Life has started to feel like a reduction sauce. Where there used to be more of everything, a bit watered down, there’s now less, with more substance.

There’s such a specific shade of nostalgia to this time of year. That old flavor of a fresh back-to-school outfit, a new timetable. A familiar craving for simplicity edging into the foreground.

We've been wringing the last drops out of summer, a handful of gatherings in Missoula and Wyoming. Late-night dancing, a tenth anniversary out in the cottonwood-strewn riverbeds of Crowheart. Time spent with people we’ve known for decades, relationships worn smooth by time. It’s been wildly nourishing, that raw satiation of ease and comfort.

I recently finished the eighth book in Robert Galbraith's (J.K. Rowling’s alias) CB Strike detective series. Gritty, dark London crime— a labyrinth of past bleeding into present, plot and personal history tightly braided, each detail laid down patiently across hundreds of pages. Rowling is no romance writer, but she’s ruthlessly good at the slow accretion of character. There has to be a word for the tragic state of loneliness after finishing a good book(s).

Otherwise, it’s been unhurried walks in search of a sufficient swimming hole and the bliss of returning appetite and energy. After Tess Sullivan’s post on the perfect slouchy vintage Levi’s, I’ve been in the trenches of eBay, hunting for a lightwash, USA-made pair of 550s. And I don’t want to rush the season, but I’m eager for thick brothy soups, slow-roasted meat, heavy sweaters, and wool socks.

It's all been the same distillation. Fewer things, cooked down. Even the way I've been moving my body has pared down— leaner, simpler, more strength-focused. What's always fascinated me about a body is the details— the architectural minutiae, the mechanics and interweaving parts, the opposing and complementary forces. I find the subtle elements incredibly seductive, as if connecting to those aspects lends a gracefulness.

I don’t feel much pull toward the usual conversation around strength training. What draws me is this idea of allostasis— how we’re in this perpetual cycle of fine-tuning to meet our environment and circumstances. The whole challenge is a willingness to adjust and refine in support of inevitable fluctuations.

And right now, that’s far from abstract. Shaving away the other modalities and leaning into strength has, strangely, been the most cathartic. And it’s not output or metric-focused; it’s taken on a form that, while seemingly contradictory, is quite feminine.

I find I’m always toggling between a few focal points when it comes to movement.

The main one has been the deep core and pelvic floor, the internal network of muscles spanning from the spine around the side body, sealed on top and bottom by the diaphragm and pelvic floor. Ideally, as we breathe, there’s a synchronicity between the two— the diaphragm and pelvic floor contracting and releasing in unison.

I’ve been experimenting with placing my focus on the intricacies of that contraction during exercises, trying to magnify the sensation of a deep wrapping and activation that comes through timing, coordination, and breath. There’s so much that expands outward as a result— a wider recruitment of muscle groups, utilizing the intercostals and ushering breath into the deeper chambers of the lungs. I could prattle on about this in agonizing detail, but perhaps on another occasion.

I’ve been playing with antagonistic muscle groups— the way joints stay stable through opposing tension, two muscles pulling opposite ways, holding everything centered between them. Over time, there’s an understandable tendency to gravitate toward habitual movements, or patterning that accumulates through lifestyle. Eventually, skeletal/muscular balance skews and can surface in a myriad of ways, such as rounded shoulders, tight hips, lower back pain, susceptibility to injuries, etc. I've been thinking methodically about whether I'm chasing one thing at the expense of its opposite, whether I'm encouraging the conditions for equilibrium.

And in light of this thematic undertone of paring back, focusing on what is complementary. Since strengthening emphasizes a lot of compression, seeking this sense of length and spaciousness through my tissues, lightly embedding stretching and yin into the rotation to help create those conditions. I ruminate about this ad nauseam, but I’m genuinely enamoured by the contemplation of polarities and how they keep a body lithe and agile.

This shift into autumn seems to be landing harder than usual— or maybe I'm just more available to it this year. Either way, it's felt. Admittedly, there's been a bit of an energy deficit, which has somehow created more room to notice the unseen and elusive. The old desire for substance feels amplified, in both a literal and metaphorical sense—wanting what I do, how it's done, who I'm interacting with, to carry a tone of nourishment. A reduction, in the end, isn't about what you remove, but what you let concentrate.

A STRONG BUY

I'm a pretty devout home practitioner. I love the intimacy of it— the ease, convenience, being able to really focus on what you're doing and how you're doing it. But I understand it's different for everyone. These are a few of my favorite tools, compact enough to live relatively unobtrusively in a small house:

PYRO BY KIRSTY GODSO — I've been working through a few of the programs on KG's online platform. She's sharp and genuinely detail-oriented, plus I have a soft spot for a charming accent. The classes are fairly high-octane and give a solid burn. There's also an enjoyable series of strength-and-stretch classes with Krissy Jones of Sky Ting.

ANKLE & LIGHT WEIGHTS

RESISTANCE BANDS

CORK BLOCKS

DUMBBELLS

PILATES BALL

We’ve been toying with the idea of a relocation for years, and lately it feels more imminent. We’re after a property that carries an intriguing sense of character, and have stumbled onto a few old cabins still preserved, more or less intact, in the 1970s. Working on a renovation that manages to hold onto the originality while shedding the more repellent, outdated parts. Having been graced with an extensive schooling in renovation and gardening in our current home, I’ve been caught in elaborate daydreams about what we’d do differently in the next project.

The seductive prospect of starting fresh: tile combinations, a reworked stone fireplace, and how to balance a space enveloped in wood with other textures, colors, and materiality. While still letting it hold on to the quirks and distinctive character of the era in which it was built. And extending that outward, into the ground itself: planting in bundles and waves, native flowers and ornamental grasses, as though the design had risen out of the earth, the interior and exterior echoing one another.

All of which is to say: between the pregnancy and the prospect of a move, there’s a great deal in motion. And beyond those larger arenas, I’ve found myself tangled in clothing— not literally, mercifully, given the heat of midsummer. As my body changes, I keep thinking about garments: different cuts, fabrics, knits, layers. The closet as another site of the ecological self.

I might be eating my own words in a few months, but I’ve been highly resistant to maternity clothing. Most of it feels generic against the skin, and there’s the matter of buying something to wear for a few months and then—what? I’m attracted to the idea that clothing can perform double, sometimes triple duty for the wearer—the items we select like a piece of well-chosen furniture, carrying the same timelessness and longevity. I’d rather work with what I already have: a loose cut, elastic, an oversized sweater—fabrics that can shift with a changing body and that I’ll have use for afterwards.

Clothing manages to capture this transformative quality of carrying both who we are and who we’re becoming. I grew up in rural Wyoming, where clothing was utilitarian—chosen for function and durability. There is uncommon romance in a well-worn pair of boots, a weathered hat, the smell of leather broken in over many seasons. A shirt worn soft and thin. Beauty and practicality never at odds, holding the same ground by way of time and use.

If you’ve ever put on a genuinely handsome piece of clothing, you know its uncanny power to elevate the moment—the way the right garment can lend you a kind of main-character energy. It’s a merging of the inner climate and the outer expression. I gravitate toward sturdy fabrics and sympathetic cutting, and toward an aesthetic I’ve been slowly piecing together over the last five years. It’s landing somewhere between western workwear, a faint Japanese influence, French minimalism, and 90s streetwear. Perhaps never have I been more sensitive to that sensation—the craving to be nourished by what's on and around me.

Excess and consumerism make for a tedious subject, frayed and easy to harp on—but the thing is genuinely haunting once you look at it directly. My resolution runs toward less: fewer things, chosen for being both beautiful and well made, the kind of fabric that lasts long enough to count as an investment. Mass production has a flattening effect. It sands the individuality off a thing until what remains is anonymous and generic—no history, no context, no trace of the hands that made it or the creativity that gives an object personality or meaning. Everything trends toward sameness, and we become, in our closets, slightly varied versions of one another.

Clothing moves along the same vein that carries our values. If people bought more discriminately and chose things they expected to last, I suspect the world would be a different place. We have this endless hunger for novelty and excitement, for instant gratification. But viewing clothing through the same lens as everything we cultivate slowly—the way we build a home, a garden, a relationship, our bodies. All the things that take time and consideration, that are artful in their slow maturation.

A SHORT LIST OF BRANDS

Jesse Kamm — a tiny family studio in LA whose classic silhouette pants have become a modern heirloom.

Ozma of California — natural fibers and flattering cuts made between LA and Peru.

Donni — LA-made, sewn in women-owned workrooms; soft, lived-in layers.

Norlha — handwoven yak wool from a nomad-run atelier on the Tibetan Plateau.

Milena Silvano — reclaimed sheepskin patchworked and hand-dyed in the UK.

Datura — luxurious natural fabrics, made in small runs between New York and Spain.

James Street Co — workwear and casual basics with that unfussy 90s ease

Elwood — the baggy, broken-in silhouette of the 90s

Vestige — a curated collection of apparel, apothecary and home goods from small batch artisans and designers.

VINTAGE

Naturally, the best vintage shopping is going to be found in person, near you. I’ve learned that genuine thrifting is much more complex than you’d assume: understanding eras, brand progression, recognizing stitching and fabric, factory locations, tag recognition...

Ludale — Keely has an impeccable eye and has such a warm and generous disposition. An adorable downtown shop with a delightful curation.

What’s Mine Is Yours — Tess writes an excellent Substack about vintage shopping. She curates specific batches and teaches you how to shop vintage yourself: the right search terms for eBay, the history of a given era and why its garments have held their value for decades. I found a beautiful old Charvet shirt through her writing and have a few moto leather jackets saved (with fingers crossed)— for the hypothetical day I’m able to make the purchase.

Every single day is a new, bizarre challenge, which seems a rather brilliant (if punishing) initiation into motherhood. It has been, without question, the most tender period of my life. Everything is thrown into high-definition while all the usual comforts and distractions are stripped bare. What’s left is the raw, unadorned reality underneath, seen with excruciating clarity.

During the first trimester, your body undergoes an astonishing physiological overhaul. Of course, this transition can manifest as any number of classic symptoms, or it could be relatively smooth. As a general overview, estrogen and progesterone dramatically increase, your blood volume surges, you have to pee every eleven minutes, and there is an insulting level of bloating and constipation. Your boobs expand rapidly (the nipple situation only becomes more frightening with time). Your uterus begins to migrate, which is a pretty odd sensational experience (for me, in the dead of night), and you miraculously grow an entire organ from scratch.

But my great crux has been the persistent fog of emotion, nausea, and fatigue. It’s unlike anything you can fathom until you’re in the thick of it: a brain stuffed with cotton, an alarmingly acute sense of smell, eating food followed by immediate revulsion. A diet largely limited to a few ingredients and mild flavor (no flavor). As someone who notoriously thinks rather extensively about food, ingredients, sourcing, etc.— you know, I imagined this part differently.

It has been, by and large, fairly unglamorous.

I’ve learned that if you assume things are going to go a certain way, chances are they generally won’t. This is true in most of life, but it lands harder when consolidated into a short time frame, and it lands hardest on the things you’ve craved the longest. When we ache for something, our instinct is to grip it tightly. We micro-manage, over-analyze, and consequently deprive it of oxygen. I had a vision of pregnancy long before I was pregnant— what I’d eat, how I’d feel, where I’d be in life while doing it. But desperation and rigid expectations cloud the view. It’s only when you finally release your grip that things start moving again. There’s circulation. More breathing room for synchronicity, for things to unexpectedly fall into place.

Learning to let go is entirely necessary because the advice and information— while endless and mostly well-meaning— will only get you so far. You can Google every stray symptom and existential question at 3:00 AM. You can read authoritative books, listen to seasoned veterans, and take detailed notes. And still: each pregnancy, each woman, is a blueprint entirely her own. The internet doesn’t know your body, and the books don’t know your baby. The greatest, most grounding source of truth has been, thus far, in the great words of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘the female intuition’— that singular, steady understanding that belongs entirely to you.

And yet, underneath all the nausea and the midnight spirals, there is a strangely euphoric sense of being systematically dismantled and reconstructed. Pregnancy and motherhood are tectonic events— how do you gracefully merge yourself with that level of primal regeneration? It is fascinating to see what a person does under that kind of upheaval. It’s especially psychedelic to be living it.

AN EARLY PREGNANCY FIRST AID KIT

I wax poetic about the sanctity of your own inner blueprint and how the endless stream of external advice is mostly white noise. However, I also spent the last three months desperate for comfort, and it would feel cruel not to share a few things that actually brought me a bit.

I’ll preface this by saying that, under normal circumstances, I generally despise relying on a mountain of supplements. But there is a time and a place, and the first trimester is that time. And mandatory disclaimer: I am not a doctor. Please treat this list as a starting point for a conversation with your OB or midwife.

RITUAL HOLY TRINITY

Because the supplement world is a notoriously unregulated wild west of proprietary blends and questionable sourcing, I opted for a company with rigorous transparency. Ritual third-party tests every single batch for heavy metals and contaminants and tells you exactly what farm or lab your nutrients came from.

• Essential Prenatal Multivitamin: Contains a bioavailable, methylated form of folate, which is crucial for early neural tube development. It also includes chelated iron that is famously gentle on the stomach.

• Natal Choline: Ideally, we’d all be getting our choline from high-quality, pasture-raised local eggs. But if you’re currently in a phase where the sight or smell of a cooked egg makes you want to vacate the room, this is a safety net. Early pregnancy demands a massive amount of choline to act as the structural scaffolding for the baby’s brain and lifelong cognitive development.

• Omega-3 DHA & EPA: DHA is the primary fatty acid needed for early brain and eye development— this form is sustainably sourced from microalgae.

TARGETED SUPPORT

• Seed DS-01® Daily Synbiotic: Progesterone fiddles with digestion, leading to ”systemic unreliability.” Seed keeps things moving, eases the indignity of bloating, and emerging data suggest a balanced microbiome can actually dial down nausea severity.

