Hello friend,

I’m writing to you on my way to Bolzano in Italy, so north that it’s “practically Austria” according to Italian friends. I complicated a tricky sequence of trains and buses by sitting on the wrong train for three hours. It magically looped me back to Venice where I’d started… leading to highly discombobulating moments of realization and starting over. How strange that I won’t ever know where I’d been.

My current train is winding through valleys and vineyards, just south of the Dolomites. It's really pretty. It's also getting dark and hopefully I'll arrive before public transportation shuts down for the day.

I'm headed to By Design or Disaster, the annual conference of the MA program in Eco-Social Design at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. This year’s theme is Radical Care - the question is not only how to care practically today, but how to create conditions that allow all to care?.

Hello friend,

I hope you’re doing well.

Spring has arrived in Paris and hey, it’s the sun. All of the benches in my neighborhood seem to be occupied by people engrossed in crossword puzzles and newspapers. Paper versions, too. I like that about France.

I am not on a sunny bench but on my couch, with a touch of overwhelm at not having figured out a measured pace to share news. I have so many projects on the grill. Please expect more Postcards in the coming months…! I’m hitting the road on Monday so the next one will be from not-my-couch, even.

Hello friend,

I hope you had a smooth entry into the new year. Is there a sense of new-ness still, in February? I think mine is gone now, having given way to a fresh-ness as ideas for spring-summer pop up from different corners.

I'm writing to you from my couch in Paris again, back from six weeks of blue-sky-winter in Japan. AQ is opening a second base outside of Tokyo, so I got to have a wild time with the team, stretching our field research legs across volcanic mountain ranges and lakes to the questions of Where do we want to be? Who might we become there?

My working theory is that the more we work and socialize online, the more we yearn for connection to place. And for those of us at home in networks, it would stand to reason that we seek that quality in how we connect to places, too—being at home in a network of places, weaving our lives with the people that inhabit them.

Hello friend,

I'm writing to re-connect, in hopes that you may be moved to shoot back a few lines or a photo or two, to share what's on your mind these days. I've been in a slow-moving transitional state, without a clear moment to send any Postcards... which you may have forgotten you've signed up for! If so, thank you for your curiosity. Today felt like a good day to sit down and write this.

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Three bits of news

Hello friend,

In Japanese, "my boom" (mai boo-mu) means something you’re hooked on at the moment. Something trending, but between me, myself and I. It might be a particular idea, a morning routine or the new bread pudding from 7-11. Your fascination requires no reasoning. It is simply your my boom.

One of my current my boom is dramaturgy, and figuring out what’s made possible when it’s tended to in the context of a project. I find it to be a deliciously awkward word. It's different from brand, storytelling or narrative but a clear distinction eludes me. Google even asked if I meant "drama turd". I did not, and am enjoying mulling over the concept.

The baby dramaturgist in me played with metaphors, and that’s how this newsletter came to be a Postcard :)

Hello friend,

This is my first newletter, the first Postcard, and it exists because I’ve wrestled to the ground the egoism of sending what’s essentially a BCC e-mail on "news from my life!". Which felt outright lazy of me, disrespectful to us, and why would anyone care…

Except you’re not "anyone". You’re someone I’m curious to better connect with, and I'm assuming, vice versa. Perhaps less happenstance updates from one of us will lead to new possibilities.

Thank you for joining me here.