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had a really lovely reminder of some of my favorite new york memories tonight, and I'm feeling like the damn plum luckiest. friends, may your past and your future be in peace and never separate, and may your optimism be always well founded.

tennessee is all bonfire skies and rock candy mountains and cigarette trees, and damn, I've missed feeling this sweet earth between my toes.

it's weird to see them all stacked there on the couch. I started collecting in colorado, but the bulk of these pieces have been a token of my time in philadelphia; from the first nosego I purchased during my inaugural summer here, to the custom sketch that @grahamwmoore had him draw up for me this spring, to the hillary whites and caitlin mccormicks and russel kings and stikmans and, especially, the jeremiah jordans. philly, you're beautiful. filled with talent just burning impossibly bright. it's an honor to be taking a few little pieces of this city away with me.

peacing out on philly for a minute to stretch my legs in the country ⚡️ aboard a greyhound, which I've not taken since that formative time I trekked from denver to santa fe because tickets were $30 and I was all, "well, yeah, duh." and then proceeded to have probably the most miserable six hours of my life.

this week has been one for the record books with regard to my capacity for complete idiocy in a few areas of my life. which, actually, has me feeling pretty great right now. there's just a lot of joy to be found in the realization that you're off track and that there are new areas of growth in your life. that you're strong enough to reassess, to find new balance. that your identity is perpetually expanding and that you are, in fact, inexplicably vast and endless. it's just the best kind of magic. you are the best kind of magic.

spent the day walking philadelphia listening to the same perfect song on repeat, falling in love, floating while dreaming, drowning in gratitude, thoughts drunk off something that sounds like south america and a heart so damn full it could burst.

in 1977, we equipped the Voyager 1 with a kind of auditory time capsule, a record which was intended to be played by any being which should happen upon it in outer space.* in addition to “earth sounds” [a baby being soothed, animals roaring, trains / cars honking, surf, “hello” in some 50-odd languages etc.] which occupy the first ~22 minutes of the record**, it also contained over 90 minutes of music spanning genres, cultures and time periods. curious about the selection of music which the committee [headed by Carl Sagan]*** chose to represent the humanity and history of earth, I gave it a listen. here it is if you’re so inclined.

spoiler: the record includes chuck berry. because yes.

additional:

*the record “shipped” into space with a stylus [in the correct position to play the record from the beginning]. written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0.70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom. The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in. [… i understand about 1/10 of that, so hopefully aliens have better public schools than those which i attended.]

**seriously, the first 22 minutes is somewhat-interesting-kind-of in a reflective-for-the-point-of-reflection’s sake, but you can skip this.

***Sagan wanted to include the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” as well, but record label EMI vetoed this due to copyright issues. […. just going to leave that right there.]

****the whole golden record is somewhere around 5 hours, and includes an hour long recording of the brain waves of Ann Druyan [who later married Carl Sagan]; basically, she asked Carl whether he supposed that in a billion years, beings could read brain waves, to which he replied, “a billion years is a long time.” so nodes were hooked up to her brain, and she spent an hour thinking – to her best ability – about the history of humanity, the plight and sadness that sometimes accompanies being a human, and concluded with her best synopsis of what it feels like to fall in love.

kind of heartbreaking, no?

#humanity #allthefeels

I've been feeling super homesick for tennessee lately; there's something in the water there that sticks to your bones and starts to ache when you get too far away. today I went on a long hike through this absolute beauty, thinking it would make me feel better... instead, I miss those bourbon-soaked hills and bonfire skies more than ever. (at Wissahickon Trail)

"there is a crack in everything. that is how the light gets in." leonard cohen

back in june -- while I was still down in tennessee and preparing to come back to philadelphia to confront both closed and unknown chapters -- I remember reading the sentence "do not be afraid of your fears. they are not there to scare you, they're there to let you know something is worth it." and telling myself it was time to find what was next. and to be honest, this has been the hardest and most challenging and the absolute most joyful time of my life. and I'm sitting here reminiscing on this indian summer; all my barefoot adventures, the exploration of my small but wild kingdom, all the growing into myself that I did, and I realize I don't feel afraid of uncertainty anymore. and I realize the immense relief that comes along with that surrender. so whatever it is that you're afraid of, let it kill you. I promise you'll come back stronger and softer and kinder and wiser. your foundation will be sharpened and widened. you'll find yourself in a wilder, noisier, more beautiful and unconstrained life. and that is absolutely everything.

“a lot of the impetus for writing Infinite Jest was just the fact that I was about 30, and I had a lot of friends who were about 30, and we’d all, you know, been grotesquely over-educated and privileged our whole lives and had better health care and more money than our parents did, and we were all extraordinarily sad. and I think it has something to do with being raised in an era when really the ultimate value seems to be – I mean, a successful life, is, let’s see, you make a lot of money, and you have a really attractive spouse, or you get infamous or famous in some way, so that it’s a life where you basically experience as much pleasure as possible – which ends up being sort of empty and low calorie. but the reason I don’t like taking about it discursively is it sounds very banal and cliche, you know, when you say it out loud that way. believe it or not, this came as something of an epiphany to us at around age 30, sitting around talking about why on earth we were so miserable when we’d been so lucky.” david foster wallace, interview; 1997

focusing on humility, sufficiency, and appreciating the process of investing sweat equity in my own life ⚡️ (at 🎶 spoon : inside out 🎶)

I always thought I'd stay put somewhere when I found something worth staying for, but a large portion of that mindset breeds more discontent; constantly asking what you can get from something and whether it's enough for you, and not spending enough energy asking what you can contribute and invest in return. every day lately I've been learning the peace that accompanies commitment, and that rest has been such a blessing.

I left home at 17 and in the decade since, I've not stopped running. of the three years I've lived in philly, half was spent too afraid of being hurt (too afraid of feeling anything, really) to make connections and forge anything deeper than surface-level relationships. the second half of it has been traveling more or less nonstop. I've lived almost 10 years in frenetic motion because I've been worried about what I'd find if I ever stood still. making the decision to stay in philly and put down roots here -- to really be where I'm at -- for at least another six months is marginally terrifying for me. and I can't fucking wait. we tend to measure the weight of bravery in proportion to its foreseeable size, but sometimes bravery is a small and quiet bird.

this list just begs so many questions, but the most important one is who is Ulises and why am I not friends with him already?

today in My Friends Are Actually Strawberry-Eating Models.

lately I've been thinking about bravery, and what that means. and for me, right now, flying back to philadelphia to pack up my apartment is just about the scariest damn thing i can fathom. I moved to philly three years ago from denver and in those three years, I fell in love, got engaged, and went through an incredibly painful break up. I worked too hard, I quit a job I hated. I drove around the country twice. I bought artwork I fell in love with, I drank too much, I laughed too hard, i met some incredible humans who I was lucky to love and blessed to be hurt by. I saw the wrong side of morning too many times to count. It's scary that this chapter is coming to an end because it's been crazy and painful and beautiful, and I don't know what's next. but this is what we do; we find what's next. even when we're scared, and even though it's terrifying. we find what's next.

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