/reader

I think all of this happened in the check-in part, so before I was actually inside the gates area. I get the impression that I was going to travel by myself for work reasons, and losing my flight meant I had to explain to my boss why, since the company had paid for it; though I wasn't really that worried about this as I was about not finding the ticket.

It's an interesting dream. Airplanes take you places, and I interpret them to be a symbol of growth. The check-in booth is important since it is a liminal area, representing the threshold between normal life and access to the mechanisms of change and travel.

My misplacing of the tickets is strange, since I'm usually quite well organized in these matters, not to mention that technology makes most of the work for us nowadays. This means that perhaps this is an important symbol here. The ticket is sort of my authorization to undergo the process of transformation. Maybe the fact that I thought I had it but can't find it suggests I'm not yet internally convinced that I'm actually ready to undergo this transformation, even though I desire it?

Another interesting symbol is the clerk. He stoutly keeps rejecting my attempts at authentication, over and over. Maybe he can be seen as a king of critic here? I wonder though if he's being a protector (protecting me from something I'm not ready to experience), or whether he's a negative influence (sabotaging my attempt at self-growth). Maybe he can actually be both at the same time? The strict, unfriendly attitude seems to suggest the latter, but the fact that I don't view him as the enemy (I'm my own enemy here) suggests it can also be a bit of the former. Though I think it's more negative than positive, as the attitude does seem to be saying You're probably not good enough.

A core conclusion that comes to mind here is that I might be stuck in some sort of loop. I know I have the tickets, but my standards for allowing myself to grow are impossibly high.

A song I’m loving:

1 — The sweetness of watching the lettuce grow & grow & grow in our newest garden bed; grabbing a leaf of arugula and tasting its bright peppery life on my tongue; feeling the gifts we are given from the earth every single day.

2 — The tenderness of sitting with my manuscript day after day: moving through edits, moving through perfectionism, moving through how much has changed within me even in the last year of writing this book, moving through surrendering the outcome and external to the wind and air, moving through layers to get to the core.

3 — The loud urge to rush toward something next, to get somewhere else, to move onto the future quickly, even as I am mindful of being where I am… this seemingly built-in mechanism of leaving the present moment so easily, and the effort required to come back, again and again… the relief that comes when I remember there are so many things that will require lifelong practice, things that won’t ever be mastered because the practice is part of what they ask of us.

4 — My annoyance with em-dashes being associated with AI as someone who has long used em-dashes and never used AI, and especially not for my writing; my discomfort seeing obvious AI writing being praised and popularized; my discomfort with change and my tendency to dig my heels deeper, rather than go along with it; my wondering of what this technology will do to our brains, to our planet.

5 — The reality that sometimes, when our worst fears come true, we might still somehow be okay — that some of the things we assume will break us actually don’t; the way I’ve lived this truth quietly the last year and a half; the power in this, even amid the grief.

6 — The hurricanes and floods, the bombs and non-beautiful bills being passed, the dismay at what is unfolding, paired with somehow knowing it was coming in some way, the ways my rage is instantly softened at the sight of generosity and kindness, the remembrance of how many people want something more beautiful for all.

7 — The delight of a good baguette and good cheese; the way something so simple can bring so much pleasure.; the desire to keep finding simple pleasures.

8 — A mama turkey and her two babies visiting our backyard every morning lately; sitting on the bench outside with my daughter and hearing her say, “it’s so wonderful sitting in our backyard, watching the turkeys”, letting my cells absorb the wonderfulness.

9 — Trying to push past my distaste for summer; how even already, I’m ready for fall to take root; wondering how I can turn toward what summer might have to offer me that I haven’t let myself learn to receive yet, what I can see with more light.

10 — These words from one of my personal heroes, Carl Rogers:
“A person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.”

11 — The gift of knowing where validation actually seeps in, which can only be an internally-directed process if it is to be real, felt, and genuine; the gift of knowing validation from the outside will only matter if we already allow it to be true on the inside.

12 — What the world I want for everyone requires of me — what I might need to bolster and build within myself in order to show up in all the ways I want to.

13 — The way A.J Muste stood outside the white house with a lit candle many nights during the Vietnam War and, when a reporter asked him, “Do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night in front of the White House with a candle?” he replied: “Oh I don’t do this to change the country. I do this so the country won’t change me.”

14 — That being lost feels scary sometimes, but only from unfamiliar places can we truly let ourselves step into new ways of being; the ways lostness can be a doorway of its own, perhaps the place presence is most available.

15 — A repeated reminder: It’s safe to soften. It’s safe to soften. It’s safe to soften.

16 — The vulnerability, the sweetness, the discomfort, the true gift of friendship.

17 — How there will always be unanswered questions we’ll have to sit with, and what not always having the answers can provide in its own way; how not knowing might widen the aperture of mystery, of possibility, of deepening our ability to sit with the great unknown in ways we weren’t sure we could.

18 — These words from Joanna Macy in a conversation she had for On Being (more on her in the links below that I highly suggest looking through):
“The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present, and when you're worrying about whether you're hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you're showing up, that you're here and that you're finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that. That was what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world.”

