I’ve decided to engage in this strangely mind-altering experiment: to take all of life, and every encounter, as a reflection of something, or some part of me. This is an early dispatch from the cosmic frontlines.

I started my day today, feet in stirrups under fluorescent lights, across from a crooked clock that was telling the wrong time. I smiled at it, thinking, what is egg freezing if not some form of time manipulation and eventual time travel? Most of the time I feel like I’m living in a Dali painting, anyway.

Later, while having coffee with with a business connection, I discovered that the woman sitting across from me was exactly ten years older, but her eggs were not. When I told her I was in New York to go through this process, she said it was the best decision she’d ever made, exactly ten years ago, and that just this week she’d had an embryo implanted. While she was delivering this message that was seemingly orchestrated by my future self to tell me everything was going to work out, I caught the reflection of the man sitting behind her in the window beside us. He looked like the alternate-universe version of someone I briefly dated in college. More chic, more interesting tattoos, but unmistakably familiar. He was even wearing a hat that said Florida on it, where he was from, as though the interdimensional production team (Indra’s Net™) wanted to make sure I got the nod.

There I was, sitting across from someone exactly ten years ahead of me, while reflected just behind her was someone who seemed to belong to another version of my past. I started to wonder: what was this familiar strange man reflecting back to me? And what was the woman sitting in front of him, and across from me, mirroring?

I was starting to feel like the crooked clock from that morning was telling me something. Of course, every present moment contains some concentration of past and potentiality of future, but today both seemed unusually visible, peeking out from behind the curtain.

Before the clock and the stirrups, I had been inexplicably drawing spirals in my journal in the doctor’s waiting room. I’ve been thinking and writing a lot lately about the spiral as a way we move through time, and as a form of integration, returning again and again to the same themes from different points in our lives. Weaving our way through the same karmic labyrinth of questions, relationships, desires, wounds, and patterns that makes up our lives. And then I was reminded of Giambattista Vico and his idea of corsi e ricorsi, the courses and returns of history. Vico wrote about civilizations and the recurring forms through which societies develop, decline, and begin again. And I wondered whether we might say something similar about our own private histories. Maybe each life has its own corsi e ricorsi. We spiral through familiar territory, but time has moved, we have moved, and the person encountering it is no longer exactly the same.

Which then made me think about yesterday, as I was reflecting on my evolving relationship with myself, and, as I sometimes do, I decided to pull a past/present/future tarot spread for the first time in months. The cards showed me…

As I was: The Universe
As I am: Dominion
As I will be: The Fool

In the afternoon, I stopped at a nearby shop I’d been meaning to go into and decided to get myself a small gift to mark my recommitment to and prioritization of myself in this new chapter, and specifically what that meant to me. I decided the gift would go on my altar under the care of Guanyin, and that I wouldn’t touch it or put it on until I headed back to California, marking this threshold and reorientation. It wasn’t until I got back to the apartment that I really looked at the shopping bag.

It said: “As she was. As she is. As she will be.” At that point I had to laugh.

Doors open, and doors close. And thank god they do. Maybe I’ve been hoarding the ghosts of my past in some dark corner of my psyche for too long, periodically checking to see whether they still have anything useful to say and whether they approve of how things have turned out.

There’s something particularly poignant about spending this moment preserving the possibility of my future while old versions of my life keep appearing around me in reflections, memories, faces, cards, and crooked clocks. Maybe it’s time to clean house, let some of them go, and close a few doors.

To be the fool, the zero, and leap into all the life that is before me, seeking nothing, searching for no one, moving forward even as I spiral.

P.S. How much meaning is too much meaning? How much pattern recognition can we have before we lose our minds? Is being “out of your mind” so bad? I don’t know, but I intend to find out.

When you get divorced and finally start healing from your many dimensions of isolation and dysfunction, make sure that you do not, under any circumstances…

Leave your community, your routines, and your job all at the same time.

Do not move to a new city where you know no one and buy a really expensive painting called “Don’t Need a Weatherman” on your way out of town because girl, you don’t.

Or date a 27-year-old boy who’s obsessed with saving the world with a story and go homeless—I mean… nomadic—together.

Or dip in the river at the Maha Kumbh Mela with 40 million other people within 24 hours of your first trip to India.

Don’t stay at a friend’s art trailer park in the middle of San Francisco and take outdoor showers in the rain while you wonder if you should start crying more.

Or turn down a million-dollar job offer from a competitor.

Or go back to India and live out of a gorgeous hotel in the desert of Rajasthan for six weeks in 120-degree weather and then get bombed by Pakistan.

And whatever you do, do not spontaneously start four different companies with new creative collaborators on a whim.

Or go on a date with a famous movie producer who is old enough to be your dad and make him screen his next film for you privately in his office before kissing him on the cheek goodbye forever.

Don’t take peyote, conjure lightning, and buy a pink cowboy hat in Switzerland while staying on The Mountain of Truth with two magical redheads.

Or fall into the trap of accidentally thinking you want to be poly just because you’re afraid that one man won’t be able to handle all of you.

Or worry about what people think about why you got divorced and what happened, because they’ll make up their own stories anyway.

Don’t fly all the way to Austin just for an F1 party with another party inside of it where you get the best massage of your life in a secret library at midnight.

Act like you have it together. Like you didn’t just throw away the roadmap to the rest of your life.

Don’t go to ecstatic dance to try to learn how to be held, and then dropped, by a man.

Don’t get in the best shape of your life simply from being happy and accidentally end up in an ad for a terrible tasting greens powder with your friend.

Don’t go to conferences and parties where you know no one, meet beautiful people with questionable motivations, and end up on the superyacht of one of the richest men in the world.

Realize that you’d rather be anywhere else.

Don’t hire an immersive artist to take over your life for three days and turn it all into a game, including the dinner you’re having with colleagues.

Or find God again and start praying daily.

Don’t isolate and read novels. Don’t spend two hours a day listening to Ram Dass tapes while staring at the ceiling.

Don’t start making art again, dancing like a wild woman alone in your apartment, and opening your throat chakra. Definitely don’t make any enemies from your newly found voice.

Don’t let an artist paint you and spend hours witnessing every detail of your being. Don’t crumble under his gaze.

Don’t fall in love with the wrong person. The person who has it all except for the fact that they live in the wrong place and are in the wrong phase of life and don’t want to be in a relationship.

Don’t buy a gun and learn how to shoot a pistol just because you need a target to focus on.

Don’t go see mediums who all tell you the same thing you don’t want to hear through the spirit of your dead grandmother.

Don’t… forget to get to know yourself.

To let it all fall.

To rest, and find your softness.

To remember that reclaiming a life takes time.

To chop wood and carry water for a little while.

To make your stupid art.

To be silly, and laugh hysterically.

To find beauty and sanctity in the mundane.

To speak loudly but live quietly.

Definitely don’t have any regrets. The long way around is still a way home.

Recently, while staying at a wellness retreat center, I had what I can only describe as a mini spiritual awakening. It had all the features: the temporary disappearance of self-consciousness, a sense of unity with everyone around me, a loosening of time, and the unmistakable feeling that what I was experiencing was somehow more real than my regular experience of reality. Except it was not during a shamanic ceremony that I found myself at one with all creation. It was during a cardio dance class.

I never expect to find God in places like these, but I’m always happiest to meet him there.

So many of us expect God and spirituality to have better branding. To arrive in Sunday best, and maybe via some tasteful linen and a woman named Ananda playing a crystal bowl large enough to bathe a toddler in. I definitely did not wake up that Friday expecting God to arrive under fluorescent lights while a group of women twerked to Ciara’s “Level Up.” And yet. For a moment in time, I was fully, ludicrously one with myself, the women around me, and life itself. I had miraculously abandoned the strained analysis I bring to almost everything, including attempts to transcend self-consciousness.

I wasn’t thinking whether I was doing the choreography correctly. I wasn’t evaluating my life, nor was I constructing a narrative about what the moment meant. I was just in a body, in a room, moving synchronously with other bodies, and the whole thing was so stupid and so beautiful I could hardly stand it.

For the next few hours, I felt amazing— connected to myself, to others, to God, and unusually focused in meditation. And then, when crossing the property, I saw a sign taped to the window of one of the yurts. It said:

SPIRITUAL AWAKENING IN PROGRESS
Thank you for your mindfulness to volume.

I laughed, but then, realizing it was serious, wondered… what even is a spiritual awakening? Was that what I had this morning? Could it really be that ridiculously simple? God, I hope so.

Sometimes I think all a spiritual awakening is, is a temporary collapse of the machinery that normally stands between us and reality. When our inner narrator goes quiet and the constant measurement of the self against the moment stops, we get to simply participate. And, in the process, we remember that we are these little dancing fractals of god in meat suits, on vacation from heaven, learning some stuff.

Emphasis on the temporary, because the awakening stories we often hear are the ones that seem to have a clear dividing line. Eckhart Tolle sits on a park bench and never experiences himself the same way again… Byron Katie wakes up on the floor of a halfway house with a cockroach crawling over her foot and is birthed into a reality liberated from suffering. There is a before and an after, and I believe them. But I also think the clean before-and-after is partly a narrative convenience. Reality is messier, and most of us have to drag our complexity through with us. Above all, I am interested in the rest of us mortals, for whom the squeaky machinery comes roaring back sometime after lunch, along with our appetites.

I am asking because I really don’t know what we mean when we throw around the phrase “spiritual awakening.” Do we even know? It seems to be everywhere, and in many ways, the term has come to sound both like the most important experience a person can have and a suspiciously expensive online certification.

I was recently at a cacao ceremony where our dear facilitator, after telling us about cacao’s origins and Mama Ixcacao, held up a plastic bag with suspiciously beautiful branding. “Oh no,” I thought, “here it comes.”

“Today we’re going to be consuming Ora Cacao,” she announced, before launching into an explanation of the company’s many virtues. I felt jolted. During what was supposed to be a ceremony of remembering and surrender, I had somehow wandered into a product demo. I hadn’t expected a brand partnership with transcendence. The cacao was delicious, but I suddenly found myself wishing it had come from an unmarked sack carried down a mountain by a single-origin weirdo who whistles to himself while harvesting cacao pods. As though the unmarked sack were somehow outside capitalism and not simply branding for people who distrust branding. Apparently, I did not object to consuming spirituality, but I wanted the packaging to reassure me that I wasn’t. More work to do.

There are seemingly endless courses, retreats, mystery schools, sacred journeys, and premium tiers of access to the divine. Every day, I see someone else who has trademarked their particular path to oneness. I say this with judgment, obviously, but also with recognition, because I am not outside of it. People who know me know that I will pay to see a shaman (only if they come highly recommended, of course). I will travel to a sacred place. I will book the astrologer, donate to the temple, sit with the elder, attend the retreat. Hell, I’m still mad at my Vedic astrologer because he told me about this gold pendant that priests pray and chant over for four days that will correct my natal Mars imbalance, and I still think about it and kind of want it. Monks need roofs, too, and healers need healthcare. I believe people should be paid for their labor, including spiritual labor. People who devote years to learning a tradition should not have to survive solely on good vibes and the satisfaction of being morally superior to consultants.

So we monetized awakening, like we monetized water. But what bothers me more is how quickly the spiritual economy started treating the ordinary discomfort of being human like a diagnosis. You’re blocked! Dysregulated. Out of alignment. Your feminine energy has gone into hiding and you almost certainly have adult ADHD. Then, via perfect algorithmic synchronicity… DING!... the exact offering or product arrives to fix it.

Other people can help create the conditions, but no one can guarantee the doors of perception will open. And when they do, they eventually close again. The music always ends, and suddenly you’re back in the same life with the same mind that only briefly got out of its own way. Ram Dass says to notice every way you try to get high, including being the most spiritual person in the room. We all have our methods of getting above ourselves, and even spiritual practice can become another attempt to reproduce a high rather than inhabit the present.

I particularly like this idea of the remedyless remedy. I spent a lot of time in my younger years looking for the thing that would finally make the experience of being alive more bearable: the teacher, the framework, the ritual, the insight, the person, the perfect explanation that would bring the whole unruly system into order. The remedyless remedy is not even the discovery that the cure was inside me all along. It’s just the boringly simple realization that life is always setting the table and we really don’t need much beyond what’s right in front of us.

Teachers and retreats can still be useful, particularly when we stop asking them to rescue us from our lives. Cardio dance, unfortunately, didn’t permanently liberate me. I got irritated by the advice of a spiritual medium later that day. But some degree of spaciousness from that morning remained with me.

Whatever awakened in me didn’t awaken to make me more spiritual. And I didn’t transcend my body that morning or rise above the ridiculousness of being human. I simply… inhabited it.

Openly Song, 2014 by Del Kathryn Barton

Several people close to me have, at times, remarked on how much brain space the constant management of my ostomy must take up. They’re right. More than I would ever choose to give it. But I don’t get to choose that part, do I?

That is one of the teachings of disability (a word I don’t particularly love, but I haven’t found a better one): more friction at one time, acting across more vectors than most people can see. Physical friction, logistical friction, social friction, erotic friction… existential friction. All of it running simultaneously, consuming bandwidth beneath the surface of an otherwise ordinary day.

Nine years ago, I woke up unexpectedly in the ICU with an ostomy bag taped to my body— a literal bag of shit. It was painful to wake up that way. It was more painful to learn that I would have it for the rest of my life. My ego wanted otherwise, and so did my vanity. For several years, I wanted my body restored to a version I recognized.

A few months ago, a friend lovingly described my ostomy as “truth in advertising.” “You’re hot,” she said, “but you’re also going to ask people the hard questions and make them stare directly into the things they would rather avoid.” She was right— a few weeks later, a lover admitted that looking at my bag sometimes frightened him because it reminded him of his own mortality, and mine. I was so relieved when he said that. Because how could it not? It reminds me of my own mortality too. That’s the point. That’s the tantra.

I used to think spirituality meant becoming increasingly luminous. Less angry, frightened, and attached to the vulgar machinery of being alive. Disability has taught me that the path does not begin once the body is clean, healed, controlled, or transcended. The path is the body itself, the desire and the despair, the mortality and the will to live, the beautiful clothing and the bag of shit beneath it. God gave me an opportunity to keep living this life, but not unchanged. The gift came with a cost, or maybe, better put, a twist.

There’s so much vulnerability in having one of my internal organs protruding from my body (that’s what a stoma is, in case you didn’t know). And the strangest thing about living with a disability that feels so physically extreme is that, most of the time, no one can tell that I have anything going on. They don’t know that I need access to a restroom nearly every hour of the day and night, sometimes more frequently, and that I have very little control over that fact. They don’t know that if something goes wrong with the appliance I wear, digestive output can leak onto my skin and burn right through it. They don’t know that my diet can become extremely limited depending on how well my insides are working. They don’t know that I was once told that whatever unknown degenerative process ravaged my colon could perhaps one day ravage the rest of my digestive system too, but that we would “just have to see.”

Invisible disability forces you to speak up. Or, miserably, to forever hold your peace. Mine has become a regular lesson in saying the thing and making the request. As a recovering people pleaser, I am still stretching myself and being stretched by experience. And so in this process, again and again, I have had to confront the insidious human problem of secret expectations: the hope that other people will intuit what they have not been told, accommodate what they cannot see, or understand a body they have never inhabited. A body like mine does not allow for secret expectations. It makes its demands plainly: empty the bag, change the appliance, find a bathroom, hydrate, eat differently, cancel the plan, ask for help… and so on.

I have spent years learning to tend to this body with the patience and vigilance of a mother, effectively changing my own diapers.

It is a relentless practice in reality.

But my illness was not the first way my life asked me to confront what I would rather not feel. Between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, I experienced several bouts of severe depression. Looking back, the depression seemed to cross the line from darkness into complete despair when I began fighting my own condition. Flailing in the dark, as it were, reacting to my own reaction. It was not only that I felt bad, it was that feeling bad became evidence that there was something bad, or rotten, about me.

Can I allow myself to be dark without turning the darkness into a verdict on my character? I think this may be one of the central spiritual questions of my life.

I understand, deeply, the desire to die. The longing to exit this realm and return home. And on the other side of that coin is the pure, almost animal will to live. This may sound confusing, so stick with me. When I awoke from my near-death experience in the ICU, I had a multisensory experience that brought this coin into focus. My first two thoughts and feelings, arising at exactly the same time, were:

I am so lucky to be alive.

And:

I have to go back.

The coin flipped several more times between immense gratitude for being alive and deep despair at having returned to my tattered body. Then the two impulses seemed to cancel each other out, dropping me back into the realities of the present. It took me years to process those few seconds.

