfire: they tell stories, they share; they are the attraction that the conversation revolves around. Takers often don't need to be invited with a question—they can be perfectly happy to share unprompted.

When Jesse asked that I spend days sending him message after message un-prompted, he was asking me to take up far more space than I, a giver, felt comfortable with.

Somewhere in my development, I decided that I needed to wait for someone to invite me to share, and otherwise assumes the person isn’t interested. I've spent many a conversation waiting to be asked about my thoughts or experience. "Just ask me! Just ask!" I'd silently think while continuing to politely ask them questions and nod attentively.

If this sounds ridiculous, that's because it is. It's like being a guest in someone's house and waiting and waiting and waiting for them to offer you a glass of water. Don't do this! Just ask for the damn glass of water! Your host is not a mindreader!

I was also committing the fallacy of wanting the world to be according to your preferences, which is a fine recipe for suffering. After all, I was waiting for someone to ask me a question, but some people never learned to ask questions, or they have a worldview that’s something like: "Everyone shares whatever they want to share. Why would you make the other person ask questions to guess at what you want to share?" This worldview is actually pretty logical, I must admit.

As I've gained awareness around my illogical behavior, I've slowly learned to take up conversational space without waiting for an invitation to do so.

The shadow side of being a "good listener": one-sided vulnerability

By asking questions and listening, I thought I was being generous and loving. Often people tell me things like, “Wow, I usually don’t talk much, but when I’m with you it seems to pour out of me.” Being curious about others' worlds and holding space for them to reflect on their experience is my love language. And I (usually) like listening. I know my own inner world so well—it's more exciting to visit someone else's!

But I've come to realize that being a giver can be ungenerous in its own way. My friend Simon reflected that if someone is just asking questions and not sharing much in return, you feel unbalanced. And actually, it's a bit rude to ask someone to share vulnerably and not reciprocate.

My shadow in always putting the other person in the spotlight is that I could hide and not fully participate in the conversation. It's vulnerable to share your full self. It's safer to show just a little bit, or just the part that you know someone will agree with. I've had whole relationships where I only shared the parts of myself that I knew the other person would approve. They were pleasant relationships, but they were not satisfying.

Like Michelle says above, pretending not to have needs—like being seen and listened to—is a form of emotional unavailability.

By taking attention and being seen, you risk being seen—and that could include being judged and disagreed with. These might seem like scary possibilities, but actually they’re good! In the worst case you might discover that you don’t resonate that well with this person. But most likely there will be a generative friction in the meeting of different realities. If nothing else, you will be allowing yourself to authentically meet someone else—the only way genuine,satisfying relationships can form.

Giving attention to “be nice” is anything but

Another shadow of the giver role is asking questions you're not interested in because you're being nice. Being nice! As if it's nice to pretend to care when you don't.

If you're bored in the conversation and can’t think of anything you want to ask your conversation partner, a better move is to take the attention. Share what is alive for you. You might be surprised—the conversation partner that you found boring a moment ago might turn out to have great reflections once you step into the spotlight.

Taking up space in group conversations

While I prefer the intimacy and depth of one-on-one conversations, I’ve found group conversations more rewarding as I’ve leaned into taking up more space in them. If I don't like a group conversation, instead of zoning out or quietly tolerating it, I’ve learned to occupy the conversation more.

There’s multiple ways to take up space in group conversations:

The obvious way would be to talk about something you do care about, or provide an alternate view. But you can also take up space as a giver: you can posit a question to the group—something you’ve been thinking about and want people's reflections on.

One of my favorite ways of taking up space in group conversations is by asking quieter members of the group for their thoughts on the discussion, or a question that feels alive. Often engaging quiet group members will make the conversation far richer than had it remained dominated by those who gravitate toward the mike.

What I learned from sending a wall of voice messages

Sending Jesse a lot of messages while he was away felt scary. I had to risk that he might find me inconsiderate, or self-absorbed, or too much. I had to trust that if he did find my messages overwhelming, he would let me know and we would work through it. It seems better to be my full authentic self and troubleshoot as needed than for me to try to control a situation by withholding and getting smaller out of fear.