• Thorne Magnesium Glycinate: The bisglycinate form is gentle on the stomach and acts like a nightly exhale, melting away muscle tension and preventing those unprovoked midnight leg cramps.

• Thorne Pyridoxal 5’—Phosphate (P5P): Standard B6 requires liver conversion— P5P is the active, coenzymated form that your body absorbs on impact. It’s vital for fetal brain development, but its primary, heroic job was taking my daily nausea from a debilitating 10 down to a “manageable” 5.

THE ELEMENTAL BASELINE

• Heliotherapy: The goal is to let your body absorb the specific light signals that regulate hormones, circadian rhythm, support Vitamin D, improve sleep, etc. As much as possible, I aim to get out first thing in the morning (for gua sha, watering the plants, or walking my dog), followed by a burst of midday exposure and a little evening light as the sun sets.

• Grounding: Literally lying flat on the earth. I spent twelve days in Greece doing almost nothing but lying on the ground and eating plain Greek yogurt. Even now, my most generative position is lying on the ground. I don’t know why it helps, but I like to imagine the Earth's subtle, steady vibrations actively soothing my system.

• Strength Training/Stretching/Yin/Walking: Has helped ease nausea and is supportive for understanding a rapidly changing body. The relationship with my body is my longest relationship, and remains an increasingly therapeutic place to land.

• Community: There’s a lot I can say here, but I’ll keep it concise. I’ve had a few women swoop in and be the solid ground beneath me through the last few months, and I can’t describe what a difference that has made. Having the right people in your orbit is an invaluable treasure.

Like all living things, we belong to the sun. It’s one of our most elemental sources of sustenance and regulation. And yet the sun has one of the most confused reputations of anything that’s unambiguously kept us alive.

For most of Western history, the status symbol was pale. A fair complexion meant you didn’t labor outdoors— Elizabethan women reached for lead-based powders, Heian-era Japanese aristocrats for rice powder, and the term “blue blood” comes from the era’s prizing of skin pale enough to show the veins beneath. To be tan was to be poor, sunworn, working the fields. Then the Industrial Revolution marched the working class into factories and mills, and within a couple of generations, the narrative flipped. When Coco Chanel stepped off a yacht in 1923 with an accidental Riviera tan, bronzed skin was suddenly the marker of leisure— of someone with the time and money to lie in the sun.

Our relationship to the sun has gotten tangled up with fashion and class. Somewhere in the late twentieth century, sunlight tipped from tonic to hazard— a thing to be feared uniformly. But we evolved in conversation with the sun, and no blanket diagnosis can capture something that intricate and individualized. The fear came dressed as science, and science is always mid-revision.

This isn’t to dispute the link between the sun and cancer, but it’s not a linear equation. None of which dismisses the dangers: burns, overexposure, sensitive skin. Moderate, regular light versus constant exposure/scorching sunburns are entirely different events, and avoiding the sun altogether carries repercussions. The ideal ground is the unsexy middle where dose matters and shifts with latitude, season, hour, and skin tone.

Heliotherapy— from helios, sun, and therapeia, healing— is one of the oldest medical practices on record. Around 1500 BCE, Egyptian physicians treated vitiligo with an extract of a Nile plant followed by sun exposure— the ancestor of a light therapy still in practice today. Hippocrates prescribed sunlight as standard care, wealthy Romans built solaria onto their rooftops, and Pliny the Elder called the sun the best of remedies.

In 1903, a Faroese doctor won a Nobel Prize for treating a form of tuberculosis with light, and the Swiss physician Auguste Rollier opened the first of what became thirty-six heliotherapy clinics in the Alps— treating tuberculosis of the bone, rickets, and stubborn wounds with gradual exposure, patients building tolerance slowly on mountain terraces. Then antibiotics arrived, cured the same diseases faster, and the solaria emptied— not because sunlight had been disproven, but because a pill was easier.

Phototherapy survives in dermatology for treating psoriasis, eczema, and newborn jaundice. One of Rollier’s contemporaries called sunlight “like a good champagne: it invigorates and stimulates, but in excess it intoxicates and poisons.”

What the research keeps finding is how precisely our biology runs in cadence with sunlight— how much of what happens in the body depends on light and timing. What the sun touches runs wider than any single system— bone and blood, skin and circadian rhythm, the healing of wounds, the steadiness of mood, the cooling of inflammation.

MORNING

Early sun arrives at a low angle, rich in red and near-infrared wavelengths, relatively gentle in UV— and what it’s doing, primarily, is relaying information through the eyes.

Light hits the retina and travels to the suprachiasmatic nuclei in the hypothalamus (fancy words), the body’s master clock, which reads it as the day’s first signal: alert, awake. Melatonin, high throughout the night, begins to clear. The cortisol awakening response rises (the good kind of cortisol— we want this). The system orients toward wakefulness. It essentially equates to steadier energy, an easier time winding down at night, and deeper sleep. Light is the great zeitgeber— the giver of time.

There’s a deeper, stranger layer, too, still in the early stages of study: red and near-infrared wavelengths are absorbed by an enzyme in the mitochondria (where most of our cellular energy is produced) and appear to help them run more efficiently. It’s part of why standing in early light can leave you feeling lit from the inside.

MIDDAY

As the sun climbs, the spectrum shifts. UVA and UVB intensify, and the skin becomes a primary site of photochemical alchemy (the body’s chemistry set in motion by light). This is where vitamin D synthesis peaks— UVB strikes the skin, a precursor molecule absorbs it, and the body converts it to vitamin D3.

UVA mobilizes stores of nitric oxide derivatives held in layers of the skin, releasing them into circulation where they soften the vessel walls and lower blood pressure. This pathway is now one compelling candidate to explain why blood pressure tends to decrease in summer.

Midday is also when UV does its complex immune work— acting as a local immunomodulator that soothes the overactive response behind inflammatory skin conditions like psoriasis. It’s when circulation visibly rises: the skin warming, blood moving closer to the surface— a rosy flush, the skin radiating a plumped, hydrated appearance.

But midday is also when the risk concentrates, and when individual variance matters most. UV intensity varies enormously with latitude, season, hour, and cloud cover, while its biological effects vary widely with skin pigmentation, sensitivity, age, medications, and exposure history.

EVENING

As the sun descends, the arc reverses. UV fades. The light lengthens and warms in color, the red and near-infrared wavelengths that opened the morning returning now to close it. The body begins its own corresponding shift—melatonin starts to rise, cortisol declines, and the nervous system begins leaning toward rest. It is the fading of blue-rich light and the drop in overall brightness that give the master clock its evening cue, supporting the physiological wind-down: preparation for rest, restoration, and the overnight work of repair.

This is where the mood question lives, and it has no tidy scientific answer. Broadly speaking, a body whose light exposure is coherent across the day tends toward better sleep, more coherent daily rhythms, and steadier mood— a pattern well supported by the circadian literature. The precise mechanism connecting light to mood, though, remains contested: whether it works through serotonin, through clock synchronization, or through a nervous system finally back in sync with the rhythms of the earth and cosmos.

Honestly, I enjoy circling back to the idea of harvesting the sun during the summer months. In February, I’m not flinging myself into the pre-dawn dark for the sake of my circadian rhythm. But this time of year, I take it while it’s ripe. It’s one of the many small things that remind me how much of who we are comes down to tiny invisible exchanges— with light, what we eat, who we’re around, our thoughts, our habits. For all the information we have (arguably too much), the actual formula stays pretty simple. Studies shift, trends turn over, and the certainties of one decade get revised in the next. Somewhere underneath there’s a steadier knowing the body holds, regardless of what’s currently being proven. I suspect the fear we’ve picked up around the sun is more corrosive than the thing itself.

Here are a few items I love, both for enjoying the sun and for protection when you’re reaching the upper limit.

A SUN KIT

Marie Veronique ColorFree Zinc SPF 32 — Formulated over five-plus years— non-nano zinc only, no chemical filters. Substantial, while somehow remaining light and invisible.

Lesse Every Tone SPF 30 — Pure non-nano zinc, made by an Australian who grew up treating sunscreen as step one of existing. Leaves skin dewy, hydrated, and protected.

Dune The Bod Guard — A lightweight sunscreen. Thinner, faster application for when a thick zinc feels like too much armor.

Badger Baby Mineral SPF 40 — Thick, everything sticks to it, and it takes a minute to rub in, but it wears like a second skin.

SunBody Hats — A proper wide-brimmed hat.

Lightweight Button-Up — I have a lightweight linen button-up from Ozma (sadly, I don’t think they carry them anymore) and a vintage cotton button-up (strong buy from eBay) that I use when I need to keep myself covered up.

Turkish Towel — The most versatile item to throw over your legs, wear around the house on a hot day, towel off after swimming, take camping, easy to pack for travel, etc.

FROM THE ARCHIVES—

I’ve been thinking about this since returning from Greece, a difficult place to hold at arm’s length. There’s an indefinable romance to it: salt-crusted breath, the silver-green leaves of gnarled olive groves, skin saturated in honeyed warmth.

Greece holds an indefinable gravity, one where myth and devotion anchored the entire weight of a civilization— belief transformed into visceral, structural reality. It is not polished. You can palpably sense the thousands of years of rough, tectonic upheaval. It’s evident in the spray-painted graffiti scarring sun-baked concrete. The imperfect, deeply grooved, soot-stained marble of a tavern table. The way locals argue over politics, their voices echoing off a landscape that has absorbed endless years of defiant collapse.

The gods at the center of all of it are no more burnished than the place that built them. The Olympians are not wise, consistent, or well-behaved. They are capricious and willful and prone to spectacular error. They scheme and nurse their grudges with a fanatic commitment.

When they argue and deceive and love and wreck things, they are crystallizing something real about being a person— something that has not aged a day in hundreds of years. There is a wrinkle where myth and history bleed into each other: the myths are not explicitly history, though history seeps in at the edges. They occupy a stranger, more useful space— not factual, but full of truth— a primitive, remarkably sophisticated simulator, running the human experiment with all the safety features removed.

Our language is, in large part, a graveyard of these stories: the planets, the constellations, the elements. Galaxias means “milky”— from gala, milk— because the Greeks saw in that band of light the breast milk Hera flung across the sky when she woke to find Zeus had tricked her into nursing the infant Heracles. We named our entire galaxy after a quarrel on Olympus.

Ordinary speech is no different. To panic is to feel the sudden, flock-scattering terror once attributed to Pan. An echo is a punished nymph, cursed to repeat what she hears and nothing of her own. Narcissism, nemesis, psychology, tantalize, atlas— all of them inherited, still in daily use.

What stays with me most is the sheer abundance. Gods, goddesses, demigods, nymphs, and minor deities assigned to astonishingly specific corners of existence— an entire population of the divine, evidently with a great deal of time for the telling and retelling of stories. One imagines the evenings were long and imagination was ripe.

GREEK MYTHOLOGY READING LIST

THE GREEK MYTHS SERIES by Stephen Fry — Mythos, Heroes, Troy, Odyssey

If the myths are a language, Stephen Fry is the ideal person to translate them— mostly because he so plainly delights in doing it. He narrates the whole sprawling saga like the most erudite friend at a long dinner, the one who knows everyone's scandals and tells them beautifully: dry, mischievous, scholarly, pausing to point out strange synchronicities and connections. He never sands the gods down to role models; he highlights their pettiness and revels in their absurdity.

Mythos lays the foundation— the origins, the Titans, the rise of the Olympians, the world assembled from chaos. Do not expect to retain all 42,957 gods, goddesses, nymphs, and minor deities; the point is the broad brushstrokes, the shape of the thing, which then spills into everything after. Heroes shifts from the immortals to the mortals — Perseus, Heracles, Atalanta, doing extraordinary things at great personal cost. Troy is the war: Helen, Achilles, Hector, ten years of glory and grief. Odyssey is the long, storm-tossed road home.

This is the series if you want to commit to becoming a true freak about Greek mythology. Fry narrates the books himself, and it makes for a glorious listen.

THE SONG OF ACHILLES by Madeline Miller

Miller writes the way a stone gets worn smooth— nothing extra, every word placed and load-bearing, the restraint itself making it lush. She’ll land an image or phrase, and you’ll find it lodged behind your sternum for days. A sparse, rich book that becomes achingly opulent.

It is the Iliad told from the edge of the frame— narrated not by Achilles, the golden warrior fated for glory, but by Patroclus, the exiled boy who loves him. We watch them grow up together, fall in love, and walk knowingly toward Troy and the prophecy that lies in wait.

CIRCE by Madeline Miller

Circe is a slower, warmer book, told across centuries with the texture of sunlight and herb-smoke. It is the rare myth-telling that feels less like a tragedy bearing down and more like a woman expanding into the full width of herself.

Narrated by Circe, a minor goddess, daughter of the sun, overlooked and belittled by her own kind until she discovers a power the gods fear: witchcraft. Exiled alone to an island, she spends her long, immortal solitude honing her craft, as familiar names drift across the years— Daedalus, the Minotaur, Odysseus, Hermes.

CLYTEMNESTRA by Costanza Casati

A Spartan-bred queen rendered with all her edges intact, neither softened into a victim nor flattened into a villain. The author studied ancient Greece, and it shows in the authority of the world she builds— brutal, political, exacting.

Clytemnestra is Helen’s sister— the other daughter of Sparta, the one history remembers only for what she did at the end. Casati gives her the beginning: a warrior girl, a first marriage, and the unforgivable thing her second husband, Agamemnon, does on the road to Troy. The rest is the slow, patient construction of revenge.

QUEENS OF THEMISCYRA by Hannah Lynn

This book is broad, built on a corner of the mythology most retellings leave alone: the Amazons. It moves like an epic rather than a chamber piece, decades and battles passing in a few pages, and its real subject is two sisters and the diverging paths they take. It’s the one to reach for when you want the scope of myth— armies, queens, the clash of civilizations.