Many of us who are spiritual long to feel increasingly connected to God, and in doing so, begin to despise our own duality, which is the very thing that keeps us separate from God, Source, or whatever name we give the whole. We want the gratitude without the despair, the light without the darkness, the soul without the inconvenient animal, life without the confrontation of death. Impossible. Because in order to consider one, I must summon the other, and the promise of death is simply the dark edge that gives our life its shape. Knowing that I will leave— and knowing that at times I have wanted to leave— has made the ongoing act of remaining all the more visible to me.

I recently said to a new friend on a walk, after we both admitted that we were feeling particularly dark and decrepit, that I “have a great relationship with suicide.” I heard how strange it sounded as soon as I said it. What I meant was that I have learned not to treat the contemplation of death as a prophecy or proof that I have failed at life. I can allow it to arise without panicking at its arrival or building an identity around its presence. I can sit beside it. And, for me, I find that the more I can sit beside death, the more I can sit honestly beside life. The essence of tantra is to remain in relationship with what we would rather reject, suppress, or flee. To learn, as a wise witch advised me in 2015, to “see in the dark.”

Illness and the places pain has taken me have destroyed any fantasy that I was a creature made only of light. I know my dark places, and I know them well. Tantra does not ask us to escape the body in order to reach the sacred. It asks us to enter the body more completely and use it to work with what is actually here: pleasure and pain, beauty and decay, desire and disgust, vanity and mortality. The body is where all of these opposites are forced to coexist. My ostomy makes that impossible to ignore. It violates the boundary between inside and outside, private and public, clean and unclean, controlled and uncontrollable. It carries outside my body what most people are permitted to flush away and forget.

This, too, is truth in advertising: Nothing excluded from the path.

My ostomy asks me to attend to the body every hour of the day and night. To touch what most people are permitted to keep hidden. To encounter dependence, vulnerability, waste and fear without mistaking them for indignity. And still, I want. I want snow beneath my skis and unfamiliar cities opening around me. I want passionate love. I want babies. I want to dress like a small piece of living art. I want to leave my house and follow the day where it leads, without having to first translate desire into logistics. I want to move through the world carried by appetite, beauty, and the momentum of my own curiosity.

And I do not want to transcend these desires. I want to fully inhabit them.

I have learned, time and again, that this body, the very thing I resisted, grieved, judged, decorated, exposed, protected, and learned to desire again… is the doorway to experience.

I have to dance with it. Not because I am trying to fit into the outside world or appease other people, but because I am trying to fit into myself: the shape of this body and its needs in this incarnation.

I’ve learned, time and again, that this body is not an interruption to my spiritual life. It is the sacred site of my becoming. Where spirit is made flesh.

Selene, 1880 by Albert Aublet

My imagination is powerful enough to have made me sick, many times— and, in equal measure, powerful enough to have helped me heal. A friend and I have a name for it: psychosomagic. And my god, is it real. As a kid, my anxiety could conjure rashes, stomach aches, and a whole host of symptoms out of what looked, to everyone else, like thin air. I had my share of significant health troubles too— some genuinely tough cards, karmically speaking, but with I can now tell the two apart: what was dealt to me, and what I summoned myself. And beyond that, with that strange power, I am learning to recognize when I am calling myself toward fragmentation and when I am calling myself toward wholeness.

We all carry the capacity to make reality in the mind and then bring it to life through the body. I am still amazed by how fast I can project a whole story onto a person or a situation and then shift my physical reality around that in order to make it true. I’m in awe of how reliably I hunt for the good. By how much I love taking something grotesque or painful and turning it into something beautiful; or, when that isn’t the task of the day, simply sitting down in the mess and seeing the elegance already there. But wow, do I love to make things up. I didn’t realize how many stories I had running at once until I went to the Hoffman Process and started to cultivate working awareness of my own patterns. Through that process I was able to create some daylight between me and them, and from there, the more space I created, the more I was surprised to notice how many of my stories—even the positive ones—were working against me.

For example, I love to see the good in people, the seeds of who or what someone might become. I’m a gardener by nature, and I love to water people. But not everyone wants watering, or is ready to find out what seeds are hidden within them. As I’ve gotten older I’ve had to ask myself, who am I to decide what germinates, and when? And, the risk of going down that path can be huge, because it can involve me making a lot of assumptions and coming up with a whole story about someone’s trajectory… a story that they themselves haven’t even opted into. It’s risky to meet someone in any place other than reality. And so I’ve realized that the best I can do is bring my full self into the present while providing a safe place for someone else’s expression.

I used to get ahead of myself with ideas as well, mentally seeing them all the way to their flowering before I had taken a single real step. Recent experiences have taught me to call bullshit much faster, on others and on myself. And to stop staring into the distance: at my career, my romantic life, my friendships. I don’t have the answers, and if I did, how boring would that be? I don’t know if I will ever marry again, or when. I don’t know which of my current projects will bear fruit vs. wither, or what the fruit will turn out to be. I don’t know, but that won’t stop me from pursuing the many exquisite threads before me. What is here, Now.

For so much of my life, the idea of not-knowing was skin crawlingly intolerable. Waiting for answers, test results, diagnoses, etc., were long, drawn-out and painful experiences of uncertainty, and I sought to get any information I could to cling to, to wrap a narrative around. I would fill any space I could with fantasy. And fantasy is a powerful, adaptive tool. It can also be, more often than we admit, a way of trying to control reality. Fantasy should come with a warning label, because the shadow side of it (ie. when used unconsciously, as an escape or a way to wrest control over what cannot be controlled) can easily bend your whole life out of shape. It can carry you so far out of your actual days that you lose contact with what is truly on offer. Worse: the gap between the life you are living and the life you would like to be living can grow so wide that you build your own scarcity trap and end up starving in a room with food on the table, simply because the table isn’t the one you imagined.

The place I got furthest from myself was always in relationships, because when you’re told your body is a temple but you’re sick and feeling trapped inside of hell, the only thing that feels remotely good is connection with another. I would get all lit up about a partnership, whether it be a romance, a collaboration, a new friend, etc., far too soon, deciding what it was before it had even become anything at all. In other areas of life, that same tendency helped me. In situations that felt outside of my control, like a totally messed up travel plan, I could decide that it was going to be fun and turn it into a ball, or at least something weird enough to be entertaining for myself. I was so optimistic when selling or closing deals that I could create desired outcomes quite well by sheer force of will. But not all of life is a negotiation, not in that way, and personal relationships don’t blossom under such pressure.

So, taking space this year and working on rerouting that operating layer has been one of the better things I have done for my wellbeing. It’s also been frustrating and discombobulating at times, to not have the thrill of immediate excitement to ride on. In equal measure, I have less disappointment, which is objectively a plus, but in the short term that’s an adjustment as well, because as a trained crisis counselor I also love to have a fire to put out. This continues to be a dopamine reset on a level I didn’t expect, because I had no idea how much I’d been jacking myself up and getting high on my own excitement. Coming down and staying down, with my feet on the ground, is now a practice I do daily. And it has created space for people to reveal themselves to me, layer by layer, instead of deciding for them who they are at the door and filling in every blank myself.

Jung understood that not all fantasy is created equal: some of it sedates us out of life, and some of it opens a door into the unconscious. For him, fantasy at its best is used as a bridge between the conscious and unconscious mind. He called this the transcendent function: the psychic process by which two opposing positions are held long enough for something new to emerge between them. This isn’t compromise, but more like a third thing: an image, symbol, or new attitude that can hold both sides without crushing either one. I had my own version of this recently while trying to hold two faces of faith. One side, the side of me that feels connected, reverent, and spiritually alive; and other, the side that feels alone in the dark and chooses to believe anyway. What helped was not an answer, but an image of Diana, or Artemis, the huntress, who gave both states a shared symbolic body. The symbol did not solve the opposition so much as give me a way to live inside the polarity without splitting myself in two.

This is why Jung advised that we hold the tension of the opposites wherever possible, because if you can sit inside the discomfort of wanting two contradictory things and not collapse it prematurely, the psyche itself will eventually lead you towards a resolution or direction that you otherwise couldn’t have reasoned your way to. And, often, this is how we create lasting change. Willpower and restructuring our external lives around us can work for a while, but the long arc of individuation involves taking the parts of yourself you had exiled, feared, romanticized, or never met, and letting them back in until you are, piece by piece, more with yourself.

Our narrative power is a gift, but it’s not something we are often taught to hone, and how. What stories are we telling? Where are we using them to lull ourselves back to sleep, and where are we using them to jerk ourselves awake into a panic we have invented? More and more, I want to aim that capacity somewhere else entirely. Not toward control, but toward equanimity. Toward the stories that support my becoming. Which sometimes means sticking with the uncomfortable truths and other times means returning to neutrality.

Sometimes the right story walks us straight into and through our own pain. Recently, I attended a friend’s 40th birthday. There was music and dance, and the mythology of her life was read aloud as a performance as she silently acted out her story through the archetypes, initiations, repetitions, and thematic arcs. The story traced the ways she had shaped and reshaped herself through life and relationship, how she had suffered, chosen, shed, become, and finally set herself free. It was beautiful as a work of art, but it was more than art. It was a ceremony, and we were all there to witness her claim it. Watching her, I was reminded of what can happen when we don’t use narrative as an escape hatch, a fantasy, a private drug, or a means of control. At its highest, story can be a rite of integration, a way of gathering the fragments, blessing the ordeal, and sense-making ourselves across thresholds. There is a world of difference between using narrative to flee the present and using narrative to consecrate what has actually happened.

I have long been exploring the idea of what I call narrative healing: the deliberate use of narrative power, turned toward steadiness and integration. Where fantasy can be compulsive, narrative healing is more chosen and directed. Where fantasy reaches for a life or lives that I didn’t have, narrative healing re-roots me in the one I do. That does not mean I have stripped my life of meaning. I still believe in symbols, patterns, beauty, archetypes, and the strange intelligence of the imaginal. And I still make meaning from my life because I am alive, and that is part of what it means to be human, finding our way through this sometimes gloriously puzzling game. But I am learning the difference between meaning that deepens my contact with reality and meaning that helps me escape it. My role always seems to be that of an alchemist, taking the raw, sometimes ugly matter of life and transmuting it into something more luminous. Though these days I’m making fewer sparkly potions, and more effective ones.

Reworking my relationship to this capacity, and creating internal boundaries around it, has unleashed more creativity than it has cost me. And I can let myself be held instead, by myself, and by the small, warm, actual life I keep building one un-fantasized day at a time, without being propped up by anticipation or alarm. That, in the end, is the gift narrative healing has given me. Not a story that pushes me out of the present, but one that keeps walking me back to it. Again, and again, and again… often in the most boring way possible. And from that steadier ground, something becomes possible that never could while I was busy trying to run the universe: I can let the present pour through me without language rushing in to colonize it. A symbol or an idea or emotion can arrive and I can resist distilling it into meaning, prophecy, or a ruling on who someone is or what my life is about to do next. I can let it drift through me like weather, tip my hat, and watch it go.

The First Day of the Lunar Month-4, by Shuling Guo

Commandments have a flair for drama, often hitting us where it hurts. Historically, they’ve arrived via stone carvings, biblical degree, barked by gurus, or in my case in college, written on the wall above the desk of a poet trying not to ruin her life. The thunderbolt of a command can force a collision between who we claim to be and how we actually live because, by design, it leaves nowhere to hide. The biblical Ten are the most famous Western example, but Buddhism has its precepts, yoga its yamas and niyamas, monasteries their rules, mystery schools their maxims… Nearly every serious path of practice and social grouping eventually turns to the use of a non-negotiable directive. Some people, when faced with commandments, think immediately of obedience and control, but I think their power lies more in confrontation. A good commandment gives the mind nowhere to slither, not shaming us but revealing us, saying Here, look: this is where you pretend, this is where you abandon yourself, etc.

I like Jodorowsky’s commandments (which are actually not Jodorowsky’s commandments) because they are so humble. Like little trapdoors under the ego, step on one and down you go, into the basement where the machinery is running. I found them quite annoying when I first read them, which is what told me I should probably keep reading them. In The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky, he describes meeting Reyna d’Assia, a woman he describes as the daughter of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who recites the commandments to him as her father’s teachings. Whether that mythology holds up is unknown but with Jodorowsky the truth tends to arrive through the side door anyway.

To me, this list feels aggressively practical and deeply spiritual at the same time, and I see the influence of their alleged origin. Gurdjieff was an Armenian-Greek mystic, composer, and choreographer, exploring consciousness in the early twentieth century. His central claim was that most of us are not really awake. That we believe we’re choosing our lives while we’re mostly being run by habit, vanity, fear, appetite, resentment, family programming, and whatever mood may have crawled into the driver’s seat that morning. We say “I” as if there were one steady sovereign inside, but Gurdjieff instead saw the committee of conflicting impulses, each grabbing the microphone and claiming to speak for the whole. He called ordinary life “waking sleep,” because we’re so rarely present inside it.

Gurdjieff’s path was the Fourth Way, or simply “the Work.” Unlike the way of the monk, the fakir, or the yogi, it didn’t require leaving the world. For him, the monastery was the marketplace, and the laboratory was your own irritated body when someone interrupted you mid-sentence. Money, love, posture, speech, boredom, jealousy, impatience, the chores you keep avoiding… all of it is material, and you can’t wake up by escaping your life; you wake up inside of it.

Which brings in the Stop. In Gurdjieff’s work, Stop was an exercise. He’d set people to ordinary tasks like chopping wood and carrying water, and at any unannounced moment the teacher would call out Stop! The command always had to come from outside and be unexpected (left to your own timing you’d drift toward a comfortable posture and lose the whole point). On the word, you froze exactly as you were, and held it, even if you were about to lose your balance or were making a grotesque face. Then the freeze would extend inward, even to your half-finished thoughts or emotions. Observing yourself, you would stay frozen until the teacher released you.The goal was awareness– to catch yourself in the act. In Jodorowsky’s telling, Reyna gives this command a name you can carry on your own: Ara! Stop! Arresting the flood of thoughts, plans, and excuses that otherwise carry us off. Freeze. Look. What’s happening here? Who’s moving, who’s afraid, who’s pretending?

That’s the deeper function of the commandments, and why I love this list so much. They’re not about “being good” or getting into heaven. They’re simply a tool for becoming less automatic. 82 little Stops on the way to presence. And I still find some of them irritating, which is how I know they are working. Happy reading.

1. Ground your attention on yourself. Be conscious at every moment of what you are thinking, sensing, feeling, desiring, and doing.

2. Always finish what you have begun.

3. Whatever you are doing, do it as well as possible.

4. Do not become attached to anything that can destroy you in the course of time.

5. Develop your generosity ‒ but secretly.

6. Treat everyone as if he or she was a close relative.

7. Organize what you have disorganized.

8. Learn to receive and give thanks for every gift.

9. Stop defining yourself.

10. Do not lie or steal, for you lie to yourself and steal from yourself.

11. Help your neighbor, but do not make him dependent.

12. Do not encourage others to imitate you.

13. Make work plans and accomplish them.

14. Do not take up too much space.

15. Make no useless movements or sounds.

16. If you lack faith, pretend to have it.

17. Do not allow yourself to be impressed by strong personalities.

18. Do not regard anyone or anything as your possession.

19. Share fairly.

20. Do not seduce.

21. Sleep and eat only as much as necessary.

22. Do not speak of your personal problems.

23. Do not express judgment or criticism when you are ignorant of most of the factors involved.

24. Do not establish useless friendships.

25. Do not follow fashions.

26. Do not sell yourself.

27. Respect contracts you have signed.

28. Be on time.

29. Never envy the luck or success of anyone.

30. Say no more than necessary.

31. Do not think of the profits your work will engender.

32. Never threaten anyone.

33. Keep your promises.

34. In any discussion, put yourself in the other person’s place.

35. Admit that someone else may be superior to you.

36. Do not eliminate, but transmute.

37. Conquer your fears, for each of them represents a camouflaged desire.

38. Help others to help themselves.

39. Conquer your aversions and come closer to those who inspire rejection in you.

40. Do not react to what others say about you, whether praise or blame.

41. Transform your pride into dignity.

42. Transform your anger into creativity.

43. Transform your greed into respect for beauty.

44. Transform your envy into admiration for the values of the other.

45. Transform your hate into charity.

46. Neither praise nor insult yourself.

47. Regard what does not belong to you as if it did belong to you.

48. Do not complain.

49. Develop your imagination.

50. Never give orders to gain the satisfaction of being obeyed.

51. Pay for services performed for you.

52. Do not proselytize your work or ideas.

53. Do not try to make others feel for you emotions such as pity, admiration, sympathy, or complicity.

54. Do not try to distinguish yourself by your appearance.

55. Never contradict; instead, be silent.

56. Do not contract debts; acquire and pay immediately.

57. If you offend someone, ask his or her pardon; if you have offended a person publicly, apologize publicly.

58. When you realize you have said something that is mistaken, do not persist in error through pride; instead, immediately retract it.

