This week I placed a few of you in my mouth, fresh from the garden. I picked out the leaves and the stems. You weren’t very clean, and every so often a nearly invisible red bug would appear, clinging quietly. You were not sweet. You were savory, almost smoky.

And then, instantly, you took me elsewhere.

To a village difficult to find on a map. To an old woman. My great, great, great aunt(?) who sat between the currant bushes in the shade on a hundred-degree day. Her long silver braid swayed in the wind as she gathered currants: red, black, and white.

She dropped them into a red plastic strainer. I watched her as I picked the raspberries nearby.

Dear reader,

I hope you are finding your way to summer fruit—something that stains your fingers.

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A quick note: I wanted to share a new project.

A few months ago in CDMX, and I sat around her breakfast table, dreaming up a magazine for the Living Infrastructure Field Kit—one rooted in Los Angeles.

We’ve just released our first two pieces in Neighbors: A Living Infrastructure Magazine, and I’d love for you to read them—and subscribe for what’s to come. The first story is penned by Alissa Walker; the second is co-written by Devon Provo and me; and the third (which comes out tomorrow) is a piece on the relationship between mycology and wildfires.

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I thought a lot about flow last year and how long it had been since I’d felt it. There were many contributing factors, but digital fragmentation was definitely a major one: the tabs, the pings, the micro-interruptions that chop the day into unusable pieces.

I grew up in a tech-obsessed world. I watched technology go from eWorld and the first consumer Wi‑Fi to AI,“a racist pile of linear algebra,” as linguist Emily Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna put it. The internet I grew up with was a fundamentally different animal. It was weird, ugly, slow. You went to it on purpose, you sat down at a desk, you logged on with a sound, and then you logged off and went outside. It was a place you visited. Now it is the place you live. And the terms of residency have changed without most of us reading the lease. The early web was not trying to hold me. The current one is engineered to grip and makes leaving feel like a loss. Johann Hari (controversial I know) puts it plainly in Stolen Focus: “your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen.”

The first thing I did about that, three years ago, was move my phone out of my bedroom. It was a small, structural, non-negotiable change, and it did more for my sleep and my mornings than anything else I tried. I knew what a phone-free room felt like. This year, I wanted to find out what a phone-free home felt like.

The courts are starting to catch up. In recent years, dozens of states and school districts have filed lawsuits against Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube, alleging that these platforms were designed to be addictive, that they knowingly deployed features that cause measurable psychological harm, particularly to young people. The documentation exists. We are now in the phase where that knowledge becomes litigation, and slowly, maybe, accountability?

The breaking point for my relationship with tech was the pandemic. I went from not having TikTok to spending entire days on it. I had all the time in the world; for the first time since childhood, the time was mine, and I handed it straight to an app. Overnight, the screen stopped being an accessory and became the only doorway into everything: work, school, friendship, family, politics, grief. Of course, our use spiked. Of course, we clung to the glowing rectangles when they were the only way to see each other and spend our newfound time. Before COVID, the boiling-frog story applied: the temperature was rising so slowly that we could pretend nothing was happening. COVID turned the heat up all at once, and suddenly, the water was obviously too hot. If there is any gift in that, it might be this brief awareness that we are in a pot at all, and that we could still climb out.

The first book I ever read about any of this was Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. It was the book that made me understand this was not just a tech problem or a productivity problem but an ecological one. Odell writes that “it’s important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bioregional awareness,” because “capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another.” The way we pay attention is not separate from the way we treat land and each other; it’s all the same worldview. Hari calls the attention crisis and the climate crisis “thematically linked” for exactly this reason — both push us past limits we can actually tolerate, and the same system that fragments us also makes it harder to notice and respond to what is happening to the land, the water, the air.

As I started to put my phone by the front door, what surprised me was how quickly the phantom-buzz went away. Because it isn’t a limb. And I am not misplacing my brain. Once the phone moved away from my body, things started coming back to me. Mostly time.

One evening, I just sat at the dining table watching my partner cook. He was slicing carrots with citrus for a salad. I knew that moment would usually be filled with an article, a scroll, definitely a screen. Instead, it was just there. I was struck by how completely normal, human, and ancient it felt to simply sit while someone you love cooks, a scene that could belong to any century, any kitchen. I realized how uncomfortable I had become with just sitting, with not being distracted, not being obviously productive. And there was something quietly unsettling about that.

I also found myself at the window more. My neighbors had refilled the bird feeder. The squirrels were at it again, bullying the birds and then getting bullied right back. Juncos, cardinals, doves, a small rush of life flooding the snowy yard.

The psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan have a name for what the bird feeder was doing to my brain: “soft fascination,” the way natural things like moving water or birds hold your attention gently, without demanding anything, leaving room for your mind to wander and restore itself. When I sat at the window watching the squirrels, I wasn’t doing anything. My attention was being repaired by the oldest technology there is.

For the past few weeks, my thoughts have felt less jagged. I can follow a task through to completion. I can feel the outline of my day again.

This essay has been written a thousand times, by people much more disciplined than I am, and none of it has helped. What I want to talk about are the stakes: what this dependency, which has been carefully designed and deliberately optimized, is costing you and me. We don’t talk about the loss. The hours we might have spent staring at the ceiling, being bored, walking around the block, looking at a tree, watching the light turn on the walls, making art, making food, talking to someone, actually looking at someone. Those small, empty-looking pockets of time are where attention and imagination actually grow, and they are the first thing to go. The crises we are living through require exactly the kind of sustained, imaginative, uncomfortable attention that the attention economy is dissolving. You cannot care deeply about a world you are too distracted to look at.

Recently, I redownloaded Instagram for work, which was necessary, and in the same motion, I logged back into my personal account. The pot closed over me immediately. My day subtly rearranged itself around the screen. The most striking effect was two days later: I had totally lost my ability to organize my thoughts. I hadn’t fully registered that I’d regained a sense of attention until I watched it dissolve again. The week I was back on Instagram, I stopped noticing the birds.

Zadie Smith has been talking for years about not having a smartphone. In a recent conversation about her essay collection Dead and Alive, she put it bluntly: her emphasis has been “on mind control. What’s been interesting about the manipulations of a digital age is that it is absolutely natural and normal for people to be offended at the idea that they are being manipulated.” She tried a smartphone briefly in 2008 and gave it up. There is something very clear about that refusal. It is also a little annoying, the way someone being obviously right is always a little annoying. She is not avoiding mild inconvenience. She is avoiding a version of herself she does not want to be shaped into.

Jia Tolentino writes in Trick Mirror that “selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource” and that “everything is being cannibalized — not just goods and labor, but personality and relationships and attention.” The monoculture Odell writes about lives here, too. When she describes “a Monsanto farm whose ‘production’ slowly destroy[s] the soil until nothing more can grow,” and the way an overemphasis on usefulness wipes out whatever can’t be monetized, I think of my own mind under the scroll. The more time I give to the feed, the fewer species of thought survive. My inner landscape becomes rows of the same few crops: worry, outrage, envy, numbness. There is no room for the slow, weedy thoughts that actually belong to me, or to the place I live.

On my way to book club last week — we were discussing Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know — I heard him say in an interview that if you want to write, you have to defend hours every day when you’re not on the internet. In the novel, a future historian tries to reconstruct what people in 2014 knew about the coming crises — how much was visible, and what they chose to see. I kept thinking about that historian looking back at this moment, scrolling through our archives of us scrolling, trying to understand how we could watch the seas rise, and the forests burn, and still spend most of our free time staring into little rectangles.

I only know that in order to do what I am here to do, I have to find a way to abstain, somehow, against all odds, to retain my autonomy over my own creativity. The stakes feel almost embarrassingly simple: actually make art, write, create, or completely debilitate myself with the phone. That should not be a hard decision. And yet here we are. The tech industry has made it hard by turning consumption into the default state, so that choosing to be in my own life now feels like an unusual option instead of the baseline. The in‑between, the time when nothing is happening, when your phone is in another room and you are simply in a room with yourself, is where the work actually lives. And maybe it is not a metaphor. Maybe it is the actual yard, the actual soil under your feet, that needs you to slow down and pay attention, not for your own productivity, but because that is how living systems work: through reciprocity, through presence, through the patient act of noticing what is already there.

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Unfortunately, the more I thought about this question, agonized over it, and attempted to embody ease, the more complicated life got.

To start the year off, I decided to flip this question to you all.

I asked folks what felt easy as an attempt to inspire us all to hold things a little lighter, with a bit more joy.

things that y’all are finding easy:

• putting on my pearls

• worrying, stressing, catastrophizing

• saying I love you (if it’s in your heart)

• deciding to go to work on climate every day!

• moisturizing

• losing time—morning crosswords that extend into the afternoon (a minimum of four a day), errands that should take ten minutes stretching to several hours, tasks that don’t really need to be done suddenly taking on immense importance

• being obsessed with basil, cuddling basil, walking basil in his stroller, bringing basil to bars

• eating breakfast

• smiling

• picking up the phone to ask my mom a question that becomes an hour-long catch-up

• spiraling

  

• leaning into the slow winter rhythms that the early dark seems to invite

• watching all the NYT Cookie Week videos and baking new treats (these Mexican Hot Chocolate cookies are sweet, spicy, and have a marshmallow surprise!)

• buying another book when I haven’t finished the ones in the pile

• laughing at the absurdity of it all, at the things that aren’t supposed to be funny, and the bad stand-up, and at the truly funny

• learning that I can ask for help

• singing

• walking down the street with my 1-year-old. She waves and says “HIIIII” to lots of people. Watching her light people up with her huge eyes and toothy little smile is one of the greatest joys of my life. Sometimes people are lost in their own world, somewhere distant and dark, but she has no sense of who is ‘approachable’ and greets them anyway. People get caught off guard and end up smiling. And I’m just standing there like an idiot, feeling like I’ve done something fucking amazing.

• playing with my dog

  

• going on curiosity walks—10 minutes to a full hour—to walk around my neighborhood and be aware of all the things I may have missed before, to be in touch with my senses. Birds of paradise beaming.