It follows Hippolyte and Penthesilea, daughters of Ares and queens of the Amazons, feared across Greece and unmatched in war. When a ship arrives carrying Theseus of Athens, Hippolyte is drawn away from her people into a life that slowly closes around her. It is a story of war, love, betrayal, and, beneath all of it, of sisterhood.

A THOUSAND SHIPS by Natalie Haynes

The Trojan War as a chorus— queens, captives, goddesses, mothers, the muse herself. Each chapter features a different woman, restoring pieces of the war that never made it into song. Haynes is a classicist by training, the learning lightly worn and dry. The book is framed by the muse Calliope, conscripted by a male poet to help him sing of heroes, who pointedly keeps redirecting him toward everyone he’s left out.

There is no single plot; it moves through the war’s whole arc— the fall of the city, the long voyages home, the women carried off as spoils, the goddesses who set the whole thing in motion.

ARIADNE by Jennifer Saint

Most people know Ariadne for the ball of string she hands Theseus so he can find his way out of the labyrinth. The writing is soft-edged and lyrical. It carries an undercurrent of anger: the account of what the women are made to pay for in the wake of men who aren’t heroic legends.

Ariadne is a princess of Crete, sister to the monster in the labyrinth and, later, to Phaedra, whose story the novel comes to hold alongside her own. She helps the hero, is repaid with abandonment on a far shore, and finds something unexpected in the god Dionysus. The two sisters’ lives diverge across sea and decades, before crossing again where neither of them hoped.

FROM THE ARCHIVES —

We feel the same phenomenon mirrored in the body. Warmth spreading through the tissues, drawing out a suppleness, a pliability. The spine lifting and uncurling, vertebra by vertebra. A spaciousness through the heart— the front of the body lengthening toward the light.

This is the question I often circle back to when designing practices for the season: what is the body already inclined toward at this time of year, and how is that inclination reflected in the way we move, relate, and communicate? And if the body is already leaning toward its fullest expression, how do we accentuate that? How do we bring it to its peak?

When we lengthen the dense tissue layered across the chest and beneath the collarbone, it reaches the end of its slack and begins to give. The sternum naturally lifts. The upper spine reverses its protective curl, a structural opening occurs along a continuous line— one unbroken sheet of tissue linking the body’s surface to its depths. What begins as physiological reshaping eventually cascades through every system.

That release spreads through the spine, the body’s central column. An intricate, ceaseless relay, transmitting and receiving signals between the periphery and the interior. The communication is only as clean as the medium it travels through. Where tissue has become dense and dehydrated, where the supple glide between layers has calcified, the signal dulls. It slows, scatters, arrives diluted, or fails to arrive at all. The body loses resolution there, dropping below the threshold of clean reception.

But restore the glide, and the signal runs clean. A spine that ripples, current transmitting smoothly through its full length. Signaling strung through microscopic layers, each vestige listening, mapping movement and stillness. Sensation resolves to a finer grain— interoception sharpens, the body reading its own depths.

The reach extends beyond the boundary of the skin. A clean signal does not stay interior. It surfaces first on the face, a warm complexion, a softening through the eyes, a radiance rising from underneath. It expands outward, reaching the gossamer layers of a summer afternoon, the residue of another person’s attention.

If summer draws us to inhabit the entirety of ourselves, then that arrival was never going to be a private event— and the question becomes what an open body is for, not to itself, but to everything it turns toward.

The coherence you build internally shapes the space between you and another person. At the edge of the body, the reach intersects with the one thing solitude cannot provide. We are social animals, and not in the decorative sense— our physiology was assembled in community. Strong interpersonal connection lowers the body’s threat load; isolation measurably raises it. We are wired to need a sense of belonging, of purpose, of being known by the people we live among. These are not the soft furnishings of a life but its structural support. We open to meet life— and life, at its most vital, is the felt sense of other people meeting us back.

And here the body does something most of us never think to credit it with: it conducts the entire exchange before the mind has weighed in.

When you turn toward someone and actually listen, through raw, undiluted attention, the listening happens in the body first. The tissues in the face begin to loosen, the breath becomes steady and slow. The small muscles of the middle ear retune, quite literally, toward the frequency of a human voice. A branch of the vagus nerve (the nerve that governs whether the body registers its surroundings as safe) wires the face, the throat, the ear, and the heart into one circuit. That attention causes the circuit to ignite, materializing as an opening across the throat and chest, a downward settling.

The circuit is reciprocal by design. To be genuinely attended to, leaned toward, held in someone’s gaze, listened to with attentiveness registers at the base of the brain as safety. Not safety as an idea, but the physiological state: heart rate variability rising, the long exhale, the soft tissue of the belly beginning to soften. Safety and connection run on the same wiring. The oldest part of the nervous system cannot tell the difference between I am being seen and I am safe. To it, they are the same event.

And because the body is conducting all of this beneath the level of thought, it is also reading the exchange as it happens— tracking whether the warmth it extends is met or whether it returns unanswered. You start to feel the cadence of a conversation the way you feel temperature: a real exchange has a rhythm to it, a crossing back and forth, attention volleyed and returned. And you feel, just as plainly, when it doesn’t cross— when the warmth and attention you extend curves toward the other person and simply stays there.

What has taken an age to understand is that you cannot read any of this accurately while you are still holding yourself back. If you stay braced, if you offer only a fragment, you only ever learn whether someone can meet a fragment. To find out who can actually receive you, you have to stop editing yourself down to the version you think is safe— you have to extend the whole signal, and then read what returns. Some people meet it. Some cannot extend their vision past themselves, and the circuit only ever runs in one direction. That, too, is information.

The gap between how you actually are and how you present yourself is a chronic contraction the body holds. And summer, the season the body turns outward into its full shape, is when that gap becomes both most felt and most available to close. Everything outside is broadening— laden, ripe, and vivid. The body, meeting the season, registers the contrast of exactly how much of itself it is still holding guarded. The dissonance is most available to close now because the body is already operating at that frequency.

This is the contemplation of the season: how do we let its medicine circulate within us and flush into the spaces around us, remolding the architecture of the body, the circuitry of the mind? How do we stretch into the full range of our being— to feel met, and to meet someone in return?

This is precisely what a practice is designed to tend. Strength and breath to steady and fortify the muscles and the nervous system. Long stillness coaxes dense tissue to soften and reshape. Stretching and mobility restore the pliable, gliding quality through the body. Each reaches the level of habitual, unconscious holding through a slightly different avenue, and together they shift the baseline— until openness is simply what the body does at rest, and not something you have to summon under pressure.

A cultivated body becomes an instrument that warms a space. The openness offered becomes contagious; nervous systems settle in each other’s company; and what arises between people is a particular flavor of joy— the synchrony of being in communion, bodies turned outward together at the height of the year.

For years, I thought the peak of summer was structural: a deeper opening, a more fluid spine. But the body’s fullest expression was never only structural. The peak is not the open body. It is the open body, met.

FROM THE ARCHIVES—

We are composed of polarities, designed for neither extreme. A practice worth keeping holds both and cultivates each long before the moment that asks for it. Restoration is not a skill you can acquire mid-collapse, and power is not a reserve you can draw on having never built it. The only guarantee is that both will be asked of us, sooner or later, and rarely on schedule— which is exactly why the groundwork is better laid in advance than under pressure.

When both are already fluent, the body becomes something you tend rather than something you scramble to repair— maintained across the years, not triaged in depletion. Building a seasonal movement program is learning exactly this: how a body becomes legible, how the different textures serve it, and how the pieces fit into a season that can flex without losing its shape.

I. LITERACY THROUGH REPETITION

The first principle of training is that you cannot read a body you're constantly surprising. Repetition is the best mechanism for perceiving what's actually happening inside your own structure— how it's aligned, how the tissues respond under load, where effort is being distributed, compensations, tension, dormant tissue. Novelty obscures our neurological ability to detect patterning.

With the framework of repetition, you start by choosing a region and a season-long through line. I organize each season around one structural conversation— a region I target through a dedicated movement matrix for three months. The work stays full-bodied, but there's a spine to it. By tending a collection of muscle groups over an extended duration and through more than one avenue, you lay down a structural capacity in that area that holds— strength and mobility that persist as a baseline long after the season's focus has moved elsewhere.

II. THE STRUCTURAL RATIO: OUTPUT & RECOVERY

To design a seasonal program that respects our biology, we translate these rhythms into an architecture. The week is the fundamental unit of design— a scaffolding that holds steady while we alter the ratio of force generated to force absorbed. The crucial aspect is letting that ratio shift as the body and the life around it fluctuate, adapting based on circumstances.

The outward side is more than strength training. It is the whole register of output: progressive mechanical tension across the larger muscle groups and the smaller stabilizers, the cardiovascular work that loads the heart and lungs, active stretching, and mobility. The inward side is restoration— long, meditative holds, deep breaths, deliberate stillness that encourages tissue remodeling. Walking sits on the hinge between them, output gentle enough to double as recovery.

In an expansion phase, the dial tilts outward, roughly 70:30— most of the week spent loading and adding tension. This is when capacity is built, when tissue is asked to do more than it currently can and adapts upward to meet the demand.

In a consolidation phase, the dial shifts inward, closer to 40:60— less generated, more absorbed. This is when that adaptation settles, when the loading you’ve already done is metabolized into lasting tissue rather than piled higher on a fatigued system.

The structure underneath stays constant; only the proportion moves. And the restorative half is never the negotiable part— it carries the same weight as the loading, because adaptation comes from recovery, not exhaustion.

III. THE SPIRAL SEQUENCE: RELEASE, ACTIVATE, INTEGRATE & LOAD

The modalities don't have to fall in a tidy order, and they don't map one-to-one onto days. A single output day might braid several together, while a recovery day stays in a single register. The mix shifts: some output days include cardio, others are strength and stretching. What stays constant isn't the arrangement; it's that across the week, variety is present.

Release is the longer-held, floor-based shapes with reduced muscular engagement and sustained attention. Connective tissues undergo a gradual yielding called creep—the tissue elongating beyond its initial resistance, the deeper layers reorganizing.

Activate wakes the smaller stabilizer muscles inside that newly available range. Lighter loads, higher reps, the precise conditioning that shifts mechanical load off the joints, preventing injury and building a stable, highly mobile foundation.

Integrate weaves that control into whole-body patterns through active stretching— the simultaneous contraction and elongation of a muscle, reaching into a range under your own power rather than waiting passively at its edge.

Load is the work of progressive resistance— heavier weight, fewer repetitions. Training through every dimension of contraction: the concentric, where the muscle shortens to generate power boldly; the eccentric, a slow lengthening under load that builds resilient connective tissue and exquisite control; and the isometric, a static hold that recruits maximum muscle fibers to teach the body how to anchor itself safely without a moving joint. Together, these forces remodel muscle tissue for the long arc.

The dialogue between the modalities is the beauty of a seasonal program. Each register elevates the next, so that every phase arrives stronger as a result of the ones around it. The practices answer one another, and each turn raises the baseline. It's not climbing a ladder; it's moving along an upward spiral.

This style of training is a foundation, not a finished structure. With a strong, pliable baseline in place, you can build on it as the season or the goal requires. For example, in winter, I add more cardio and heavy weights to condition for splitboarding, stacking a specific demand on a body already prepared to receive it. The baseline is what provides adaptability.

That versatility enables the broader fluctuations. We live within the literal seasons, and beneath them the seasons of a life— stretches with real capacity to brush against our edges, and stretches where we require replenishment, and all the nuances in between. The faculty that enables smooth navigation between them is utilizing our intuition: a capacity sitting right at the intersection of acute physiological signal and something energetic, mystical.

Women hold a distinct cyclicality, a hormonal tide that impacts every facet of our constitution, including how connective tissue rebuilds. Mapping your cycle is less about restriction than about locating your leverage. The follicular rise toward ovulation has an appetite for load, where the heavy sessions and the personal records live. The luteal descent asks for volume pulled back and restoration leaned into. None of this is fragility. I once ran forty-four miles, the Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim of the Grand Canyon, the day before I bled, so I’m not arguing for delicacy— only that override has a cost, and a mature program reads the tide instead of paying, later, for having fought it.

This rhythm breathes across years, too. Connective tissue remodels more slowly with age, recovery windows lengthen, and the hormonal landscape that governs repair shifts— testosterone tapers, and tissue turnover slows. For women, it arrives as a more defined threshold, the marked transition of perimenopause and menopause. None of it demands a smaller life; it is simply a different set of inputs. A program that pretends you are perpetually twenty-eight will eventually hurt you for the crime of aging normally.

To build an enduring practice is, in large part, to recognize what a privilege and joy it is to inhabit the instrument of a body— and explore how we care for it as the years pass. That care begins with knowing your own bias and engineering the counterweight in. If you lean toward the inward pole, embed a little more push in the plan than feels natural. If you lean toward outward push, the work is developing a relationship to rest and recovery.

This is the essence of seasonality: the inward and the outward are not opposites but partners, and the range you build in one direction directly expands your range in the other. Practiced this way, movement becomes a form of somatic divination— no longer about conquering the body, but about learning to read and oscillate between your own contractions and expansions as fluently as the earth reads its own.

FROM THE ARCHIVES—

When left untended, it accumulates. It generates, retrieves, anticipates— weaving its threads until we are swallowed by them, until the sediment of all that mental fabrication begins to settle and harden. We move through our days looking entirely awake, and the mind is somewhere else entirely. Ahead, behind, rehearsing, regretting. The actual moment, luminous, unrepeatable— passing like light through glass is left unregistered.

I am, by nature, highly cerebral. I tend to get tangled in my own thinking— to overanalyze, to fabricate, to be pulled under by the weight of hypotheticals that have no basis in the present moment. For a long time, this was simply the texture of being inside my own head. Much of the depression and anxiety I carried in earlier years came, I suspect, from a profound dissociation from my own body, waging a constant state of war within myself.