By leaning into my discomfort, my psyche is slowly learning that it’s safe to take up space.

Tell me: What are your thoughts?

Well, that sure was a lot of talking on my end! 😅

I’m curious—what’s your perspective?

How do you navigate the give and take in conversations and relationships?

Why don't we talk more about how strange time is?
A piece in which I try to pin down what I find so uncanny about time »

to know the landscape of someone's psyche
A short poem about getting to know the full depth of someone »

“State of Being” illustrations
Here’s three of them:

3 favorite books read this year

The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein

These books should be required reading for anyone touching a house or public place. And even if you're not building anything, they’re worth reading because they elucidate what you have always felt but could not describe. For example:

Why do American cities often feel soulless, while old European cities feel charming and lively? Or, what makes a particular home feel just right?

But I think what gives A Pattern Language universal appeal is it speaks to something beyond architecture—a quality Alexander refuses to name but is something like harmonious aliveness.

I wish all professions had such an accessible foundational text that teaches core principles that empower anyone to foster this quality of harmonious aliveness. What would A Pattern Language look like for body wellness, for childcare, for group gatherings, for productivity…?

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
A novel about friendship, collaboration, and creative success and failure. I was rapt from the first chapter and binge listened to it in a weekend.

3 favorite songs on repeat this year

Harry Cutter - Melokind

This slowly building song was my constant travel companion. Perhaps there’s something about its complexity of feeling—melancholic and bright, constrained yet expansive—that keeps me hitting the play button.

Romy - Weightless

I was delighted to discover that the XX's Romy had produced an independent album. The XX albums I remember from a decade back were fantastic but sad, so it was lovely to discover that Romy's album, Mid Air, is overall joyful. It was like hearing from a long-suffering friend years later and discovering that they are now thriving. The whole album is exquisitely produced, and the minimal euphoric “Weightless” is my favorite track.

Carioca Chandra Edgar - Agua-caldera

The celebratory joy in this track is fit for a soul's homecoming.

What were your favorite things you created, books you read, and songs you listened to this year?

Comment below—I’d love to check them out!

I am here to tell you that the world is VAST and BEAUTIFUL.

I am here to tell you that your inner world is EQUALLY FASCINATING and MUCH CLOSER.

I am here to tell you that I went to the sites of Kyoto and returned to my tatami mat room to create images in Midjourney, and couldn't discern which was more marvelous.

I am here to tell you that there still exist some capital cities of Western countries without Starbucks (but not many).

I am here to tell you that you can spend a whole year and a lot of money traveling and still feel that you have only glimpsed a mere crumb of the world.

I have seen the fruit fly and it is me.

I am here to tell you that what you have seen on TV is not true, and that the world is full of beauty and kind people (like Pele the taxi driver). It may not be for-sure-definitely-100%-safe, but we don't get out of life alive no matter how safe we play it.

I am here to tell you that there exists a land where stray cats are integrated into society and their existence peppers everyday life with more kawaii than all the anime shops in Akihabara. And being there, in Istanbul, I thought maybe cats shouldn't belong to any one person but to society as a whole, just as children probably ought to belong to a whole tribe instead of a nuclear family.

I am here to tell you that as exotic and glamorous as full-time exploration may seem, I spent a good chunk of the year feeling lost and lonely. I missed feeling like I mattered to those around me and that I was serving them in some way. In short, I missed my ikigai.

I also missed my weighted blanket.

But what do I have to show for this year of sabbatical, anyway?

Well, this blog, a good story about shoveling shit at a zen monastery, a quarter-written novella about a future society that uses DMT to spy on alien enemies, a handful of mystical experiences, a renewed sense that life is Good and Worth Living, a 101 understanding of Buddhism, a partner whom I love, a sense of purpose and direction, and a bit of ease knowing that should I die tomorrow, I will at least have seen a glimpse of this beautiful world.

It was a year that I produced nothing in an economic sense, and yet gained things invaluable.

I am here to tell you if your life is falling apart, if all the structures in your life are breaking down, if you feel there's nothing to do but give your life up to the winds of fate, it may just be a great blessing.