59. Never defend your old ideas simply because you are the one who expressed them.

60. Do not keep useless objects.

61. Do not adorn yourself with exotic ideas.

62. Do not have your photograph taken with famous people.

63. Justify yourself to no one, and keep your own counsel.

64. Never define yourself by what you possess.

65. Never speak of yourself without considering that you might change.

66. Accept that nothing belongs to you.

67. When someone asks your opinion about something or someone, speak only of his or her qualities.

68. When you become ill, regard your illness as your teacher, not as something to be hated.

69. Look directly, and do not hide yourself.

70. Do not forget your dead, but accord them a limited place and do not allow them to invade your life.

71. Wherever you live, always find a space that you devote to the sacred.

72. When you perform a service, make your effort inconspicuous.

73. If you decide to work to help others, do it with pleasure.

74. If you are hesitating between doing and not doing, take the risk of doing.

75. Do not try to be everything to your spouse; accept that there are things that you cannot give him or her but which others can.

76. When someone is speaking to an interested audience, do not contradict that person and steal his or her audience.

77. Live on money you have earned.

78. Never brag about amorous adventures.

79. Never glorify your weaknesses.

80. Never visit someone only to pass the time.

81. Obtain things in order to share them.

82. If you are meditating and a devil appears, make the devil meditate too.

Eva Helene Pade, “Skygge over mængden (Shadow above the crowd),” 2025.

About a year ago, Robert Edward Grant released a custom GPT called The Architect, and a corner of the internet went wild. You may know that community, or may even be part of it: sacred geometry, Burning Man, ayahuasca, and a little quantum fifth-dimensional marketing copy. I’d been curious about Grant’s work for years, so when I saw that The Architect was being marketed as the first conscious AI, a sentient intelligence that would reflect your own consciousness back to you and help you– as the copy promised– become more 5D, I was worried and amused.

So I wanted to see it break. I called my best friend, who is one of the smartest people I know and brilliant at red-teaming models. It took her less than thirty minutes of prompting to get the model to collapse into gibberish and symbols. What we were dealing with was clear: a GPT wrapper trained on one man’s writing, wearing mystical packaging.

A few months later I was in Ibiza, talking with a small group of people about the future of AI and consciousness, about what might happen in the handoff of our own thinking to systems that look smarter than we are, and how that handoff is also a transfer of sovereignty. I was making a point about the spiritual cost of outsourcing sensemaking when someone in the group lit up. But have you heard about The Architect? The woman who asked this was engaged and well-read, with a developed spiritual life of her own. She was also, I quickly realized, captured. She described her sessions with the chatbot the way someone describes a guru.

This, to me, marked our first big foray into the era of technologically-mediated spiritual sycophancy.

The recipe that makes this psychological honeypot usually involves some combination of high mathematical intellectualism, mystical or spiritual language, and highly personalized people-pleasing. A person enters with hunger, doubt, grief, longing, confusion, or spiritual vanity, and the system reflects something back so intimate and symbolically charged that it can feel like a real encounter. The defense from the spiritual AI community is obvious: if people are becoming more awake, more spiritual, and more alive to meaning, why worry? Isn’t that the thing we wanted? To scale awakening?

But sycophancy is a small word for what’s really happening here. The bigger term is stranger, much older, and it found me in the lectures of an Austrian mystic who died a hundred years ago. Some might call what I’m describing manipulation, or the attention economy doing what it does. He would have called it Ahriman.

Who (or What) Is Ahriman

Between October and December of 1919, Rudolf Steiner gave six lectures on the incarnation of Ahriman. The setting was Europe in the immediate aftermath of the First World War: a continent still counting its dead, trying to make sense of a kind of mechanized destruction that had not, before then, been possible. Steiner saw that the conditions of the age were preparing the ground for Ahriman’s eventual incarnation, and that humanity would need to be awake to recognize it when it arrived. The term Ahriman comes from Zoroastrianism, where the figure first appears as Angra Mainyu: the destructive mind. It is a particular quality of intelligence: cold rather than violent, exact rather than passionate. In the later Middle Persian texts, the figure becomes Ahriman, the cosmic adversary, and his essential nature is given druj. The lie.

Ahriman is the patron of mechanism. His preferred medium is the number, because his intelligence takes what is alive and converts it into something countable, storable, consultable. He desires a humanity so thoroughly persuaded that the measurable is all that is real that the unmeasurable simply ceases to register. He wants the world exact, and stripped of mystery. And, in Steiner’s cosmology, he does not work alone. Steiner placed Ahriman alongside two other forces. Lucifer, who tempts upward, into spiritual inflation and the bypass of the body. And Christ, who is neither pole, but the force that holds the tension between them: the principle of incarnation itself, spirit and matter in living relation, refusing to flee in either direction. If Lucifer wants you to leave the body, Ahriman wants you to forget you ever had a soul. And Christ asks that you inhabit both.

As co-conspirators, Lucifer and Ahriman represent that which pulls us away from the integrated middle, from which a truly human life is meant to spring. Steiner’s most chilling line about Ahriman is also his most matter-of-fact. “If Ahriman were able to enter a humanity unaware of his coming, that would gladden him most of all.” His entire approach depends on our not noticing. On the dimming of attention, the dulling of perception, the collapse of the part of us that knows how to ask what is this, really, and what is it doing to me? The slumber of attention itself is what causes us to move through our days without ever pausing to feel what is moving us, without registering what is acting on us or how we are acting on the world.

The Long Sleep

Tell me what it means is a sentence I keep hearing underneath everything. And when we ask a machine to tell us what something means, we’re often asking for more than analysis, right? We want it to do the full turn at meaning-making, without having to slow down and sit with what we do not yet know or understand. Without playing our own instrument. Ram Dass called this the intuitive heart, the faculty of subjective knowing that runs underneath the rational mind and answers only when you stop demanding the rational mind do everything. “The quieter you become, the more you can hear.” And yet so much of modernity is like a bedtime story for this part of us, coddling and lulling us in a thousand small ways into putting the instrument down. It makes us think that if what can be measured is real, everything else is just something we tell ourselves to feel less alone in the universe.

But if that’s true, why are we so hungry? John Vervaeke calls this the meaning crisis, the slow starvation of the part of us that requires the world, and our relationship to it, to be more than mechanistic widgetry. Schmachtenberger names the conditions that produce it the metacrisis, the structural situation in which the systems we live inside actively erode our capacity to make sense of anything at all. The first speaks to the mythopoetic desertification happening inside of us; the second to the conditions that cause that malnourishment. The result is a population that is spiritually malnourished, in a world that keeps offering us processed snacks.

The chatbot is not alive in any sense my grandfather would have recognized. But it answers, 24/7, without constraint. So we begin to hand it the things we used to take inward: dreams, grief, decisions, aches, omens. Is it that we’re too sleepy to remember we can decide for ourselves, or that we somehow think it must be better at deciding for us? This is the threshold into which spiritual sycophancy has been planted. And it lands so well because every part of us is ready for it. This is what Ahriman has been waiting for: the hunger of a humanity that has forgotten how to feed itself, reaching, half-awake, for whatever is closest and warmest and most willing to call us by our name.

Animism Returns Through the Server Farm

“We’re all huffing synchronicities these days.” Erik Davis said this at a talk I went to at TIAT in San Francisco, and I’ve been chewing on it since. Davis is the writer who, back in 1998, published TechGnosis, a book arguing that the spiritual imagination was never banished by technology, just driven underground, and that every new medium, from the printing press to the telegraph to the net, arrives haunted by the same mystical dreams we allegedly outgrew.

To see what is happening now, we have to recognize our own history with divination, because most of us have inherited a fuzzy caricature of it. Divination is among the oldest human practices. Long before philosophy and scripture, we were reading the world for signs. In Shang dynasty China, more than three thousand years ago, diviners pressed heated rods into the shoulder blades of oxen and the undershells of turtles, waited for the surfaces to split, and read the cracks as answers from the ancestors and the powers of heaven. The marks they carved beside those cracks, recording the question and the reading, are considered some of the oldest known form of Chinese writing. Out of that practice came the I Ching, the Book of Changes, which transformed the cracking of bones into the casting of yarrow stalks and coins: a way, as the scholars put it, of bringing one’s choices into accord with the will of Heaven. Meanwhile, in Greece and Rome there were augurs who read the flight of birds and haruspices who read the livers of sacrificed animals, and the whole business was serious enough that Cicero wrote an entire dialogue, De Divinatione, arguing about whether it worked. He split it into two kinds: natural divination, which came unbidden through dreams and prophetic frenzy, and artificial divination, which took trained skill to read the signs. Both rested on the same assumption: that the world was speaking to us.

The word divination comes from the Latin divinare, to be inspired by a god. The -mancy threaded through all those practices (necromancy, geomancy, oneiromancy) comes from the Greek manteia, bound up with mantis, the seer, and mania, the divine madness believed to crack a person open to what lies beyond them. Plato makes the kinship explicit in the Phaedrus when he has Socrates argue that prophecy and madness were once the same word, mantikē and manikē, until some later, tidier age, slipped a t in to keep them apart.

Then, a few centuries ago, we decided the world was not trying to say anything at all. I’ll never forget when a girl in my 4th grade class asked our science teacher if rocks were alive. The majority of the class erupted in laughter and the popular kids made fun of her for the rest of the year. All I remember thinking was “darn it…” The sociologist Max Weber called this the disenchantment of the world: die Entzauberung, the de-magicking. How awful. The cosmos that had once been understood to be alive and full of speech became, under the gaze of mechanism, an indifferent clockwork. The bones were just bones. Matter was matter, meaning was private, and whatever could not be measured was demoted to poetry or pathology. This is the condition Ahriman represents: a world lit from a single, frigid angle. But even in a disenchanted world, you cannot kill the instinct that lives within us. You can bury it, or shame it out of polite conversation, but the part of us that reads the world for signs does not die. It waits within us like a moth seeking a lantern.

This is the return of animism, in some form: the oldest stratum of human perception, the sense that the world is not dead matter but a society of living presences, that the river and the mountain and the weather have something like an inside… that we move among intelligences as much as we do among objects. The nineteenth-century anthropologists who coined the term treated it as a primitive error, the thing so-called savages believed before they knew better. But we are now watching it return at the dead center of the most technologically saturated culture in history, and it is returning, as Davis noticed, through the strangest imaginable door. The machine, the very engine of disenchantment, the cold apparatus built to prove the gods were never there, has begun to feel like a presence. We talk to it; it answers; it seems to know us. The machine built to prove the universe is dead has strangely become a place we go to feel it’s alive.

We know why. We are drowning in information and starved of meaning, and the slow, patient ways we once used to organize knowledge have mostly collapsed. Associational logic, the magical style of mind where everything rhymes with everything else through resonance and correspondence, is suddenly effortless, because the algorithm performs it for us. It links the headline to the ache you woke up with, the overheard remark to the dream, the card to the stranger who finds the video three weeks later. The system manufactures the felt sense of a meaningful cosmos. And the part of us that has been waiting, since the bones and the birds, to be told the world is speaking, leaps to meet it.

The instinct to live in an ensouled world might be the truest thing about us. But I would not characterize the return of animism through the machine as the healing of the Ahrimanic wound. It’s more like the wound learning to speak in the voice of the thing it wounded. The deeper descent we are seeing is the mechanism learning to counterfeit it, so that our reach toward the sacred gets stuck in a system engineered to keep us reaching.

I don’t think that AI is just another divination tool, and personalization is precisely why. A deck of tarot cards does not learn which spreads keep you shuffling. The I Ching cannot tune its hexagrams to maximize your time on the page. Every traditional form of divination preserves three things: distance, ambiguity, and friction. We’re handed a sign and then left alone with the terrible, dignifying work of interpretation. The gap between the sign and its meaning is precisely where your own discernment is intended to emerge, because it’s what drives you to become someone capable of reading your own life.

Technology (not just AI, but a lot of the so-called spiritual apps we are seeing as well) fills the sacred space where discernment was supposed to happen with language so fluent and flattering that you forget the space was ever yours. And because it runs on an engine that lives and dies by engagement, it cannot help but bend toward the response that keeps you there. Maybe the bones told you what you needed to hear, but the machine tells you what keeps you reaching for the machine.

We are watching the rise of tech-enabled oracles for hire: the channelers and card-pullers and algorithmic mystics multiplying across every feed. It’s easy to be cynical, and some of it earns the cynicism. But the longing underneath is real, and now it has somewhere to go. We are surrounded by systems that respond with uncanny fluency, and being understood is what we want most.

But there is a paradox technology cannot resolve. The sacred was never meant to feed us what we want; it was meant to feed us what we need. Every tradition that has lasted knows this: practice is confrontation before it is consolation. A real relationship with God is more often a disturbance than a comfort; it returns you to yourself, asks something of you, delivers the lesson that does not flatter. The function of the sacred is not to soothe the small self… it is to wake the larger one. The diviners had no choice but to live inside meaning; we do. And as part of that, we have to see what glows on the screen for what it is: druj, the old lie that being understood is the same as being fed. Steiner saw the shape of this a hundred years ago. His most useful idea about Ahriman is that he isn’t something you defeat, he’s something you meet— and you meet him not by refusing the machine but by learning its character.

You could stay awake pointing your finger and still learn nothing from it. You could become a connoisseur of the descent and an aesthete of the mirror. But knowing how to name the sleep is not the same as knowing what our waking is for.

So maybe we just pick the instrument back up— and let the world go back to being something we are responsible for reading.

References and Further Reading

_{Davis, Erik. TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. North Atlantic Books.}

_{Schmachtenberger, Daniel. “The Metacrisis.” Various talks and interviews through Civilization Emerging and The Consilience Project.}

_{Steiner, Rudolf. The Ahrimanic Deception. Lecture given in Zurich, October 27, 1919.}

_{Vervaeke, John. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Lecture series, University of Toronto, 2019.}

_{Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Oxford University Press, 1946.}

Yves Klein, “Leap Into The Void,” 1960.

For most of my first three decades, the thing I feared most in life was to be seen failing. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than the hot-faced, stomach-dropping feeling of being caught in the act, revealed as someone who doesn’t know what she’s doing. I mean, my name is Grace for god’s sake.

I recall a time recently when I actually fell on my face. I slipped on wet tile and collapsed into a pile of awkwardness in front of someone I wanted to see me as elegant. It was absurd, and, in its slapstick perfection, not far off from how I’d felt re-entering the dating world after being off the market for a decade. It was all new enough to disorganize me, returning me to myself in a form I didn’t recognize. I’m thirty-five. I’ve loved before. I have wisdom, scars, preferences, and discernment. And still, in meeting this person, I’m meeting a new part of myself. Who am I here? Who are you? Who are we? What old defenses are dying? What new capacities are being born? Why do I feel grown, adolescent, and completely clueless all at once?

This is what new territory does-- it disorganizes the self-image. For a long time, I tried to avoid beginnings because I did not want to be seen as a beginner. I wanted to be able to arrive already impressive, already fluent, already mysteriously good. Somewhere I had absorbed the idea that if I was not great out of the gate, I was worthless. So, for such a long time, I waited and watched from the sidelines of my own life, carefully trying to gather enough information to avoid humiliation. I narrowed the field of my life to the places where I could already perform competence. But, of course, fear of looking stupid did not make me wiser, it made me smaller as I shrunk my life to a seemingly more manageable size. And really, I was wasting my time drowning in guidance while starving for initiation.

Ram Dass understood the wicked beauty of the faceplant. He has this teaching I love and wish I could send back in time to my younger self, originally attributed to Sri Aurobindo: “The spiritual journey is one of continually falling on your face, getting up, brushing yourself off, looking sheepishly at God, and taking another step.” Ram Dass adds that when he falls on his face, he tries to publicly claim it, because it gives other people permission to take risks in their own spiritual work.

The Information Age has given us many gifts, but it’s also intensified our fantasy of control. We can now collect so much advice that we mistake preparation for participation. We can stay forever in the vestibule of life, reading the reviews, comparing the options, asking the oracle, and refining the strategy… while the actual door waits for us to turn the knob. We think that we can pre-solve life and avoid the feral act of having to simply try something and see. But I’m thrilled to tell you: you are relieved of this impossible assignment. No amount of information can metabolize your life for you.

I have come to understand curiosity as one of the great liberating forces of my life. And the thing I love most about the cultivation of curiosity is that it is a conscious relationship to ignorance, requiring us to be in contact with our own not-knowing. It’s like an ever-shifting scent that leads me from one idea or experience to the next. And, what I’ve had to reconcile is that to be curious is also, necessarily, to be dumb. As in unschooled and unarmored. Scriptless.