• kissing

• random acts of kindness with strangers: paying smiles forward; helping someone struggling with their bags up and down the subway stairs,
  offering your seat on the bus, and if a kid is staring at you, interacting with them; complimenting someone in line behind you at the grocery store.

• going to the sauna!

• standing on my mom’s vibration exercise plate

• drinking 1 gallon of water a day out of my mom’s purple bottle with a straw

• eating rice out of the rice cooker with a spoon

• wandering into the kitchen while my husband cooks and taking a sip from his beer or slipping a roasted carrot into my mouth, tasting the charred sweetness. And later we might play cards, or cribbage, or watch a TV show that’s not too taxing, or listen to music in the dark, with the dog, the only light from a lamp we picked up in Red Hook years ago.

• taking a hot shower

• watching the hummingbirds eat nectar from the feeder

• imagining the hummingbirds as fish swimming

• saying yes when he asked to kiss me!

• being in solidarity with a free Palestine. Always and forever. Free Palestine.

• performing my rituals of swimming in the ocean 🌊 on Hunakai Beach

• telling people I love them

• hanging out with my sister

• finding joy in little moments of connection—working on a puzzle with Justin, getting pictures of my nieces and nephews, talking to my brothers on the phone.

• mending clothes

• rolling the windows down and breathing fresh air

• packing a suitcase

• working — I love my teams right now

• walking with my dog in the afternoon, which turns into a meander in the woods. Off leash, she runs with abandon. And sometimes, when no one is looking, I do too—jeans and Uggs and a quilted coat.

  

• walking the puppy

• eating yummy food with loved ones

• napping

• distilling

• making bread

• weeding my garden

• organizing in living rooms, kitchens, coffee shops, bars, workplaces, and farmers’ fields. The momentum we have now has the power to transform this time of crisis into a time where the seeds of liberation can take root

• feeling the resistance becoming swift and massive

As we move into this new year, I’m looking for ease and less rigidity. Small decisions that don’t require armor.

Moments where you soften, and the world softens back.

Dance!

Last week unraveled fast. Everything seemed to arrive at once. That’s part of the truth too. No one lives at perfect tempo.

This year I kept circling the word solastalgia in my writing and film development. Glenn Albrecht coined it to describe a particular kind of homesickness—not for a place you’ve left, but for a place that’s leaving you.

Flattening started as a reclaiming of time. It’s also become a way to stay with that grief. A rhythm sturdy enough to notice what is going missing.

In early summer I returned to my favorite street in LA. A few homes were marked by fire. The smell still hung in the dense overcast. Sometimes change arrives like a siren. Sometimes it takes years to make itself visible. A skyline that no longer makes sense. A creekbed that remembers water.

Back in New York, I call my best friend on their commute up PCH. I walk while they drive. We try to get our bearings by what’s no longer there. The pink house is a carcass. The glass one is gone. Directions by erasure. Muscle memory wiped. In this new world nothing is constant. New landmarks vanish too—the burnt tree, the scaffolding, the fence. We’re navigating on a moving map.

In my studio, I have been returning to texts I read at Cooper. I came back to philosopher and theologian John Mbiti’s framing, the future isn’t a wide horizon; it becomes real through events, unfolding in rhythm rather than forecast. Maybe writing makes the future for me now—pages make a week. A rhythm becomes a future.

In the climate space we are constantly forced with the potential reality of future scenarios.

I think about a writers’ room in early 2020, dutifully modeling pandemics before we knew one was rounding the corner. I learned that year that forecasts can feel like grip.

Can you be nostalgic for a future that has yet to unfold?

Svetlana Boym once wrote that nostalgia isn’t really about the past. It’s about the vanishing present. She called it chronophobia—a fear of time’s speed. Nostalgia becomes not a longing to go back, but a refusal to live only in acceleration. A reach for a thicker sense of time.

That’s what I keep coming back to. Storytelling as a way to thicken time. To trace how we got here. To notice where we are. To carry forward only the rhythms that still hold.

Not going back. Just learning how to stay.

Maybe this is the practice for year two: choose the rhythms worth hearing. Let memory and future hold hands.

This week, I’m finishing a few new paintings—small proof that the future can be made by gesture.

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reading: Flights by Olga Tokarczuk—fragmented, non-linear, full of body-in-motion reflections, a constellatory novel that traces travel, time, and displacement.

seeing: the Sky High Farm Biennial—Trees Never End and Houses Never End—in Germantown, NY

saying goodbye: to cactus store :(

eating: croissant cereal from L’Appartement 4F

clearing: my desktop

playing: with my new printer

listening: to the occasional cicada in my backyard

June 22nd, 2025: America has bombed Iran.
Went swimming in the afternoon.

I haven’t written to you since late March. Each week I sat down to try, only to be met by the calamity of the moment. At first, I told myself I had nothing worth adding. Then I realized I didn’t want to write at all—because putting words to it would mean letting myself feel it. And I couldn’t feel one more thing.

I’d think, next week. And then something else would crash through.

So I sat on my hands and my words.

The morning of the bombings, I went to the beach. The sun was bright, the water sharp and cold. I stood waist-deep and felt... nothing. Not calm. Not fear. Just a faint electrical hum under my skin, like my body wanted to slip into static. It wasn’t empty. It was dense with the sense that there was nothing I could do.

I remembered the first time nuclear war felt real—at a salon at MoMA, listening to Susan Buck-Morss talk about the scales of planetary collapse.

I’d been busy unpacking RCP scenarios, measuring probabilities, thinking I was already holding so much. But she was holding more—more complexity, more uncertainty. She laid out a future where nuclear weapons could destroy us before the horrors of climate collapse even fully unfurled.

I felt a drop in my gut. A kind of powerlessness I hadn’t touched before: no lever to pull, no door to knock on. Just an awareness so total it bypassed thought.

That evening, she also spoke of our collective inability to look away.
She said:

“The anesthetic effect of distant war killings is reversed when cell phones, close to our bodies, show us daily the devastating bodily harm inflicted on persons who speak to us of their pain… [they] meet us democratically at home.”

It made sense. The war, the raids, the rollbacks of rights—they aren’t somewhere else. They live in our phones, nestled in our palms, whispering at us in the dark. Our screens keep delivering what others feel, so looking away doesn’t really feel possible anymore.

It wasn’t the first time I felt what Ranu Mukherjee and Alicia Escott call shadowtime—that eerie sense of living on two parallel clocks at once. Planning ordinary days, even enjoying them, while also being acutely aware that the near future could be drastically different from the present. Shadowtime can make fixing dinner, applying for a job, even going to bed on time feel absurd when a flower that evolved over 42.7 million years has just gone extinct.

So what does flattening mean now?

I think for the rest of this year, it’s about letting flow return.

Last weekend, I was poolside. Working. Not because I needed to—I didn’t have a single deadline pressing on me—but because it was easier to keep working than to let myself actually unwind. I looked up and saw about fifty people day-drinking, laughing, sprawled out with friends. I felt this jolt, like my body and my reality were out of sync.

I’d dismantled the stack. Made more room in my days, cut my hours—but my body hadn’t gotten the memo. It kept pushing forward, shoulders tight, breath caught, mind scanning for the next crisis.

It felt a bit dreamlike, like looking down to find a bike I’d been pedaling for so long was no longer under me, but my legs were still moving. Patterns like that don’t vanish just because the weight lifts; they keep running the same tired routes.

Until you disrupt them.

Lately, flow has looked like getting lost on are.na, following stray threads with no outcome. Falling back in love with photography. It’s not documentation. It’s a way back to seeing.

This weekend, I was poolside again—this time with friends.

watching: the bear - at first I thought this season was bad - but then it redeemed itself with the episode 4 and beyond.

reading: The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad and committing to the 100 prompts, by 100 one hundred writers, artists, and thinkers, over the course of a 100 days.

listening: to my nearly-12-hour high school playlist.

noticing: patterns

visiting: the botanical gardens beauty

harvesting: sour cherries

developing: rituals by going to Central Park every friday with a book

eating: yummy food

In the years that followed, I've made a ritual of the first days of spring. I open the windows. I listen to the birds. I pay attention.

Since the war in Ukraine began three years ago, the transition from late February to early March has carried a weight I can’t explain with words. Those early days of the invasion in 2022 transformed what should have been a celebration into a period of grief, as I found myself unable to blow out birthday candles without tears streaming down my face. Now, each year when March arrives, my birthday wish remains unchanged—a fervent hope for peace, for an end to the destruction that has torn through Ukraine.

Since the beginning of the administration, things have felt closer than ever. Last Friday at Columbia, I taught a class on climate storytelling. While we discussed the impact campaign of "How to Blow Up a Pipeline," the fire alarm sounded, a piercing noise that told us we all had to evacuate. It was a false alarm, yet it seemed a perfect metaphor for all of this—for having to just keep going nonetheless.

Class ended and I began receiving a flurry of messages about $400 million dollars being pulled from Columbia.

The weekend passed and the news broke about Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holding Palestinian activist and Columbia student taken by ICE agents.

The following day I read the NYtimes article that quoted Jelani Cobb, Dean of the Journalism School at Columbia, “Nobody can protect you,” Mr. Cobb said. “These are dangerous times.”

This reminded me all too much of what began happening in Russia over the course of Putin's reign: he has been president as long as I've been alive.

I keep coming back to Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More"—a book about the late Soviet Union where the performance of normalcy became more important than reality itself. He called this hypernormalisation: that peculiar moment when the rituals of institutional life become more rigid even as their meaning hollows out, when everyone knows the forms they're maintaining are empty but maintains them anyway. Performing business as usual.

On Saturday night, Oli and I went to a concert. There, surrounded by the pulsing crowd, a strange alienation washed over me. I watched as people lost themselves in the music—singing at the top of their lungs, bodies swaying without restraint, faces alight with uncomplicated joy. Their freedom felt like a language I'd forgotten how to speak. At that moment, I realized my body had been holding a chronic tension since January 7th, the morning the LA fires began. For months, my muscles had remained coiled, braced for the next attack without a single moment of true release.