And if nothing else, well, everything's gonna be.

Do You Live for Love or Fear?

I hang the final picture in my office and step back to admire my work. The picture is the final piece of decoration in my new home in Porto. The home is a narrow tower of double-dense concrete, carved glass, and warm wood. It’s the perfect oasis of safety for my fiancé and I to live happily ever after. And my life, with all its hazards and uncertainties, will be largely solved. 

Completing the decoration should feel satisfying, like slotting in the last puzzle piece. But instead it feels like I’ve hammered the last nail in a coffin in which I’ve buried myself alive. I turn my attention away from that mental image, not wanting to confront the tidal wave of pain it will entail to decimate this lovely and comfortable life. My pain is one thing, but hurting my fiancé—sweet and smart, handsome and loyal—is unthinkable. 

"Everything would be perfect if I could just want this life." It’s a thought on loop in the haunted back corner of my mind, the corner another part of me had taped off with "I love my life" affirmations and gratitude lists. This other part of me works tirelessly to seal the deal on this life. When I’m not looking, she pays the deposit on the wedding venue. 

Thich Nhat Hanh stressed the importance of having a shared vision for a partnership, to work together on the same dream. My fiancé and I share a vision for making Porto home and to continue being playful and loving. But as the months pass we drift into different dreams. I find myself needing... more. 

I feel like I’m going insane: one part of me knows I have to honor the sense that something is wrong, that I feel more and more dead as I continue down this path. The other treasures this life of comfort and security and the love we share. I’m straddling two trucks careening down the highway, and I have to pick one of them—now. 

A few weeks later, on a plane to Paris, I suddenly know what is keeping me stuck in this situation: I am afraid of life. If I could just surrender to that primal terror, I could follow my heart into the unknown. 

"I accept the dangers of the world. I will not be afraid," I declare to myself. 

I leap into the unknown. 

No God No Boss No Husband No State!

I move to Lisbon to be near friends. A few months in, I struggle to summon the energy to do my job. I used to be able to easily devote my waking hours to work, what is wrong? I take my lack of energy as a sign, and quit to take a sabbatical and investigate. 

A month later, Portugal rejects my visa application on account of my filing error. I’m usually careful with paperwork, what is going on?

It seems all doors are closing. I recall a piece of graffiti I had seen a few months back, which now strikes me as prophetic:

I had been feeling called to travel, so I figure I’ll follow that aliveness instead of reapplying for a new visa. Besides, I now have no job to reference on my visa application. I put my things in storage and book a one-way ticket to Thailand. 

In Thailand I start this blog, which I come to call "Inner Pathing.” It reflects my sense of following a path inside of me, one that only I can sense, through the world. While I have dark moments where I feel I’m drowning in a sea of optionality, I know which way to go by following a sense of aliveness. I trust that if I follow that, I will find where I need to be. 

This trust is backed by two previous times I hit reset on my life, both of which were met by good fortune. The first time, I was in the Bay Area when struck by an overwhelming desire to live in nature. I didn't know how I would support myself there, but I moved. There I found an amazing job that taught me so much and was a formative step in my career. 

My second life reset was four years later. I had seemingly everything—a prestigious position, a dream apartment, a sweet boyfriend—when I started daydreaming of digital nomading in Thailand. I was terrified of leaving but I couldn't suppress the calling. I followed what felt alive through several countries, went out on limb after limb, and discovered my next dream job in Berlin.

So as I book a one-way ticket to Thailand for the second time, I trust that something amazing will happen again, that if I jump off the cliff the grace of the universe will catch me.

But fast forward 11 months and I start to worry. I’ve visited Thailand, Taiwan, Japan, the US, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal, Greece, Albania, and now Turkey. I start to wonder if I’m doing anything but accruing a sinful carbon footprint. I’m tiring of nomadism, but really I’m tiring of aimlessness. I try to commit to moving back to Berlin—the last place my life really worked—but that decision stops feeling right after only a few weeks.

I believe that when I find my next thing, it will feel right. The energy will be there, that I will want it more than anything. 

