Another World is Probable

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...

A few people have said to me they don’t feel particularly motivated right now, that they’re low energy, and just generally not feeling amazing. What keeps coming to mind is a post I wrote in November 2021 about letting things be terrible. Even though I’m not recovering from a car accident or participating in the now-defunct NaNoWriMo organization challenge, this post still feels relevant. Enjoy.

I just finished Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest memoir, All the Way to the River , and a few lines jumped out at me. In one art piece (because the memoir includes her doodles), she writes, “Replacing fantasies with different fantasies is not a good idea. Trade fantasy, which has a storyline, with mystery, which does not.”As we open this new year, that feels like the best possible advice I could hear. M...

One of my guiding principles is that the universe is always communicating with us, so when something unusual happens – like this week – I pay attention. The other day, something small and slender drooped from the top bar of my shower stall. Was it caulk? The glue unfurling? No. It was a millipede. Listen to hear what the millipede had to tell me.

It’s funny, or perhaps timely, that as we approach the longest night of the year in the Northern hemisphere that I’m thinking of light, both literal and metaphorical. On the metaphorical level, I very much relate to the story of the Golden Buddha.

I have preconceived notions of what my life will look like and how I will get my needs met. What I’m finding out, though, is the universe takes care of me in ways I didn’t think it would.

You may be tired of hearing about gratitude, but at the risk of overloading you, I want to talk about gratitude. Author and speaker Case Kenny reminded me recently of a powerful way to feel grateful. I don’t know about you, but gratitude can start to feel rote. Like, of course, I’m grateful for clean drinking water and a safe place to live. But do I always feel that in my body? I wish I did, but I...

A frequent complaint I have is, “Why is this taking so long?” That’s everything from a person returning my telephone call to becoming a bestselling author. I’m struggling with what to say, but when I let my writing flow in the form of a letter, the words poured out. More in this week's post.

We’re still in a time machine this week. I’m noticing I’m slowly chipping away at the obstacles before me, and this post from December 2018 gives me hope. May it do the same for you. When I thought about what to write this week, the image that kept coming to mind was a sea wall battered by waves. That’s a lot of what 2018 felt like to me – ceaselessly buffeting an immovable object until finally th...

As I watched Hamlet this weekend, all I could think was, “Me too.” I wouldn’t have taken the actions he took, but I empathize with his feelings in a way I didn’t before. I’m reminded of that quote by Maya Angelou, who said, “ We are all human; therefore, nothing human can be alien to us. ” Yes!