Change rarely arrives through a single decisive moment. More often, it comes through small, almost imperceptible reroutes— one degree of shift, held long enough to alter the entire trajectory. But at some point, I made a decision: that I did not want to simply manage that space, I wanted to redesign it. That decision led, inevitably, to stillness— and to the confrontation waiting inside it. The accumulated interior, everything that had been running beneath the surface, unexamined, precisely because daily life provides such an efficient means of avoidance.

What I have come to understand slowly (and not without resistance) is the deeper you are willing to go, the further you rise.

The descent is not something to circumvent. It is something to move through deliberately, because the range you develop in one direction directly expands your range in the other. The seasons understand this implicitly. Autumn does not resist the falling away— it yields into it, concentrating downward into root and seed, so that the ascent that follows carries genuine force.

The mind has its seasons, too. Meditation does not eliminate the fluctuations. It develops a literacy for them— until the contractions and descents become as legible as the expansions, and you begin to understand that each carries a potency.

We do not arrive at ourselves unformed. Long before we have the language or the distance to question it, we are already being shaped by our early environment, by the emotional climate of the households we were formed in, by the particular ways we learned to manage uncertainty, seek safety, and interpret ourselves. That shaping does not stay in the past. It becomes the architecture of perception— the ingrained pathways through which every subsequent experience is filtered.

Conditioning runs deeper than mood or habit. It becomes the entire operating system of a life— the invisible substrate beneath how we navigate intimacy, gauge our own worth, decide what we are capable of receiving, how much of the world we allow ourselves to inhabit. The conditioning was the water I swam in— total, ambient, so familiar it had long since been mistaken for the shape of things. It had a particular quality, like fruit that never quite ripened: nothing fully opening, nothing quite yielding. And it spread to everything I reached for— visible and advancing, spoiling what it touched.

The brain is neuroplastic— malleable, responsive, amenable. Capable, under the right conditions, of being fundamentally remade. What the contemplative traditions spent centuries transmitting, neuroscience can now measure. Neural tissue reorganizes in response to the quality of attention directed through it— the way water, given time and consistency, reshapes the land it moves through. Pathways traveled repeatedly grow wide and efficient, carving themselves deeper into the landscape. Those gradually released begin, slowly, to silt. To narrow and fade.

Seven days of a consistent meditative practice begin to quiet the regions of the brain responsible for the internal chatter— that low, persistent current of self-referential noise that most of us have simply learned to live beneath. After eight weeks, the amygdala begins to restructure— the brain's alarm chamber, the circuitry of dread, the low and continuous hum generated by a braced system.

Years of practice thicken the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, the regions governing attention, memory, and emotional regulation. Recent imaging has found that long-term meditators show measurably greater connectivity between hemispheres, a more integrated quality of processing, and increased synchrony with other people during social interaction. The practice changes not only how we inhabit ourselves but also how we move toward one another.

The mind, on entrance, reveals its full nature— restless, associative, magnificently designed to solve, to categorize, to thread meaning and understanding from our surroundings.

The unfinished conversations, the unpaid debts of emotion, the obligations and their endless filaments— but also the longing, hope, curiosity, hunger, the joy— each aspect becoming sharply etched. In these early minutes of meditation, it’s not suppression or forced stillness. It’s an allowance of oscillation, witnessing the currents of thought in their most saturated form. Consciously directing the mind to move between the thought formation and redirection, finding the space between. Imagine the infinitesimal pause between inhalation and exhalation, allowing the spaciousness to widen. Eventually, this expansion allows you to step outside the stream.

Then, gradually, the waters still.

The nervous system shifts registers— from the vigilant state that governs most of our waking hours to something older, more ornate. Within our interior, the sensory terrain becomes high definition. Interoceptive pathways, opened by sustained attention, begin transmitting at a finer resolution: the texture of circulation, the sensation of breath moving through the chest, the resonant quality of the body— cells vibrating, every tendril in communication. All of these strands interlaced into a complex, thrumming lattice. The mind reaches into the full breadth of itself.

There is, in those moments, a sense of immense steadiness, of vastness— the boundaries of the self becoming permeable, the distinction between interior and exterior dissolving with each breath. It is, in the most precise sense of the word, psychedelic.

What the practice builds, over time, is not just equanimity. It is capacity— a wider window of tolerance, a nervous system trained toward regulation rather than reactivity, an attention span capable of remaining present with difficult material without being overwhelmed by it. This capacity translates into the body as directly as it does into the mind— effort moving more cleanly through the tissues, sensation deepening in richness, challenge in a physical practice becoming something the system can read rather than simply brace against.

It is the foundation that certain deeper therapeutic modalities (EMDR, for instance) require to do their most precise work. Subconscious patterns, the ingrained circuitry of old experience, respond differently when the mind has already developed some fluency in observation. When the nervous system is no longer in a constant state of defense. Meditation prepares the soil— so that when you go looking for the root, you have the steadiness to find it, and the precision to prune.

None of this absolves the eddies of being human. What it changes is the quality of your passage through them— a shift most legible in retrospect, looking back across the years at the changed atmosphere of a life.

Cultivation of the mind is the longest practice and the most radical. You become, over time, the embodiment of what you have been tending. Not perfect, not untroubled, not without fracture— but present, clear, and genuinely alive to the life you are already living.

ON FINDING YOUR FORM

Researchers attempting to catalogue meditation traditions have counted anywhere from a few dozen to several thousand distinct practices— spanning Tibetan Buddhism, Theravāda, Zen, Vedic, Taoist, Sufi, Christian contemplative, and beyond. Within each tradition, entire lineages. Within each lineage, forms are specific to the teacher, season, and stage of practice. The diversity reflects different minds, different entry points, different needs at different moments in life. Virtually all of them fall into three broad orientations— focused attention, open awareness, or self-transcending.

BREATH AWARENESS (SHAMATHA). The foundation. The instruction is almost insultingly simple: follow the breath, return when the mind wanders, repeat. What it builds, slowly and without fanfare, is the capacity to direct attention.

INSIGHT MEDITATION (VIPASSANA). Where shamatha steadies the instrument, vipassana uses it. The practice turns clear attention toward the contents of experience itself— sensation, thought, emotion— observing how each arises, shifts, and passes. In some lineages, it follows a foundation of concentration; in others, such as the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition, insight is the vehicle from the outset, the investigation itself the path.

MANTRA. Across the Vedic, Tibetan, and contemplative traditions, mantra takes different forms with different mechanisms — a personally initiated syllable in Transcendental Meditation, a deity-specific sound in Tibetan tantra, a sacred name repeated in devotional practice. What they share: sound used as an anchor rather than a concept, the repetition gradually releasing its grip on meaning until only resonance remains. A different door into the same room, arrived at by different keys.

YOGA NIDRA. Rooted in the Tantric practice of Nyāsa and systematized in the twentieth century by Swami Satyananda Saraswati of the Bihar School of Yoga, Yoga Nidra is not relaxation, though relaxation is its byproduct. The practitioner is guided through a precise protocol— a rotation of consciousness through the body, the seeding of intention (sankalpa), the movement through paired opposites, and visualization — while held at the hypnagogic threshold between waking and sleep. It is in this liminal state, neither fully conscious nor fully surrendered, that the practice does its deepest work. One hour is said to carry the restorative equivalent of several hours of ordinary sleep, though that is incidental to what it is actually building: access to the layers of consciousness that ordinary waking life does not reach.

ZAZEN. From the Zen Buddhist tradition, and in some ways, the most austere form on this list. The practitioner sits, spine erect, eyes softly open, and simply meets whatever arises. No object, no technique, no thread to follow. It is sometimes described as thinking not-thinking— a quality of open, ungrasping presence that neither clings nor rejects. There is nowhere to arrive. Which makes it either the most liberating or the most confrontational form, depending on the person and the season — and that tension, too, is the practice.

VISUALIZATION & INNER ALCHEMY. Works with constructing inner landscapes, moving light through the body’s energetic geography, and inhabiting images with enough precision that they become portals. In the Tibetan Vajrayāna tradition, it is called deity yoga. The Taoist lineage enters a similar territory through inner alchemy— circulating Qi through the microcosmic orbit, directing awareness into the organs, moving light through the central channel until the boundary between sensation and image begins, quietly, to dissolve. In Jungian psychology, it’s active imagination. Different maps through different lineages, united by the idea that the mind must simultaneously construct, inhabit, and observe. When the attention holds, the practitioner can access the body as an energetic landscape, light as something felt rather than seen.

TO BEGIN

The meditations I teach and practice are available here in THE STUDIO— mainly breathwork and visualization practices. For independent exploration, Waking Up— created by neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris, is a mindfulness and meditation app focused on understanding the nature of consciousness.

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Gardening in the margins of all that— compacted soil, interrupted irrigation, ground that has been dug up and filled back in more times than I can count— has been, frankly, a demoralizing process. Southwest Montana, with the expanse of the Absaroka and Beartooth Range looming in the background, is notorious for alkaline soil, violent wind, and summers that can swing from drought to a snowstorm in the same afternoon.

You learn, over seasons of failure and the occasional bewildering success, that the question is not what you want to grow— but what actually wants to grow here. I suspect this is true regardless of where you garden, though I'll concede there are soils significantly more agreeable than mine.

The more interesting question has been: what kind of garden do I actually want to be in relationship with? I craved a garden that holds the same seasonal philosophy I value in the greater context of life— one that finds as much meaning in January as in July, that treats dormancy as part of the story rather than an interruption of it. I had been reaching toward this understanding for years without quite having language for it. Then I stumbled across Piet Oudolf, and had that holy sensation of the clouds parting.

Oudolf is a Dutch garden designer who has spent five decades working with the same foundational argument: that structure and movement are the real materials of a garden, and color is almost secondary. This distillation of his philosophy is to design with the full seasonal arc, not just the bloom. You choose plants not only for their flowers but for their seed heads, their winter silhouettes, their ability to hold form under snow, to catch frost and low light.

He plants in drifts and loose repetitions, uses grasses as connective tissue between bolder perennials, thinks in waves of bloom so that one thing gives way to another without a gap— from the first tentative Baptisia spires of late spring through to the frost-silvered Russian Sage of November. And he insists that naturalistic planting is not the same as neglected planting (this, I can really get behind).

This philosophy weaves seamlessly with the ecological benefit of planting pollinators. The crisis in pollinator health is complex, but one thread runs consistently through the research: floral diversity and bloom continuity are the most reliable predictors of colony health. Bees need something in flower from early spring through late autumn. A garden that blooms exclusively in June and is done by August is ecologically similar, from a bee’s perspective, to a parking lot.

What Oudolf-style planting offers— that long, staggered, sequenced arc of bloom— is precisely what bees need, and what most conventional gardens often fail to provide. Agastache blooms from midsummer well into fall; Echinacea feeds bees while flowering, and goldfinches after— nothing is wasted. Monarda is a particular favorite of bumble bees and specialist native species that won't visit most other flowers. The grasses, which don't provide nectar, provide something equally important: shelter, overwintering structure, nesting habitat for ground-nesting bees. And because bees are not generalists, a monoculture of even the very best pollinator plant will support fewer species than ten different things blooming in sequence.

WORKING WITH WHAT YOU HAVE

Most of us, understandably, are not working with the sprawling acreage of an Oudolf installation. A 4’x8’ bed in reasonable sun is plenty— one grass, two or three perennials.

The principles scale without losing the overarching philosophy. What the framework requires is not acreage but intention about bloom sequence, honest assessment of your conditions, and the willingness to leave things alone in winter.

A few questions to ask before you plant anything:

• How much sun does this space get? Oudolf-style planting is mostly a full-sun enterprise, with a minimum of six hours. But you could adapt this framework to heavily shaded areas, depending on your space.

• What is the condition of your soil? Does it drain fast, stay wet, or crack in drought? What is the pH— a basic testing meter is considerably cheaper than sacrificial plant education.

• Do you have irrigation, or is this a rainfall situation? This divides everything. Plants that don’t mind being wet-dry-wet-dry are different from plants that want consistent moisture.

• What’s your USDA hardiness zone— and what does that actually mean where you live? The zone average low temperature is useful but incomplete. Late frost dates, wind exposure, snow cover patterns— these are the details that determine what survives. In high-elevation mountain climates, particularly, you can be a zone colder in practice than on paper.

AN AI PLANNING PROMPT

Gardening is a discipline that hands you your ignorance slowly, one dead plant at a time, and there is nothing particularly wrong with that. To reduce some of the friction, use AI as an educational tool tailored to your circumstances. The goal is to walk into a nursery with enough context— moving into the endeavour with a combination of preparation and sense of possibility that carries a distinctly pleasurable gravity.

Here is a prompt that will get you a genuinely helpful, customized starting list:

I am planning a Piet Oudolf-inspired perennial garden bed and want your help developing an initial plant palette. Here is my context:

— Location and hardiness zone: [your city, state, and USDA zone if known]

— Garden aspect: [which direction does the bed face? North-facing? South-facing? Full sun, part shade?]

— Soil conditions: [sandy and fast-draining? Clay and slow-draining? Rocky? What is the rough pH if you know it?]

— Water situation: [is this bed irrigated? Drip system? Hand-watered occasionally? Dependent entirely on rainfall?]

— Square footage or rough dimensions of the bed.

— Any aesthetic preferences: [color range, height preferences, strong preference for native plants, anything you want to avoid]

Based on this, please suggest a plant palette organized by: bloom time (early/mid/late season), height tier (front/middle/back), and moisture preference (wet-tolerant vs. dry-tolerant). Include 2–3 ornamental grasses that would work as connective tissue. Flag any plants that are particularly strong for native bee forage. Suggest a simple planting scheme— not a detailed plan, just a rough composition strategy.

Then iterate. Tell it what you don't like. Push it toward or away from certain colors. Ask it to justify its suggestions. Cross-examine its reasoning. Request alternatives. Ask it to flag which plants have good winter seed head structure.

Be honest about how much attention you actually intend to give this garden— whether you have a devotional relationship to deadheading, or you are the sort who wants plants that will thrive on a certain foundational indifference. There is no wrong answer. There is only the wrong plant for the wrong gardener— and that, mercifully, is a solvable problem.