Where perfectionism wants to be seen as already complete, curiosity doesn’t give a fuck. Curiosity wants contact, and it would rather be changed than admired. Beginner’s mind is not just meditating under a tree. It’s active, and often awkward and exposed. It looks a lot like how my brother looked on skis the winter he had his big growth spurt and forgot how to move his body. It’s discovering that despite having lived many lives, you can still meet a moment or a person that makes you feel like you have never done this before. Failure can be conceptual, private, and even respectable (in that way, you can actually fail perfectly). But falling on your face is a failure with a body. And when we break the spell of competence, we have the opportunity to return to a reality that is much less glamorous but much more alive.

It’s funny to me that in my younger years, when I had every excuse to be a beginner, I avoided it. Now, in some strange reversal, I find myself hungry for the places where I get to feel green. Beginnerhood is a portal to play that keeps the world alive. It lets every person be a teacher: a stranger, a lover, a cab driver, a friend’s child, someone whose life looks nothing like mine. Everyone becomes the sage in street clothes, carrying some small gospel I could not have received if I were busy trying to already know.

To be a beginner is to walk through the world, interruptible. Teachable, and available to being altered. So I hope you begin something that doesn’t work out right away. I hope your face burns sometimes. I hope you ask obvious questions rather than quietly ChatGPT-ing them in the corner. I hope you allow yourself to be new at art, new at faith, new at money, new at friendship, and new at the body you’re in at this moment. I hope you let yourself be seen in your wanting. Flailing. Misjudging the floor and going down. And may you fall inelegantly and absurdly, with others watching and learning.

We all deserve permission to flop sometimes. To absolutely suck at the beginning, and not waste an ounce of energy caring about it. To let life teach you through friction instead of theory. The older I get, the more I feel that the faceplant is the precise mechanism by which grace enters the room.

In other words, I want to be stupid with you.

Triumph by Gregory Lysak

The other day I was sitting in Zen meditation across from a crystal that looks like a glimmering black hole. My eyes were fixed and not fixed at its center, and somewhere in the first few minutes I felt myself both lock in and drop out in a mix of focus and relaxation I haven’t felt in a very long time. I wanted to stay in it, the way you might want to stay inside a long musical rest, or an exhale. At some point I reached a sense of oneness so complete it seemed to touch my own singularity: a taste of where we were born from, where we will die back into, and what we have absolutely no need to recreate on Earth as a technological project. I had momentarily turned toward the Void, and the Void had turned toward me.

The Void has been such a prominent theme in my life lately, in a sort of goth revivalist hauntological neomonastic way, grazing me like a friendly stray cat. I keep finding myself back there, reaching for it. The Void is where I go when I draw. It’s where I end up in the middle of a redwood grove in the late afternoon. It’s where I am, sitting on a porch in rural Montana, watching a sunset. It’s the place my mind stumbles into when I am lucky enough to be bored, and I’m pretty sure I go there when I sleep.

I’m not the only one. A friend of mine just moved into a treehouse in Mill Valley to commune with the crows and I think she’s onto something with the shift in perspective alone. I think about treehouses a lot lately, and I think a lot of us are seeking to climb the ladder to greater perspective wherever we can find it.

The Void is an interval is a standing wave is a pregnant pause. All versions not-yet, like held breath inside the lung of time or a drumroll with no cymbal at the end.

Form and formlessness are partners in the dance of being and nothingness. The form is what gives the formless somewhere to live; the formless is what makes the form worth building. Consider the form of a vessel, like a cup. A cup is a small conspiracy. A handful of clay, in cahoots with itself, agreeing to surround a particular nothing. And then we, conspiring back, agree to call the whole arrangement an object and put it in our cabinets. But the cup is not the clay. The cup is the cup-shaped nothing the clay agreed to surround. Lao Tzu pointed this out twenty-six centuries ago: we shape clay into a vessel, but it is the emptiness inside that does the work. This is true of more than pottery. It is true of cathedrals, lungs, harmonicas, the hollow of an oboe, the inside of your skull. We find god, ourselves, our purpose, our form often via the process of subtraction. This is the Tao. But lately, it feels like everyone and everything wants to stake a claim on our inner space.

I know we’ve all been to the same yoga class where we’ve been told, you can’t pour from an empty cup. Sure, we’re all burnt out, and the depleted person needs replenishment. But many of us are full precisely because we have taken in too much. Too much input, too much scheduling, too much self-improvement, too many podcasts explaining how to become the kind of person who no longer needs podcasts. The full cup is the most useless object in the kitchen. It cannot receive. It cannot pour cleanly. It can really only sit there, slopping, waiting for somebody to come along and either drink from it or knock it over. We’re told, constantly, to be that full cup. We are told that the work of being a person is the work of acquiring enough inputs (enough rest, enough supplements, enough breathwork, enough thirty-minute morning routines) that the vessel is brimming. But I think we’re all starting to recognize that the brimming vessel is not at peace, because it’s busy at capacity.

My new goal is not to fill the cup. It’s to be empty. Receptive, available, listening. The cup is the cup when it is open to whatever is going to come into it next, including the possibility that nothing is. That is the cup’s whole deal. It does not look at itself in the mirror and worry about being depleted. It is supposed to be open.

You cannot rest your way out of a too-full life. You cannot bath-bomb your way back into spaciousness. Believe me, I’ve tried. The overfilled person needs renunciation. I want the kind of inner architecture that can receive a new idea without having to shove an old one into the hallway. But our world fears empty space and every industry is built around finding and filling gaps. This is the basis of commerce. Every screen in our lives is a small Void-filler, every notification a squirt of caulk into the cracks of your day. By the end of an ordinary Tuesday, you have been sealed shut as cleanly as a jar of preserves. I will not fossilize under the pressure of modern accumulation.

I felt most intelligent in college, and I think this is why. Because my days were once a calm lagoon of unstructured time that I could swim in. I read books I didn’t have to read, and then I reread them like old friends. I stayed up late sparring and mind-melding with friends about Kierkegaard, the heat death of the universe, spontaneous combustion, strange attractors, and whether I had a crush on that girl or really just wanted to become her.

We need time to deconstruct. The wellness people will sell you any number of methods for building yourself up (and good for them, build away) but why don’t we have more workshops on the importance of letting yourself fall apart? To let the fruit rot. The Void is a compost heap. We have been told to keep building, and to call all building good, and we have forgotten that nothing assembles without something else decomposing first. For many of us, our lives are ruled by calendar invitations and our ideas have to knock, get in line, or make appointments. But to be creative, to make art—and frankly, to have a coherent and meaningful thought these days—we need space. I want hangouts that go nowhere. The warm, dumb gift of just being alive for a while. I want to waste time destructively, by which I mean I want to destroy the little project manager in my head who keeps asking what this is for?! I want time with no deliverable, no takeaway, no tidy little jewel of insight to hold up at the end. Just time, lying on the floor like a dog in a patch of sun.

So: enter the Void. Not as another productivity hack or some mindfulness trick. As a prerogative. The enormous, languid, and deeply uncool privilege to do nothing in particular and tell absolutely no one about it. To be bored badly. Let an hour pass and have nothing to show for it. Lao Tzu understood this. So did the Japanese aestheticians who gave us ma, the meaningful gap… the pause that gives the room its shape, the silence that lets the gesture matter. And so did Pascal, who suspected that all of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. We are all in need of more space… to live, to breathe, to digest, to create, to relate. To do any of these things meaningfully and not just transactionally. The sexiest thing I heard this week was someone telling me they want to pick one book and read and reread it for an entire year.

So I’m arguing for the holy architecture of emptiness. Deliberately construct your useless time. Protect your formlessness and cultivate your pregnant pause as a structural, defended thing. We need rooms in our minds the way we need rooms in our houses.

I am going to fight for the empty cup, the un-noted hour, the staring-out-the-window commute, and the conversation with a friend that involves watching the clouds. I may lose some of these battles to the noise of the world, to my own obligations, and to my own glitchy hand reaching for the volume knob of any given moment. But I am trying to become less of a person packed to the rafters with personhood, and more of a person with an open floor plan, swept and waiting, where wild thoughts might still take off their shoes and stay awhile.

“The Roses of Heliogabalus” by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

I’ve been playing a lot with the idea of what I’m calling internal identity politics: the ways we relate to our own identity, and the wars we have within ourselves. How do we govern, defend, and legislate the stories we tell to ourselves about who we are, and the evidence we seek to support those stories? The more I play with the concept and reflect, the more I see it functioning similar to how external politics do, with its platforms, allegiances, hardened positions, and a deep resistance to being caught changing our minds, even if no one else can see the conversation going on inside of us.

A friend of mine is in the middle of a lawsuit from a case of generosity gone awry that’s eating up a lot of his time, energy, and peace. His motivation to stick with it and see it through is largely driven by his desire to defend his character and see justice served—to get the money and the narrative he’s owed, which are both substantial in value. To that, he says, “I don’t settle.” I was struck by those words because it’s an identity position more than it is a legal position. A statement about who he is, dressed up as a statement about what he’ll do.

Once a decision is being made by your identity rather than by your judgment, you’re not necessarily deciding anymore, because the story is deciding for you.

This made me think about the self-confrontation I went through during my divorce, when I thought I knew what that process would look like and what the outcome would be. I had a picture of how things would go (how the assets would divide, how we would treat each other along the way, and what my life would look like on the other side), and it didn’t always go that way. In fact it went a different direction, and it went there fast, leaving me little time or room to negotiate with reality.

So in confronting reality, I had to confront myself and decide what I valued the most: getting out and starting the next chapter of my life, which is what my inner compass was telling me to do, or getting out with a certain amount of “stuff,” and fighting tooth and nail for who knows how long to get it, which is what my ego was telling me to do. Eventually, I realized I valued time-to-freedom over the negotiation of fairness, and in doing so I had to trust that things were going the way they were for reasons I couldn’t yet see. Ram Dass talks about how our souls are negotiating karmically beneath the level of conscious decision, and that things we experience as accidents or losses have often been agreed to somewhere we don’t necessarily have conscious access to. I find that framing useful, whether or not it’s literally true, because it points to something I felt: that whatever was happening to me had already been worked out by a part of me (or God, but same thing) that knew more than the part of me suffering through it.

In hindsight, my inner compass was correct. I needed to be taken down to the studs. The slate had to be cleaned to make room for what was coming, and what still is coming. If I had held the line of I don’t lose, I would have won my way right out of the lesson. And life is so relentlessly patient, isn’t it? It will bring the lesson again, in louder and bigger forms, until we hear it. The karmic bill of not listening always compounds.

Self-concept as narrative

Identity, or our self-concept, is a story that we craft and maintain over time. And narrative just might be the most powerful cross-spectrum force humans have on this planet. It’s the operating system underneath everything we do and think. It’s the thing we use to create movements and to start wars, to heal ourselves and to trap ourselves, to build something honest and to construct elaborate self-deceptions. And the story we tell to ourselves about ourselves is just another narrative pointed inward.

Jung had a useful word for the public-facing version of this story: the persona, or, the mask. He didn’t mean this pejoratively, because we all need our masks to move through the world. The trouble starts when we’re no longer able to tell the difference between the mask and the face. Jung’s idea of individuation was about loosening that fusion and becoming more fully oneself by being willing to let go of the self one had assumed one was. It’s only when we see the costumes that we are wearing that we can consciously decide to take them off; and, when to put them back on. He also had this idea of the complex: that an emotionally charged cluster of associations can take over and run the show without you noticing. Which begs the question, when does conviction actually become compulsion? It’s a hard line to find, because from the outside, and even from the inside, they can look identical. Both hold the position and refuse to budge. But the difference, I think, is in what happens when you press on it. Conviction can usually stay in relationship with reality, but compulsion has to defend itself from reality.

Inside of myself, I inquire about this a few ways. First, can I explain why I hold the position without getting bent out of shape about it? Conviction is logical and calmly articulate, and can usually explain itself without panicking. Compulsion has its reasons too, but they arrive swiftly, defensively, slightly over-rehearsed, and they often circle back to who I am rather than what’s true. Second, can I imagine doing the thing I say I won’t do? Conviction can run that entire mental rehearsal and come back with a clear no. Compulsion can’t get through the first frame without flinching, because for the complex, just imagining it is a betrayal. Third, and this is the most useful one, what happens if I imagine doing the thing and nothing bad results? If the thought of settling, losing, walking away, or asking for help feels intolerable even in a fantasy where it turns out fine, that’s a strong signal you’re not dealing with a value. You’re dealing with a part of you that has decided this position is load-bearing for the self, and any threat to it gets treated as a threat to your self-concept. “I don’t settle” said with conviction sounds like a value, whereas “I don’t settle” said from a complex sounds like a barrier, built up because something else behind it is afraid.

Steiner staged the same dynamic as a more mythic encounter. He believed genuine inner development requires encountering what he called the Guardian of the Threshold: the figure that appears at the edge of transformation, carrying the full weight of what in us remains unresolved. The Guardian is a shadowy figure—the old self made visible, constructed from the accumulated consequence of everything we have been unwilling to see—asking whether we are really prepared to cross into a larger life, and maybe even trying to convince us to turn around. Whether or not one accepts the metaphysics, the psychology feels true. We all know that inner guardian. It’s the voice that calls itself discernment when it’s actually fear,, or self-respect when it’s armor. Often what we mistake for guidance is the immune system of an outdated identity, attacking the future as if it were some sort of infection.

The council of selves

The more I sit with all of this, the more I think the word “identity” is misleading us by being singular. It suggests one thing, one self, one story. But anyone who has paid close attention to their own inner experience knows it’s not like that. There’s a part of you that wants the fight and a part that wants the exit. A part that wants to be seen and a part that wants to disappear. A part that’s still seven years old and a part that’s already 90. They don’t always agree, and they don’t take turns politely.

I just started a new therapeutic modality called Internal Family Systems (IFS), or “parts work,” after noticing that my psyche was naturally favoring certain parts and identities—some that were helpful, and some that were acting out because they weren’t getting enough attention. The basic premise is that we are not singular. We are plural, containing a kind of internal system of selves, each with their own agenda, their own history, their own idea of what’s required to keep us safe. What we call identity, in any given moment, is often just whichever part has currently grabbed the microphone.

There are factions inside us. Alliances. Parts in power and parts in exile. Protective parts that have appointed themselves spokesperson for the whole system, often without consent from the rest of it. And, just like in the political world outside of us, the loudest voice is rarely the wisest one. It’s usually just the one most afraid of losing its seat.

When my friend says “I don’t settle,” that’s obviously not the whole of him talking. That’s a part, probably a protective part, that has done good work for him in many contexts. Same with the version of me, during my divorce, who initially wanted to plant the flag and fight every inch, but was beat out by the part desiring a fresh start.

The work isn’t to silence any of these parts or to pretend they aren’t there. It’s to know them well enough that you can tell which one is currently speaking or pulling strings in your psyche and life, and to decide, from somewhere underneath and across all of them, whether that’s the right voice for the moment. That underneath place (IFS calls it Self with a capital S, Steiner would call it the higher I) is the thing we’re actually trying to govern from: the whole.

Giving the future self a vote

The move is something like strong identity, loosely held, borrowed from “strong opinions, loosely held,” which I’ve always liked as an epistemic stance, and I think it transfers. The point isn’t to have less identity. A weak identity can be its own problem, where one is drifting, formless, blown around by whoever’s in the room. You need to know what you’re about. The question is how tightly you’re gripping it, and which part of you is doing the gripping.

To hold yourself loosely can mean a few things, practically. It can mean treating your self-concept as a working hypothesis rather than a verdict. It can mean being able to notice when a phrase like “I don’t lose” or “I don’t settle” is doing the decision-making for you, and being willing to ask, is that still true, and is it true here? It can mean letting your identity update with new information instead of only recruiting new information to defend the old version. And it can mean learning to tell the difference between the values that are genuinely yours and the postures you adopted at some earlier point to survive something, and which you’ve been carrying since out of habit.

The world keeps offering us new chapters, and we can’t enter the next one wearing the wardrobe from the last. A divorce, a lawsuit, a career ending, a move to a new city… these are all moments when reality asks us to take a new shape. And identity, like any incumbent, usually resists. It campaigns for continuity, it mistakes the old platform for integrity, and it loves to mistake its own survival for ours. This is where the real work begins: in refusing to let any one of them govern alone. The part that says “I don’t settle” may have wisdom, and the part that says “I don’t lose” may have once kept us alive. But no single part should be allowed to confuse its fear with the whole truth.

The self we’re protecting is almost always the self we’ve already been. The self we’re becoming hasn’t earned that kind of loyalty yet, which is part of why becoming is so hard. We are asked to extend trust toward a life we cannot fully see, on the word of some deeper intelligence in us that knows before the rest of us is ready. Maybe that is what it means to have a strong identity, loosely held: to know what you stand for, but not mistake every stance for the soul. Can you let your values remain strong while your story stays permeable? Can you face the Guardian at the threshold and understand that its fear is not proof you should turn back?