19 — Those moments where you suddenly notice what used to torment you no longer does; the moments you feel the devotion you’ve had to growth and healing becoming lived in, becoming worn in your own life; the moments you recognize how tending to yourself has morphed into fuel for being the person you want to be in the mundane day-to-day; the moments you feel yourself living what you’ve learned in ways you were once waiting for, in ways past you might have never known you’d be able to.

20 — Letting myself be flawed, hold contradictions, have so much to learn, be messier than people might know, and still choosing compassion for those very parts of me it might be easier to hate or banish or push away; letting compassion become the thing that gets you through, in all the ways you thought control or force or judgment or criticism would; letting compassion be the guide, the starting place, a home to grow in, an offering that, once fully received, can be given widely.

Thank you, as always, for being here.

△ A beloved teacher and elder of so many — Joanna Macy — is dying. Her family and dear friends are generous enough to be sharing updates from the portal, and people from all over the world are offering reflections, comments of gratitude, stories, prayers, tenderness. It is something sacred to get to behold from afar. I’ve been lighting a candle for Joanna, keeping my favorite books of hers nearby, reflecting on all I’ve learned from her and the way she models how I want to be on this earth, and feeling connected to the thousands upon thousands who are woven through her beingness. What a life she has led; what a gift she has given. I will carry her wisdom with me always. I am imagining her awash with peace.

△ Joanna Macy’s five vows

△ More of Joanna’s precious wisdom

△ Okay, here’s what we’re going to do

△ Kinship Time

△ The beauty of comfortable clothes (and Lindsay Mack)

△ Forever recommending Jacqueline’s books

△ Cannot stop thinking about this novel after finishing it weeks ago

△ I rarely share photos of myself anymore — hello from a sunny spot in my office earlier this week

With care,
Lisa

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I got hit by a van one time while I was riding my bike. I ended up going to urgent care and getting an x-ray of my foot, which was obviously hurt. The doctor currently at the urgent care took at look at the x-ray and was like: hard to say but looks fine to me. The clinic called back the next day, as another doctor took a look at the x-ray, and was like: actually your foot is broken.

That was nice of them to call back. I definitely want doctors that know what they are doing in the world, let’s keep training doctors.

But also x-rays seem like perfect fodder for AI. Shouldn’t we have like 20 million x-rays of feet along with diagnosis sitting around somewhere? I want my foot x-ray in there. Feels like there should be medical imaging “models” that are pretty damn accurate. Shouldn’t there be 20 million cat scans? 20 million ultrasound videos?

We don’t have to, nor should we, put 100% of our trust in the machines, but it seems like it would be an awfully useful tool in medicine.

And likewise, anything with lots of similar video that you can attach to measured outcomes. 20 million videos of swim meets. 20 million security videos of blackjack tables. 20 million birdfeeders. Tell us about the patterns. Tell us about the anomolies. Tell us things that computers can see that we can’t.

 

I'd much rather look at these janky Polaroids on my wall than any too-perfect-super-sharp-high-megapixel digital image.

The Clear theme I'm using right now in Ghost is quite nice. Also, much like nearly every other Ghost theme I've looked at, it's a little boring. One could easily mistake it for a Substack site, or any given WordPress theme. This bugs me a little.

Ugh, I'm so conflicted about Ghost-as-social-handle. Maybe my blog and socials should be separated.

Contrary to other people, I never cared about posting something on July 6th here on the blog. Since 2017, the year I stared this blog, I only posted twice on July 6th: back in 2018 I wrote a blog post about typography and spacing in CSS—something I have to revisit considering my approach has changed quite a bit—and last year I posted a picture from my weekend getaway. In that post, I wrote:

There will be a time to share and elaborate on all the mental struggles and the inner difficulties. But that day is not today.

Well, that day could be any day, so it might as well be today. I am currently sitting at my desk, typing this blog post. I won’t spend a weekend away this year to celebrate my birthday. In fact, I’m not celebrating my birthday at all. For reasons unclear to me, thinking about my 36th birthday has put me in weird moods over the past week or so which is probably why I don’t feel like celebrating.

That said, I did spend some time thinking about gifts. And more specifically, what I should gift to myself. I found that to be a fun mental exercise. Like many people—most people?—I do have things I want. Some are things I want but can’t afford to buy as a present to myself: a house, a piece of forest. Those will have to wait.

Then I have other things that I could buy and are currently saved in a wishlist. And yet none of those items felt like an appropriate gift to myself this year. Ultimately, the answer to the gift question came to me while sitting in meditation. There are two things I should gift myself: kindness and time.

I am very self-judgmental and there are many, many aspects of who I am that I don’t enjoy. I look at myself and all I see are the failures and shortcomings. I see the things I didn’t manage to do. I see the things I did poorly. I see the times I disappointed others. I see the times I let others down. I see my inability to take proper care of my body. I see my inability to take things seriously.

