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Moments.to.days

Moments.to.days

“It was the secret of heaven and earth that I desire to divine.”

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Hello my love.

This is how I start my journaling for the past few years. Sometimes good morning (mourn) slips from my head to my throat more willingly than anything else more accepted, more true. Consider it a prescription I wrote myself. Consider truth the only result I was ever seeking.

“Consider truth the only result I was ever seeking.”

To you reading, You are love too!

Hello, my love. Come close. I've let you in to see me, and I intend to stay open.

I want to tell you everything. I wish I could place it in your hands complete one file, your name on it, the precise coordinates of what needs to be done specifically, irreversibly, for you. But we are not machines, my love. And that distinction matters more than it may first appear.

Norbert Wiener, who founded cybernetics in the late 1940s, spent his life studying how systems communicate, self-regulate, and respond to feedback how information moves through a system and shapes what that system becomes. He warned that the machine logic of control, if left unchecked, would not stay in machines. That it would colonize human life. That people would begin to be treated and would begin to treat themselves as inputs and outputs. As problems to be optimized rather than lives to be lived.

He was right. And most of us did not notice when it happened to us.

The slow replacement of the cycle with the system. The feedback loop closed off, rerouted, made to serve something other than the living thing at its center.

The truth has never arrived in a clean package. It does not come with a file, a name on it, a protocol. It arrives the way truth always arrives through the body, through the seasons , through what nature has been trying to tell us long before we were ready to hear it. Because nature does not optimize. It does not suppress the signal to maintain the appearance of stability. It completes the cycle. It moves through. It grieves and winters and returns not managed, but whole.

We are not machines, my love. We were never meant to be regulated into legibility. And the work the real work is learning to receive the signal that was always there, underneath everything the world taught you to suppress.

So let's start

in this season this season of death ringing and grief screaming into the void of social media we arrive precisely where Jiang Xueqin told us we would, in the summer of 2024, when he named the fractures already splitting this nation open at the seam: the American Dream curdling in the mouths of those who swallowed it whole and found it hollow, and a distrust of every institution so complete, so total, that people no longer know what is true or who, if anyone, is for them.

As an artist as someone who never fit neatly into the Western world's idea of what a life ought to look like I learned early what most outsiders and misfits come to know: that the unknown, the unseen, is not something to be feared. It is where you go to find yourself, away from the noise of other people's certainties, away from prejudice dressed up as order. Baldwin understood this. He knew that the people this society had most thoroughly tried to disappear were the ones who had been forced, by that very pressure, to see it most clearly. That the margin was not a wound only. It was also a kind of knowledge. A particular and irreplaceable way of knowing what is real.

That knowing is the beginning of everything.

Any honest navigator of the stars would suspects:My Pisces stellium in the 8th house will confirm what I am, as Nietzsche would name it, a master free spirit. And what that has meant in practice is years long, multicolored, unglamorous years of painful transformation. Lives connected through and past this one, absorbed into the very tissue of my body, ancestral, ancient, rooted deep in the dark truths of what this country has always been and has never been willing to say plainly.

amerikkka. I will call it what it is.

But hear me, my love and I need you to really hear this you are connected to divine creation. The tools that artists use, the very access we praise and lift to the heavens as though they belong only to the gifted and the chosen, Chloé Zhao said it plainly in her New York Times interview: they belong to all of us. From the moment we open our eyes in the morning we are already inside the divine enchantment of being alive, and there right there, in that first breath, in that first unglamorous moment of consciousness is all the power we will ever need for change.

So I ask you what I have had to ask myself:

Like any mystic beast you encounter in a tale, I ask if will you be present in stories that might lead you out of the maze if you're willing to take the advice I weave through them and find your own way out. Through the kind of stories and myths that speak to us not because they comfort us, but because they reveal us. Tracé révélateur, the French call it. A revealer of what was always there. These are stories that hand us tools for living by showing us the truth of what we are made of, the social, political and moral pressures shaping us in real time, and the characters fictional and ancient who walked through it and left a map.I will bring the stories. You bring yourself. That is the only requirement for what we're building here. Welcome. I'm glad you're in the room.