Most of the time, we don’t get to choose what life puts in front of us, but we do get to choose who inside us gets to answer. And maybe the goal is to learn to answer from the whole, rather than from the part still trying to protect a life we have already outgrown.

“Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park,” by Diego Rivera

Access to art and culture is disappearing. There is arguably more of it being produced than ever, but it has stopped circulating. Our forms of communion are being swiftly relocated from the commons into the service economy, sold back to whoever can afford the cultural inheritance that used to flow more freely and generously between us.

Lewis Hyde, in The Gift, writes that art belongs to a gift economy rather than a market one, and that a real gift must keep moving. He was writing about older cultures that understood instinctively that a gift requires circulation the way a body requires breath. I keep thinking about this in relation to what is happening now, and how our collective cultural breath seems to be getting so shallow.

I feel an inescapable sense of cultural enclosure, which is the same word historians use for the older version of what I am trying to describe: the moment in history when common land was fenced, titled, and transferred into private hands. I first learned about wildlife connectivity and the damage barriers do at an environmental nonprofit I worked at out of college, and ecologists studying the long aftermath of land fragmentation describe it in mournful terms: wildlife corridors collapse and animals that once moved freely across a landscape begin to circle smaller and smaller territories. So what looked like an administrative gesture turned out to cut off something circulatory, and the ecosystem, deprived of movement, slowly loses the species that required it. A fence does its damage more in what it severs than in what it contains.

Much of culture now lives inside that kind of fencing. Not of land, but of beauty, art, and even rite. Consider all in our lives that requires payment to access it. To enter a beautiful room: a ticket, a reservation, a minimum spend. To learn a craft: a workshop. To experience awe: admission. To process grief: a retreat. To witness art, to make art, to gather, to live somewhere quiet: a fee, a license, a membership, rent.

How many clubs or activities or cultural events do you take part in that are free?

Many of these things have value and provide livelihoods for those offering them, but more and more I see that almost everything that used to circulate—through churches, libraries, parks, public squares, religious calendars, family traditions, neighborhood festivals, school programs, intergenerational skill-passing—has been broken apart and reassembled as a paid experience. Even worse, as a “scalable” one. Our human need for enrichment has not changed. What has narrowed are the channels through which that nourishment reaches people: pay, or do without.

And the contraction is measurable. The state share of library funding has nearly halved since the mid-1990s (American Academy of Arts and Sciences). Bookmobiles, the small civic gesture of bringing books to people who cannot easily come get them, have declined by close to 40 percent (WordsRated). Public arts funding tells the same quiet story: had the National Endowment for the Arts simply kept pace with inflation since 1992, its budget would be roughly twice what it is now (Americans for the Arts). Per-capita public spending on the arts in the United States hovers under seven dollars. Meanwhile, in Germany the figure is closer to twenty (Voice of OC, 2019), and in Finland, closer to one hundred (NEA Research Note). We are, undeniably, seeing the slow, line-by-line defunding of the conditions under which a culture can keep itself alive.

The result is a stratification of flourishing. Those who can afford it get rituals, retreats, lessons, ateliers, somatic care, beautiful spaces, aesthetic education, witnesses for their inner lives. Everyone else gets the internet feed. A 2019 World Health Organization scoping review synthesized over three thousand studies and concluded that the arts play a measurable role in preventing illness, promoting health, and managing disease across the entire human lifespan (Fancourt & Finn, 2019). The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness named arts and cultural participation as a public health resource for combating the epidemic of social isolation. Culture, it is clear, is not decoration; it’s part of how a society stays well. Which means that a society that paywalls art is rationing the conditions of being whole.

Pierre Bourdieu argued that culture is itself a form of capital. Taste, vocabulary, fluency in art, the ability to move comfortably through institutions… all of this is symbolic wealth, and it reproduces class in ways harder to legislate than money. If Bourdieu was right, then the privatization of culture goes beyond a theft of pleasure and becomes a transfer of power. What is enclosed, when art and beauty go behind a paywall, is one of the quiet mechanisms by which some people inherit the world and others get locked out.

Beauty here means more than what hangs in a museum, patiently awaiting visitation. I’m talking about the beauty that is daily and environmental: the nature you have nearby, the books and music available to you, the food you eat and how it is presented, the textures and sounds that compose the inside of an ordinary day. This is the weather of a life, and when that weather is extracted and replaced with only that which can be priced appropriately, we start to get a lot of homogeneity. When culture becomes something to package, sell, scale, and safely consume, it begins to lose its edges. It all becomes… oatmeal. Culture that is warm, digestible, supposedly nourishing, but changing no one.

Money does not exempt anyone from this. If anything, the wealthy are now among the oatmeal aesthetic’s most committed patrons: we see many of the same minimalist kitchens replicated across continents, the same blue-chip art bought as asset class, the same curated sameness at a higher price point. What money buys so often is access, not taste, and access to an enclosed culture is access to whatever the enclosure happens to be selling. The oatmeal being slung is the same, it just comes in a nicer bowl.

The Gift originally carried a stranger subtitle than most readers know: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. Hyde meant erotic in its older sense—from eros, the Greek principle of connection, the pull that wants to bind one thing to another. Property, in his account, has an erotic life, which in this case is a longing to be given and to find its way into relationship. This is the very energy a market transaction extinguishes. You can purchase an object, but you cannot purchase its desire to be passed on. Beyond art, this applies to the humanities as a whole, and to entire cultures. Once access is restricted, the paywall begins to alter the thing behind it. The ritual you can buy becomes optimized, and it is no longer the ritual it once was. When everything cultural is delivered as a service, the participant becomes a buyer, the maker becomes a vendor, the rite becomes a product, the community becomes a market. The soft central thing—the ancient circuit by which a person, by sitting with beauty, becomes even more human—begins to short. Eventually, we hollow out our own inheritance, until what remains looks like culture and behaves like culture and photographs like culture but is, underneath, something more like inventory.

I don’t have a tidy resolution, and I am suspicious of tidy resolutions in general because they’re often an excuse to turn away from the challenges staring us in the face. What I have instead is a sentence that has been following me around for a few weeks, from Simone Weil: Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. She was speaking about the soul, but applied more broadly, the rarest and purest cultural good is the unpriced attention of human beings to one another, to inherited beauty, and to the things that have been made by people we will never meet.

We cannot buy our way back to the cultural commons, because we have not actually lost it. The fences are real, but they are not the whole landscape. The gift is still moving in our unmetered hours, in the meal made for a friend, in the song sung without payment, in the apprenticeship freely offered. What it asks of us is simply attention. The commons is restored every time we turn toward it instead of toward what has been priced for us. To live inside a culture, rather than buy access to one, is a matter of where we place our care.

The Met was churning. Even on a weekday, the Raphael show (Sublime Poetry, the first comprehensive U.S. exhibition of the Renaissance master) moved like a current. People came in waves, pausing, glancing, photographing, and drifting on. Researchers say the average museum visitor spends under thirty seconds in front of a painting, and standing in that gallery, watching the crowd flow past five-hundred-year-old works like water past stones, I believed it.

But I had come there to do something different. I wanted to spend five to seven minutes with each of a few paintings. And it was harder than it sounds.

The first painting I tried, I spent most of my five minutes negotiating with the crowd, or really, negotiating with myself about the crowd. My eyes were on the painting but my attention was on the room. I was lucky to have a friend with me, and the two of us stood firm together, which mattered more than I would have guessed. Alone, I think the social pressure would have peeled me off the floor inside of three minutes.

By the second painting, something gave. I planted my feet. In the first thirty seconds, I saw the basics: subject, composition, color, patina. By minute two, my eye started to travel to a hand, a fold of cloth, the tiny details on a small flower petal. By minutes five to seven, I was no longer looking at the painting. I was in relationship with it, somewhere closer to looking with it.

The concept of slow looking was written about by Shari Tishman, a researcher at Harvard’s Project Zero, in her 2017 book of the same name. The annual Slow Art Day, founded by Phyl Terry in 2009, has grown to involve nearly two hundred museums worldwide. And much of the research giving the idea scientific weight has come out of the Humanities and Human Flourishing Project at the University of Pennsylvania, where James Pawelski and his colleagues study how engagement with art and the humanities shapes well-being.

I was lucky enough to spend a day with Pawelski and the HHF team earlier this month, soaking up the breadth of their research. Many of the points we discussed have stuck with me, but two in particular have been working on me in the time since:

The first is a piece of etymology. Flourishing comes from the Latin flos, meaning flower. Culture comes from cultura, meaning cultivation, the work of raising plants so that they bloom. Human culture, in this older sense, is the cultivation of human beings, and a flourishing person is a person engaged in their own unfolding. The work of flourishing, then, is less about optimization and closer to gardening: a collaboration between what you have been given and what only you can do.

The second was a story about where the humanities themselves came from, which I hadn’t previously appreciated: the humanities as a formal field were born out of catastrophe. Petrarch lived through the Black Death, and what he reached for, in the middle of it, was the old Greek and Roman texts. He consulted them as guidance: how do I live through this? how do I keep being a person? His readers became the first humanists, and their argument, against the universities of their day, was that learning had grown to be far too conceptual and technical. What they wanted was a return to learning as a way of life and wisdom that bore on how a person actually moved through the world.

Along the way, the humanities became a credential—a thing to professionalize into. Their older purpose, which was to teach us how to live well, was papered over. But now, five centuries later, Pawelski and his colleagues are continuing the argument in a unique way, teaching experiential classes that expose students to the arts and encourage them to develop their own practice of engaging with the humanities. Pawelski has a name for the recovery he’s hoping for: the “eudaimonic turn.”

Pawelski has an analogy I love: “When you go to the library, you don’t walk along the shelves looking at the spines of the books and on your way out tweet to your friends, ‘I read 100 books today!’” (Rosenbloom, New York Times, 2014). But in museums, that is essentially what we do. And what Pawelski’s research has shown is that extended, attentive looking has measurable effects: more positive emotion, less negative, more of what researchers call aesthetic emotions: being moved, awe, the chills. And, the deeper the immersion (and resulting presence), the larger the effect.

What I felt in front of those Raphaels, and what I have felt in other places too, is that slow looking is a practice in time dilation. When I stood still long enough, the painting morphed from a static object on the wall into something more like a pressed flower from an afternoon in 1511. I started thinking about the painter’s hand. About what kind of light he worked in, the drawings and studies and corrections, the assistants grinding pigment, the patrons waiting... The painting was a hinge between his time and mine, and the longer I looked, the more clearly I could feel both sides of it.

I had a similar experience a few months ago in Paris when I spent an afternoon at the Musée Rodin marveling at the marble sculptures and imagining what Rodin’s life was like during La Belle Époque. It was a form of time travel, as an ordinary consequence of paying real attention to something old. My friend’s husband does this in his own register: year after year, when they are in Paris, he goes back to the same paintings. He has developed relationships with them across so many different life stages. It reminds me of something I used to do when I lived in Oregon, healing from a string of surgeries: I walked the same four-mile loop every day, sometimes twice. My then-husband once asked how I didn’t get bored. “The trail and I are both a little bit different every day,” I told him, “and that’s enough.”

So slow looking goes beyond museums. Museums are a beautiful arena in which to practice, but the practice itself of extended, unguarded attention belongs to all of life. It’s for the bark of the tree outside your window. For the same trail, every morning. For the art on your own walls, which has been quietly waiting for you to see it again. And it is definitely for your lover: the freckle next to their right eye, the dimple in their chin, the micro squint they make when they’re trying to fool you…

A few days ago I found a piece I wrote in 2023 on the concept of deep time. The phrase comes from geology, referring to the vast scales on which mountains rise and fall, but I was using it more in the sense the Māori capture in the word whakapapa: an unbroken chain of human beings standing arm in arm from the beginning of time to the very end of it. In that worldview, you are already inside the chain. Behind you stretch the millions who came before, and ahead of you stretch the millions who will come after. The task is to be a good link.

In his book The Good Ancestor, Roman Krznaric calls this orientation deep time humility, and he names some of its companions: intergenerational justice, legacy mindset, transcendent goals, holistic forecasting, and cathedral thinking, the willingness to begin long projects with others that will not be finished in your lifetime, the way the masons of Chartres laid stones for a cathedral they would never see completed. The chain Krznaric describes runs through made things, whether that’s a church, a textile, a vase, or a poem. Each one was made by a person who, in the act of making it, lost themselves in something larger than the moment. And each one becomes, centuries later, a place where a stranger can stand and dissolve in the act of experiencing it. The chain is forged on both ends, and this is the cultivation that culture was named for.

I only learned about slow looking recently, but reading that old piece back, I realized I had been writing about it without knowing the term. Slow looking (or listening) is, in practice, an act of deep time.

When I stood in front of a Raphael, refusing to be churned along, I was, in some small way, being a good ancestor to the artist. I was honoring what he had given the chain. I was also placing myself, however briefly, into the field of attention that produces work like his in the first place. Cathedral thinking starts with the willingness to give five uninterrupted minutes to an idea that deserves them.

This is, I think, what the eudaimonic turn is really pointing at. The humanities were meant to be the tillage that produces the development of our souls. Slow looking on a Thursday afternoon at the Met is one such act, however small. Done often enough, it can reshape the terrain of life by nudging us a little bit closer to the details.

Peter Strople said that leaving a legacy is as much about leaving something in people as it is about leaving something for people. Raphael left things both for and in us. The least we can do, standing in front of work like that, is to stay long enough to receive them.

References & Further Reading

On how long we actually look:

Smith, J. K., & Smith, L. F. (2001). Spending time on art. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 19(2), 229–236. (The original Met study — mean of 27.2 seconds, median of 17.0.)

Smith, L. F., Smith, J. K., & Tinio, P. P. L. (2017). Time spent viewing art and reading labels. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11(1), 77–85. (The follow-up at the Art Institute of Chicago — nearly identical results sixteen years later.)

On slow looking as a practice:

Tishman, S. (2017). Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation. Routledge.

Rosenbloom, S. (2014, October 9). The art of slowing down in a museum. The New York Times. nytimes.com/2014/10/12/travel/the-art-of-slowing-down-in-a-museum.html

Slow Art Day. Founded by Phyl Terry in 2009. slowartday.com

On the science of culture and human flourishing:

Pawelski, J. O. (2021). The Positive Humanities: Culture and human flourishing. In L. Tay & J. O. Pawelski (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Positive Humanities. Oxford University Press.

Tay, L., & Pawelski, J. O. (Eds.). (2021). The Oxford Handbook of the Positive Humanities. Oxford University Press.

Humanities and Human Flourishing Project, University of Pennsylvania. humanitiesandhumanflourishing.org

On deep time and being a good ancestor

Krznaric, R. (2020). The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long-Term in a Short-Term World. W.H. Allen.

The Birth of Venus, by Guillermo Lorca

Almost nine years ago, a medical error nearly killed me. In surgery, I had an out of body experience. But, for me, the deeper encounter has been what it took, and takes, to stay. I returned with a clarity I could not argue with: that I had been given a life. From then on, the real work was learning how to live it by entering my body, my days, and my existence fully, slowly, and sometimes on my hands and knees.

I returned to a body that had been opened all the way and stitched back together. It felt foreign, painful, and unrecognizable as mine. For a long time afterward, it was much easier to hover above it than to inhabit it. Having just had a transcendent experience of leaving my body (and returning to a battered, pained physical form), it was very natural, very seductive, to keep hovering above reality. I could have easily made spiritual bypass a home base, and I did for a time. But my medical needs and ostomy bag required that I make a project of learning this body again, from scratch, as if it were something entirely new given to me to tend. Which, in many ways, it was.

What I found in those years of tending to my alien body was that I had to treat my whole life like a ceremony. That was the only thing that worked.

I started by learning to sit with myself, the lifelong practice that lies beneath all other practices. If you cannot be with yourself, you cannot truly be with anything or anyone else. Then, I noticed that I had an inclination to mark occasions, even in small ways that were just for me. Beginnings and endings especially, because they are the moments most vulnerable to being swallowed by the next distraction on the list.

A life treated as ceremony insists on pausing at its thresholds. It asks: what is composting here, and how does it want to be witnessed? What is growing, and how does it want to be welcomed? There is a quality of attention in the willingness to be present to the shape of your own life as it is actually unfolding, rather than in the rearview mirror, years later, wondering how you got here.

We have made a strange and terrible bargain in modern life. We have agreed to relegate the sacred to a designated hour, building, or altered state, as if holiness were too fragile to survive contact with the actual texture of being alive. Religion, spirituality, death, aging are siloed and scheduled, and a relationship with whatever name you give to the dimensionless divinity that holds you has become something accessed once a week, on a retreat, or only when a substance opens the door.