AN EXAMPLE IN PRACTICE: TWO BEDS, ONE GARDEN IN LIVINGSTON, MT

Here is a more concrete example from the same beleaguered property described above, growing against considerable odds— two different bed types, scattered throughout.

DRY BEDS

No irrigation, lean soil, designed for hardy, drought-tolerant plants.

• Russian Sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia) — silver-stemmed, luminous blue-violet, blooms from midsummer through frost, thrives on neglect. In winter, it becomes a smoke-silver skeleton.

• Echinacea (Purple Coneflower) — drought-tolerant once established, leave the seed heads up in winter.

• Yarrow (Achillea) — divide every 2–3 years; it blooms generously, and the flat-topped flowers are a major bee landing pad.

• Rudbeckia fulgida (Black-eyed Susan) — a reliable, sturdy perennial species that holds its seed heads all winter and gives the dry beds a warm amber anchor.

• Agastache ‘Jethro Tull’ — tubular flowers in orange-apricot that hummingbirds and long-tongued bees lose their little minds over. Blooms relentlessly from midsummer into hard frost.

• Eryngium planum (Blue Sea Holly) — structural, architectural, the metallic-blue bracts are electric in late summer, and the dried seed heads are winter art.

• Catmint (Nepeta) — shear after first bloom, and it will rebloom enthusiastically. Soft blue-purple, spills beautifully, alkaline-soil tolerant.

GRASSES FOR DRY BEDS:

• Helictochloa sempervirens (Blue Oat Grass) — blue-silver, tight and tufted, holds its color through winter

• Schizachyrium scoparium (Little Bluestem) — native, copper-orange in autumn, extraordinary textural contrast

WET BEDS

Drip irrigated, more heavily amended and fertilized soil allowed to dry between waterings

• Peonies — short season, massive impact, poetic flowering, and bees adore them.

• Siberian Iris (Iris sibirica) — blooms in perfect synchrony with the peonies in late spring, one spare and architectural, one extravagant and opulent.

• Veronica (Speedwell) — neat, spiky, picks up the blue-purple thread from the dry beds and carries it into the wetter planting zones. Bees love the dense flower spikes.

• Monarda (Bee Balm) — divide every 2–3 years, choose mildew-resistant varieties, and accept that it will cheerfully self-seed everywhere.

• Phlox paniculata — choose a mildew-resistant cultivar (David is the standard recommendation; it holds up) and you’ll have fragrant midsummer color that bridges the gap between Monarda and late Echinacea.

• Echinacea — the plant that ties both moisture zones together visually, a repeated element that tells the eye the two beds belong to the same garden.

GRASSES FOR WET BEDS:

• Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ — Upright, architectural, blooms in early summer, holds its form all winter.

• Panicum virgatum (Switchgrass) — ‘Heavy Metal’ for upright form and wind resistance; ‘Shenandoah’ for deep red fall color. Both are excellent.

THE THREADS WEAVING TOGETHER

There is a dialogue within a curated garden where it stops being a collection of plants and becomes a single, coherent entity. A subtle repetition that moves through a space the way a musical theme moves through a composition: appearing, disappearing, returning in a different register, making everything around it more itself by virtue of having appeared before. Oudolf calls this visual continuity— a thread the eye follows, the reason you stand at the edge of a garden like this and feel, without being able to say exactly why, that it grew from the land rather than was imposed on it.

In this case:

• Echinacea in both moisture zones is the single strongest unifying element. Same plant, same silhouette, different soil conditions— it proves the two bed types are in conversation.

• Purple-blue runs through the whole property: Russian Sage and Catmint in dry beds; Veronica in wet beds.

• Grasses in both beds create a shared visual language— movement, transparency, winter structure.

• The bloom sequence across both beds: Siberian Iris, Peonies, and Catmint (late spring) → Veronica and Yarrow (early summer) → Monarda, Phlox, Russian Sage, Agastache, and Eryngium (midsummer) → Echinacea and Rudbeckia (late summer) → Russian Sage, Agastache, and Catmint rebloom (autumn) → Echinacea seed cones, Eryngium dried heads, Karl Foerster plumes, Siberian Iris pods, and Russian Sage skeletons (winter)

FINAL NOTE

It is a slow, methodical relationship— beginning with planning for the plant you may not love or fully understand quite yet.

Peonies will sulk the first season and do very little the second, and then in year three, they will bloom extravagantly. Karl Foerster will look embarrassingly small in the first season and shockingly large in the third. Russian Sage will put all of itself underground the first year, building the root system that will make it essentially bulletproof. You learn, over time, the personality of each plant. When to divide and when to leave alone, what doesn’t enjoy being overcrowded, what plants are the most ornamental throughout winter. You learn to read the garden the way you learn to read anything you love— slowly, with attention, the inevitable mistakes that turn out to be instructive.

The garden you are planting now is not the garden you are going to have. The one you are going to have is three, five, seven years away, accruing depth and self-knowledge the way good things do— unhurried, on its own terms, more beautiful and lush than you can currently imagine.

“For me, garden design isn't just about plants, it is about emotion, atmosphere, a sense of contemplation.” — Piet Oudolf

If you use any of these planning prompts, I’d genuinely love to see what you put together. Reply here or send a direct message in the Substack chat. And if you’re in a region with specific growing challenges (ex. high altitude, alkaline soil, serious drought, heavy clay), share your conditions. We can commiserate together through the gardening season

…recently added to THE STUDIO

THE STUDIO

Of course, there are weeks when the execution doesn’t quite match the enthusiasm. When I’ve forgotten something critical, or arrive home with a pleasing collection of ingredients and only a loose theory about what to do with them. The recipes that earn a permanent place in my rotation are the ones that can absorb that. Seasonal, adjustable, forgiving. Disproportionately satisfying relative to the effort involved.

The preoccupation lives mostly in the sourcing. The small corner market, a farm on the outskirts of town, the gourmet cellar with a unique vinegar, locally raised meat. While admittedly laborious, patching ingredients together is, genuinely, my idea of time well spent.

The resulting meals are usually pretty simple, don't require an unreasonable number of dishes, and contain zero jars of something obscure slowly dying in the back of the fridge. I find the preparation is as consequential as the final result. The meditative chopping, the loosening of aromatics, tasting along the way— it pulls you out of the ambient noise and puts you somewhere specific. What you make with your hands, the threads connecting the ingredients, the people you feed— even a humble meal holds all of it.

A COLLECTION OF SPRING RECIPES

SPRING ONION GALETTE BY ALEX BOLAR
Think of this less as a recipe and more as a template. A galette is, at its core, a forgiving vessel for whatever is currently in season. In spring, that could be asparagus, peas, morels (if you can find them), thinly sliced leeks, or a combination of whatever is at the market looking bright. A version I would gravitate towards: goat cheese and crème fraîche base, prosciutto, thinly sliced asparagus laid on top— finished with parmesan, and lemon zest. Perhaps an egg on the side.

For a gluten-free version, Aran Goyoaga’s The Art of Gluten-Free Bread has a pastry dough worth keeping in permanent rotation— it’s one of those recipes that makes the GF adaptation feel like a choice rather than a consolation.

ZA’ATAR SALMON & TAHINI BY OTTOLENGHI
Za’atar and sumac crusted onto salmon, wilted spinach underneath, bubbling lemony tahini poured around the whole thing, and finished in the oven. The za’atar forms a proper crust on top of the fish, the spinach collapses into something silky underneath, and the tahini turns nutty and molten at the edges. Round the whole thing out with roasted potatoes and a simple salad (a light lemony vinaigrette would not disappoint), and you have a dinner that feels considerably more intentional than the effort required.

A few notes: Diaspora Co. has an excellent sumac. Would recommend making your own za’atar if possible— it takes a few minutes and makes a noticeable difference. If you’re local, the Peelers truck makes regular visits through Livingston and is the move for wild-caught salmon.

DILLY BEAN STEW WITH CABBAGE AND FRIZZLED ONION BY ALISON ROMAN

Evidence that I have not fully left the beige food chapter, nor do I intend to. White beans and cabbage are among the most underrated, most affordable things you can keep in your kitchen— this stew puts them on fine display. Butter, frizzled onions, fresh dill, a splash of white distilled vinegar at the end. Deeply savory, surprisingly complex, incredibly simple. A solid recipe for a blustery spring day with rain streaming down the windows. A big, meaty California corona bean is a strong move.

TINY WHITE BEANS IN GREEN BAGNA CAUDA BY ALISON ROMAN
Beans are one of my great and abiding loves, and this recipe does them justice. Small white beans (Rancho Gordo if you can get them) simmered in a warm bath of butter, olive oil, garlic, anchovy, and herbs until they’re garlicky, velvety, and deeply savory. This is the recipe for a cold, snowy day when it’s technically spring but you’re digging your sweater out of the drawer.

It’s rich, so let everything else on the table be simple. A good grilled or roasted chicken, a green salad, and a torn chunk of sourdough for the sauce situation at the bottom of the bowl.

SPINACH AND GOAT CHEESE FRITTATA BY ATHENA CALDERONE
The frittata is, first and foremost, a fridge clean-out— and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Whatever vegetables are wishing to fulfill their destiny, whatever cheese needs to be used, whatever herbs are three days from turning. Into and onto the eggs they go. This version from Athena Calderone is a good blueprint: baby potatoes, leek, spinach, crème fraîche, goat cheese. Finishing with a generous handful of fresh herbs and a drizzle of olive oil. But treat it as a loose guide rather than a strict instruction. Serve it straight from the cast iron. If you’re in the market for one, a Smithy is probably the thing I’d grab if my house were on fire— even though it would almost certainly survive.

SPRING PASTA WITH PEPPERED PEAS BY ALISON ROMAN
Pea shoots, fresh peas, green garlic, guanciale, a truly unreasonable amount of black pepper and pecorino. A spring-y alla gricia that tastes exactly like the moment the farmers market stops being an act of hopeful optimism and starts being genuinely abundant. Alison Roman's instructions are, characteristically, more of a suggestion— use what's good, ignore the measurements, put every green leafy thing you have into the pan. This is an excellent weekday option.

SEED-CRUSTED LAMB CHOPS WITH ZESTY HERB MARINATE BY ATHENA CALDERONE
This recipe doesn't require much of an explanation. It's ideal for those mid to late spring days when the windows are left cracked open, and the tulips are drooping languidly out of their vase. A locally sourced lamb, marinated in fennel, coriander, cumin, and sumac, finished with a bright herb salad. Let the spice paste sit on the chops for at least an hour before grilling— it allows the aromatics to soak in and ensures the meat is at room temperature for that golden sear. Flamingo Estate's Winter Persimmons Vinegar in the marinade is an exceptional pairing.

…you might enjoy

The last few months made me acutely aware of something I hadn’t fully reckoned with: I am deeply, embarrassingly attached to the weather. Not in a polite, oh-I-do-love-a-rainy-day sort of way. In a full dependency, my-system-is-co-regulating-with-the-atmosphere sort of way. Winter was dry and violent. The relentless wind that relocates the grit, deposits an anxious residue, and leaves. The snow that usually arrives in thick, dramatic installments came instead as a vague rumor. A few thin days. Even the cold lacked conviction.

There is a particular dissatisfaction in a season that won’t fully commit.

As late March arrived, the lilac buds cracked open in small, stubborn fists. The pine trees pushed out their new growth— bright, deep-chartreuse needles, heavy with fragrance. The meadowlarks returned, then the bluebirds, and then the curlews— their long, ridiculous bills, that cascading call. If you’ve never heard a long-billed curlew, I can only describe it as: mournful, ecstatic, arresting.

I felt something release in my chest the moment spring actually showed up. Folding the prior three months into a drawer somewhere in the back of my mind.

I’m intentionally rearranging. Matcha is back— vivid, grassy, a good pairing to a season laced with change and (ideally) momentum. Shincha makes the occasional appearance, the arrival of the new spring harvest marking the peak of last year’s. A process called jukusei— slow winter maturation, last year’s leaves have been deepening, their raw edges softening into something richer and more refined (the metaphor here is not hard to reach for). I rotate with the seasons because rearranging small aspects of the day is a simple way to keep life from going stale.

A friend generously restocked me with the treasured Wyoming honey. I want to be careful here because I’m aware that describing honey with a vivid vocabulary is a certain kind of person, and I am apparently that person. This honey is from a small operation out of the high desert— creamy, structured, lightly floral, and somehow, improbably, not overly sweet. There’s a warmth to it, a bite at the back of the throat that I can never adequately explain. A strong buy, possibly even worth a trip to Dubois.

There’s a jar of preserved lemons in progress on the counter. It’s a dead easy and satisfying process— pack the salt and wait. The lemons do the work slowly, over weeks, fermenting from a sharp, aggressive citrus into something silky, funky, and complex.

We are, objectively, living through a strange moment. The acceleration of AI, the political psychosis, the ambient hum of overstimulation and desensitization— the present has acquired a quality that is simultaneously too fast and completely unreal. The algorithms have made it their entire business to keep us inside the loop: metabolizing information we feel powerless against, reaching for distractions we might not otherwise choose, believing things we haven’t examined. The turbulence is unevenly distributed, as it always is— and the people absorbing the most of it are the ones with the least capacity to deflect it.

On the Waking Up app, Joseph Goldstein quoted the opening line of a James Joyce story: “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” Mr. Duffy is a man who has opted out of his own experience— emotionally, physically, sensuously— in favor of something sterile and cerebral and safely managed. He observes his own life as though it belongs to someone else. I thought about him for days. Not in an abstract, philosophical way. In a this-is-a-real-and-present-danger way. The way it’s possible to be technically present in a room while actually living nowhere in particular.

The invitation of spring— the actual, embodied invitation— is to close the distance. Mr. Duffy is a cautionary tale, but he is also, if we're honest, a very available option. It is remarkably easy to live from the neck up. To outsource your attention to a screen, to let the days accumulate without ever quite landing in them. How we spend the quiet hours is not separate from how we stand in the larger ones.

