Another World is Probable

I keep thinking about the cycle of luck. If you take a snapshot of an event, it might initially seem like bad luck. But if you widen your lens, so to speak, that unlucky event can become lucky.

I’m finally watching The Wolf of Wall Street because I’m doing research for my next book. It’s safe to say the movie is a study of excess. The characters want more, more, more. More money, more power, more prestige, more sex, more drugs. They are never satisfied. It’s easy to believe that’s only true for the likes of greedy capitalists, but not so.

I’m still entranced by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and am thinking about how animacy/animism dovetails with a concept from philosopher Martin Buber. He wrote a book called I and Thou, which I haven’t read, and I only conducted a cursory search on the internet about it, so my apologies to the philosophy nerds who know way more about this than I do.

I can’t not talk about how Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire. He’s a trillionaire, but in the U.S., 47.9 million people lived in food-insecure households in 2024, the highest since 2014, according to the Washington Times. He’s a trillionaire, but 181 million children will only eat one meal today, according to a UNICEF report. You and I are much closer to being homeless than we are to bei...

I planted a “fairy meadow” mix in a pot outside my front door and the first flowers to bloom are California bluebells. I am utterly enchanted by these royal blue, purple flowers. Is the fact I’m so enthralled a happy quirk or is it by design?

The other week, I had a conversation with a friend who told me instead of following conventional wisdom and keeping his part-time job to pay the bills, he devoted himself completely to his own business and went into debt. And now, years later, his business is taking off and turning a profit. I love stories like this because they remind me there isn’t only one way to do things.

I first wrote this in 2019 so I’m not struggling with the same things but the concept of acceptance is relevant at any time .There’s a reason why it has staying power in 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. Enjoy.   One of the things I’m grappling with right now is acceptance. It’s easier for me to fantasize about the future when things aredifferent. When I have a job again, when my body fe...

The typical discourse from mystics and saints surrounding their relationship with God, the Divine, Source, whatever name they have for it, is one of unconditional love, deep devotion, and reverence. Hafiz, Rumi, and the rest wax poetic about dancing mad in the streets with a love like they’ve never felt before. You know what’s far less common? Unbridled hatred. More in this week's post.

Maybe this concept has always existed and the internet just makes it easier to find, but there’s such a thing as “Wife School.” Wife School molds women into smiling, attentive, submissive wives. Contrast that with another form of femininity, that of a feral queen or a dark goddess. More in this week's post.

I love rainbows. Even if I’m the one making a rainbow appear with a gardening hose, every time I see one, it feels like a gift. They speak to me of joy, promise, and beauty. The other week, I learned something about rainbows that makes me love them even more . I'll tell you about it in this post.

I’m going to do something I never do and present an idea that I can’t fully verify. So basically, don’t quote me, and hopefully this post gets you thinking, which is ultimately my intention. I think there's a connection between "art" and "truth," etymologically.

I, like many, watched the Artemis II mission with rapt fascination. It was incredible to see so many updated images of the moon and Earth. But it also had me pondering our strong connection to the moon.

When I thought about what to write today, the answer that came to me was, “Take a break.” I think it’s both a missive and a message, meaning I need to take a break, but also other people need to take one too. I can’t speak for anyone else, but for myself, I notice right now with so many things happening in the world, so many issues vying for my attention, it feels irresponsible to take a break. Th...

On Saturday, I remarked to some friends of mine that I’ve spent nearly a year querying literary agents for my romantic comedy, and no one wants to represent me. One of my friends chimed in, “yet. No one wants to represent you yet .”That word snagged my attention because there’s so much hope and faith wrapped up in three letters.

In the process of coaching me through transformation, my chiropractor said there is a space between who I am and who I’d like to become. And in that space, I need to breathe in trust and creativity. I don’t need to know how to get where I’d like to go, I just need to trust I’ll get there and remember to be creative. More in this week's post.

I’m finishing up a housesit in Berkeley and typing this outside while birds chirp and the sun warms my face. A leaf just fell on my keyboard. Earlier today, a rainbow prism sparkled in my bedroom and lit up a nature scene on the wall so it seemed like the rainbow could have been part of the picture. I tried to capture it to no avail. Just a moment for me, I guess. I forget it’s the small things, t...

I’ve been writing about transformation so much lately because that’s the phase of life that I’m in, but the shadow side is I keep bracing for the worst-case scenario. It’s perfectly reasonable, sensical, even, but that also means my hope for things working out or going the way I’d like is at a nadir. Hope is so tricky.

I’m at the point where most of my friends are talking about getting older, and they’re grieving the fact they no longer have the same sense of possibility about their future like they did when they were younger. The essence is, “The world is no longer my oyster.” But have you actually thought about that expression?

I keep thinking about a song I first heard more than 20 yearsago called “Eg Ser.” Unfortunately, there’s no publicly available version I can share, but you can purchase the albumit came from . And YouTube offers numerous options, just not the one I’m thinking of. Anyway, “Eg Ser” is a Norwegian song, and the English translation I like best is:   I can see that you are tired, but I cannot walk all...

You may already know this, but AI safety researcher Mrinank Sharma resigned recently. That’s not really news in and of itself – people leave their positions all the time. No, the newsworthy part is that he left Anthropic, best known for its chatbot Claude, to study, drumroll please: poetry . Yes, poetry. The context is what makes the whole thing fascinating.

When life gets stressful or complicated, I notice a tendency in me (and in some people I know) to make things even more stressful, even more complicated. I don’t know why exactly, but I suspect it’s because when people are scared, they start scanning for threats and want to resolve them all. It feels protective to try to fix everything. I don’t know about you, but for me, that only makes things wo...

You know how people say most of the things they’re afraid of never happen? The opposite is true for me – most of the things I’ve feared have happened. Not the fleeting, “I’m scared I’ll miss my flight” things, but the “I’m scared I’ll be broken into” things. The recurring fears, the ones that cause my stomach to roil and my chest to constrict. But I've learned something as a result.

Something that’s on my mind a lot is the desire for one-and-done. I want the magic pill, the silver bullet, the “do this once and everything is fixed” solution. I see this in myself but I also see it in the rhetoric we use when talking about the world writ large. “Save the world,” we say, as if the planet is in need of rescuing. That’s what “saving” means, by the way, to rescue from impending dang...

Something I heard recently: “No one really wants the truth. Not when the truth is ugly, and the liar is beautiful.” Yeeees. The truth is ugly, uncomfortable. It often asks something of us. It forces us to look at something we’d rather not look at because it challenges our worldview or a belief we have about someone or ourselves. It’s much easier, in some ways, to keep living a lie.

I had an interesting experience with certainty on Saturday night. I went to a Democratic Socialists of America teach-in where they discussed how veganism feeds anticapitalism and vice versa. They served dinner and I was SURE I’d be able to eat almost nothing because while I’m vegan, I don’t eat onions and garlic, which are basically in everything. It turns out they ordered food from one of a handf...