Hello
A retrospective and a preview
“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” - Khalil Gibran
Saxifrage (noun) - a low-growing plant of poor soils, bearing small flowers. Many are grown as alpines in rock gardens. Commonly known as rockfoils.
“We’re still alive.” - Princess Mononoke
Everything can be very overwhelming all the time.
So many people I know are struggling to get by. So many artists, talented professionals, hard workers who are barely making ends meet. And the slackers are truly screwed. Personally I think they deserve a comfortable living standard too. But we’ll get back to that.
I used to be overwhelmed by The State Of The World. I was depressed, angry, and in my 20-something opinion, justifiably self-righteous, raging against a system I saw as destroying my generation’s future. I can still get mad if I let myself.
I spent four years in my twenties working on political campaigns, on an idealistic and somewhat pathological quest to elect Bernie Sanders to the White House. Then Bernie lost, COVID happened, and an era collapsed in an instant. The summer of 2020 I also finally escaped an abusive five year relationship. I had a very severe nervous breakdown. Drug addition, suicidal ideation, etcetera.
I’m better now. I’ve spent the last five years working on reinventing myself and growing up. I’ve got a journaling-and-reflecting process on a quarterly system that my friend described as “very corporate.” Harsh but fair. I like it. It’s working.
An early step in my healing was realizing that I really can’t actually do very much about The State Of The World at this point. I can’t stop climate change or end US support for Israel. I don’t know how to fix housing policy, or who’s gonna help the homeless, or my friends that just wanna smoke weed all day but still deserve healthcare.
I don’t advocate for “giving up” on Doing Something. I’ve just made a personal choice to be done with advocating, for now (mostly). I don’t think I know very much about What To Do in the grand scheme of things. I don’t see much evidence that anyone else has any particularly viable ideas about What To Do in the grand scheme of things either.
I figured maybe I should focus first on figuring out how to be a better person in my own life, and on finding a path to peace, happiness and purpose. I’m trying to support my family, friends and community in ways that feel meaningful and real.
I’m reading a lot, and meditating. I crawl around the tidepools in Malibu and feel grateful to be alive; I let the brevity of my existence wash over me in the warmth of perfect blue. I’ve been in LA now almost three years. It’s the first in the dozen places I’ve lived that truly feels like home. I hope I never leave.
When I was a kid I wanted to be an artist, so I’ve decided to become that. I’ve been writing screenplays, taking photos, making music and spending a lot of time at movies and in museums. I’m taking a directing class, which I love.
I don’t really want to be doing this Substack, but apparently if you want to be a writer you do actually have to write. I’m still getting over my chronic lifelong embarrassment at existing and having thoughts (sorry if you hate me). I promise this will be the last(ish) fully autobiographical post, and probably the longest.
What I want to do with this project is give you a version of what I journal weekly for myself. I read Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic a while ago, and this quote inspired me to reflect weekly on all that I experience: “What really ruins our characters is the fact that none of us looks back over his life. We think about what we are going to do, and only rarely of that, and fail to think about what we have done, yet any plans for the future are dependent on the past.”
I’m not gonna tell you my secrets and life story and hopes and dreams every week, but I do want to pass along some of the things I’m looking back on.
On Sundays, I’ll share Weekly Rockfoils, a list in three categories:
Things I loved: art of all kinds, news headlines that made me smile, travel notes, beautiful nature scenes, etcetera
Things I didn’t love: things that didn’t sit right with me and when applicable, what to do about it
Little wisdoms: philosophical passages, poems, personal reflections and so on. Anything that brings me peace, and hopefully will for you too
Like myself this Substack will be a work in progress. I’ll probably write about politics every once in a while. Maybe eventually I’ll get more personal again, or not. I hope you’ll hang out with me along the way, be kind to yourself, and find the beauty in things.