What had changed was not just my circumstances but my relationship to uncertainty itself. In months or even years prior, I had been metabolizing uncertainty intellectually—as concept, as theory, as something to analyze. I had held it at arm's length, examining it through the safe remove of ideas rather than experiencing its full weight against my skin. Now I was facing it viscerally, embedded in every aspect of my daily existence. Standing there on the dance floor, the realization crystallized: I existed in a perpetual state of vigilance, my nervous system constantly signaling that I, the people I love, the people I work with, people I know intimately and people I’ll never get the chance to know are under attack. The theoretical had become embodied; my flesh and sinew now carried what my mind had previously contained.

My body wasn't overreacting—it was responding with perfect accuracy to a world that had fundamentally changed.

Our systems of knowing aren't just changing—they're learning to doubt themselves. We're caught in a peculiar trap: just as we've begun seriously interrogating how we know what we know, what we know keeps dissolving faster than we can interrogate it. I'm reminded of Karl Rove's chilling declaration during the Bush administration: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too." Two decades later, this doctrine has only accelerated, with power increasingly claiming the right to manufacture not just interpretations but reality itself. When facts become malleable, when history is rewritten in real-time, the simple act of witnessing what actually exists becomes radical.

The challenge before us is to hold multiple truths simultaneously: to acknowledge the systems collapsing around us while refusing to be collapsed ourselves; to recognize danger without surrendering to despair; to find moments of joy without retreating into denial. To resist is not merely to oppose, but to insist on seeing clearly—to refuse the empire's claim on reality by documenting the world as it actually is, in all its terrible beauty and beautiful terror. In a time of hypernormalisation, the most revolutionary act may be to simply describe what is happening, to name the tension in our bodies, to acknowledge both the concert and the crisis, to refuse the comfort of looking away while still allowing ourselves the necessity of looking toward each other.

I've written myself into a corner of my own making—describing a practice of resistance I can barely sustain. Yet even in acknowledging this contradiction, something shifts. We don't have to be perfect witnesses, just persistent ones. Take care of your hearts. This is marathon work.

Getting into: knitting - the ultimate anti doom scroll activity.

watching: Caught two films on 35mm - Pedro Almodovar's "All About My Mother" and Sergei Parajanov's "The Colors of Pomegranates."

Learning: How to wire my own lamp. This is the year of hard skills.

eating: Big Love’s take on tapas. Feta. Roasted Bell Peppers. Hamachi. Jamon…

hearing: went to a Rodrigo Amarante concert and cried to my favorite song live.

Visiting: in the town of Woodbury (the antique capital of CT) there is the most dreamiest furniture shop (of not antiques but late 20th century design+) run dont walk to George Champion Modern Shop

developing: Something Yellow! My animated film project with Gaia Alari which you can read a little about in the post below.

Ahead of the 3rd anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, I wanted to republish my piece on bringing my grandmother, Mama Lena, to the US. It was first published in Trumplandia Magazine in 2022.

Since then, many more phone calls from the frontlines have been exchanged. In Odesa, the days and weeks trudge along with no end in sight.

And Mama Lena remains in limbo - an astronaut who landed on a different planet, as she described herself when she first arrived. That planet is the US.

In many ways, this piece is more relevant than ever. As Trump issues an unprecedented amount of executive orders, all those who have sought asylum - Ukrainian and otherwise - are left in constant fear of Trump revoking their temporary protection statuses. Trump's interpretation of diplomacy feels like a tightrope walk, balancing our collective future on a wire of words and egos. Case in point: Trump’s “peace” talks with Putin, where Ukraine's absence is glaring. It falls in line with what Russia has told us all along: our peace and our oppression is at their whim.

I dream of the end. Of the day when the missiles finally cease. Of the day when my uncles and cousins can come home. Of meeting my baby cousin. For the longest exhale there ever was and ever will be. For tears of relief.

But for now, we wait.

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In the center of Odesa, the monument to the Duc de Richelieu — the 19th-century governor who transformed Odesa into a modern city — had been buried in sandbags. The only thing left visible was the top of his head. Derybasivska Street, which was usually teeming with pedestrians, musicians, and local foods, had been left deserted. In place of strolling tourists were barricades, tank traps called “hedgehogs,” and the uniformed volunteers of the national guard.

My grandmother Olena Gavrishkiv, or Mama Lena, as she was known to everyone in the city’s art and music scene, saw all this on March 20, 2022, the day she returned to Odesa. It was not a joyful homecoming; she had spent the previous three weeks hiding out in the village of Troits’ke, an hour and a half outside the city. She rode back to Odesa in a small rickety bus, one of the few that was authorized to move through the towns. The passengers were mostly women, but there were two men, whose documents were checked diligently at every checkpoint they passed. The bus was full of chatter about farming, of a potential future harvest. As they drove into Odesa, the conversations died down.

Mama Lena was returning for one night to pack before setting off to seek asylum in the U.S. The bus dropped her off at the station in Odesa, where she was picked up by two old friends who would drive her to her apartment. As she rode on through the city, she could not help but notice the eerie calmness of Odesa’s pastel facades — the peaches, light blues, creams — and neoclassical arches that had been transformed into a city prepared for attack. “It wouldn’t be true if I didn’t tell you that in that moment my heart broke, as if someone tore it in two,” she told me.

In the car with her were Olga Kashenbekova, a Ukrainian video director and editor, and Denis Popkin, a navy officer in Odesa. As they drove through the city, Mama Lena said, “Denis, take me to my Black Sea.” The beaches that were once studded with people were now studded with mines. Mama Lena knew she had to bid farewell to the sea whose shore she walked every morning, where she had met her late husband when she was just 13. Olga, determined to grant this last wish, directed Denis to the dock. Mama Lena dug around the floor of Denis’s car and found an old plastic water bottle. She would fill it with water from the sea, to take with her on her journey.

When they got to the beach, they encountered a fence with a sign that read “Mines Ahead.” There was no one in sight but an old man who sat on the rocks in the water. Mama Lena and Olga squeezed through the slats in the fence and walked out onto a grated pier. Water splashed up the metal grate as they bent over to fill the bottle with salty water.

Mama Lena could not see them from the beach, but the threats to Odesa were massing in the sea. Offshore stood fourteen Russian vessels, including a missile cruiser, two Ropucha-class amphibious landing crafts, mine-clearing boats, and the flagship Moskva. Two weeks earlier, President Volodymyr Zelensky had warned that the Russians would try to take Odesa. They would “soften up” the city by bombarding it from the air. Then they would invade from the sea.

By nightfall, the shelling had begun. “From one side of the city, from the other, from the sea. I felt surrounded as the buildings shook,” she said. “You could feel the wave of energy from each bomb in your throat. I thought, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t even wait until dawn to leave.’” When dawn finally came, Mama Lena went in search of a last cup of coffee. Her cabinets were empty. So she sent her daughter, Oksana, who had come to see her off, to the store. “By the time she came back, it was too late. I was already in the car. So I asked the driver to honk and stuck my hand out the window,” she said, “It seemed she didn’t understand that I was already gone.”

As Odesa disappeared into the rearview mirror, she clutched her bottle of the Black Sea.

The term Roma refers to different subgroups of people who share a common language, known as Rromanës.

Linguists map Romani history through traces of language from Punjab, in India, to Northern Europe, somewhere between the 9th and 14th centuries. According to the historian Viorel Achim, these travelers claimed they were from Egypt, and thus were labeled Gypsies by Europeans.

In the earliest European accounts, Romani bands traveled throughout the continent. They moved around in caravans of thirty to forty people, men out front and women and children behind. They played music and practiced various crafts, including blacksmithing. The women became known for telling fortunes. Some Roma groups also made their living through theft and brigandage. Although welcomed and even sometimes lionized in certain times and places, the Roma were frequently attacked, evicted, and even (in the case of Romania) enslaved.

According to Fascination and Hatred: The Roma in European Culture by Jason Dawsey, the question of why the Roma people were so persecuted in Europe is complex. Several factors can be cited, including their itinerant lifestyle, their perceived non-Christianity, their generally darker skin tone, and the ugly stereotypes that followed them. On the other hand, Dawsey notes that “the Romani life of restless movement soon appealed to many who felt alienated by [a] new capitalist order.” Artists and intellectuals alike idealized the free-spirited Roma, who were not part of the bourgeois world of work. The Roma people inspired Georges Bizet’s famous opera Carmen, and Alexander Pushkin’s Romantic poem “The Gypsies,” written while he was in exile in Odesa in the 1820s.

During the Second World War, the Nazis began to target the Romani as part of their bigoted racial policies. They were sent en masse to concentration camps. Between 250,000 and 500,000 Roma people perished. According to Achim, “It is estimated that from 70 to 80 percent of the Gypsies who lived in countries occupied by Nazi Germany fell victim to the program of extermination.” But the attempted genocide did not end with the Allied victory. Czechoslovakia continued to forcibly sterilize Roma women until 1976. Around 90,000 women were subjected to the procedure.

The Romani remain the poorest social group in Europe. Today, between ten and twelve million Roma people live across Europe, with large populations in the Balkan Peninsula. It is estimated that 400,000 Roma are living in Ukraine, mostly in the south of the country. According to Achim, the vast majority of the Roma — 79.4 percent — have no specified profession and thus live well below the standards of rural or urban life. Many Roma communities continue to struggle for full citizenship in lands they have inhabited for centuries.

My grandmother, Mama Lena, is Roma. I had known very little about the Roma side of my family. What I did know had come to me in stories that never arranged themselves in any chronological order. Mama Lena had not been a huge part of my life. I had met her a total of four times, for a couple of weeks, when I spent my summers in Russia growing up. She had no job or property and was a widow; thus, the United States had not let her into the country for the twenty seven years my parents have lived here.