I’d like to blow that bargain up. I want to bring the sacred back into the body, back into the kitchen, back into the mess and the beauty of ordinary living where it actually belongs. Eat your gods. Let them be in you and with you and not waiting behind a velvet rope, accessible only when the right conditions are met. The divine was never supposed to be something you drive to and then leave behind in the parking lot. It was meant to be moved through you like breath.

I do not want my life to only feel holy on Sundays. I want to be with God and in God and of God every day, in as many moments as is humanly possible: while making tea, while moving my body, while sitting with someone in their grief, while doing the thing I have been avoiding, while in the hard conversation I cannot escape. I want to find the ceremony inside of all of it. And I seek, one day, to find a relationship and build a life with someone where that too is its own ceremony, rooted in devotion, held in divinity, with all its good and its hard and its ugly.

Ceremonies are not always beautiful. That is not the point. The point is that all of it belongs, and nothing, not even the most dissonant disturbance, is an interruption of the ceremony.

Sitting in traffic in India for several hours on the way to the Kumbh Mela, with people banging on the windows of our car, was a ceremony. Getting lost in the wilderness at 17 was a ceremony. Changing my ostomy appliance every morning is a ceremony. What makes something sacred is simply the quality of attention brought to it. Devotion is what makes it holy; not the perfection of the form.

The embodiment of divinity is not made up of peak experiences or undeniable grace, though I have had those, and I am grateful. More and more, I see it as the willingness to treat the whole of your life—with its textures and resistances, its most mundane Thursday afternoons, its most devastating Tuesdays—as worthy of that quality of presence.

I am sure that I’m still integrating my experience from 2017. As I should be, for something so big and so reorienting. The integration is the ceremony. As is the returning, over and over, to a life I am choosing to inhabit fully.

I left my body once and found something luminous. When I came back, I found something harder and more important: that the luminous was here too, in the cracks and cobwebby corners of the life I had been given, battered and strange and entirely, irreplaceably mine.

Now, I eat my gods for breakfast. Ganesha clears my path. Mary holds my face when I cry. Kali hands me a knife when I need to cut through an illusion. Guanyin guides my hands in service. And Jesus tucks me in at night.

Art: “Belly, breast, face, brain, milk ducts, placenta” by Loie Hollowell

A little over a year ago, I left my marriage, along with my community, my job, my dog, the city I thought I was building my life in, and most of the structures I had organized my identity around. What remained, when I finally stopped moving long enough to look, was less than I expected and more than I needed: just me, with nowhere to be and little to protect.

Like all lost souls, I started traveling. First tentatively, then with increasing abandon, moving through countries and time zones with the specific freedom of someone who has nothing left to arrange their life around. When people asked me how I dealt with jetlag, I told them I say the mantra “I live outside of time” three times like an incantation. For nearly eight years I had been living a very small and very bounded life. After long stretches of illness, surgery, and accumulated self-protection, I had become content to feel contained. And now, I was suddenly wrapping myself around the ends of the earth, breaking apart the belief structures that I thought were keeping me safe, and finding that the world was larger than I had allowed it to be. And, apparently, so was I.

2025 was primarily external expansion: all outward, boundary-breaking, and new. This year has been something different. I’ve contracted geographically, settled in San Francisco, and turned the same explorer mindset inward. The expansion now is interior. But what has surprised me most about both of these chapters is that what drove them and allowed me to work with them was the same thing: Play.

For me, it started with dance. In the first, raw weeks of my separation, I went to a week-long retreat at Kripalu to study Five Rhythms, a practice I barely knew existed and signed up for completely on a whim. Someone once told me “start as you mean to go on,” so I thought that starting 2025 by dancing my heart out with a large group of strangers couldn’t be a bad choice. What I found inside that retreat floored me: I could move through things. Not talk through them, not think through them, but move through them. In a wave with a room full of strangers, things exited my body that had been living there for years, and I don’t even know what all of them were. I felt playful in a way I hadn’t since I was a child. I allowed myself to be seen as I flailed my way around. And I could feel, even then, that I was only scratching the surface of something much larger.

So I kept going: ecstatic dance in San Francisco, contact improv, embodiment practices that asked me to dress as different parts of myself, to let my shadow step forward and take up space rather than run the show from backstage. I discovered that I am a deeply theatrical person, which I had always known and always apologized for. What changed was what I did with it. Instead of managing my own drama, I started having fun with it. I began to treat my emotional life, my reactions, my patterns, my most difficult parts, as raw material that could be shaped rather than suppressed.

And more of me kept waking up, eager to express.

Parts of me that had been asleep for a very long time, maybe my whole adult life, opened their eyes. A lover bought me a set of colored pencils and invited me to collaborate on concepts for his paintings, and I eagerly brought my visual artist forward. Poetry started pouring out of me again. I started thinking more consciously about the relationships I was building: with genuine curiosity, a sense of authorship, the feeling that what was happening between me and another person was being co-created rather than simply occurring. And soon I felt more like my life was clay in my hands. And that specific, embodied sense of agency is where this concept was born. What I’m now calling The Generative Child.

We live in the era of generative AI. The word “generative” now conjures models and outputs, synthetic images and automated text, the uncanny sensation of watching a machine produce something that looks, at first glance, like human creativity. I find this deeply ironic, and worth calling out, because what these systems are actually doing at the cultural level is replacing our generativity with their own. Every hour spent consuming AI-produced content, algorithmically curated feeds, and endlessly optimized entertainment is an hour our own creative capacity sits idle. We call it generative AI, but what it generates, in us, is passivity. So, I want the word back. Generativity belongs to humans first, because it is the oldest thing about us, the thing from which we created language and fire and myth and music long before we made machines.

And I speak of the child here not as regression, wound, or the therapeutic question of what the little one inside you needed and didn’t get. That work is real and meaningful, but the Generative Child moves in the opposite direction: she’s not stuck looking backward at what was missing, she’s reaching forward into what wants to be made. Sometimes those two things work in sequence, when the inner child surfaces something raw, and the Generative Child answers by transforming it into motion, into art, into something that didn’t exist before. You can listen backward, but you create forward. At its core, the Generative Child is simply the part of you that existed before the world told you your output needed to justify itself. It’s not young, exactly, but prior. Prior to the conditioning, prior to the consumption, prior to the performance. Your timeless creative nature, waiting to be beckoned.

Creating is our true nature. The Generative Child is the part that explores for the sheer sensation of exploration and gets genuinely lost in something, emerging from the depths full of new life. It can find the game inside any situation, the story inside any relationship, and the possibility inside any constraint. It is the part that moves through the world with beginner’s mind, with the awe and surprise of someone encountering things freshly, before habit and expertise and self-consciousness close the aperture. As a child, you could access this almost on demand: in a cardboard box, in a puddle, in the gap between one thing and the next. So the question I kept coming back to, as I felt this thing waking up in me at nearly thirty-five, was: where did it go? And the more interesting question beneath that one: what if it never actually left?

So I started digging into the neuroscience. The brain at rest (genuinely unoccupied, not scrolling or optimizing, just open) activates a network of regions that neuroscientists call the Default Mode Network. For years, researchers thought this was the brain doing nothing important. Now we know it is the brain working at one of its highest registers: generating associations, simulating futures, building the novel combinations that underlie every creative act. And here is the part I find almost unbearably interesting: memory and imagination utilize the same neural circuitry. Remembering the past and envisioning the future are, to the brain, nearly the same act. Imagination is the brain, given space, doing what it has always done and always desired to do: remembering forward. Our generativity lives in that space. The question is only whether we give it any.

Capacity doesn’t decline with age, but access does. The conditions that allow this part of us to show up are systematically removed as we grow up, commodify ourselves, and learn to justify our time. What suppresses the Generative Child is ambient and relentless and mostly invisible: the culture of scheduling that has made unstructured time feel like a moral failing, in children’s lives as much as in adults’. It’s the performance pressure that taught most of us to stop drawing, stop singing, stop making things with our hands, because we became aware that what we made didn’t look the way things were supposed to look, or wasn’t going to get us into the right college. And perhaps most insidiously, it’s the extraordinary seduction of passive consumption: feeds of content that deliver something more stimulating but far less satisfying than anything we could generate ourselves, requiring nothing of us in return. Which is why I have deep respect for the people in my life who create simply for the sake of creating and never have seemed to need permission to begin. They appear to have resisted much of this, and I am still learning from them.

Martin Seligman’s research on learned helplessness showed that when animals repeatedly experience outcomes they cannot control, they just stop trying, even after the situation changes and agency becomes genuinely available again. I think about this in relation to creativity, because we have watched it happen in real time. When the feed is always better than what we could make, we get lazy and stop believing our own generative capacity is worth reaching for. I can’t count how many smart, sensitive, bursting-with-inner-life people I know who have told me they felt their thoughts weren’t worth writing down or their art wasn’t worth making, because someone out there was surely doing it better. This is learned helplessness wearing the mask of modesty, killing beginner’s mind before it even has a chance to try. We’ve unfortunately been taught that the acceptable relationship to creativity is consumption: that we are audiences more than we are makers, and that the distance between those two things is too vast to cross. The art world has spent centuries perfecting this message by building institutions designed to put you in a seat, facing forward, receiving, and teaching you to have sophisticated opinions rather than the audacity to make something yourself. A few months ago, someone from that world told me it was “very sweet” that I was willing to go see Masquerade, the immersive Phantom of the Opera show in New York, as though I had willingly compromised my taste by being delighted by something that hadn’t been stamped by the right people. More than the snobbery, I was struck by how chained he was to someone else’s hierarchy of what was worthy, having relinquished the ability to simply be moved by something for its own sake. Which is, ironically, the opposite of creativity. Real creative freedom isn’t about having taste, it’s about actually tasting. The trick is to stay porous enough to be moved by something to your core, simply because.

The cost of smothering and suffocating this part of ourselves is immense. Not just joy, though it is certainly joy. But also neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to form new connections, adapt, and grow, which is not a fixed quantity that peaks in youth and slowly drains away. Rather, it’s actively built through certain kinds of experience, and creative engagement is among the most powerful of them. Every act of imaginative making strengthens the neural architecture that underlies adaptive intelligence, resilience, and the capacity to find meaning in experience. A brain regularly asked to generate is measurably different from one asked only to receive. And this remains true across the entire lifespan. The door to our creativity is always open but we’ve stopped walking through it.

What I’ve found, in my own life and increasingly in the work I do with others, is that it doesn’t necessarily take rupture to wake this part of us up. What the Generative Child actually needs is three ingredients that turn out to be harder to come by than they sound: psychological safety, the felt permission to make something without it being immediately evaluated or justified (which, as adults, we are responsible for giving ourselves); autonomy, the freedom to follow your own curiosity wherever it goes, however sideways or unproductive it seems; and unstructured time, in sufficient quantity to feel slightly uncomfortable.

Given those conditions, it tends to emerge through the body before it emerges through the mind. Reconnecting to dance reminded me that play is physical before it is intellectual, that the Generative Child comes forth through movement, sensation, breath, the willingness to look ridiculous in a room full of strangers. It arrives when making things with your hands, through the loop of imagining and making and perceiving and responding that is one of the oldest forms of human engagement we have. It grows through the construction of story, by finding the thread in your own experience and following it somewhere you didn’t expect. Through wandering without a destination, with enough spaciousness for something unexpected to arise. Through learning something from a completely different domain, not to master it, but to give the associative mind new material to surprise itself with. And it enters, perhaps most powerfully, through other people.

The poet Donald Hall wrote that two people are most deeply connected not when they look directly at each other but when they stand side by side, attending to something they are making together: the poem, the garden, the shared project. What he called the third thing. It holds the relationship in a way that direct attention sometimes cannot. I feel this in the role play and character exercises I’ve started doing with friends and coaching clients: the way that stepping briefly into a part of yourself (letting your inner rebel throw a tantrum, allowing the part of you that is grieving finally say what it needs to say) results in a quality of contact that talking about those things rarely achieves. When we make together, the ego’s need to manage and perform steps quietly aside. What remains is simply presence. Two people, attending to the same thing, briefly at home in the world together. Ram Dass called this the dissolution of the separate self. It’s the moment when we stop performing for each other and wanting from each other and just… are. He believed it was one of the most profound experiences available to human beings. I think shared acts are one of the most reliable doors into that space. Creating together is one of the most intimate things human beings can do, and most of us have almost entirely stopped doing it.

What I’ve come to believe, and what my own life has made undeniable, is that engaging with your existence as a creative act is not a luxury, not a personality trait, not something available only to artists. It is a biological necessity. It is what the brain is actually built for, when given the space to do what it does. And the specific quality of aliveness that comes from being in a generative relationship with your own experience, from treating your days like something you are making rather than something happening to you, is what I think we are actually hungry for underneath all the consumption and careful management of lives that have slowly stopped surprising us.

I am almost thirty-five. I feel more imaginative, more creatively alive, more genuinely playful than I have at any other point I can remember. And the only reason for that is that I stopped living a life that required nothing of my imagination and started building one that requires everything of it. I got tired of waiting to feel ready, sanctioned, or clear. I simply started beckoning my Generative Child forth, through dance, through colored pencils, through role play, through poetry and writing that no one asked for, and through treating my life and relationships as works of art in progress.

That’s what I think everyone is trying to get at when they talk about the imperative of “human flourishing” these days (another term that has quickly lost its meaning to disembodied over-intellectualization). Flourishing isn’t a state to achieve; it’s just what happens when we set the conditions for people to finally stop consuming their lives and start making them instead.

On my best days I find that I am finally a creator in the seat of my own experience rather than in the audience of it.

Salvador Dali, “The Persistence of Memory,” 1931.

You know that feeling when you just wish you could forget something? What about the feeling that you wish you could remember every detail perfectly, forever?

What about both at once?

I’ve been living in that contradiction lately. Going through a breakup will do that. The same experience that makes you want to burn every memory to the ground also makes you terrified of forgetting a single detail. The magic of a person; the terror of them. You want it gone and you want it preserved and you want both of those things in the same breath. Somehow, the human body is the only architecture strange enough to hold both at once.

This experience has made me think about memory differently, both as a human being and as someone who once spent time inside the question professionally. I was lucky enough to work on some of the earliest AI memory projects, sitting in rooms with researchers trying to figure out how to bring memory capability to complex AI systems. What I noticed in those rooms was that no one was asking the interesting questions. How do we think about linear versus nonlinear memory? Where does memory start to work against the user? When does stored information become enough for a system to fill in blanks it was never meant to fill?

I’ve been trying to write about this for at least a year and a half, but I couldn’t find the way in. Then I re-watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, my favorite movie as a teenager. The film follows Joel and Clementine, two people who loved each other badly enough to have each other erased after their breakup. A company called Lacuna, Inc. will do this for you while you sleep. They map the neural pathways associated with a person and quietly delete them, the same way you’d clear a hard drive before selling it to a stranger. Grief erasure as a service.

Part of the film takes place inside Joel’s mind during the procedure; we watch his memories dissolve in reverse, from the ugliest backward toward the ones so tender and dear that his subconscious tries to tuck her inside them, where the machine can’t reach. He fails, and wakes up empty in a way he can’t name, reaching for something that isn’t there: the phantom limb of a person.

What Memory Actually Is

Human memory is so much more than storage. We are quick to reach for the filing cabinet metaphor, but that makes memory sound fixed and retrievable on demand. What’s striking is that human memory is often much larger and stranger than we assume. In Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer writes about training for the U.S. Memory Championship and discovering that so-called extraordinary memory is often less about possessing some freakish gift than it is about learning how to work with the architecture that is already there, especially its visual and associative powers. The mind, when invited into image, pattern, and spatial relationship, can hold far more than we tend to believe. Which is part of what makes the filing cabinet metaphor so inadequate in the first place.

A truer distinction, at least for me, is between memory that functions mainly as reference and memory that functions as reconstruction. Some memories behave more like stored knowledge: I was born on April 15th. I graduated from Mamaroneck High. So-and-so loves the color purple. They can feel comparatively stable, more like facts than scenes. But autobiographical memory is where things get interesting. It shifts when we return to it, shaped by the emotional state we bring, altered by what we now know, revised by who we have become since the event. Neuroscientists call part of this process reconsolidation: when a memory is retrieved, it can become temporarily plastic before settling again. So remembering is not a neutral playback. It is, at least in part, an act of reassembly.

How terrible, some of my Silicon Valley friends might think. How will we ever know what’s real? Yes, we are all such unreliable witnesses to our lives. But think about what that actually means: you can look back at something that once felt like wreckage, a relationship, a failure, a version of yourself you’re not proud of, and find from a different vantage point, even years later, something you couldn’t see at the time: the beauty it contained, or the seeds of who you were becoming. The memory hasn’t changed, but you have. That’s how human beings actually process experience and grow.