The lemons on the counter, the honey, the tea, the curlew I'll annoy on my morning walk— these are my version of a counterargument. Patient chemistry. Slow transformation. Proof that time, applied with intention and without an audience, produces something genuinely substantial.

Mr. Duffy, notably, did not stretch. A few more spring movement practices are here ↓

THE STUDIO

Yin carries a vast philosophical history— threading an ancient way of reading the world through the connective tissue of the body, merging Taoism and physiology in a way that gives the practice unusual width and depth.

In classical Taoist thought, Yin and Yang are not opposites so much as conversational partners— complementary poles of a single continuous process. Yang is active, warming, dispersing. Yin is receptive, cooling, consolidating. It appears in the natural world as fog settling into the valley, coolness held beneath stone, the north face of the mountain where sunlight never directly falls. Not as poetic flourishes, but observational categories from a cosmology that understood balance as something you read in the landscape.

The river is viewed as one such demonstration. Its power is not in force but in yielding— finding the low places, moving with the grain of the land, carving its path with time and consistency rather than insistence. Yin yoga operates on a similar logic: the most efficient path is often the one that stops pushing.

Yin sequences work through longer-held, floor-based shapes, with reduced muscular engagement, and sustained attention. Holds last for three to five minutes— long enough for the deeper layers of the body to register and respond.

In any Yin hold, there is a margin— where the body's neglected terrain becomes suddenly arresting, a distinct taste. A weaving of sensation, stored history, and dense tissue. This is the most important territory in the practice, a golden band of gentle discomfort.

The sensory input causes a physiological cascade. Long-duration holds target connective tissues that respond to time rather than intensity. Fascia, ligaments, and joint capsules are viscoelastic: elastic enough to spring back from quick load, viscous enough to yield slowly under sustained tension. This gradual yielding is called creep— the tissue elongating beyond its initial resistance, the deeper layers reorganizing beneath the surface of stillness.

Fascia is the body's living web— not a passive wrapping but an active, highly sophisticated tissue that envelops organs, muscles, bones, nerves, and vessels in one continuous conversation. Nothing occurs in isolation; a shift in one thread moves through the whole. A shape held at the hip sends ripples through wider pathways.

Over time, with the inevitable calcification and wear of life, the fluid that allows fascial layers to glide begins to thicken and lose its fluidity. The result is the characteristic sensation of tissue that is not simply tight but no longer freely moving— two surfaces designed to slide, now claggy, reluctant.

With patience and consistency, sustained holds gradually remold the edges of density— causing a tangible response within the tissues, a quality of spaciousness, a softening categorically distinct from muscular release. Beneath the stillness, slow-adapting receptors in the deep fascia and joint capsules signal to the central nervous system, downregulating sympathetic tone and coaxing the tissues back toward hydration.

A Yin practice pries open a small but consequential gap between stimulus and response— drawing us into observation, physically untangling crystallized layers while learning to read sensation and our resistance to it. A few minutes into a hold, something gathers— a restlessness that moves through the body like weather, pressure building at the edges of the shape, the mind darkening toward the exit. Stay, and you watch it crest and dissolve.

To watch a reaction move through you without becoming it is to discover you are not that thought. Stillness makes the mechanics of reaction visible, giving us space to course-correct and intentionally shape the conditions we inhabit. Practiced consistently, this quality of attention sharpens interoception— and interoception, once refined, does not stay interior. The more accurately we can read ourselves, the more precisely we read our surroundings. Sensitivity, practiced, becomes fluency.

That capacity to read inward is, at its deepest, a seasonal intelligence. To live seasonally is to understand that expansion requires consolidation, that dispersal requires return, that the most intelligent thing a system can do at the height of its outward movement is remember how to come back in. Yin is that remembering— not passive waiting, but the slow underground accumulation that enhances outward movement and expression. Practiced not once, but across the full arc of the year, each season offering a different quality of excess and a different invitation to still. That yielding, as the river demonstrates, is not the absence of power.

TIPS FOR A YIN PRACTICE

CLOTHING
Wear loose, warm clothing. You want softness, not restriction— especially around your belly, ribs, and hips.

PREPARATION
Don’t practice on a full stomach. A simple rule: avoid eating for about two hours beforehand so stillness feels light rather than heavy.

TIMING
Practice later in the day, when your tissues are already warm— afternoon or early evening is ideal. Incorporate warmth, dim light, and soothing music.

FINDING AN EDGE
Choose a sensation zone, not a maximal edge. You want a mild-to-moderate sensation you can sustain for 3–5 minutes: enough that the tissues register load, not so much that the body braces, contracts, or pulls away from the opening.

USEFUL BASICS

• Bolster (or a firm pillow)

• Blocks

• Blanket

• Strap

• Optional: an eye pillow, socks, a second blanket for weight/comfort

…you might enjoy

I’ve been reaching for books that sharpen what is already in the air: fragrance, appetite, cultivation, the faint sense that change is underway.

The stack I’ve been living with lately isn’t cheerful (necessarily), but it’s very much alive— preoccupied with gardens and grief, with scent and power, with the way desire and consequence tend to pull up the same chair.

Scent threads through centuries like a riddle you can’t quite piece together. In tended soil, the stalled places find traction. The understated beauty of moss, water, and negative space. A meal with rare ingredients exposes manipulative power dynamics. An old stone cottage holds grief like weather— unavoidable, intimate, settling into the walls. And somewhere in a tidy village, tea and manners become a kind of pantomime where the smallest detail turns decisive.

Everything here is either blooming, fermenting, or breaking open. It feels right for spring in Montana— still brown, barely budding, with the distinctly hopeful sensation of warmth penetrating dormant layers. These books keep good company during ungainly transitions.

SPRING READING LIST

JITTERBUG PERFUME BY TOM ROBBINS
This is one of those books that leaves you permanently rearranged. It opens with a notorious meditation on beets— deadly serious, vaguely criminal (possibly the devil’s preferred appetizer). Robbins turns perfume into theology and immortality into flirtation, sliding through centuries with a cheerful disregard for chronology.

The story stretches from ancient Bohemian forests to nine o’clock tonight (Paris time), following a janitor in pursuit of a missing blue bottle embossed with a goat-horned god. The bottle may contain the universe's secret essence, and, inconveniently, there are only a few drops left. An enveloping, fragrant seduction— brash, absurd, and unexpectedly wise.

HAMNET BY MAGGIE O’FARRELL
Another read that leaves a residue— orchard air, bees in the hedges, syllables scraping lightly against stone. Set in 1580s England as the plague moves through the countryside, Hamnet begins with a young Latin tutor falling for Agnes, less a heroine than a weather system. She walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove, reads plants better than people, and carries the kind of presence that makes a room shift slightly around her.

On Henley Street, she becomes the centrifugal force of the household while her husband’s ambitions pull him toward the London stage. O’Farrell writes domestic life with vivid, intricate detail. The garden overflows, grief rearranges gravity, and bloom and rot share the same branch.

THE SECRET GARDEN BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
Wicked little Mary Lennox arrives at a lonely manor on the Yorkshire moors and promptly discovers two things: a bedridden cousin and a locked garden no one is meant to enter. What begins as curiosity turns into transmutation— snowdrops, daffodils, lilies, and iris unfurling through dark, neglected soil. Bodies reanimated through fresh air, movement, and stubborn attention.

Burnett treats nature not as scenery but as a working remedy: sunlight, movement, dirt against skin. The result is part fairy tale, part pastoral experiment in what happens when something long ignored is finally tended.

THE JAPANESE GARDEN BY SOPHIE WALKER
Not your average coffee-table book. Walker moves through more than eight centuries of Japanese garden design— Shinto shrines, imperial grounds, moss-heavy temple gardens, and contemporary Zen landscapes. What unfolds is not a history so much as a philosophy of attention. Seasonality as devotion. The charged intersection of beauty and mortality. Gardens that never appear the same way twice, and the value of impermanence.

In a world committed to speed and excess, the Japanese garden offers a corrective that feels almost severe in its insistence: nature is not merely decorative, growth is not linear, and what is absent is as intentional as what remains.

LAND OF MILK AND HONEY BY C. PAM ZHANG
In a near future where climate collapse has blotted out much of the world’s agriculture, a young chef finds herself inside an improbable enclave where food still exists in abundance. Mountains, rare ingredients, elaborate meals— an atmosphere of luxury that feels illicit when the rest of the planet is starving.

Zhang writes about appetite with surgical precision: taste, texture, the power dynamics embedded in who gets to eat what. The plot moves like a tasting menu—each course richer, stranger, a little more revealing than the last. Visceral, unsettling, and sharply observant about the politics of pleasure.

MISS MARPLE: THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES BY AGATHA CHRISTIE
A quiet English village, tidy hedges, polite tea trays— and beneath it all, the predictably dark mechanics of human behavior. Miss Marple, elderly, observant, and underestimated at her peril, solves crimes through pattern recognition: people are rarely as original as they imagine.

These stories move with Christie’s signature efficiency— clues slipped into conversation, motives tucked behind good manners, conclusions delivered with unnerving calm. Gardens, parlors, vicars’ sitting rooms, train compartments: small settings where the smallest detail becomes consequential. Cozy, if you define cozy as murder adjacent to knitting— otherwise it’s all logic and sharp social critique.

…you might enjoy

Spring is back— bright, fresh, insistently optimistic. Unfortunately, my body is responding like it’s still stuck in a long, beige corridor of eternal November (if you spent this winter in the Mountain West, surely you can relate). Life has been slightly less than cinematic: a weighted head, tired behind the eyes, that dense feeling in the tissues, and the steady sense of operating at “functional,” but not exactly luminous.

Often, this is what it feels like when the body has accumulated more than it can process: excess stimulus, muscular repair, metabolic byproducts, or emotional fatigue. The revolving cast of responsibilities that your mind manages while your body translates the overflow into sensation— thickness, lingering fluid, a certain sluggishness that makes even small decisions feel like they require a committee.

The lymphatic system is one of the body’s most elegant designs— an understated network built for flow. It helps clear the spaces between your cells by moving fluid, proteins, and cellular debris through the lymph nodes before draining the fluid back into the bloodstream. Unlike blood, lymph has no central pump. It moves because you move— through muscle contraction, pressure shifts, and the rise and fall of the diaphragm as you breathe.

It tends to respond best to gentle, livable support— the kind that folds seamlessly into a day. If the body has accumulated residue, a stronger input is not always the answer. Too much intensity can add strain to an already overworked system. Typically, it responds better to ease and pleasure: a delightfully Venusian version of health— sensory and unforced. A few simple habits that help the system do what it was already designed to do.

These are the ones I tend to turn the dial up on when things start to feel suboptimal.

WALKING
Walking is the most underrated luxury on this list, and I will die on that hill (possibly while walking up it). The steady contraction of the muscles (especially in the calves), paired with rhythmic breathing and gentle pressure variation, helps fluids move. Aim for 10–20 minutes, ideally at a brisk pace: enough to warm the body and lift the cobwebs.

SHAKING
Shaking is, admittedly, absurd. You can do it standing, with soft knees and feet grounded, letting your body bounce lightly as your arms, shoulders, and jaw go slack. Or do the even more unhinged version: lie on your back, raise your arms and legs into the air, and shake your limbs vigorously. Even sixty seconds can change your internal weather. If bouncing aggravates vertigo or pelvic floor symptoms, skip it.

DIAPHRAGMATIC BREATHING
Diaphragmatic breathing is the most direct way to create a pressure shift through the abdominal cavity. When the diaphragm descends on the inhale, the abdomen gently rises and intra-abdominal pressure increases; when it recoils on the exhale, pressure drops. That rhythmic motion encourages lymphatic and venous return and nudges the nervous system toward parasympathetic tone.

Try this: one hand on the belly, one on the lower ribs. Inhale through the nose and intentionally send the breath down— let the belly expand first, then feel the ribs widen. Exhale slowly (longer than the inhale) and feel the ribs soften and the abdomen fall. Do 6–10 breaths.

DRY BRUSHING
Use a dry brush on dry skin, ideally before a shower. Start at the feet and move up the legs with long strokes toward the heart. Then hands to shoulders, again toward the heart. For the abdomen, gentle clockwise circles that follow the path of the large intestine (up the right side, across, down the left), then a few light sweeps upward toward the heart. For the neck/face, go feather-light: brush down the sides of the neck toward the collarbones, then outward along the jawline. Two to four minutes is generally plenty.

GUA SHA / LYMPHATIC MASSAGE
Use oil or serum so the skin has enough slip— the goal is glide, not drag. Start at the neck and collarbones, then move to the jaw, cheeks, and under-eye area with light, rhythmic strokes. I am, frankly, evangelical about this. The facial muscles become spacious, a brightness returns behind the eyes, and there is an animated quality to the face afterward that is impossible to replicate any other way. You can follow this tutorial for gua sha, or this one for face lifting and lymphatic drainage.

CASTOR OIL PACKS
Castor oil packs have the kind of old-world reputation that lives in the margins— passed down, sworn by, highly mysterious. At the bare minimum, you’re essentially creating a soft, parasympathetic-friendly container over the abdomen, which helps tissues unclench, breath deepen, and fluid start to circulate. Apply cold-pressed castor oil to cotton or wool, place it over the right side of the abdomen, just below the lower ribs (liver area), cover with a towel you don’t mind staining, then apply gentle heat (warm, not hot). Lie down for 20–45 minutes. Patch test if your skin is sensitive. Skip during pregnancy or during your bleed.

It’s tempting to treat intuition like a rare gift—something ethereal and dramatic. But it’s quiet, and it takes finely tuned attention to decipher it cleanly. The question isn’t whether it exists—it’s whether it’s being heard. And when it is, it’s highly practical: discernment, calibration, the ability to adjust without forcing.