Mama Lena’s grandfather was the first to transition from the nomadic lifestyle to rural agricultural life. After years of seeing his family members’ tongues cut out for speaking their native Romani language and the women in his family raped, he wanted to break the cycle of discrimination and prejudice. He gave his word to the collective farm foreman that he and his future children would be honest workers.

In 1954, when Mama Lena was born, her grandfather commanded her father, Ivan, to work the land and do right by his family. But he had an education and wanted to work in the city and make a new life for himself. He and his wife were beaten by his father for being disobedient. The shame and anger drove him away. Mama Lena never saw him again. Her mother moved to Odesa on her own, leaving two-year-old Mama Lena behind with her grandparents.

In those early years, Mama Lena took up singing. “I have a vivid memory of sitting on the collective farm foreman’s lap when I was around five years old and singing to him the songs that my aunties sang about stealing from him,” she said. “He laughed as I revealed through song what no one wanted him to know.” Her grandparents were not too happy with her after that. They used to scare her by threatening to give her to the Gypsies, “as if that isn’t who we were,” she said. In the village, their background did not seem to matter after a while. Everyone worked, and they began to look like the Ukrainian farmers around them.

Mama Lena was repeatedly blamed for things she did not do. As the obedient one, she became the scapegoat — she begged to go live with her mom in Odesa. When she was in the fifth grade, her grandparents agreed. In her new life in the city, her love for Odesa blossomed. She befriended the kids in her building, and they would all go to the beach together. “The years on the Black Sea,” she called them. Mama Lena met her husband there, “a blue-eyed boy playing the guitar.” When she turned eighteen, they decided to marry. Soon came two children, a boy and a girl, three years apart. She never worked; she spent her days with the kids, singing when she could, and walking the streets of Odesa. Her husband got a job as a contractor, but that was not enough to put food on the table. What followed were two dark decades she refuses to speak about, ways of living she is not proud of. It was a lifestyle that eventually led to her husband’s early death.

Years after his passing, Mama Lena went to the U.S. Consulate in Kyiv to see if she could visit us in Los Angeles. My parents, her son and the woman he married, immigrated to the United States in 1995. On her trip into the capital, she met some musicians who played Gypsy and Jewish folk songs and called themselves Topor Orchestra. Instead of going to the consulate she ended up staying with them in the large house they all shared. When the musicians began touring they invited her along to sing and play the tambourine. They went to Goa, India, and around Europe in a van. But after seven years of this lifestyle, she missed Odesa and decided to return in 2020. She said, “The people of Odesa are just simply different. There is a warmth, a kindness I haven’t found anywhere else.”

The first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Mama Lena was in her one-bedroom apartment in Odesa’s city center. Although she had lived there for just a year, she knew every inch of it too well from the city’s fequent COVID lockdowns. In the first couple of days, she did not believe the invasion would become a full-scale war. She sat at home answering phone calls from worried relatives abroad and remained relatively calm. She was not in good health, and when she heard the air raid sirens from her apartment, she decided not to worry herself with rushing to the bomb shelters. Leaving did not cross her mind, although her family and friends kept insisting that she should go.

By the fourth day of the war, my father — her son — had convinced her to return to her old village in the countryside. The same day, my second cousin, Laura Antoniuk, who owned a cattle farm one hill over from where Mama Lena was born, knocked on her door. She quickly packed a bag. They drove two hours to the village of Troits’ke; the road they drove on was shelled the next day. The night they arrived, Laura had a dream that Ukraine was split in two right under her feet. A fault line opened and swallowed her whole. Mama Lena knew this was not a good omen; it was a type of vision that came to her line of Roma women that she considered to be prophetic: some territories would be lost.

In the rush to get out of Odesa, Mama Lena had forgotten her winter jacket. She sat most mornings in the kitchen of the farmhouse, shivering. Every day she experienced the war through the television screen. Every night when it got dark they turned off all the lights, as the government had instructed, and boarded up the windows.

Despite the circumstances, Mama Lena enjoyed being out of the city and in nature. She took walks and foraged for mushrooms, but if she listened too closely, the only noise she heard was the distant sound of tanks rolling through the spring mud. One day, some Russian jets flew overhead. From that day on, she saw and heard explosions on the horizon. There was a bomb shelter not too far. But when Laura’s mom, Inna, arrived, they began to prep the basement with pillows, mattresses, and dry food, as at the age of 77, Inna would not be able to make a run for it. Mama Lena announced that she was not going to go down there. “I don’t want to prematurely bury myself,” she said, to which Laura responded, “Great! I was wondering who was going to dig us out.”

One day, Mama Lena saw that the postman had delivered a stack of papers. Laura burst into tears as she realized these were draft documents for her sons and her husband. Her husband had been delivering men and boys from the villages to the military bases. There were no other men left, and his time had come. Vlad, Laura’s son, my cousin, was in Odesa, with his wife who was pregnant with their second child. A week later he went off to war.

Mama Lena’s days went by like this until she got a call from my father.

On the first day of the war, I had FaceTimed Mama Lena. She answered with her face too close to the camera, as usual. Her tattooed eyebrow and her mole were the only things in view. Her voice was deep and croaky from a lifetime of smoking filterless cigarettes. “This will be over soon,” she said, “I am not afraid.” She assured me she was safe in Odesa with her friends. “The Russians will let up in a few days.”

On the second day of the war, I woke up and read that a town called Schastia, a word that means “happiness” in both Russian and Ukrainian, had been 80 percent destroyed by the Russian army. By the next call, I could tell Mama Lena no longer believed what she had said on the first day. It was visible in her eyes and in her voice. “A heavy feeling of fear has set into my body,” she said.

In the first days of the war, a feeling of darkness ate at me. Just two years prior, I had witnessed the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict reopen as if thirty years had not passed. My mother and her family had fled Azerbaijan during the pogroms of 1988. The attack in 2020, perpetrated by Azerbaijan, unfolded with no mass media coverage; its war crimes remain unpunished. When I called my maternal grandmother in Los Angeles, I could see through her tears how the war was very real for her.

The third day of the war, I got a call from my best friend in Los Angeles. Her mother was born near Odesa, and she had spent every summer in Kyiv growing up, playing on the same playground that her mother did. She told me that Kyiv would fall by the weekend. We hung up. That day left fifty-eight civilians in Mariupol, and thirty-five people, including two children, wounded in Kyiv.

Mama Lena moved to the countryside. I breathed a sigh of relief, as I watched the destruction elsewhere online. On the outskirts of Odesa was the damage of the Grad and Kalibr missiles. Piles of rubble, of debris, of lives left unfinished. I decided to call Mama Lena every day when I left the house to show her the various parts of New York that I walked through, in hopes of distracting her. The one thing I did know about her was her love of beauty and her attention to detail.

On the sixth day, the streets of Kharkiv burned. On the seventh, Luhansk and Donetsk.

That night, when I called them, Mama Lena and Laura were laughing. They were laughing with the rest of the world at the “Russian ship, go fuck yourself” video that had gone viral. They were also tickled by news they heard of a clan of Romani stealing a Russian tank.

The nuclear power plant in Enerhodar was attacked. The days started to blend together on both sides of the Atlantic. Inna had finally arrived from Odesa. It was getting more dangerous, and the air raid sirens were intolerable. Mama Lena and Inna shared a room for the first time in decades; they kept each other up speaking of family histories, lineages maintained only through oral tradition. Laura told me about her husband and son’s draft notice, but the next day they picked up laughing again — about the women yelling at the heavily armed Russian soldiers, “Don’t you know where you are? You’re in Konotop. Every other woman here is a witch. You’ll never get an erection, starting tomorrow!” They must have retold this to me every day for the next three days with the same joyous laughs every time.

The following day Mama Lena reported back: “There was not even salt in the store today.”

Kyiv was not taken by the first weekend, as my friend and many experts had predicted. But the situation became much worse and more dire than I or anyone around me had thought possible. The destruction of the maternity ward in Mariupol, the refugee numbers increasing into the millions, Putin’s Crimea Celebration Event, nuclear war threats, death tolls rising, the rape of women and children in front of their husbands all flooded my screen, my thoughts, my nightmares. Throughout all this, I found myself in the position of having to live in two simultaneous realities. In one, I was scrolling on Twitter for live updates on a country, however complicated, that had been home to my patrilineal lineage for centuries. In the other, I was a graduate student at Columbia University studying climate and preparing to enter the workforce. The things we spoke of in my classes, although tangentially applicable, never dared cross over into the realities, the atrocities, the “politics” of what was happening in my other reality.

Every day I talked with my parents, in Los Angeles, about what we could do. We had helped situate Laura’s other son, Dmytry, and his family in Berlin. Some days we spoke of going to Europe to volunteer, others we sat together on FaceTime grieving. It was hard to tell from abroad when the war would end, and when the situation surrounding Odesa would become truly dire.

We had tried so many times before to get Mama Lena permission to enter the U.S. that it was not part of our conversation until, on March 19, my mom read a New York Times article about Ukrainians getting in through the southern border of the United States. As soon as she read it, she called me and said, “It has to be now.” My dad did not want to send his mother into Europe with no one to assist her. But Putin’s pro-war rallies, for him, were an indication that things were not going to improve soon. There was not any time to lose: everyone was saying that the Russian offensive in the south was about to accelerate.

The next morning, my dad called Mama Lena to propose that she come to the States. To our surprise, she agreed. When an opportunity that held relative certainty presented itself, she realized she was more than willing to leave. She was scared for her life. My dad called Laura and asked her to get Mama Lena back to Odesa.

It took around four hours in total to plan the route.

The goal, my father told me, was to make the flights under one reservation; that way, if something was delayed during her border crossing, it would be possible to make changes to connecting flights. We first looked at Wizz, an airline we heard was flying out of Moldova at the time, but the proximity to Ukraine meant that all the planes had been grounded. We opened a map of Europe while my dad scoured every possible website: Expedia, Kayak, Skyscanner — the main issue was what would happen if there was an unexpected delay at one of the connections. What if she got stuck at the border from Ukraine to Moldova, from Moldova to Romania? What if her phone died? What if the bus was late? What if she got lost? Would she lose her documents? Would she miss all these connections? Would someone stop her at the Mexico-U.S. border because of her darker skin tone? Would she be put in a cage?