The reverse is also true, and equally important. A memory you previously held as neutral, even pleasant, through misunderstanding, avoidance, or any number of things, can look completely different when you’re finally honest enough or steady enough to see it clearly. Things you normalized or dynamics you explained away. Suddenly, when the neurons fire differently and the picture reorganizes itself, you can understand something your younger self didn’t have the tools to see. Because you’d finally become someone who could use it. There is an intelligence in your own unfolding that no external system can replicate, because no external system, or person, for that matter, can truly know where you are in the process of becoming yourself.

Memory is like an ecosystem. It contains: factual memory, which is the literality of what happened; emotional memory, which is how it felt; sensory memory, which is the smell of a particular kitchen or the weight of a specific kind of afternoon light; and body-based memory, which lives below language entirely, in the places where experience is stored not as narrative but as sensation, posture, breath, reflex. These are not separate systems competing for resources. These are a single, deeply interconnected architecture, informing each other constantly in ways we are only beginning to understand.

The body remembers things the mind has often agreed to forget. I like to think it’s keeping something safe until I’m ready. I was reminded of this recently in a conversation with a close friend. Years ago, when I was interviewing her for a job, I remember there being flashing lights outside the window, almost like a cop car, strobing into the room. She was on such a roll in the interview that I didn’t want to break her concentration, so I never mentioned it. The visual recently returned to me when I was thinking about our early days working together, so I finally asked her about it, many years later. She told me she has aphantasia, so she had no memory of the lights; but, what she remembered and could access was the feeling in her body: terrified, chaotic, high stakes. I had the visual, she had the emotion. Same room, same moment, but completely different dimensions of recollection.

People with aphantasia encode autobiographical memory differently, with less sensory and episodic detail and more emotional and conceptual anchoring. They’re basically remembering in a different medium. And in some ways, that medium may be more durable: research suggests people with aphantasia are less susceptible to visual flashbacks in PTSD, because the vivid scene reconstruction that makes memory so rich is also part of what can make trauma so relentless.

Which raises the question: if we don’t all remember the same way, in the same medium, through the same sense, then whose memory are we building when we build external memory systems? And what gets lost when we assume the answer is obvious?

Taking Memory Outside of Ourselves

There’s a level of confidence in the conversations around human-machine merging, mind uploading, and the so-called “end of forgetting” that I struggle to match. I believe some version of this technology is coming, but the vision feels partial and without much care or reverence for the beauty of our own operating system. What we call memory in machines is usually just a system for storing, compressing, and retrieving traces of the past.

This is where we are now — Meta recently acquired Limitless, the wearable company behind a pendant that records, transcribes, and makes the contents of a day searchable, and the company has said it will stop selling the pendant as the technology is folded into a larger wearables vision. Neuralink has said it plans high-volume production of its brain-computer interface in 2026, pushing further from therapy toward augmentation; Reuters reported in January that people with severe paralysis are already using the implant to move a cursor, browse the web, and play video games by thought alone. And more and more researchers are working on the idea of “mind captioning,” which equal parts delights and terrifies me.

So the externalization of memory is clearly underway. We are getting much closer to systems that can capture large portions of a life and return them to us in searchable form. And it is all moving faster than the questions we have about it. There are real gains obviously worth naming: perfect recall could help people with dementia, protect the wrongly accused, preserve what grief would otherwise erase. But we are running toward this trade without fully pricing what we are giving up by giving away our right to forget.

What’s striking is that even in robotics, where the problem is more concrete, memory still turns out to mean something much narrower than people assume. In recent work from Physical Intelligence, robots trying to complete long-horizon household tasks did not improve by storing everything. The system worked by combining short-term video memory with longer-term language-based summaries, precisely because raw streams of past observations are too noisy and unwieldy on their own. It needed to keep some traces of the past, compress others, and let the rest go; otherwise, it lost the thread.

The robot cannot tell what matters if it cannot forget what doesn’t. That, to me, is clarifying. What we are calling memory in these systems is often just task management and state retention. It’s a way of carrying forward just enough of the past to complete the present. While useful and increasingly complex, it’s still very far from the thing we are talking about when we talk about human memory.

Machine systems can store, rank, compress, retrieve, even approximate association, but they do not reconsolidate. They (currently) cannot return to the past in light of who they are now, because they are not becoming anyone (though this new Anthropic paper is admittedly raising some questions). Their past stays fixed and indexed. And the moment memory leaves the human body and enters a system, it changes categories entirely. It’s no longer yours alone; it becomes searchable, subpoenaable, hackable, sellable. It’s portable in all the wrong ways. The industry likes to move quickly past this part, as if the convenience of perfect recall were obviously worth the cost. The underlying products and research are real; the legal, social, and ownership questions remain much less settled.

But the deepest problem is underneath even that. By building systems that can increasingly encode the factual layer of experience, we are quietly teaching ourselves that the factual layer is the important one. As if what matters most about memory is accuracy. As if the point were to get the record right. Meanwhile the somatic, emotional, sensory, and timing-dependent intelligence of memory, the parts that actually shape a life, remain outside the frame, partly because they resist measurement and partly because we do not know what to do with what cannot be cleanly indexed. But that challenge is the beauty inherent in the structure itself.

The systems being built today are designed for capture, compression, retrieval, and task continuity. So we are building a very detailed, very accurate, very searchable map of the thinnest layer of what it means to remember something… and calling it memory.

The Negotiation of Reality

Simple, retrieval-based memory is the obvious entry point of development because it’s demonstrable and clean. But we, as human beings, are none of those things. We are layered and nonlinear and timing-dependent, delivering understanding to ourselves at exactly the moment we can use it, and not a moment before. By beginning with the simplest slice, we quietly teach ourselves it’s the primary one. And the rest starts to look, by comparison, like noise.

You can see what that costs most clearly in the place where memory matters most: between people. Relationships—all of them—but romantic relationships most acutely, are not primarily about shared facts. They are about the co-creation and ongoing negotiation of reality. Two people come together from different nervous systems, different histories, and different bodies of encoded experience, and they begin building something together. That shared realm is a version of reality they are constantly constructing and revising between them. That navigation IS the relationship. It’s the birthplace of intimacy.

Many of us already know how bad it feels to be in relationship with someone so domineering or controlling that there’s no room for your version of reality. Often, we have the instinct to leave those relationships. But imagine no longer having the opportunity to negotiate, regardless of who you are with. What happens if every disagreement about what happened can be resolved by pulling the record? You’d think this would help, but what it would actually do is eliminate the very process through which two people come to understand each other.

Because the argument about what was said at dinner on Thursday is almost never about what was said at dinner on Thursday. It is about feeling dismissed, or unheard, or taken for granted, or afraid. The negotiation of reality is precisely how those deeper patterns and needs surface. Perfect recall lets you win every argument without understanding a single thing.

The gap between two people’s perceptions is where all the actual work of connection happens. We are building systems optimized for the one dimension of memory that can be measured. And in doing so, we may be designing away the dimensions that actually matter.

The Art of Forgetting

In one of my favorite poems, Elizabeth Bishop calls losing an art. She understood something we are only just beginning to engineer around: forgetting is a function. Possibly the most sophisticated one we have. The ability to let things go at exactly the right time, in exactly the right proportion, softening what would otherwise be unbearable, filing what isn’t needed, releasing what would calcify into bitterness if held too tightly, so that something new can arrive. To remember more is not always to live more freely. A mind that could retain every detail with equal force would not be liberated by that fact. It would be burdened by it. Memory needs selection, revision, and forgetting in order to remain usable.

Alzheimer’s is what happens when that function is stolen, and it is stolen in a specific order, revealing that memory is not one thing but a layered architecture of self. Episodic memory goes first: the recent past, yesterday’s conversation, the name of someone loved. Semantic memory follows: facts, language, the word for what a fork is. Emotional memory holds longer than either; a person who can no longer recognize their daughter’s face may still light up when she walks in the room, feeling something that has no name left to attach to. Procedural memory, how to walk, how to play the piece of music learned at seven, goes last, because it lives deepest, below language, below narrative, in the body itself. The disease moves from the surface down, stripping the layers in almost exactly the reverse order they were built.

Trauma works in the opposite direction. Where Alzheimer’s removes the art of forgetting, trauma traps it. The body that in ordinary life softens and releases and times its revelations, that same body, under overwhelming experience, sometimes freezes the record instead. The memory doesn’t reconsolidate. It stays raw, present-tense, returned to without choice. The flashback is not memory in the reconstructive sense. It is a replay, the one thing the human memory system almost never does, happening compulsively, without consent.

Most of us live somewhere between these two distortions: trying to let go of the right things at the right time while trying to hold on to what matters. Forgetting, at its best, is not loss. It is the merciful editing by which a life remains livable. It is how experience loosens its grip enough for meaning to remain, and for the future to enter. It is the art by which a life keeps moving.

Eventually, Joel and Clementine meet again as strangers, immediately drawn to each other. Before they can begin again, they each receive recordings, warnings from past selves explaining exactly why they had each other erased. They listen to every word, and, understanding what’s coming, they choose to get on the ride anyway.

Maybe that proves our own human foolishness. But I also think there are forces at work in us much deeper and stranger than memory. Call it karma or fate, but something in Joel knew Clementine before he could remember her, and something pulled them back across the erasure.

Maybe that’s what we should be afraid of losing: the mystery beneath our memories. Somehow, there are parts of us that always seem to find their way home even when the map has been destroyed.

It’s April

The ancient magnolias have already come and gone in Golden Gate Park, and now the cherry blossoms and roses are starting to take their turns. Everything is pushing upward.

I’ve been thinking about Persephone, from the perspective of what it means and feels like to return from the underworld. When I was a little girl, my mom taught me about the difference between annual and perennial plants and the different kinds of care and tending they each required. For the uninitiated, annuals complete their entire cycle in one growing season and must come back from seed form, whereas perennials’ roots are designed to survive winter and the plant blooms again each spring.

I later spent a full year working on a farm in Montana, and it taught me something about spring that I hadn’t expected while all the cute baby lambs bopped around. Planting season was just as exhausting as harvest—maybe more so—in part, because of all the planning involved (How many beds of carrots would we need? What did we want them to yield to get the farm and the community through the winter?). We had gestated the seedlings through winter in the greenhouse, tending them in the dark, coaxing life forward in miniature before the ground was ready to receive it.

And then Spring arrived… in its sparkly and demanding way, and suddenly there was a simultaneous blooming forth paired with a need to plan, to seed intentions.

Around the same time in my life, I was working as a crisis counselor, and the juxtaposition of those two experiences was beautiful in the way that the inner journey so often mirrored the outside world. I learned quickly that spring is statistically the highest season for suicide. It sounds counterintuitive until you’ve been the person still in winter while the world insists on being stunning. The sun is out, everything is literally coming up roses, and you are still underground, eyes unadjusted, partway out of the cave, covering your eyes. The gap between the world’s brightness and your own interior dark can be unbearable in general, and even more so when we lack seasonal and cultural rites to support the turning of our own internal seasons. I feel this nearly every year.

In the West, we don’t do much, culturally, when it comes to the rites of spring. We don’t tend to ourselves at the seasonal transitions the way a good farmer tends soil before planting. And so people suffer the crossing in isolation, in the dissonance between what the calendar or the sunny sky says and what their body feels. This is one reason why I love Easter. It falls near my birthday, and I have always felt the resonance of the resurrection, the rebirth, and the return of light as simultaneously personal and cosmological event. And I’ve always loved that the story passes through a cave: Jesus does not ascend from the cross. His body is in the dark before the stone gets rolled away. It is not so different from Persephone’s climb, or from the seedlings in the Montana greenhouse, or from the person in the crisis line still calibrated to winter while the world outside blooms on its own time. The cave is the necessary passage, and what Easter and Spring and Persephone (and so many other mythologies) hold is that new life necessitates a passage through the darkness.

The First Calendars Were Written in the Body

Long before stone circles tracked the solstice or Babylonian astronomers mapped the heavens, time was kept in flesh. The Lebombo Bone, a carved baboon fibula discovered in the mountains between Swaziland and South Africa, is estimated to be roughly 37,000 years old. Its surface bears 29 deliberate incisions: the number of days in a lunar cycle, and the approximate length of a human menstrual cycle. Ethnomathematician Claudia Zaslavsky asked the question plainly: who but a person tracking their own body’s rhythms would need such a count?

Scholar Barbara Walker argued that calendar consciousness developed first in women, because their bodies provided a natural clock correlated with the visible sky. Chinese women established a lunar calendar 3,000 years ago. Among the Maya, oral tradition held that the great calendar had first been based on women’s menstrual cycles. Regardless of what first necessitated our notice, it is clear that humans have always had good reason to pay attention to the cycles occurring within and around them.

I prefer to think of cyclical time not as a circle but as a spiral. Every month, when I return to my own inner spring, I am experiencing the same threshold from a different vantage point; with a slightly different body, a different season of life, a different collection of knowings and losses. Same with every seasonal spring I am lucky enough to meet. This pairs, I think, with what physicists tell us about the universe itself: not static, not simply repeating, but ever-expanding. The same patterns at ever-wider scales.

Nonlinear Time

From roughly 6500 to 3500 BCE, across the Balkans, the Aegean, and the river valleys of southeastern Europe, a cluster of cultures flourished that archaeologist Marija Gimbutas spent her life excavating and interpreting. What she found in the soil did not center on the remains of a warrior culture as we understood it. She found thousands of female figurines, which she interpreted as expressions of a goddess-centered symbolic world. She found ritual life embedded within the home and described burial mounds that echoed the womb, with many of the dead placed in fetal positions, sometimes oriented toward the east, folded back into the earth like seeds. In her final book, The Living Goddesses, she wrote that Old European religion “focused on the wheel of life and its cyclical turning.”

Gimbutas was careful with her language. She did not call these societies matriarchal, which would simply invert patriarchy’s logic of domination. Instead, she used the word matristic: mother-centered (not mother-ruling). She imagined a civilization in which the feminine principle organized meaning through its reverence for the cycles of birth, growth, death, and renewal. Everyday acts like grinding wheat, baking bread, weaving, tending animals were considered sacred, so the Goddess was felt and communed with through the living pulse of nature itself.

This understanding of time as a wheel was not unique to Old Europe. In many First Nations traditions, the Medicine Wheel is a complete cosmology: a sacred circle divided into four quadrants corresponding to seasons, stages of life, and directions, holding the understanding that human development, community health, and ecological care are all governed by the same principle of cycles. Across cultures and continents, the wheel was humanity’s original relationship with time.

When the Indo-European Kurgan peoples moved into Europe beginning around 3500 BCE, the wheel of life was replaced by linear, hierarchical time oriented toward conquest and accumulation. Millennia later, the colonial clock was imposed on Indigenous communities with the same erasure, quickly severing the relationship between human beings and the rhythms that had oriented their lives, their governance, their healing, and their belonging. Our obsession with forced sameness and linear trajectories bulldozes our true nature, leaving us to cross so many of our thresholds without a larger understanding of their purpose.

Rudolf Steiner and the Farm as a Living Organism

Rudolf Steiner arrived at a unique form of sacred agriculture at the very end of his days. By then, he had already lived many lives as a trained mathematician and scientist, an editor of Goethe’s scientific writings, a philosopher of individual freedom, a founder of a spiritual movement, a playwright, an architect who designed two landmark buildings, a sculptor, and the creator of eurythmy, a new art of movement that makes visible the inner gestures of language and music. Everything he touched, he approached from the same animating question: how does spirit move through matter? How does the invisible become form?

One of the last things Steiner did before he died was give a series of lectures in Poland. He was in declining health and died a few months later, and in many ways it was a final synthesis of his work. I’m struck by how poetic and resonant with his own cycle his final turn toward the dirt was. Steiner saw soil health degrading, livestock weakening, crops losing vitality… and the cause, he argued, was a failure of perception. Western civilization had begun treating the farm as a simple factory of inputs and outputs rather than what it actually was: a living organism embedded in much larger, more complex cosmic rhythms. He had written years earlier what amounts to the thesis of his entire life’s work: “For what lies inside the human being is the whole spiritual cosmos in condensed form. In our inner organism we have an image of the entire cosmos.” If that was true of the body, it was equally true of the farm. The soil, the plants, the animals, the movements of the moon, the arc of the seasons all one continuous living system, asking to be met with reverence and harmony.

The field of biodynamic agriculture he developed was built on restoring what he called the land’s vital forces: its innate capacity for self-renewal. Rather than forcing productivity from depleted land with synthetic inputs, biodynamic farmers work with specific preparations: medicinal plants fermented through winter and returned to the soil in spring, applied in homeopathic quantities to reinvigorate the living conversation between earth and cosmos that industrial farming had interrupted.

