{💌 this is: my artist digest for August. I also send Friday letters (resuming next week) called guide.notes}

dear friends,

{💌 this is: my artist digest for July. I also send Friday letters (resuming next week!) called guide.notes}

~

dear friends,

I definitely fell off the map for a few months while traveling to China and the US, but I’ve returned now. I spent the last few weeks meandering my way back to center — through drawing mind maps, soaking in new ideas, and nerding out on human design.

{💌 this is: my artist digest for April. I also send Friday letters called guide.notes}

—

Dear friends,

hello from China. I’m currently in Hainan Island on the South China Sea, visiting family, being steamed alive in the sticky heat, and eating the creamiest, sweetest mangos of my life with a spoon. The weather, the fruit, and the thrashing waves are here to occupy me as I’m processing all the sensations that come with returning to China after 6 years. Before this, I was in my birth city, Hangzhou.

dear friend,

I have travel brain fog, as well as too-many-people brain fog — both of which are strains of too-much-input brain fog. at the same time, I also have the brain fog of being with family, speaking only Mandarin, eating too much, and feeling barely unrecognizable to myself.

dear voyager friends,

everything you see below, I drew on the 9 hour plane ride between Istanbul and Beijing. I arrived in my hometown this morning, cried while hugging my grandmother, had dinner with my relatives, and already ate a long list of foods and exotic fruits you’ve all probably never heard of before. (many of them, I had never heard of before). everything in China has changed so much, and yet, feels comfortingly familiar.

dear kindred friends,

next week I'll probably be writing you from an airport, en route to my hometown / motherland (hangzhou, china) where I'll be for three weeks to visit family. I haven't been back in 6 years.

dear creative friends,

these recent years, my experience of spring has felt like being involuntarily woken up from a delicious nap (aka, winter). I'm groggy, sluggish, and mildly irritated at being interrupted and pressured (by the beautiful weather, no less) to spend time outside.

hello friends,

I'm writing to you from spring in Istanbul - just a few days before local elections, where the streets are filled with flags of politicans' faces fluttering in the wind, and vans playing political songs on loudspeakers. I'm slowly, reluctantly un-hermiting from winter.

these days: I'm listening to Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein on audiobook, and recently watched WandaVision, which touched the abyss in me (I wrote about it here.)

in this letter, I'll share:

dear friends of the void,

in recent days, I've been thinking about nervous system regulation as it relates to working for yourself -- and how the feeling of never-quite-doing-enough is rooted in a survival response.

dear wildfire friends,

I've decided to write and send you this letter on Friday mornings. that way, it feels like a soft exhale, like sharing a leisurely cup of coffee with a familiar friend, or like laying out the fruits of my garden & forest forgaging on the table... rather than something I stress out about on Thursday nights, at 11pm.

dear kindred spirits,

I'm not sure about you, but this week felt like a series of nose dives (hence this late letter). I found myself running towards deadlines, and then crashing afterwards -- with long lists of stuff I still didn't do, haunting me.

dear adventurer friends,

hello there friends,

this month I've been really deep in the work. sometimes this feels a little too much; too brainy-obsessive, like olympic swimming in my own head.

I'm dreaming of: growing gills, taking half days off to wander Istanbul and ride ferries to nowhere, to read more poetry.

I'm asking myself, again and again -- "but what do you really want now?" -- until the answer feels razor sharp, like a blade. Then, I want to let my days be soft.

dear worldly friends,

I woke up at 3:55am today, unexpectedly, (due to a terrorizing mosquito) and decided to start working in the dark. by 10am, I had already been working for 5 hours -- somehow, this changed the entire shape of my day. time morphed into a completely different creature (like, from an anxious rabbit to a giant snake, molting skin).

have you ever experienced this?? I've been amazed, and perplexed.

this week: I launched a podcast, began writing a new series on forming a vision, and reflected on the practice of keeping an inspiration log.