There are only certain hubs and a few airlines that fly directly into Mexico City from Europe. She could not connect from the U.S., as she would have to have a visa to board the flight. As the hours went on, the options seemed to exponentially spiral out into various connecting cities, flights that would take her around the world in many days. One potential itinerary was Bucharest to Barcelona, Barcelona to Dubai, Dubai to Bogotá, Bogotá to Mexico City. After exploring all the options we decided to make a reservation through the American Express Travel Concierge, which had a 24-hour cancellation policy, and the flights could connect under one reservation. Her itenarary was Chișinău, Bucharest, Paris, Mexico City, Tijuana, Los Angeles.

She was scheduled to arrive in Tijuana on Wednesday, March 23. A four-hour drive from my parent’s home, a four-day trek since she had left Troits’ke.

On the morning of the 21st, she left with only one bag. “I didn’t even think to bring food,” Mama Lena said.

She had her path written down on several small pieces of paper: she would take a car to the border and walk across into Moldova. On the other side of the border, a car would meet her and take her to Chișinău; from there she got on a bus that would take her on a ten-hour ride to the Bucharest airport. From Bucharest, a two-hour flight to Paris and an eight-hour layover. In Paris, a twelve-hour flight to Mexico City. From there, she would fly another three and a half hours to Tijuana, where she would be met by her son and daughter-in-law, if all went to plan.

The volunteer driver who came to pick her up in Odesa had “beautiful hair,” Mama Lena said, “but she didn’t talk much.” There was another woman in the car with her who was returning to Moldova. Mama Lena stared out the window at a city now on borrowed time. She was filled with fear. She knew civilian vehicles fleeing Ukrainian cities had been targeted by Russian forces. “There could be an explosion at any moment. We were lucky,” she said. They reached the border in just over an hour. It was still early in the morning and very cold outside. Lines of women, children, and dogs appeared as they got closer. Some had no idea where they were going, others followed directions from relatives to get to Moldova, seek safety in Warsaw, take the train to Germany.

She walked through the border checkpoint that a volunteer had pointed her to and sat under a white tent with offerings of hot sweet tea and open-faced sandwiches. She waited for the volunteer who was going to bring her to Chișinău. There were buses, small vans, and cars with signage to countries they could drive Ukrainians to.

Even once she crossed the border, she was still worried. “I didn’t feel relieved yet. Although in my mind, rationally, I knew I was out,” she said. She still had a long way to go. Mama Lena was met by a young Molodovan male volunteer. They had a cigarette and were off to Chișinău. On the way, he got a worrisome phone call and grew silent for the rest of the route. At the bus terminal in Chișinău, she spoke with a young Israeli man who was en route to fight in Ukraine; his relatives had desperately attempted to talk him out of it.

On the bus she was exhausted and fell asleep. She woke up ten hours later at the Bucharest airport. She was in the airport for a few hours and had fried fish for breakfast before a two-hour flight to Paris.

In the Paris airport, they tried to take away the bottle of Black Sea water. “‘This is chernoe morye, chernoe morye,’ I kept repeating myself until I burst out crying.” Around ten security agents surrounded her, sniffing the water, and finally translated what she was saying, “when they realized what it was, they let me keep it.” She sat at her gate, relief coming over her body, but then she got a hot flash of panic; it was the first time she began to process what she was going through. “I quickly started undressing, and I looked at the attendant checking people into my flight and said ‘Help me,’” one of the few phrases she knew in English, but a useful one to know. The medics came and took her blood pressure. They gave her some medicine and escorted her onto her flight.

They took her bottle of the Black Sea in Mexico City. By then she was too tired to argue.

Mama Lena landed in Tijuana as planned on Wednesday, March 23. She was united with my parents outside the airport; she had not seen her son in seven years. They drove to the U.S. border. There, she was separated from my parents so she could fill out her asylum paperwork. The border patrol agent assured my parents there would be someone there who spoke Ukrainian or Russian, but when Mama Lena arrived at the processing center, she was handed paperwork in what appeared to be Arabic. “No Russian,” she said, pointing at the document. Eventually, they found something for her in Russian, and she filled it out. The processing center made a poor impression on her. “There were about five benches in a row. The first three had people handcuffed to them, chained like dogs.” For a while, it seemed, the agents didn’t know what to do with her: the executive order allowing 100,000 Ukrainians into the country was brand new, and not everyone understood how it worked. In the end, after four hours of waiting, Mama Lena was granted humanitarian parole, which will end in one year, on March 21, 2023. She was one of the first Ukrainian nationals to be welcomed to the U.S.

Today, more than 2,000 refugees have arrived in Tijuana. “There are people waiting for three to four days at the border. I am so glad we got her out when we did,” my mom said to me over the phone. Since then, the number of refugees has grown each day by the hundreds as the U.S. government expedites the process to admit Ukrainians. But details from Biden’s program have not been released, and thus it remains largely unorganized at the border. The crossing time has gotten longer and longer with each day.

When I called her on her first day in California, she said she was feeling better. “Who knows how long this war will last, but never in a million years would I have thought that I would be on the other side of the planet, on a different continent,” she said. She complained that my parents were not letting her smoke, that she had to stand twenty feet away from the house.

The next day, Mama Lena told me about her friends, musicians who had all fled with their families into Europe when men could still leave. She had tears in her eyes thinking of all those who had remained. “I write to everyone in Ukraine on Facebook, I wish them life — just like that, ‘I wish you life.’” She said, “I couldn’t imagine what it’s like for those men to not be home with their children and wives. They could have a family one moment and not the next, and they wouldn’t even know it.”

During one of our conversations, a helicopter flew overhead and I watched as the color left her face. “Planes and helicopters still trigger a reaction deep within me. They fly over me and although I know I am safe, and so far from Ukraine, I cannot shake the deep-seated fear,” she said. “I try to look around and ground myself. I try to relax.”

On her second week in Los Angeles, I received a video of her asking the Google Play in the house to play jazz. “This for me is like living on the moon, I am like an astronaut who has landed on a different planet. It’s true, I look at everything with newborn eyes,” she said. A few days later she proudly told me she had quit smoking.

In mid-April I visited my family in Los Angeles for my mom’s fiftieth birthday. My dad and Mama Lena picked me up at the airport. On the way home, my dad said that Laura had just called him from Troits’ke. She and the members of the family staying with her, Inna, Vlad’s wife and child, were scared of retaliation on Odesa. He explained that their fear had grown over the past days because the new general, Alexander Dvornikov, is known “to simply erase cities.” This retaliation would come in response to Ukrainians using the Neptune missile to sink the Moskva — the flagship that stood afloat on the Black Sea the day Mama Lena fled.

Over the weekend, I watched as Mama Lena, now clad in my mom’s old clothes and sporting a fresh haircut, attempted to assimilate to the lifestyle of my parents in Santa Monica. Some things looked the same: she lived a relatively slow life, worked in the garden, watered the plants surrounding my parents’ apartment, scrolled through Facebook, and sang. Some things looked very different: the famous Potemkin stairs, immortalized in Battleship Potemkin, were replaced by the Santa Monica steps; Derabasivska Street was now the Third Street Promenade; the Primorsky Boulevard, which runs parallel to the water in Odesa, was now the Pacific Coast Highway. After knowing Odesa like the back of her hand, she felt lost in this new neighborhood far from home.

In place of the Black Sea she now had the Pacific Ocean. On my last morning in Los Angeles, I walked down the shore of the Pacific with Mama Lena. It was surreal to have Mama Lena, who had only ever existed on the other side of the world, walk down the beach with me in my hometown. She often stopped to observe the birds, the seaweed, learning her new waterscape. Seeing her in person allowed me to feel slightly settled for the first time in months.

Around us during the birthday weekend were the usual suspects: my mom’s side of the family and friends. But we were also surrounded by new faces: Ukrainian refugees and Russian dissidents alike whom our community was housing. After dinner, we sat around singing everything from Soviet classics to Ukrainian folk songs to Roma wailing songs. I watched as Mama Lena’s energy significantly shifted in the presence of music. She hummed and sang along, until it was her time to sing to us.

She sang a Roma song called “My Sunshine.” It is a song about freedom — the freedom that the Roma and their children have within the cover of the night. As she sang, tears of happiness streamed down her face — I think she was happy to be among family, to be safe, to be far from the war.

She sang, “Oh, don’t wake the young, until the Romani sun rises. Give your hands, brother, and great happiness will come over the Romani.”

She looked over at me, her smile radiating, and said, “Now, this, this feels like home.”

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And then I didn't.

At 5am on January 7th, my dad drove my partner to the airport. On the way, he mentioned work had told everyone to stay home. The winds were too strong. Later, my mom's voice carried through the morning haze: "The winds are life-threatening today." My climate-degreed brain, still pre-caffeine, failed to make the connections. Fire didn't register. It was January, after all. January in Los Angeles, where seasons had become theoretical constructs, where the desert's patience was wearing thin.

10:30am: Dad's photos started coming through. The Palisades fire, caught in its infancy during his morning walk. What started as a 20-acre brush fire would become the most destructive fire in Los Angeles history.

I continued working, the familiar rhythm of keyboards and deadlines creating an illusion of normalcy. A friend came over. We performed the modern ritual of disaster assessment — too close? Not close enough? The grab-and-go bag mentality I'd written about, theorized about, suddenly demanded action.

Documents first.

I called my aunt. My cousin was there — in school — in the Palisades. A connection got through, they had made it out.

The firelight — that first herald of California's unraveling. Red light beaming through windows for days, turning familiar rooms into something other, something warning. It's the language California speaks now, these chromatic omens that we've learned to read too well.

The gridlock swallowed us whole. Cell service wavered, a digital stutter matching the stop-start traffic. Then came the alerts — that distinctive, blaring tone that would become our ambient soundtrack for days. The amber alert horn that speaks in binary: stay or go.