I see many things that I don’t like. And I judge. Judging is what I do when it comes to myself. That is something I’m apparently very good at. I know it’s bad. I know it doesn’t improve the situation. And yet I still do it.

But that is why I want to gift myself those two things. I want to gift myself the same kindness I’m usually capable of extending to others, because deep down I know I deserve it. And I want to gift myself the time to change things, without putting needless pressure on myself. Because I’m not already 36. I am just 36.

My current life experiments are all focused on the mind but I noticed that I’m very unhappy with my body, for a variety of reasons. But unlike my mind, I know that is not something I can fix quickly. Which is why I’m gifting myself time, in addition to kindness. Time to do things properly, time to take care of myself. I’m going to gift myself one year to turn things around and I can’t wait to write about this again on July 6th, 2026.

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Singapore is a very small country: we could drive across the entire country in less than an hour, so we are not used to driving for more than that. Our roads are also very orderly and planned, so we may lack the survival skills required for more chaotic traffic. Thankfully we could skip most of the bangkok traffic by driving from the airport area.

We had the idea to visit khao yai because we have a friend living there. I was semi-curious of her life. I admit I knew nothing about the place before we met her. It wasn’t a destination that came up before.

Thanks to her I decided to skip driving on the highway and opted for the slower but calmer roads. I also made 3 stops along the way to break up the monotony and fatigue of the driving. We were not in a rush anyway. This is one of the cafes near bangkok we stopped at to have some matcha. It is amazing how we can find such tranquility near bangkok:

We finally reached khao yai many hours later due to the frequent stops along the way. We must be the only people making this many stops for a 3-hour drive. But why not?

It felt really worth all that anxiety and effort upon reaching:

One of the many cafes with an amazing view and environment:

Vineyards are also a thing, though they are probably not in season now:

Some cafes are really stupendous:

I wrote some of the following in my anniversary post: that as I age I tend to find myself more and more drawn to the safe and comfortable zone. Knowing and remembering more of life gave me more accumulated anxiety about everything, so I prefer to be in a stress-free existence by only having safe experiences. But I am aware that this causes a chronic shrinkage of my existence. I have become smaller and smaller, and I have become one of those people who have started to wonder what had happened to my past free (and admittedly ignorant) self?

Maybe to many people a 3-hour drive is nothing, but it felt like a huge accomplishment for me, a barrier I had consciously chose to break for myself. I was chronically trying to avoid it. This opens up other possibilities that I wouldn’t have contemplated before.

I feel like I have to actively rebel against ageing, not because I am afraid to be old, but I don’t want to become static or smaller. The accumulative stress of living makes me want to stay safely in the same place, yet ironically it also makes me less and less resilient to stressful conditions.

I am glad I am still able to experience something different, and I hope to continue to be able to do so.

 

Anna wandered down to the sea. She knelt in front of some of the stone nest houses and peered in. Anna’s life here was, I was coming to see, devoted to paying attention to – or, more than that, being completely committed to – the beauty of the world before her. She seemed to have done it by cultivating an extraordinary form of independence from other people, their values, and their noise. She used every ounce of her willfulness to shut out the world and concentrate on these simple things. More and more, she reminded me of my grandfather. He spent many hours walking his farm and learning about the wild things upon it, like it was the most important work a human could do. Growing up, I’d wanted to be like him. And I was, for three or four years, after I left school. I’d go for walks over the fields; on sunny nights I’d sit with my back against a rock or climb into the lower branches of a tree and watch the world happening around me. I’d spend hours just watching deer or foxes or badgers, or swifts tumbling and screaming through the sky. I’d lie on my back in the grass and watch the swallows hawking after flies round my dad’s cows, or the brown hares playing in the meadows. But somewhere in the years since, I’d stopped being that person. Life was too busy to stand and stare. I became responsible for boring, necessary things. At one point I had three jobs and worked most nights and weekends. D. H. Lawrence once wrote that the industrial age had created a new kind of human, a machine-like man with iron in his soul. I had become one of them. The past few years had been swallowed up by striving. I remembered a friend back home trying to tell me, gently, that I had become almost manic. But the longer I spent with Anna, the more that way of being felt like a sickness I needed to recover from. A new calmness began to settle over me. It was a feeling I had not known since I was a child following my grandfather round his fields.

Anna reminded me that the first rule of living is to live. To see, hear, smell, touch, and taste the world. The more I tuned in, the closer Anna and I were growing as friends. I was beginning a journey back to the person I had once been – and needed to be again.

— James Rebanks, from the Prelude of “The Place of Tides” (Mariner Books, June 24, 2025)

Notes:

• Loved the book. Highly recommended.
• Book Review: A warming tale of gathering eiderdown in Norway. Shepherd’s Life author trades the Lake District for a remote island just below the Arctic Circle, where he joins an ‘unbreakable’ septuagenarian keeping an ancient family tradition alive.
• Book Review in The Guardian: “Duck Tales. The Lakeland shepherd heads to a Norwegian island where eiderdown is harvested to learn lessons about nature and humanity”
• Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.