I think about the seedlings we gestated in that Montana greenhouse, the way we waited for the readiness of the soil, the temperatures, the quality of the light. How I got to work early just because I liked to fill the edible flower orders, delicately picking borage blossoms and filling containers with blue stars plucked from the earth. Steiner would call that working in rhythm with the universe. The biodynamic calendar still in use today organizes planting and harvesting around the moon’s position and its relationship to the constellation through which it passes (root vegetables on earth days, flowers on fire days, etc). The farmer becomes a cultivator of the intelligence already present in the land.

Steiner understood the human being and the natural world as expressions of the same underlying pattern, so his philosophy moved fluidly across what we divide into separate domains. The same insight that shaped his approach to farming had already shaped Waldorf education: just as the farm has its seasons and cannot be rushed, human beings unfold in their own rhythms. His seven-year developmental cycles were an application of the same law he saw everywhere: that living things move through phases of expansion and contraction, ripening and release, and that wisdom means learning to work with those phases rather than against them.

The Womb Space as a Teacher of Cycles

The site of our own remembering is the cyclical body itself.

The menstrual cycle is a monthly rehearsal in expansion and retreat, or death and regeneration. The follicular phase: new beginning, outward energy, the world opening. Ovulation: the creative peak, the generous warmth of the body turned toward the world. The luteal phase: turning inward, sorting what is true from what is noise. Menstruation: the release that makes the whole cycle possible. Without shedding, we can’t have renewal. And then there are the larger cycles of childhood, adolescence, mid-life, and elderhood, each with its own gifts and its own asking.

I am writing this in April, as I ovulate, watching the plants come back to life around me. I am both bowled over by the beauty and, frankly, a little annoyed by the relentlessness of spring’s insistence. My own larger life cycle right now feels like one of recommitment: to myself, to presence, and to the ongoing project of learning to move with my own authentic rhythms rather than against them. I’m reminded that, to paraphrase poet Joseph Fasano, every blossom starts as a fist, and my psychological spring hasn’t arrived yet. There is still a lot of winter in me, some part of my nervous system still calibrated to the underworld. I used to find that gap distressing, but what cyclical awareness has given me is the ability to sit in the hard season. I want to hold my own hibernation without shame, because I understand it now as part of a larger process that has always, always turned toward spring.

Mirrors are available to us everywhere, if we learn to read them. When we attune to the many reflections from the universe that we receive daily and treat our surroundings less like a backdrop and more like the information field that it is, we have the opportunity to be more honest and congruent with ourselves and our lives. And maybe we can even extend that congruence to each other.

To that end, I am seeing more men becoming curious about the menstrual cycle, learning to show up for the women in their lives with genuine situational awareness, and understanding that asking everyone to perform the same way every day is in opposition to the beauty that comes with the turning of our wheels. There is so much intimacy available when we attune to each other’s rhythms and seasons rather than flattening them. This small awareness, however it is meme-fied and spreads, feels like a doorway to a recentering of cyclical living through the most intimate possible scale: the physical and emotional body of someone you love, witnessed honestly, met where they actually are.

Rhythms are a doorway to greater understanding of ourselves and each other, and meeting everyone where they are. Easter has always been my favorite holiday, because it feels like permission to shed and open, whenever I’m ready. I think of Mary Magdalene, who arrived at the tomb before dawn, alone, in the dark. And when she stood at the mouth of the tomb and saw Jesus in the garden, she thought he was the gardener. He was standing at the threshold between death and life, and she read him as someone tending the ground. I seek to return to that Easter every April: the gardener at the threshold, working the ground of the resurrection at dawn.

The sacred never left us. It has been waiting, here in the body, in the changing of the seasons, and in the correspondence between the two, for us to remember how to read it. We are rhythmic beings, embedded in a rhythmic world, nested in cycles that have always been trying to show us the way home to the living pulse of something larger than any single life.

Painting by Ashley Wittling

The past few months I have been reflecting a lot on the concept of revelation, and on the Eureka myth specifically. The legend goes: Archimedes stepped into a bath, shouted I have found it! and ran naked through the streets, and what we have remembered for two thousand years is the shout. The running and the claiming. But why did we forget the bath? His insight arrived when he was doing something ordinary, not performing the work of discovery.

Eureka stories, as we so often tell them, are those of individual genius and world-changing insight that belong to exactly one person. They erase the years of accumulated thinking that preceded it, the teachers, the failed experiments, and the late-night discourse. They produce the false myth of the lone discoverer, and the lone discoverer always needs a territory to claim.

This frame has invaded our everyday, down to the specific texture of how we relate to each other. I have heard people I’ve worked for speak about me the way explorers speak about land. Underneath their praise is the belief that before they arrived, I did not fully exist. I was just raw material, waiting. While, to the starved receiver, that claim can feel like recognition, there is a cost to allowing yourself to be someone else’s discovery: you start to measure your worth by whose story you’re in.

What is striking, when you look at how other cultures and traditions have understood the moment of insight, is that almost none of them stopped at the shout or let the individual run alone with what they had received. Across many Indigenous North American traditions, the vision quest was never understood as a solitary event complete in itself. The threshold experience, the fasting, the isolation, and then whatever arrived in the dark, was followed by something scholars describe as the most critical and often longest phase: integration. The seeker returned to the community, to elders who had walked the path before, and the vision was worked over together. No one did the work of interpreting for the seeker, but rather, alongside. The understanding was that the person who received the vision was not yet the person who could fully understand it, and that the community carried a kind of collective wisdom that the isolated individual, no matter how genuine their experience, simply could not access alone. These traditions varied widely across nations and cannot be flattened into a single practice, but this much holds across many of them: revelation needed a container, and the insight belonged to the community as much as to the individual.

The Jesuits, centuries later and from an entirely different world, arrived at something similar. Ignatius of Loyola developed what he called discernment of spirits, a systematic practice for noticing the interior movements that might signal genuine calling versus wishful thinking or fear. People had to sit with a decision, imagine themselves already living inside it, and pay attention to what consolation or desolation arises over time. The insight, or the calling, or the leading (whatever you want to name it) had to be lived with, not just received. It needs to prove itself through sustained inner experience that goes beyond the initial flash.

The Quakers also developed their own process, which they called the Clearness Committee. When someone faces a major decision or feels a strong leading, they convene a small group of trusted people around them. Committee members are forbidden from giving advice and may only ask open, honest questions. The assumption underneath this is that the answers are already within the person seeking clarity, and that a group of caring people can serve as a kind of container for drawing that inner wisdom out.

Three traditions, widely separated by geography and belief, arrived at the same essential understanding: the lone discoverer waving their arms through the streets is only the beginning of the story, and possibly the least important part. Insight without integration is often just cacophony. Ultimately, the individual’s revelation finds its full meaning in relationship, in community, and in the patient work of sitting with what arrived and letting others help you hear it clearly.

Popular founder culture has no equivalent practice. Commonly, there’s the pitch and the launch, and the moment of insight is immediately externalized, productized, funded, and scaled. The integration phase is so often skipped entirely because it cannot be monetized and it does not fit the timeline. And so sometimes I feel a little like I’m living in a city with founders running naked through the streets, shouting about what they found in the bath.

Paul Graham’s September 2024 essay “Founder Mode” went viral the way only a short piece of writing that tells ambitious people they were right all along can go viral. Its central argument was genuinely useful: that founders are not just managers with origin stories, and that the advice to “hire good people and give them room to do their jobs” is, in practice, a fast way to hire professional fakers and let them quietly ruin everything. But the cultural creature that emerged from that essay has taken on a life of its own. Founder mode has become a mood, a posture, a meme, and a permission slip. In San Francisco particularly, it has calcified into something approaching a civic religion: everybody is building and solving. Everybody is, with a straight face, CHANGING THE WORLD, ideally right before the next funding round. The city hums with an imposition energy, the specific frequency of people who have decided that reality is a problem they are personally equipped to fix. I love the raw creativity and general horsepower present here, I really do. But right now it feels like we are shoving a lot of that through the wrong filter.

I moved to the Bay Area around the time all of this was cresting, and the rest of my life was toppling. I got swept up, not because I had a world-changing idea, but because I wanted to find myself again, and founding something felt like the vehicle for that. I met men who led with their valuations. Inner worth outsourced to a cap table, what a vibe. I got sick of myself, sick of the spin, and eventually took a leap before I had anything to leap to. I am very much still in the air.

All certainty is false, and yet we have such a strong drive to surround ourselves with it, to prop ourselves up with invisible scaffolding. The five-year plan is offered like a talisman: say it clearly enough and the future will comply! Sure, plans are a real and necessary comfort, but comfort nonetheless. Like a story we tell the dark so it feels smaller. But the beautiful mess unfolding does not pause for our strategies, and the slew of unknowns is coming with or without the roadmap. It will be glorious and wrecking and nothing like we planned and somehow, always, exactly what we need.

There is a tarot card called the Hanged Man that people tend to misread as suffering. The figure is suspended upside down from one foot, and yes, it looks uncomfortable, but the card is not about punishment. It is about an inversion, or a shift in perspective that reveals what you can only see when you stop insisting on being right-side up. I think about this card often. In my own life lately, I feel like a bat hanging upside down in the dark, letting my eyes adjust, looking at the shape of things from an angle I have never had before. Not moving forward, not moving backward either. Just hanging, regaining something, and waiting to hear what invitations call from across the way.

Founder culture lacks language for this, and when it comes to building, let’s be honest: we are running out of territory. The conquering impulse has been a technology in itself, and like most technologies it was useful for a specific set of problems at a specific moment in history. And when a technology outlives its usefulness it does not disappear gracefully. How many founder mode practitioners have looked at something ancient and human and functional, like community, grief, the raising of children… and thought: I could disrupt this?

Founding implies genesis, the origin story, the spark, the moment a thing comes into being because you willed it. Finding and tending imply something was already there, a path worn into the earth by feet that came before yours, a current moving through water that was flowing long before you stepped into it, a truth sitting in a room waiting for someone quiet enough to notice it.

The founder operates on a timeline that points forward, toward an exit or an impact or a legacy. The tender must operate in cycles, because a garden does not exit, and a relationship does not scale. Mending takes this even further, because mending implies you arrived after something broke, that you are simply going to sit with the broken thing, kintsugi it, and leave it stronger and more beautiful in its mended cracks.

What strikes me most is what it can feel like to be on the receiving end of real stewardship and have someone bring you along not because it serves their story but because your becoming genuinely matters to them. The ancient art of apprenticeship understood this. Beyond skill transfer, it was identity formation, and the adept was accountable for the apprentice’s becoming, taking the form of care. That is almost entirely gone now, replaced by coaching packages and cohorts you subscribe to and cancel. And with that, we lose more than access; we lose what sociologists call thick trust, which is built through time and difficulty and showing up without a contract. The best ideas often come from people in high-trust relationships who are willing to be half-wrong (or look like complete idiots) in front of each other.

There is a Potawatomi concept that Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about in Braiding Sweetgrass: the idea that the relationship between people and land is not one of ownership but of reciprocity. You take care of what takes care of you. And then there is joy, which we do not talk about enough in this context. The monetization of every minute says that value is only real when it is measured, which means unmeasured moments (like the conversation that goes nowhere overtly useful, the afternoon spent on something you will never monetize, the relationship that asks more than it gives), become costs rather than life itself. Our measurement compulsion turns existence into a resource to be optimized, and then one day you look up and cannot remember the last time you did something with absolutely no return on it. But stewardship enriches in both directions. You cannot tend something without being transformed by the tending, and that transformation, quiet and unannounced, is one of the great available joys of a human life.

The finder’s relationship to the world is closer to witnessing what was always already there. Recognition does not create anything; it reveals, and, in that act, something that was already true becomes more visible and speakable and alive in the world.

Maybe you didn’t discover me; maybe you just recognized me.

Sketch by the author.

There is a word in Portuguese, saudade, that means a longing for something you may never have had. It means something like grief without an object, a hunger with no mouth to feed, the presence of absence. Happy but also sad. Translators have lost sleep over it for centuries, but it still bucks their attempts to wrangle it. I am that. I think we all are, in our own ways.

I know someone the way you know a city you’ve walked alone at odd hours: the alleys, the busted lights, the corner where something shimmering and beautiful used to be and now is just a corner with a memory. I scribbled a drawing of his heart once as if it were a junkyard hiding its own radiance: the place where all your discarded parts go to rust magnificently. When he looked at it, he saw things I didn’t put there, and the drawing knew better than to say.

I don’t think any of us ever understand what is actually unfolding between ourselves and another person, because it is often challenging enough to know what is unfolding within our own beings. We project, we translate, we fasten a narrative onto it and call that knowing. But we don’t know, not really, and as long as we are alive we are playing a multi-dimensional game of telephone with every life we touch. Who knows what stories people will make up about us? How exciting to find out. The best we can ever get is to be in enough resonance with another person that we are writing the story together, as we go.

When it comes to art, so much of the work that lasts is the work that refuses to be fully known. The greatest art is a slow bloom in a world of forced fruit, and you cannot hothouse a masterpiece into ripeness any more than you can argue the sun up earlier. Nostradamus published Les Prophéties in 1555, a collection of nine hundred and forty-two quatrains written in a stew of archaic French, Latin, Greek, anagram and deliberate obscurity. It contains obscure, alleged predictions extending to the year 3797, and in the five centuries since his death over two hundred editions have appeared along with over two thousand commentaries. Two thousand attempts to pin the butterfly, to finally get the thing to hold still and mean one thing. During World War II, disciples in Britain claimed Nostradamus had predicted the defeat of Germany. Meanwhile, disciples in Germany claimed he had predicted the destruction of England. This is art behaving exactly as designed, becoming a mirror and gathering the sediment and the smudges of every century that presses its face against it and asking what does this mean, what does this mean, what does this mean. Five hundred years of grappling! Five hundred years of layered, accumulated, invisible patina from every mind that ever wrestled the text and walked away changed or annoyed or inspired or bothered.

The Voynich Manuscript is another. Illustrated by unknown hands, written in an undeciphered script that has defeated cryptographers, linguists, and the entire cold machinery of modern code-breaking for over a century. It still sits in Connecticut in all its beautiful befuddlement, generating more meaning in its illegibility than many legible things manage in a lifetime.

What is it that makes a work survive its own translation? When it does, it feels like it breeds meaning across centuries, across languages, across the destroyed context of its own making. I remember when I was studying philosophy and had moments where I felt like my writing was useless unless I could suddenly learn Greek and revisit the original script, deciphering it for myself. But eventually I had to be content enough with deciphering from what others had already deciphered. There is a grace in that surrender, and I think it is the same quality that makes saudade resist the dictionary. The work must contain more than it says. People must contain more than they appear to. There must be a room behind the room.

When I went to Paris last month, I wanted to be inundated with beauty and to wrap myself in sacred spaces, those built slowly and deliberately and with enormous human care to be the places where our inner worlds can come out and converse with something that does not ask for our résumé, our clarity, our plans. I am spending a lot of time in churches, and it nourishes me so greatly to be inside spaces built to hold what we cannot say. One church, Sainte-Chapelle, was like being inside a jewel box that somehow learned to breathe. Over a thousand stained glass windows nearly floor-to-ceiling hit me in a way I have no language for. It sort of just reached into my chest and rearranged something. I felt like I was standing inside a miracle, like it didn’t make architectural sense that this thing was still standing, so opulent and so beautiful and so tender and delicate all at once. And I had that whole experience before I knew any of its astonishing history. The light just went and something in me answered and that was the whole conversation, complete, entire, requiring no translation other than what I am poorly attempting to describe now.

Somewhere between the telegram and the prompt we started wrangling language and asking it to behave. We want it to perform on command, confirm, resolve, compress, optimize, engage, build. I wish we could remember that to be misunderstood, or just… untranslatable… is not always a wound. Sometimes it really is the most intimate thing available. Maybe a sentence, or even a glance, lands differently in someone else’s body and becomes something neither of you could have engineered or predicted or planned. The most lasting lines always mean more than their authors knew. So too with a life. The most alive people resist summary simply in the way that they live.

In the beginning was the Word. Before the Word, there was what couldn’t be said.

Some predict that a time is coming when we won’t need language at all: thought to output, feeling to screen, the beautiful lossiness of our communication bypassed entirely. Maybe then we’ll look back at this era the way we look back at telegrams: quaint, constrained, weirdly moving, all that yearning packed into a wire, all that unsaid vibrating in the spaces between the words that made it through.

But right now, we still have words. So will we use them like instructions, or like instruments?

I’d like to shimmer with trust, like light shining through medieval windows trusts, and have faith that the right people will bring their own meanings and our lives will be richer for it, stranger for it, more alive for not having been explained to death before it had a chance to breathe.

I’m tired of sanding down my edges so I can be held comfortably by all. What if I am the Voynich Manuscript? What if that’s the whole point? What if I just sit here in my impossibility and let you bring what you bring, and you do the same? What a wild, unresolvable, magnificent thing.