Here's the thing about imagination in crisis: I had spent years mapping Los Angeles's possible endings. In my work, in my writing, I had walked through a future Los Angeles where the desert reclaimed its territory, where fires had written their final verdict. But I had given us more time. My plan was clear: move back before 2030, then exit before things got "real bad."

But what is "real bad" if not this moment? Driving down the freeway that first night, watching the Santa Monica Mountains transform into a theater of flames. The sky performed its apocalyptic best — a vibrant, hellish red that no camera could capture, no words could properly contain. Naked flames visible from the freeway.

The Eaton Fire started.

We went to a friend's house (where we’d stay for the next few days), carrying the weight of a question I had been asking theoretically for years: What are the goodbyes that we didn't know we had to make?

The news played in the background, a grim soundtrack to our collective uncertainty. A couple sat with us, suspended in that space between knowing whether their home still stood.

Time stretched like taffy.

The next few days blurred into a strange choreography of alerts and check-ins. My phone became a portal of anxiety: Watch Duty pings alternating with messages from concerned friends.

Then the Hurst Fire started.

The footage started coming in: Altadena, where my teenage years lived in muscle memory; the Palisades, where I'd stood mere moments ago. Will Rogers Beach drowning in red — the same stretch we'd biked just Sunday, now unrecognizable. Reports filtered in about PCH: lifeguard towers on the beach consumed by flames. Cholada, Reel Inn, Moonshadows — iconic landmarks reduced to ash in an instant, taking pieces of collective memory with them. By January 10th, the fires had jumped PCH.

When we returned home to pack more thoughtfully, every object became a philosophical puzzle. A sketchbook from when I was 16. Photo albums. That early 19th century Santa statuette. A first edition book on early feminism. My family had lost everything once before, when they fled. Now here we were, choosing what to save, what to leave behind. Each item posed the same question: What matters when everything might not?

We were halfway down the road when we remembered: blankets, pillows. Basic comforts for uncertain destinations. Who knows where we'd be sleeping? On our return, the National Guard had materialized, setting up posts where they'd remain for the foreseeable future — another marker of how normal had shifted.

The Sunset Fire started.

The peculiar nature of this disaster lies in its persistence, its refusal to be contained in time or space. It keeps going, it's still going. The concept of "safe harbor" becomes fluid — friends sheltering friends suddenly finding themselves in evacuation zones. Some had options, others didn't. The fires might not discriminate, but the paths to safety do.

In the days that followed, I put on my mask: I folded, organized, drove. Each distribution center became its own micro-community, each with its distinct rhythm of care. It was beautiful in its way — watching people mobilize with the speed of necessity, creating order from chaos. A reminder that even in dissolution, we find ways to weave ourselves back together.

Then the Woodley Fire started.

I traveled back to New York with a slight cough and complete disorientation. The last week had felt like a year. For a while, I let the futility consume me. I buried myself in work immediately — the familiar rhythm of keyboards and deadlines and baking for fundraisers creating an illusion of control. The stack doesn't ask questions about what you've lost. The future I'd mapped in climate scenarios had arrived ahead of schedule, like so many forecasts these days. Time feels compressed now — the distance between "someday" and "today" shrinking faster than our models predicted.

The Lidia Fire started.

Then something shifted. Not hope exactly, but purpose. I found myself working on tools for Angelenos to shape their futures intentionally and resiliently. Because while we're living through the futures we feared, we're also creating the ones we'll inhabit next.

Maybe that's how we walk around without going insane: by holding both truths at once. The knowledge that everything is temporary, and the choice to continue anyway. To love anyway. To plan anyway. Not because we trust the ground beneath our feet, but because we've learned to trust the hands that reach out when that ground shifts.

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There’s tons of mutual aid links and donation links flying around (happy to provide 1-1 if you want to help)but I wanted to highlight these three initatives:

• Suay Sew Shop is transforming the overwhelming overflow of donated clothes into essential items for displaced Angelenos

• Nova's Pair and Care program matches donors directly with affected families

• Words of Mouth's "Hire an Angeleno" connects you with locals looking for work

I have been a delinquent. Or maybe I'm flattening, flattening.

The truth is I have spent the last month coping with coping. It came together for me watching Joshua Oppenheimer's "The End" – a film that crystallized how the stories we tell ourselves about our actions, our families, our society, our planetary health, ultimately shape our fate. Sometimes, the very delusions that keep us going also ensure our demise.

We are storytelling creatures before we are anything else. Stories are our primary technology for making sense of everything – from ourselves to the chaos we have wreaked. Stories make the unbearable bearable. But this gift comes with a curse: our stories can either illuminate reality or obscure it. We can hide in the delicious delusion of self-deception, or we can pull the wool from our eyes and face ourselves honestly, choosing growth over comfort.

Think about the stories we tell ourselves daily—both conscious and unconscious.

They aren't just coping mechanisms – they're narrative structures we've built to make the present livable. But at what cost?

Each person crafts their own story about why things aren't as bad as they seem, or why their particular form of coping is the "right" one.

Maybe we're not supposed to be "good" at coping with all of this. Maybe our inability to smoothly process multiple simultaneous catastrophes is actually the most human response possible. Our awkward, imperfect attempts to hold it all – the grief, the fear, the unexpected moments of joy, the uncertainty – might be exactly what we need to be doing.

We need new stories that acknowledge the flames while showing us how to walk through them. Stories that don't promise salvation but offer solidarity.

Like that king in "Ran," we stand on our platforms watching the world burn. But unlike him, we still have a choice about what story we tell about the flames – and more importantly, what story we tell about ourselves as we face them. Stories that remind us that fumbling through the dark together might be the most human thing we can do.

As we enter 2025, I want to dedicate this space to these kinds of stories – the ones that help us flatten into clarity rather than denial. Stories that make room for both our fumbling and our grace, that honor the messiness of being human in catastrophic times. Because maybe that's what flattening really is: not a collapse, but a clearing of space for truer narratives to emerge.

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reading: Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, – because sometimes you need to step away from climate into different kinds of heat.

watching: P.S. Currently oscillating between holy and unholy screen time – just watched Conclave (Stanley Tucci in Vatican intrigue? Say less) and The End. If you need me, I'll be somewhere between papal politics and apocalyptic thoughts.

seeing: MAK Center for Art and Architecture

eating: tomato soup perfect for a chilly day.

listening: my spotify wrapped #1 was Aflana by Attarazat Addahabia & Faradjallah y’all got nothing on me and my habibi funk.

developing: ok – the rolls are here–I decided to create these micro reels which you can find here.

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Since starting this newsletter, I have felt like I have cracked open—again, and again, and again. I did not expect that flattening would take such an ongoing reckoning with the self. I thought unstacking was the hardest part and that it was in the rearview mirror. When I unstacked I was forced to look at the shit that had piled up under the stack. 

Spoiler alert: it was not unlike a middle school locker.

“As with any kind of grief, bidding adieu to the stories you used to live by will carve your stomach out, and that is never not disruptive.” - Britt Wray

Keeping to business as usual would’ve been easier. 

Once you see the shit, you have to contend with the fact that you’ve been in it, that you are still in it, and that you need to get yourself out of it. Over time, you realize it’s not as easy as you thought. It’s not just an objective clean up job. You have set aside other people’s shit, and now it's all your shit that you have to sort through.

Prepare the shovel.

The American condition is to solve grief, which is to say to solve the irreconcilable. We have a deficit of language around grief, and most of us - myself included - bury it deep in the stack.

“We have sadly turned the ritual of life into the routine of existence…

We were not meant to live shallow lives, poked by meaningless routines... 

We're designed to encounter this life with amazement and wonder, not resignation and endurance. This is at the very heart of our grief... The dream of full-throated living has been replaced by a societal fiction of productivity.”

Francis Weller

We break when we don’t actually make space for all the emotions we are capable of carrying. It feels impossible to make space under the stack, and so the grief compounds, hidden (for now).

What we don’t realize, or maybe, what we are slowly being forced to realize, is we’re flying way too close to the sun; our disposition to look away from pain will always bite us in the ass. Couple your existing, simmering grief with any given day's news cycle—election results, forest fire, a hurricane—and the fragility of your condition is revealed.

I’ve capsized many times throughout my years of stacking. But it only made me double down.

Trying to fathom the occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) by Azerbaijan while seeing friends in Baku for COP29. The ongoing pain of the war in Ukraine, and hearing that a rocket flew into a building just meters away from my aunt yesterday. California burning. Canada burning. Prospect Park burning. 

I’ve often thought about grief like a rubber band: you pull further and further away from the pain until it snaps, and you are right where you first started. I’m in an acute period of snapbacks. 

And no, these things unfortunately won’t slow down - and yes, we will all still have to maintain some sort of stack. That’s a requirement of life. If we just made space for only grief we would, in fact, drown. Such is life’s constant duet. But we can’t live fully through these times in a grief-phobic society. 

“The principal emotion that can help us build a better world is love, and so it is also grief.” - Britt Wray

Prepare the shovel. Dig deep. And don’t forget to come up for air.

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reading: What if We Get it Right? - Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. Because the book club simply could not read another dystopian climate novel.

watching: last weekend I saw two films at DocNYC one was called Two Strangers Trying not to Kill Each Other about two artists Maggie Barrett and Joel Meyerowitz find language, love, and grace in the denouement of life. The second was My Sweet Land, a film close to home, on the last years of life in artsakh through the eyes of an 11 year old philosophical aspiring village dentist, Vrej. Jordan recently pulled the film from its Oscar submission after pressure from Azerbaijan. Please, please go watch this film. Especially y’all who just came back from Baku…

Enjoying: neighbors chalk art.

eating: soviet gingerbread.

listening: Cecilia Vicuna’s poems and chants that I discovered last week. Fun fact, cecilia and I used to do PT at the same time. 

developing: all the rolls of super 8 I shot in Italy – I can’t wait to share some of the clips here.

dreading: the year ending, I feel like I usually don’t feel this way - but I feel wholly unprepared for this year to wrap. Anyone else?