This attunement opens a finer layer of sensory awareness. What was previously indistinguishable becomes discernible. Patterns become distinct. It carries a sense of abundance that has nothing to do with accumulation.

The word prosperity originates from the Latin prosperus—from pro, meaning forward, and sperare, meaning to hope. To prosper originally meant to move forward with hope.

Prosperity as circulation, as life moving in a way that feels generative rather than stagnant. Even through periods of compression or difficulty, there remains a sense of moving with the current.

What makes a life feel prosperous is not constant ease. It’s clean decision-making. Choices you don’t have to white-knuckle into place, that don’t require constant self-coercion. At times, the best decisions aren’t clear to logic at first. That depth of trust in uncertainty comes from a different faculty: perception beyond linear thinking.

Beneath the surface of your skin, there is a constant choreography occurring—joints stacking, tissues organizing, breath shifting, muscles contracting and releasing in precise coordination. Electrical impulses. Chemical feedback. A complex, never-ending symphony. A magnificently designed sensory organism.

Reality is filtered through the senses, whether we’re consciously aware of it or not. Every emotion starts as a physical sensation. Yet most of us live almost exclusively from the neck up, overriding this remarkable tool with speed and abstraction.

When your nervous system carries a clear map through the body’s internal fabric, effort distributes cleanly through your tissues. The system becomes more economical. Less energy is spent compensating—vigilance drops, and higher-definition sensing increases.

Information doesn’t have to fight its way through a physical landscape that’s dense or calcified. From there, internal awareness deepens and naturally extends outward. The energetic textures within and around you leave a distinct imprint. Intuition stops feeling esoteric and becomes structural.

The body registers shifts in cadence, breath, and tone. Decisions get cleaner, timing improves, and stress is detected early before it hardens into strain or escalates into injury, burnout, or withdrawal. Life requires less mental gymnastics because you’re no longer contorting or manipulating yourself into place.

Relationships, opportunities, and conversations begin to feel like patterns in motion. Fear and intuition stop masquerading as the same thing. Life feels less adversarial, less confusing, less effortful—not because it’s simpler, but because the signal is clear.

Prosperity, then, is circulation. Energy moving cleanly. Information traveling without distortion.

The remedy is simple: relate to the body as a sensory instrument, not a machine to optimize. Move with intention, in a way that restores communication through the tissues.

This orientation can feel anticlimactic because it unfolds slowly. We’re conditioned to value the body for how it looks and to chase immediate, visible outcomes. But the body is always in dialogue with what surrounds it, and what’s so often overlooked is the vast, intelligent, dynamic landscape beneath the surface.

SIX WAYS TO SHARPEN SENSORY AWARENESS

Sensory awareness isn’t developed through abstraction. It’s trained through repetition and simple, physical cues. Below are a few ways to begin restoring that dialogue—not as strict rules, but digestible entry points.

• ALIGNMENT & ACTIVATION
  No matter the modality (strength, pilates, yoga, HIIT, etc.), seek teachers who cue alignment and activation. If a class never mentions joint position, load, or support, it’s likely training output, not awareness. Routinely orienting yourself around alignment and activation compounds remarkably fast.

• SLOW THE MOVEMENT DOWN
  Moving slowly amplifies information you’d normally rush past: which muscles are actually working, where you’re collapsing or gripping, what’s disengaged, what’s compensating.

• LEARN TO DIFFERENTIATE SENSATION
  Restorative or yin-style practices are powerful entry points. Longer holds and stillness create conditions to observe tissue quality, emotional charge, and reactivity to sensation.

• DELIGHT IN SIMPLICITY
  Choose a few practices and repeat them consistently over weeks, not days. Repetition builds familiarity, familiarity builds trust, and trust allows mastery to emerge. Constant novelty interrupts learning.

• TRACK THE BREATH
  Notice where breath moves freely and where it feels restricted during movement or rest. Breath quality is one of the fastest ways to sense internal state.

• NOTICE ENVIRONMENTAL & RELATIONAL IMPACT
  After spending time with people or in certain spaces, pause and check in: do you feel expanded or contracted? Energized or heavy? Clear or scattered? Treat this as data. Intuition sharpens as you recognize patterns and learn to trust what the body registers.

As I blend seamlessly into white walls and take long walks in oversized wool, I find myself craving the light, minimalist ease of summer. A venture to the ocean. The crusty, irreplaceable sensation of saltwater and sunshine against your skin. Sand in every crevice and article of clothing.

I’ve always found travel glamorous in unexpected ways. Not in the polished, postcard sense— but in the way it sharpens perspective, puts the details of your character into high resolution. It has this elegant, almost imperceptible way of reshaping your internal architecture. What once felt urgent starts to feel negotiable. Timelines warp, assumptions reconstruct, the narratives you’ve been gripping soften enough to see them in a fresh light.

Travel has an uncanny ability to reveal your untidy habits, small neuroses, the rigidities that could use relaxing. The parts of yourself that stay comfortably hidden inside familiarity tend to lose their cover. It’s intoxicating and destabilizing in equal proportions. Life stretches outward, simplifies, is distilled down to what you can carry. (I’m firmly a carry-on person, which I know immediately places me in one of two camps!)

Travel has taken many shapes over the years. At this point, I’m interested in traveling in a way that amplifies the qualities of the season— Japan or British Columbia in winter, the Mediterranean in summer, Scotland in autumn. Not escaping the season, but letting it leave a stronger imprint.

I’m actively retiring the era of ruthless layovers and reckless bookings that felt like endurance training disguised as adventure. I still expect inconveniences and a healthy portion of utter nonsense. The occasional destabilizing episode that’s best described as logistical chaos. Travel, at its best, is beauty laced with absurdity— your ability to laugh at both determines the quality of the story.

Below is a small collection I’ve gathered over the years — spring and summer places that range from elegant to rustic. I’m always seeking that blend: historic buildings with patina, unexpected hotels, Airbnbs with character or compelling locations. Spaces designed with intention— where the environment elevates the day.

7 BEAUTIFUL SPRING & SUMMER STAYS

TEXERE CASA — Santa María del Tule, Oaxaca, México
Located in Santa María del Tule, on the rural outskirts of Oaxaca, Texere is a shared textile studio and art residency— a creative haven with a materials shop and a large, sun-warmed garden. Earth-toned walls, handwoven textiles, raw wood, and shadows that move slowly across plaster create a space that feels minimal but warm. The kind of place where mornings begin with strong coffee and the distant sound of dogs and church bells, and afternoons drift easily into mezcal and long, unhurried dinners.

Thalori Traditional Ecotourism Village — Kapetaniana, Southern Crete, Greece
Perched high in the Asterousia Mountains overlooking the Libyan Sea, Thalori is less “hotel” and more stone-built Cretan daydream. The one-room sea view houses are carved into the landscape— thick stone walls, wooden beams, linen-draped beds. It’s intentionally rustic, solar-powered, locally built, and self-sufficient. Even the website, charmingly preserved in what appears to be a late-90s design archive, adds to the appeal.

Hotel Corazón — Mallorca, Spain
Tucked into the Tramuntana mountains of Mallorca, Hotel Corazón feels like the love child of an artist residency and a countryside estate. Part rural finca, part creative clubhouse, it’s the sort of place where you arrive planning to rest and accidentally join dinner with ceramicists and someone who casually mentions their olive grove. Eclectic but intentional rooms with sun-faded textiles, sculptural furniture, nothing overly polished or cluttered.

Il Convento — Ostuni, Puglia, Italy

A restored 17th-century convent tucked into Ostuni’s whitewashed maze, Il Convento is monastic architecture softened by Southern Italian light. Vaulted ceilings, thick stone walls, and arched corridors that stay cool despite the summer heat— cultivating that rare, structural quiet carried by old buildings. Terraces overlook olive groves and the distant Adriatic, where late afternoon light turns everything the color of warm limestone. You arrive seeking serenity, you leave very well fed.

Hotel Hermitage — Elba Island, Italy

Tucked into a private bay on Elba, wrapped in pine forest and Tyrrhenian blue, Hotel Hermitage feels like Italian summer passed down through a family line. Terracotta paths, striped umbrellas, white stucco buildings stepping gently toward the sea— cinematic, but lived-in. It was founded on Frediano Pardini’s idea of “sole e mare in pace e libertà,” translating to “sun and sea in peace and freedom.” Now in the hands of Federigo Pardini and his wife Barbara, the atmosphere remains heirloom rather than polished.

Saména — Marseille, France

Tucked into a cove just 50 meters from the sea, Saména feels less like a rental and more like a lived-in idea of the South. Once an industrial site, then a ruin, it was rehabilitated by Olivier Amsellem with deliberate restraint— keeping the rough plaster, the exposed stone, and the visible layers of time. Inside, it’s textured and sun-warmed: wood ceilings, weathered walls, a freestanding tub beside a bed. Two patios, a small pool, an outdoor shower— all within reach of salty air and limestone glare.

One-Bedroom Stone Haven — Perast, Montenegro

Set in what may be Montenegro’s most photogenic village, this one-bedroom hideaway pairs original stone walls with a view straight toward church bells and the glassy sweep of the Bay of Kotor. Perched high above the waterfront, it’s a quick descent down stone steps to swimming spots and very persuasive Adriatic lunches. Inside, oak floors and handmade rugs temper the cool stone, the proportions simple and unfussy.

There is a particular flavor of fatigue that settles without spectacle, often without recognition.

It arrives through anticipation— life held in a near-constant state of readiness. Consistently tracking inputs, outputs, metrics, and emotions. Days lived with one eye trained forward, the present treated as provisional, something to be endured while waiting for the real thing to begin.

Much of modern wellness mirrors this posture.

The language is familiar: optimize, regulate, hack, manifest. There’s always a new leading device, a better supplement, a more precise practice, a more sophisticated diet. Not because any one of these things is wrong (some are genuinely helpful), but because the promise underneath is always the same: you’re close, but not quite there.

This isn’t a rejection of self-examination, desire, or aspiration. When the fabric of life feels dull or constrained, it’s natural to reach for solutions that promise relief without requiring a deeper reweaving— especially when meaningful change feels slow or overwhelming.

The issue isn’t buying things, optimizing, or doing inner work.
It’s when those things become substitutes for living.

When devices, supplements, and protocols are used less to support a life and more to avoid discomfort, uncertainty, or presence. When grief, boredom, restlessness, desire, and ambivalence are treated as problems to overcome rather than to learn how to be in a relationship with.

We’ve seen this cycle repeat for decades. Low-fat diets in the 90s. Then gluten avoidance. Then no meat, then only meat. Sugar, carbs, fruit(!)— each cast as the culprit in turn. Movement followed the same logic: yoga, then pilates, then strength training, then cardio avoidance, then cardio redemption. It’s a circus.

Now the focus has shifted again— toward devices, data, and constant self-monitoring. Sleep scores, stress metrics, recovery numbers, blue-light hysteria, red-light therapy. Even the nervous system is treated as something to be endlessly pampered, rather than something capable of weathering the storm.

But vitality has never fallen neatly into categories.

What actually brings a felt sense of wellness lives outside prescriptive frameworks. Evenings that run late and mornings that arrive imperfectly. Coffee on an empty stomach (to me, this is peak enjoyment). An occasional cigarette. Movement guided by sensation. Work that asks something of you and gives something back. Light, air, temperature— allowing it to play against the skin without protection.

Some of these things wouldn’t pass a strict wellness audit. And yet they can deliver a disproportionate amount of aliveness.

This is because pleasure isn’t a single emotional state, nor is vitality the absence of difficulty. It isn’t constant happiness or uninterrupted ease. It’s familiarity— the satisfaction of becoming fluent in how things move, of knowing your own inner landscape well enough to find fluidity within it rather than swimming against it.

Vitality includes sadness, fatigue, longing, indulgence, and frustration— not as failures to correct, but as information. As texture and contrast. It isn’t sourced from any one thing. It’s ecological, woven from relationships, environments, variety, the balance between desire and obligation, the rhythms of effort and rest, and the daily negotiations between what we give and what we receive.

No symptom exists in isolation. Digestion, energy, pain, mood— each reflects a wider context. What matters is the entire landscape. The body isn’t a machine made of parts to be repaired, but an ecosystem: alive, relational, shaped by internal and external forces. Every imbalance belongs to a larger story.

This is where self-examination finds its proper scale.

It becomes a tool for understanding, not something to depend on. A way of developing fluency in your own patterns, thresholds, and emotional weather— without being overly preoccupied with mitigating or perfecting them.

When self-work sharpens awareness, it supports living. When it becomes the epicenter of existence, it displaces it.

So perhaps the question underneath consumption isn’t: What else do I need?

But rather:
What am I rushing past?
What am I doing out of obligation?
Where have things become mechanical instead of tactile?

And maybe, this week, the practice isn’t adding anything at all— but noticing the places you color outside the lines, and how often those moments carry more joy than the ones you carefully follow.

We don’t need more devices or protocols.

We need lives constructed with enough nuance, individuality, pleasure, substance, contact, and rhythm that wellness becomes a byproduct— not a project.

Vitality accumulates through familiarity— through repetition, through learning the grain of things over time. Effort matures into familiarity, familiarity into trust. Rhythms emerge that are sturdy enough to live inside, rather than habits built for immediacy or escape.

THE LIST: SIMPLE PLEASURES

• THE GREAT on HULU

  A wildly irreverent, darkly funny, historically unhinged satire dressed in excess—lavish, absurd, and sharp. It loosely circles the life of Catherine the Great, one of Russia’s most legendary rulers. I binged all three seasons while down with a head cold, emerging delirious with a light British accent.

• NIGHT VISION — A Winter Playlist

  Smooth, slightly morose, cinematic. If it were a perfume, the top notes would be a scintillating clarinet solo (has that ever been written?), unfolding into a heart of hushed strings and low brass, before settling into the bottom notes of layered piano pieces that are delicate on the surface, emotionally merciless underneath.