Prometheus Bound, oil on canvas by Jacob Jordaens, 1640

Love

Can We Get Better at Love?

What Is It Like to Be a Good Lover?

Attention to Detail

Patience

Curiosity

Resilience

Sensuality

Reason

Perspective

Am I Allowed to Be Turned On?

How to Make Love Last

Courage for the Journey

— Art as Therapy, Alain de Botton and John Armstrong

I started studying acting again and it led me back to myself. It was a reckoning I did not ask for and could not have planned. I had stopped feeling. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But the way a river goes underground, still moving somewhere, but no longer visible. I was completing what the world had been quietly building for some time: a long dissociation, a self I sent away to appear stable to the outside while my interior world crumbled without a sound.

It was my acting coach who cracked it open. Most unwillingly. In him I finally understood what had always pulled me toward artists like a tide I could not name or resist it was the embodiment. The availability. The willingness to be a full human being in the room and let that be enough. Acting requires you to understand that your character has a whole life beyond the moment you are acting in, and the search for the whys and the hows and the hidden costs before you ever open your mouth to perform makes it so the work that emerges is not manufactured. It is remembered. Rooted in the present actions, fully charged, drawing from wells you've taken the time to dig.

In Hamnet, a stunning, deeply felt film, I did not find escapism, but a mirror. A beacon for me to remember the natural elements of my rebecoming. The unglamorous work. The work that brought me to holistic health, to plant medicine, to learning how to live within the seasons' cycles as a form of present healing. To understanding that just by knowing, truly knowing, what season I am in, I can find my way back to oneness the way a compass finds north. Not by force. By nature.

I felt like Paul Mescal as Shakespeare in that opening scene pained, standing at the edge of something vast and green and indifferent, sending up a prayer to nature to bring forth something greater. And then Jessie Buckley as Agnes walks into frame a walking embodiment of nature.

Here is what I know now, what I could not have known before: after learning about Jessie’s dream journals during filming and the open, meditative dream Chloé Zhao cultivated, the scream Agnes releases losing Hamnet is not a fictional scream. It is the collective, unplanned, uncontainable scream of every grieving mother alive right now.

And Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet there is a profound, gentle vulnerability in him that I was not prepared for. In his face I saw myself as a child: the dreamer, the one who loves with a ferocity that has no ceiling. My mother, the curse breaker, her mysticism alive in my bones. My desire to actualize my dreams. And my deep, unshakeable protection of my sister that bond that does not require explanation because it precedes language. The idea that I would give my life for her, that I would trick death itself on her behalf, is not a metaphor. It is not a question. It is simply fact.

But in Hamnet's face I also saw the children the ones alive right now for whom death is closer than the possibility of a dream. Closer than the image of a simple life: a family, a table, a future that belongs to them. The news we have learned to scroll past.

And so I have to ask plainly: will Hamnet's lifeless body, held by a mother whose scream could not be contained, witnessed by a father who arrived too late will that finally make it real? Will we understand, at last, the significance of stopping the systems, the policies, the culprits, the quiet institutional violence that allows children's death tolls to climb so high that the numbers lose their faces?

Art holds what the news cannot. And that is exactly why we need it.

Can you be as brave as Jessie Buckley playing Agnes, vulnerable enough, present enough, to be seen lost in this moment? Can you learn to listen the way Paul Mescal as Shakespeare listens, tuning his whole instrument to the frequency of another person's grief? Can you love without bounds like Jacobi Jupe? Can you hold what Chloé Zhao has held the unbearable, the unresolved and still move forward through it, and in moving through it, help dream something new into existence? A collective dream. One that lives in radical complicity with desire. For all of us. Without exception.

I will be brave enough to act in accordance with the truth found.

Will you come with me?

Next Frankenstein Mary Shelley's creature misunderstood, abandoned, furious, tender has reemerged in this particular moment in history, and there is a reason for that. We will find it together.

Frankenstein Mary Shelley