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I used to pray that if I was consistent enough with any part of my day that somehow it would become natural. Prayer didn’t cut it.

For me, there’s nothing close to natural about waking up at the same time, or blocking out my writing, or brushing my teeth at the same time. 

I thought that perhaps being away from other people, responsibilities, work, would leave me craving an armature for my blending days. 

But it didn’t. I wasn’t uneasy. I didn’t feel the usual guilt that comes with self-perceived “unproductivity.” I thought back to Jenny Odell’s Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock.

“Maybe "the point" isn't to live more, in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life, but rather, to be more alive in any given moment—a movement outward and across, rather than shooting forward on a narrow, lonely track.”

Maybe my lack of routine was chasing that feeling of being alive, of serendipitous moments, of chance. Even still, I fought myself. I tried to rebrand routine into ritual, ritual into rhythm. But I didn’t seem to buy that either.

I resorted to studying routines, reading page after page of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. I learned that: 

“Patricia Highsmith’s favorite technique to ease herself into the right frame of mind for work was to sit on her bed surrounded by cigarettes, ashtray, matches, a mug of coffee, a doughnut and an accompanying saucer of sugar. She had to avoid any sense of discipline and make the act of writing as pleasurable as possible.”

And

Maya Angelou has never been able to write at home. “I try to keep home very pretty,” she said, “and I can’t work in a pretty surrounding. It throws me.” As a result, she has always worked in hotel or motel rooms, the more anonymous the better.

And

Phillip Roth read till all hours if he wanted to. “If I get up at five and I can’t sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. So I work, I’m on call. I’m like a doctor and it’s an emergency room. And I’m the emergency.”

But no other artist's quirks seemed to fit the glove. I gave in. I didn’t map my time. 

In those unstructured hours I found a feeling that I thought would be harder to restore—that inexplicable wave of desire to create. Maybe, that was it. That feeling of aliveness that Odell nods to. It came over me day after day. Calling me to the page. I started reading Annie Dillard's “The Writing Life”:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days…A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.

I found myself in a pattern of sorts. One that felt positively untethered to productivity. Perhaps that's what birthed the calling.

Some days I’d ignore it—opting to go on a walk, or down to the town. 

Some days I’d give in. 

I’ve since returned to New York. And although I’ve managed to hold on to that feeling, yet the quiet internal nagging that tells me that life would be better structured has returned. 

I gave in to the opposing team. I’ve decided to try it out. To build an armature. One that is flexible – one that can be iterative. I took the season into account, the late afternoon slumps of a premature sunset. Something to help hold time, not speed time along. I want to hold onto that novelty of chance that keeps me not compressing each day into an expedited time soup.

This design I have built is forgiving, and maybe even gentle— 

I write this to you on the morning of election day. The first morning of my new rhythm. It’s held me thus far. I have no words of wisdom for tonight, or tomorrow or the next day. But what’s kept me tethered through the anxiety of the past few months is John Stewart’s words from his return monologue to the Daily Show: 

“the work of making this world resemble one that you prefer to live in is a lunch pail fucking job, day in and day out…November 5th is an important day but November 6th is nothing to sneeze at.”

Which is to say that building a better future takes the action of all of us, every day, together, willed, faked, and so brought into being with hopefully a gentle rhythm to guide us through. 

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Things I’m reveling in this week—

reading: it's the perfect time to read or in my case reread Katherine May’s Wintering: The power of rest and retreat in difficult times. I’ve kept close to my heart AND maybe even been subconsciously inspired by May.

[Ants] are a projection of how we so often think we ought to live, but also a model for a life we’ve collectively failed to achieve, over and over again, across the entire history of humanity. The ants are not real, not on a mass scale; they are an if only. If only everyone could be the ants. If only we were all so forward thinking and responsible. If only the grasshoppers of this world could be so simply dispatched. I will give you an alternative if only. If only life were so stable, happy, and predictable as to produce ants instead of grasshoppers, year in, year out. The truth is that we all have ant years and grasshopper years – years in which we are able to prepare and save and years where we need a little extra help. Our true flaw lies not in failing to store up enough resources to cope with the grasshopper years, but in believing that each grasshopper is an anomaly, visited only on us, due to our unique human failings.

watching: Anora - go watch it in theaters folks~

visiting: hands down the best museum in Florence is the Museo Marino Marini. It was so beautiful and so peaceful.

remembering: Frank O’hara reciting having a coke with you, where I first became aware of Marino Marini. Extra Credit: a great read on Frank.

eating: exploring a new mushroom in this ovuli crudo, also known as caesar’s mushroom. 

listening: Seed Catalog, a new podcast by friend and mentor Kit Nicholls, is for every kind of teacher and student, with stories and ideas about how we build knowledge and how we can learn to make a future we want to live in. Give it a listen!

harvesting: olives!

returning: to friendly and familiar friends at the Union Square Greenmarket. 

missing: if you are in los angeles do yourself a favor and make your way over to venice for a breath & sound class at Open. I wish I could go every. single. day. —I’ve been trying to find a New York comp but haven’t succeeded yet! —(they also have a phenomenal app if that’s your thing).  

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About how I’ve always left little room for it. Too busy to daydream and unwilling to cope with the potential of many other parallel lives, modes, cities, people I can become.  I preferred to live in clean, clear lines.

This thought, of course—as all great thoughts do—came from an instagram reel. The reel clipped a soundbite of Anne Carson in conversation with Linn Ullman.

“Descartes said this famous sentence cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am—which everybody knows and learns in school but if you look at the sentence really it says dubito ergo cogito ergo sum—I doubt, therefore, I think, therefore I am—...you know you see cogito ergo sum on t-shirts all over the world but dubito has a bad press.”

I started researching other texts on doubt and so many of them ask us to leave doubt behind. 

I couldn’t help but spiral a bit. I’ve known and even preached that uncertainty is the thing we need to get comfortable with, lean into, maybe even leap into. 

Flattening was my first step. 

But why was it so damn hard?

Last week, the things that hid behind the stack, the things I previously had no time to question, began to reappear—they creeped. They began to sketch speculative versions of myself I had yet to become. 

I dreamed of shapes appearing out of darkness. I felt my body tense, then release, and then a deep grief set into my chest.

What does it take to reframe uncertainty? 

We always talk about it in the climate world and in the storytelling space but what can it look like in practice? How do we embody it, in our day to day? In the micro moments? 

Rebecca Solnit says that “the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act,” but have we grown too cowardly? –distracted? –distraught? –self absorbed?

I knew I needed to make friends with the darkness AND now I’m stuck. Maybe that’s part of it? Maybe it's supposed to be the opposite of easy. Sitting in the darkness.

I sought guidance. I had to look to my, in the words of Ellie Robins, imaginal ancestors this week. Some of them live in my phone notes:

One of the hardest things to accept is learning to live within uncertainty and neither deny it nor hide behind it. Most of all, to listen to the messages of uncertainty without allowing them to immobilize me, nor keep me from the certainties of those truths in which I believe. I turn away from any need to justify the future- to live in what has not yet been. — audre lorde

I’m finding that taking advice, even when it’s as resonant as Lorde’s, is a process. Today I'm swimming in the “what has not yet been” - but I don’t doubt I’m getting more comfortable with uncertainty (or should I..?).

I have no answers for you. 

Only questions.

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Things I’m reveling in this week—

feeling:

watching: I watched a lot these two weeks in doing research for my film projects. I’ve loved revisiting Yuri Norstein’s “Hedgehog in the Fog”

listening: Zadie Smith on Ezra Klein

When you wake up in the morning and you turn to your social app, you are being instructed on what issue of the day is what to be interested in. The news has always played some element in doing that, but this is total. And it’s not even, to me, the content of those thoughts. There’s a lot of emphasis put on the kind of politics expressed on these platforms to the right or to the left. To me, it’s the structure — that it’s structured in a certain way. That an argument is this long, that there are two sides to every debate, that they must be in fierce contest with each other — that is actually structuring the way you think about thought….And that’s OK. All mediums modify you. Books modify you, TV modifies you, radio modifies you. The social life of a 16th-century village modifies you. But the question becomes: Who do you want to be modified by, and to what degree? That’s my only question.

walking: up and down mountains

picking: persimmons 

missing: if you are in new york do yourself a favor and book an acupuncture/gua sha/cupping session with Kelpy—perfect for transitioning into this new season—I have been going consistently for over a year now! —they were the channel that brought the idea of this newsletter to me! 

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I asked someone to play with me.

I was really bad–uncoordinated even. And then, I got better—day by day—maybe even good? 

It wasn’t easy. 

It took me creating my very own uchronia, an existence outside of the regimented pace of contemporary life, to ease myself back in.

Somewhere in my stacked self, play—which I wrongfully equated to games—became cringe. I was too serious to play, and too busy to play meaningfully. I built walls around play. So, I had a hard time writing, making, flowing.

The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I shied away from my natural state and deemed it childish instead of childlike. I closed off the truest part of myself.  

I made no time for deep work, let alone deep exploration or experimentation.

This week, I exhaled reading William Deresiewicz’s book Death of the Artist: 

““[New York’s] identity right now is money,” [Lizzy Goodman] has said. And “money has a bleaching effect, eventually, on culture … New York feels to me burnt out, whited out.” Great art happens, even plain old interesting art happens, not in trendy cities, not in “vibrant” Richard Florida cities, not in cities that have money flying through the air, but in cheap ones. 

Artists need space, but most of all they need time. Time, not to be productive, but to be unproductive: unstructured, open-ended time. Time to play; time to take as much time as you need.””

I inhaled, remembering that what I excelled at as an only child, was unmitigated, no rule, no winner, no loser, expansive play. 

Play makes room for observation. Observation makes room for play. 

My days consist of everything from foosball to smashball to drawing to dreaming up the lives of the characters in my film. 

Even my dreams have become playful. I woke up laughing yesterday.