But... where is that thing? Have I taken a wrong turn? Have I not followed the energy? Will the universe catch me again so I can begin the next part of my life, or am I another nomad lost in an abyss of optionality? Does this poem have a rhyme, or not?

The Path to the Rose Garden

There are only a few rules of thumb for my travels: I try to “follow the energy”, aka the sense of aliveness, and I try to stay in the same geographic area to minimize air travel. I’ll be in Albania in October and Berlin in December, but November is blank. So when I learn that Jesse will be in Turkey in November, I ask to tag along. 

I met Jesse at Jesscamp, where I admired him for how he seems to need nothing but give everything. At Jesscamp he slept outside under a tarp of his own design while spending his days ensuring Huel-habituated internet kids got fed. Jesse struck me as a rugged element of nature, more granite or wildcat guardian than human. 

One evening my ear caught him playing a song to a small group. I pulled up a chair to listen. He sang:

Did you want it to go on forever?
When you know every road has an end
You went where the wind chose to blow you
And the wind blew you far from a friend

The lyrics pierced my still-grieving heart, and waves of sorrow poured out of me. 

So now our paths cross again in Berlin, when we both crash at Simon's place. 

We’re hanging out at the park one day talking about napping when he boasts: "I can teach anyone how to fall asleep." He says he taught this trick of nervous system mastery to his ex-wife by falling asleep laying next to her.

On my final night, when we’re sleeping on Simon's living room floor, I call him on this skill: "Want to snuggle?"

"Um, would that be good for you?" Classic Jesse.

"Uh, I think so, yeah." 

We awkwardly lay down into spoons, and when our bodies touch I feel an explosion of energy. I close my eyes and see his energy as a great white bird encompassing me. The energy keeps shifting and changing. It’s far too interesting for me to fall asleep, but I do pick up a sense of how he holds his energy in open calmness.

Standing in line at the airport the next morning, I shyly tread into a "was the snuggling romantic or not?" conversation. Perhaps, we decide.

So I’m not sure what to expect of our time in Turkey. I definitely don’t expect that 36 hours into being together in Istanbul I’ll admit I’m falling for him. The feeling is mutual, and feelings turn into dreams for a beautiful life together. My path of aliveness becomes a shared path. 

In the rose garden of the Rumi museum, we perform a handfasting, a Pagan ceremony to commit to being together for a year and a day. It’s a mini-marriage, honoring our connection and giving us a container for the start of our relationship. More on the ceremony at Jesse’s blog »

While I still have much to figure out, my inner pathfinder feels it’s found what I’ve been searching for. I feel that I’ve at last crested a mountain and can see a beautiful path to the next stretch.

The Path of Aliveness

So that's my story of following the path of aliveness for now.

I hope that continuing on this path will mean being an amazing partner to Jesse and getting to spend our lives supporting each other in our dreams. But I can't control life. I can only do my best at each step, and to honor the life flowing through me. I would rather live my full truth than box myself into what might look like success to others. 

The path of aliveness has often been tumultuous for me, but it’s not always so dramatic. Sometimes it's not the path to break up, to move, to quit—sometimes the transformation is an internal shift to meet outer circumstances. It might look like re-attuning to yourself, returning to forgotten dreams, making art, giving up addictions, starting a spiritual or physical practice, or speaking your full truth in relationships.

Whatever the case, the path of aliveness is something only you can sense; it's an inner path.

What does your heart whisper to you when you're not afraid, when you're not being practical, when you're attuned to the precious miracle that is being alive? 💗

getting to know someone is like
slowly becoming acquainted with
the landscape of their psyche

maybe first they show you
their flowering meadows
their noble gnarled oaks
their proud mountain range

as you get to know them,
they might let you see
their bog of despair
their existential chasm
their black churning sea of terror

if you're really lucky,
if they trust you,
they might let you see
their maze of narcissism
their soulrot marshes
the volcanoes of hurt that ring their heart

it is an honor and privilege to get to
visit the passes in someone's psyche that are fenced off with barbed wire
to sit with them in those rare and lonely places,
waiting silently together for sunrise