the myth (and misquote) of malcolm gladwell’s 10,000 hour expert makes us want to believe that in 10,000 hours we will be an expert in something, we will have mastered our practice, we will have triumphed and have earned the recognition for the very thing we are pursuing.

when we live in faith, rather than fear, we notice change on a different timeline. faith in ourselves, faith in our magic, faith in the unknown, faith brings us home to ourselves.

As someone who hadn’t come to terms (at all) with their queer identity growing up, I find it fascinating to look back on some of the conversations I was having that were inherently queer without me knowing.

i’ve been offline for the past month, not for lack/want of trying. as someone who has lived with various degrees of depression, anxiety, and chronic ptsd for most of my life, when the waves hit hard, i fall hard.

the trailblazer, pathbreaking pioneer bell hooks passed away yesterday at the age of 69. the last public figure’s death i felt a personal mourning of was agnès varda in march of 2019.

my enlightened six-year old self had a message for me today: eighteen years ago (almost to the date 12-10-03), i wrote in a school journal that “i beelev in magic because i am magic, because pennys come out of my ere.”

it’s a somewhat-known fact that i have been a… critic of the internet society we live in and inhabit. naturally, it has to do with the fact that for at least the last decade of my life, the ways in which we established and grew social capital had to do with our existence online: what we were posting, what we weren’t posting, where we were traveling, how much we had, how much we didn’t have.

The Great American Road Trip has been en vogue for almost the timeframe in which Western Europe has been cognizant of the existence of the land mass itself.

i am trying to do nothing and everything, to let the whims of the universe come to my front porch and knock on the door without any expectations of or attachment to outcome. i have talked a lot about this flow of anti-practice practice over the past few months, of detaching from outcome, of removing myself from the process of plan and structure and form in order to connect deeper with spirit, with god, with myself, with my community. but christ on a bike! it is hard!

I’ve spent my entire life hating my name. That might seem like a dramatic sentence to write out. But it rings true for me. So, I’m going by a different name.

i’m starting to dream again of the places around the country that i either want to return to or want to spend more time in. i’m not sure what that looks like (and probably won’t until i’m already there), but i’m excited to spend the coming weeks swimming every day and writing every day and in a routine every day — we’ll see what happens after that.

On December 31st, 2020, I deactivated all of the social media accounts I personally used: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. The goal was to take a social media sabbatical for a year. After over a decade on the platforms, which at some point or another, included YouTube and Tumblr and Reddit and god-knows-what-else, it felt right to take an extended period of time away from them, to try to find a life outside of the confines of social media.

in the past few weeks, i’ve been investigating what happens when i get stuck between a rock and a hard place. the details, the description, the depth with which i can feel so foggy. the researcher in me wants to find a cohesive set of words to encapsulate the experience but each time i reach for a bow to wrap the box, the ribbon slips, and i find myself back in the depths, the murky place from which i have not yet escaped.

in my healing work, in my travels, in my day to day life, i read and ask a lot of questions about social pedagogy, in particular how we learn about, process, embody, and support grief and its potential trappings. an easy default for me, an easy confine for me is to run and hide, alone and afraid when grief comes knocking at my door. alone and afraid are a reflex, because the vast majority of my learned experience of this world has leaned on this response as a defense mechanism.

i used to mishear the italian proverb of “chi va piano va sano e lontano, chi va veloce incontro alla croce” which roughly translates to “those who go slow go healthily and far, those who go fast encounter the cross.” instead of “chi va piano va sano,” i would hear, “chi va piano va solo”: “those who go slow go alone.” i suppose a more accurate misinterpretation would be “chi va veloce va solo”: “those who go fast go alone.”

as pema chödrön writes in when things fall apart, ”things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. we think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved.”

today marked the 10,000th mile driven on this adventure, and it feels incredibly arbitrary!! i had this image in my mind that by 10,000 miles i’d have had a whole different experience: more people, more places i’d fall in love with, more *big* decisions about my life (i mean… i guess this kind of has happened, but the decisions happened gradually).

there are a few things i turn to when i feel like i’m not riding the waves as well as i’d like: i focus more on my breath, i try to get outdoors and get my body moving more, i remind myself to drink more water, i pick up my favorite books, i slow down.

so many things we own are, by nature, designed to break without being fixed — the cycle of consumerism goes on, because it is far easier to buy the cheaper, convenient thing than it is the expensive, inconvenient (in terms of acquiring or maintaining) thing. there’s a movement called the “right to repair”:

sometimes, i say things multiple times in order to convince myself of them — a prime example is that a fundamental learning curve of this adventure has been the motto: “the best plan is no plan.” i’ve said to this to many of you before, but i (not surprisingly) had a hard time embracing it as a way of life.