Through play, I’ve found a groove, I’ve found a flow. The words come flying out. The marks do too. 

While developing my film this week, my collaborator and I spoke of the character’s fear of the unknown (climate, war, futures). “But,” she said, “without uncertainty there’s no room for imagination”, which is to say to imagine a different future we must make space for play.

"Play is our adaptive wild card. In order to adapt successfully to a changing world, we need to play. Play is not frivolous, it’s essential.” — Isabel Behncke, Evolution's Gift of Play, From Bonobo Apes to Humans

When was the last time you asked someone to play?

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Things I’m reveling in this week—

watching: The magic of Alice Rohrwacher continues to astound me. If you need a weekend watch, Happy as Lazarro is it.

enjoying: getting back to drawing.

visiting: If you couldn’t tell from the last post – I kind of have a thing for Porcinis. This week we traveled two+ hours by train to the Fiera del Fungo di Borgotaro – translation: A PORCINI FESTIVAL.  

they looked like cartoons

listening: the absolutely wild range of Samara Joy:

eating: you guessed it -porcinis! And chanterelles, for good measure :) – 

chanterelles from liguria

porcini soup

enjoying: storms. Oli caught this on his phone—and I caught it on super 8! I can’t wait to see what it looks like.

PS. It was a lovely surprise to be highlighted by Coleen Baik of The Line Between in last week’s Substack Reads. Hello to everyone who has come to flatten! 

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Somehow unbothered, the local sips his espresso and orange juice. 

Bothered, I cannot help but see this and cringe.

I’ve been enjoying my first true love this week—observation. 

Life under the stack closed off all of my senses. All that was left was a walking semi-developed-prefrontal-cortex. 

It left me too serious, with no room for play. 

As an artist, this was an absolute killer. 

I don’t know how much I lost without my ability to observe, both outward and inward, but boy am I glad to have it back.

I yearned to taste, to smell, to see, to hear, to touch, to receive the information I’m now transmuting onto the page, out the instrument, through the lens. 

True observation takes not being a molto-multitasker (I borrowed this neologism from pattern extraordinaire, JJ Martin). It takes relearning stillness and unlearning screenness. 

Observation is intimately entwined with attention, which are both crucial facets in our ability to imagine and build a better collective future. I will write about this more at a later time but for now, Johan Hari’s Stolen Focus — masterfully weaves this interconnection.

“The climate crisis can be solved... But to do that we will need to be able to focus, to have sane conversations with each other, and to think clearly. These solutions are not going to be achieved by an addled population who are switching tasks every three minutes and screaming at each other all the time in algorithm-pumped fury. We can only solve the climate crisis if we solve our attention crisis.”

On a hike this last week, I realized how afraid I was that I’d blink and it’d all be over. I’d be back in Brooklyn, and nothing would have changed. 

That, friends is textbook lack mentality. It’s an aftershock of the stack. It lingers. It’s a built-up default. 

This week I chose to reframe. To think about my time here abundantly—with joy and with pleasure.

I wake up slowly, with no alarm clock. I lay in the grass and just listen. I draw, making dark, imperfect, marks on the page. I sing too loudly. 

PS. Maybe I was too salty about the whole Dolce Vita thing, it’s quite seductive if you just give in. 

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Things I’m reveling in this week—

watching: pachinko (S2) — an instant classic. for the film I’m writing (oh yeah. I am writing a feature), I’ve been exploring generational guilt of children that’ve lived a more comfortable life than their parents — that feeling of being eaten alive by the unsaid was captured perfectly in the last episode… 

“I’ve lived a pathetically easy life,” Solomon admits. “When I look at the way you look at me, the way my grandmother looks at me, how can you not ask yourself, Did I really live through all that for this?” 

grilling: fresh fish, an open fire, rosemary wood, oh yeah….

eating: we stopped by Parco Statella, sat down, no menu, and were served one of the best meals yet. two porcini dishes straight from the erupting etna

studying: the wild, wild paintings of Hieronymus Bosch

enjoying: saving butterflies

listening: fellow substacker Black Noise’s playlists — they’ve all hit the right mood

experiencing: climate weirdings—my camera died before the ping pong sized hail fell

PPS. Feeling incredibly honored to be in the company of all the brilliant climate leaders working to make a better future possible on this year’s Grist 50. Each year, the Grist 50 list features 50 climate leaders bringing unique and innovative solutions to their field, their community, and the world.

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That once you left your hesitation behind, once you leapt, there was nothing to do but embrace the salt water.

I write to you from a small fishing village an hour outside of Palermo, where the cicadas and the Italo pop are always in acoustic competition. 

Our host's entire family greeted us when we arrived. They filled our fridge with fresh lemons from their orchard, local cheese, and sweet nectarines.

Across from our apartment lives a rather leathery Sicilian couple who spend most of the year in Belgium. Throughout the summers they sit on their balcony, smoke, eat, argue, sweep, nap, repeat. 

An occasional guest stops by from time to time. 

These are my role models. 

*spikes camera* Before we continue, I just want to put some things on the table. This will not be an eat, pray, love newsletter nor will I employ the use of dolce far niente for the next two some months. Flattening does not equate to doing nothing. It is my attempt at a slower, more present, and more intentional path with life, with work, with self.

But, it turns out, transitioning to my flattened state has been a massive headache.

My last week at my job, the week that I released my first newsletter, everything that I had said emphatically yes to in the last 12 months, invited itself straight onto my nearly flattened stack. Festival jurying, book club and party hosting, wonderful creative projects, promised readings of others' creative pursuits. They stacked, and they stacked hard.

I barely slept. I left for Roma with a smaller stack, but a stack nonetheless.

As I write this, a massive thunderstorm and concurrent flash flood is hitting our slice of heaven. 

The power is out. Everything around me is dark, except where it’s lit by candles. But my face glows from a laptop screen.

I lie to myself. Just these last two and we’re home free. We’ve flattened.

The cobblestone staircase that I had laid out on, tanning in this morning’s sun, is now a waterfall. And yet, somehow, I’m still fighting the stacks that my brain forms. 

I’ve been here for just under a week and only today I noticed the silly fish magnet with a mercury thermometer on the fridge. 

I’ve always wondered how much life I’ve missed under the stack. 

Here’s to finding out.

Things I’m reveling in this week—

watching: Nick Cave on Hope—If you have two minutes this week please watch this, if you have longer the whole interview is worth it, and if you have even longer, one more time with feeling will change your life.

I will write more about hope and grief in a later newsletter—but for now I guess it’s important to note that I’ve always had a complicated relationship to hope (which you could read more about in my friend zoe’s newsletter, how to have fun in an apocalypse) and how we, especially we climate folk, employ it. Nick changed something in me this week when he said: 

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position it is adversarial it is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.
—Nick Cave

enjoying: shooting on my super 8. I was considering not lugging it over but it has given me such joy to capture tiny moments.

reading: out on the shore in my undies I read Patti Smith’s Woolgathering cover to cover. I smiled as I read the intro:

Someone asked if I would consider woolgathering a fairy tale. I have always adored such tales but I am afraid it does not qualify.
—Patti Smith

By chance one of the only other books I brought with me was six fairy tales from the brothers grimm with illustrations by david hockney. For those who don’t yet know, the film I have come to Italy to develop is largely centered around a modern armenian fairytale. 

A lovely synchronicity.

slurping: I am usually not a shrimp girly (hello the climate implications) but this local crudo was tangy and buttery. 

listening: Raffaella Carrà - Pedro - I know TikTok made this trendy but watching the Italian wil’ out to this has been so joyous.

My childhood, filled to the brim with everything from competitive dance, surfing, and beach volleyball to Russian, tennis, and art lessons, never left me a moment for boredom. Over time, the act of stacking became a habit, and that habit became an identity. 

I grew up, and the stack grew with me. I found success balancing undergrad, part-time jobs, and making art. Life under the stack felt safe, comfortable – like home even.

Then a new kind of stack formed, entirely out of my control. 2018 brought the unrelenting hellscape of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, Trump unfriending the Iran Nuclear Deal, Trump as a general concept, and, of course, the IPCC special report letting me know we had 12 years until we were fucked. 

The weight of this left me in bed for a week, until Rebecca Solnit pulled me out. She put it simply: if the French civilians did not see past the monarchy, they would have never been able to topple it.

The motivation was new, but my approach was not. I founded Cooper Climate to help me live with the weight of the future. We programmed large public events. The community grew. We met three times a week, and did it all unpaid. There was a global pandemic. The community grew larger, and my stack grew with it.

I kept myself busy until the Nagorno Karabakh war re-started. I was devastated, and in my devastation, all I could do was write.

But the show must go on, I told myself. I went to grad school, met my partner, began processing the Ukraine War, found a dream job, and started a supper club. The stack was bigger and shinier than ever before. But it no longer felt like home.

My friend, the stack, never allowed for any grace. 

Sometime last year I began to choose myself. I made room for grace. Somewhere between the artist way class I took last fall with Ella Fitch at Index Space, increasing psychosomatic manifestations of stress, and making my first-ever serious New Year’s resolution (to figure out a non-default way of living), I steam rolled right over my stack. 

I made a promise to be a more porous person. I blew up the risk-averse-fast-track I had set up for myself. I quit my job. I started saying no. I flattened the stack.

Welcome to flattening, where twice a month I’ll be bringing y’all along on transitioning to a slower, more intentional, more creative life amidst a warming world. I’ll be traveling, sitting still, writing, reading, eating, taking photos and doing a little bit of something, and a little bit of nothing. 

Stacks I’m resisting this week: 

Connections: It’s so hard to choose to pause momentum. Flattening means saying no to connections to cool people, cool work, cool projects, cool public speaking opps. 

Things I’m reveling in this week.

Nibbling: I can’t get enough

Listening: Saâda Bonaire - Heart Over Head—A bop

Going: Donald Judd Foundation—For 7 years I have been meaning to schedule time to go to Donald Judd’s live/work space in SOHO.

If you’re looking to escape the heat and go home wildly inspired - run, don’t walk.