• HORSE BLANKET — Bardo Tea

  For all the horse girls, past and present. Horses were the epicenter of my life growing up, and the aroma of this tea is uncannily specific— old leather, horse sweat, dust, a worn blanket cooling at dusk. Painfully and delightfully nostalgic.

• A SPACIOUS MIND — Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
  A collection of lectures on Waking Up where Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo explores the central teachings of Lojong— Tibetan for “mind training”, a Buddhist practice emphasizing compassion, selflessness, and the cultivation of wisdom through challenge and adversity. I listen while making breakfast, and it’s become a soothing, steady beginning to the day.

• NEVER ENDING NOTEPAD by Rachel Saunders
  Bought a never-ending notepad in hopes that my lists might become more sensational— less punitive, more pleasurable. And I must say, it has dramatically elevated a somewhat compulsive relationship to productivity.

• HONEY CANDLES

  Beeswax candles with a clean burn, light honeyed scent, and warm glow. Beeswax purifies the air as it burns, burns longer than paraffin, and ages beautifully. They do give me a strong urge to own a chamberstick and a dressing gown.

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It’s late January, and the snow still hasn’t arrived— not in its typical fashion.

Winter is here, technically, but the cues are inconsistent. Bare ground, unusually warm days. Outside my window, the trees look slightly ahead of themselves, small buds appearing well before their due date. And I’ve noticed the same disorientation appearing in my body— a low-grade confusion about whether we’re conserving or preparing to move.

This is usually my favorite moment in the arc of the year. It’s a liminal stretch— potent, understated, a little surreal. I have a particular affinity for the bitter cold and the theatrical inconvenience of snow. Winter, in its full expression, is strategic, deliberate. It makes inefficiency become especially apparent.

At its core, winter is an economic season.

Light is scarce. Warmth is finite. Energy needs to be allocated carefully. Whatever is wasted is felt immediately. The body responds by becoming more selective about where effort goes and how it’s spent. Precision and simplicity are both functional and highly beneficial— small choices, made consistently, that slowly compound.

I’ve found, with the weather dissonance, I’ve had to double down on the finer-grain details.

In movement, this means slowing down enough to notice what’s actually happening. How the body is aligned, how the tissues respond under load, where effort is being distributed. Moving at half speed exposes information you’d normally rush past: compensations, tension, dormant tissue.

That information matters. The body holds an intelligence, a subtle awareness that’s often clearer than the mind— more transparent, acute. When we learn how to listen, it becomes an incredibly reliable source of guidance.

I’ve been noticing a similar orientation to nuance beyond movement, specifically through color.

I was recently wandering the paint aisle at the local hardware store and learned, to my horror, that the most popular color of 2025 is a flat, lifeless gray. It sent me back to this podcast episode, and to a feeling I think many of us can relate to: how has everything become so sterile? Gracious, we need color. The way I’ve felt starved of it lately has been palpable.

Uniformity is highly, highly suspicious.

I painted one room a deep indigo that swallows light. In the bathroom, merging a glossy, heavy plum that reads differently depending on the hour, and a pale taupe in a dead flat. Within days, two rooms that took on an entirely different personality based on a color shift.

The same attention has been guiding how I eat and what I take in.

Warm foods. Broths. A carefully formulated herbal infusion. Consuming less information, letting ideas metabolize instead of stacking them. Choosing routines that are stabilizing rather than overstimulating (except maybe coffee, I’ve admittedly been happily riding that edge). Paying attention to what genuinely replenishes the system, versus what simply fills space.

And on the occasions I do find myself in a luminous, white winter setting, the real question becomes how present I’m able to be within it.

Even though she’s wearing a slightly altered form, winter still offers the same invitation. To replenish deliberately. To choose consistency over intensity. To meticulously place attention where it compounds in a generative fashion, so when the turn comes, as it always does, momentum feels less like a push and more like levitation.

You can find recipes, winter infusion blend, podcasts, and practices that have been supporting me lately in the DECIDUOUS subscriber chat. If you want to explore the Studio, you can find details here. You can follow me on IG here.

We’ve reached the shortest days of the year. The light arrives late, slanted, and brief—stretching across the floor in diffused streaks before retreating again. Outside, the landscape is in constant metamorphosis, wind and temperature carving shapes into the snow. The stillness feels weighted—cold, dry air pressing against the windows.

If winter makes you feel flat, wired-at-night, or unusually unmotivated, consider this: light is information. It tells the body what time it is. And in the dark half of the year, the way we light our spaces can either support our descent inward—or fight against it.

WORKING WITH LIGHT IN WINTER

• SCULPTURAL LIGHTING
  A room doesn’t need to be uniformly bright to feel livable—it needs dimension. Winter asks for contrast, for edges, for the relief of shadow. Let some corners recede. Let others glow.

• LAYERING AT VARIOUS HEIGHTS
  Let light gather in low pools and gradients: a lamp beside a chair, a sconce warming one wall, a pendant over the sink. Think “pathways” more than “coverage”—small zones that invite you to move through the house slowly, rather than blast the whole space with brightness.

• REFLECTION
  Mirrors, glaze, gloss—anything that reflects light can lengthen the day without forcing it. Reflection multiplies and extends what little exists. It’s one of the simplest ways to make winter feel less stark.

• EMPHASIS ON FLAME
  Firelight and candlelight, used liberally. Flame changes the quality of a room instantly—less productive, more intimate. It signals the body toward downshifting.

• EMBRACE THE DARKNESS
  Not everything needs illumination. Darkness isn’t a deficiency—let it be present instead of correcting for it. This is part of the season’s intelligence.

Mirrors are tools of extension. Positioned across from a window, adjacent to a lamp, or leaning on a mantle, they catch and multiply light—stretching the hours and adding complexity to a room. Aged or imperfect glass does this beautifully, softening the reflection, fracturing it slightly.

Rooms with little natural brightness offer their own richness—a shadowed bedroom, a windowless bath, a dark hallway. This is where surfaces can participate. Higher-gloss paint magnifies what’s available, enhancing reflection rather than simply increasing exposure. Glossy tile, lacquered cabinetry, glazed ceramic—each catches the faintest shimmer and sends it rippling.

Overhead fixtures flatten a space, erasing the interplay of shadow and dimension—and in winter, that kind of exposure can feel abrasive. Layer downward-facing lamps at varied heights to form gentle pools of light. Let an upward-facing sconce wash a wall in warmth. Tuck under-cabinet lighting beneath shelves to lend ambiance to the kitchen’s most-used corners. Hang a single pendant low beside the bathroom mirror to catch the steam’s slow ascent.

Candles and firelight, of course, are the ultimate embodiment of the season. If a wood-burning stove isn’t part of your home’s infrastructure, candles offer a similar intimacy, capturing the meditative quality of flame.

Light, when woven thoughtfully, becomes a pathway. You move from one patch to another, disappearing and reappearing in different corners of the home. Dimming the lights in the evening draws us into books, into meandering dinners as wax drips and collects along a candlestick, into a smoothly spinning record with snow accumulating on the sill.

SIMPLE ADJUSTMENTS

• Turn off overhead lights after sunset (or keep them to the absolute minimum).

• Create one warm “pool of light” in the room you spend the most time in (lamp at seated height).

• Add one low-light source (small lamp or candle) to deepen the gradient.

• Place a mirror where it can catch either window light (day) or lamp glow (evening).

• Dim screens for the final hour (Night Shift / low brightness) and notice how your system responds.

  

Long before optimization took the lead, buildings were treated as living entities—designed not simply to contain life, but to elevate it. Structures were extensions of the environment, shaped with the belief that architecture could restore the spirit as much as shelter the body. Materials were chosen for how they aged, how they retained or released warmth, and how they interacted with climate and landscape. Over time, that vocabulary faded. Structures became efficient, but energetically brittle.

Inspiration doesn’t come from opening a magazine or flicking through imagery on the telephone. Being able to search through your own Rolodex of atmospheres, and places, and materiality, and craftsmanship that you have seen and use that as pointers for how you resolve your own creative problems.
—Jonathan Reed

Design, in that sense, becomes a form of remembering. The places you’ve visited. The visual scapes embedded in the recesses of your mind. The felt impressions that altered your rhythm. The colors, materials, and proportions that appealed to your senses—gathered and reimagined as you construct the contours of home. The spaces we shape, in turn, shape us: they attune our cadence, govern our pace, and refine our perception.

Winter invites a dialogue of shadow, reflection, and restraint. As the dark days pare life back to essentials, a home becomes a collaborator in restoration.

Further inland, the landscape shed its lushness. The rivers turned glassy and cold, snow-capped peaks scraped the sky, and larch trees shimmered in warm ochre against the frost-bitten edges of autumn.

The season of decomposition, the distinct scent of damp earth and rotting leaves, of life returning to the soil. Above ground, it appears as loss; below ground, it’s redistribution. The mycelial web thrives on reciprocity. One tree in surplus feeds another in need. The whole forest thrives through invisible cooperation.

The varied ecosystems made me think about energy as a form of stewardship—where it’s placed, how it’s spent, and what it’s feeding. Autumn always brings that reminder: the contraction inward, the pruning and reevaluation, the beauty embedded in restraint.

Somewhere along the line, we’ve lost fluency in reciprocity. The invisible network that once taught us how to exchange, to nourish, to support, has thinned. The flawed nature of being human—ambitious, anxious, endlessly seeking—has, in many ways, sabotaged that web.

We’ve become noisy creatures, tangled in distraction, worshiping busyness, mistaking attention for connection. We take without noticing, speak without listening, consume without digesting. Caught in loops of comparison and self-concern, we forget that those around us are living systems, metabolizing their own seasons of loss and renewal.

It’s not malice so much as amnesia. We’ve forgotten the intelligence of the forest floor and the generosity built into its design. But nature, patient as ever, keeps offering the reminder: what thrives does so through exchange.

I was recently given a bit of outstanding advice—so perfectly simple yet shrouded in the tone of elementary punishment: mind your own business. Elegant, really. I’ve taken it to highlight noticing where energy circulates and where it evaporates.

We leak so much of ourselves into other people’s weather systems—forecasting their moods, managing their narratives, trying to be the sun in every ecosystem. Meanwhile, our own roots are parched.

When energy is regarded as a living ecology, everything shifts. Some connections feel nutrient-rich, others strangely sterile. Some conversations leave us charged, others hollow. The art is in observing which exchanges replenish the system and which ones leach it dry. Mastery is found in the curation, in the clarity of understanding: this is worth feeding.

And once the excess is stripped away, devotion begins to take shape—not glamorous or loud, but steady and unremarkable in the best way. It’s the peace that succeeds pruning, when attention, no longer scattered, begins to take on density. You start to feel it: how focus thickens, how time expands when it’s no longer divided into fragments, what arises when you aren’t depleted of nourishment.

There’s an atmosphere to this kind of living—a satisfaction in precision, a commitment to conscious participation. Showing up where there’s a feedback loop, where what you tend also tends to you. To know the texture of your own attention—its currents, its tides—and to place it where symbiosis exists.

That’s the majesty of this season: the return to depth after dispersal, the slow alchemy of giving and receiving in equal measure, of doing what you do and doing it well. A narrowing toward what holds substance.

The mycelium doesn’t require a standing ovation for its cooperation; its orchestration is based on what is required to sustain life. Maybe our work is the same—to exchange with mutuality, to rest when the system asks, and to keep tending what feeds us until balance returns.

THE LIST: FOR THE SAKE OF ATMOSPHERE

• SHERLOCK HOLMES
  Currently devouring Sherlock Holmes, read by Stephen Fry on Audible. This time of year, I have a penchant for waistcoats, dog carts, foggy London streets, pipe smoke curling through candlelight, and a perplexing mystery narrated with a British accent. Holmes is observant, methodical, and brooding, with a cocaine habit and a fanatical dedication to detail. He and Dr. Watson make for excellent company on a rainy evening—the perfect mix of logic, lunacy, and late-Victorian charm.
  
  LISTENING ORDER

  • A Study in Scarlet

  • The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

  • The Sign of Four

  • The Hound of the Baskervilles

  • The Valley of Fear

  • The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

  • The Return of Sherlock Holmes

  • The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

  • His Last Bow
    

  (Highly recommend long drives, fog, and mild existential malaise as ideal listening conditions.)
  

• “AUTUMN IN F MINOR,” a playlist by Sophie Wolf of The Place
  The sound of late-afternoon light stretching across the floorboards. Warm, wistful, with piano and soft percussion. Best enjoyed while stirring soup, driving nowhere in particular, or imagining you’ve just inherited an old estate with excellent acoustics.

• BIALETTI MOKA
  I treat morning beverages with an attention to detail bordering on neurosis. The Bialetti has made a resurrection as my latest addiction—a standalone shot, or added into a cup of pour-over, a splash of half and half twisting through the dark eddy of coffee. The hiss, the bloom, the steam rising in the dark hours before dawn, a delightful display of liquid choreography. (Still on the hunt for a little espresso mug, send recommendations if you have any!)

• ROWSE EYE CONTOUR SERUM + VITAMIN C BOOSTER
  A new skincare discovery that carries a light, uplifting fragrance with an impossibly smooth finish. In the evening, after washing with Marie Veronique’s EO-Free Cleanser, I spray a light layer of Pre + Probiotic Daily Mist, followed by the Rejuvenating Night Oil, Vitamin C Booster, and lastly, the Eye Contour Serum.
  (If you are in Livingston/Bozeman, you can find Rowse at Cactus Blossom’s brick and mortar.)

• EKONE SMOKED OYSTERS
  Briny, buttery, perfectly smoky— ideal for an afternoon snack with a crisp apple, a sliver of aged cheddar, and strong black tea.

• BODHA ‘GROUND’ SMOKELESS INCENSE
  A warm, woody incense with notes of hinoki, Japanese cedar, and frankincense. It smells earthy and clean, the perfect companion for meditation or Yin. I love having scent alongside practice; it layers the experience, adding texture and atmosphere to stillness.

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