I was sick for most of February. Hormonally sick (😫) for the first half, and then sick sick for the second (an insidious respiratory virus that slowed me down for weeks). Drag! It was slow season for Zen center work and I had high hopes of being a motherfucking creative genius and all of that. You know how it is. But alas, I never really got it going.

And now here we are at the end of March and we’re back in our annual spring ango, a 90 day Zen practice intensive that will keep me running until the end of May. Which is kind of a pain in the ass, and kind of a relief. I love being tested, and that’s what an ango will do. Push you beyond your comfort level and show you what you’re capable of when you’re doing it for the benefit of all living beings, and when rest is not an option. It’s full of joy, too — this year I am an assistant teacher and next year I’ll be a co-teacher — and I love, love, love diving deeply into dharma and practice and sharing it with others. It is such intensely fulfilling work.

And yet we’re only two weeks in and I’m already tired. I’m doing some client work outside of the center, too, and also all the regular life things and dang, it’s a lot. It doesn’t leave much time for my usual existential rambling. Which, again, not a bad thing. It's nice to have some built-in structure to inhabit, to decorate in whatever way I can. So yeah, right now that’s my main creative practice. Doing my best to be expressive within the confines of my day-to-day routine.

Below I’m sharing some pieces I wrote over the past year in the Zen Writing Workshop, which we do on the third Saturday of the month at . Speaking of being expressive within the confines of your reality, these are pieces born from prompts, constraints, and showing up in a room and writing whatever comes through. Some of the material I generated myself, and some of them are found poems I wrote by assembling little bits of other people’s work. Our next one is Sat, 4/21. Join us! It’s a lot of fun and a pretty unique experience as far as workshops go. Suitable for writers and non-writers alike.

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1
If you listen long enough to the crows, you can’t help but come away with the idea that it’s all just a game that goes on and on forever. Life occurring, obstacles arising, tricks and strategies and alliances to surmount them, a lot of impassioned caws and matter-of-fact clicking. Silence and pondering, maybe a shoulder to perch on or an ill-behaving human to target and brood over. Or not. Who am I to say I know a crow’s business?

What I can tell you is that sometime in the past week or so, a hawk has shown up on our block. Which is not surprising, being the block is chock full of other critters, including skunk, squirrels, possums, coyotes, and this one black cat who wears a gold Cuban link necklace.

The hawk is different, a different kind of imperious than a crow. Its cries are piercing and from a great height. The better from which to see the prey, I suppose. I haven’t seen this new character yet, but I hear it, imagine it surveying the urban landscape so full of discarded whippet canisters and empty cans of Modelo. It’s a place of abundance, Echo Park. Many varieties of experience, including avian. You hear Canadian geese a lot too. Bird giants all around us.

When I lived in Atlanta there was a big red tail living in the oak tree in my dad’s backyard, and there were also barred owls, a.k.a. hoot owls, which make a really crazy noise that sounds more like it comes from a land animal.

I used to listen for overlap. How do all these birds interact with each other? Are the owls and hawks in competition over the tastiest rodents? Or do they each have a lane they kind of stick to? Is there a hierarchy? Do the crows stay clear of their bird of prey brethren? Is their food easier to find and that’s why they’re more trickster-y, because they can be? These are questions I could probably find answers to, but it’s more fun to wonder. Why are some humans more trickster-y than others? Why are some all business, imperious and predatory, and others mostly in it for the LOLs?

Do hawks lol? I read a memoir about a woman who worked with goshawks and I gotta say, there did not seem to be a lot of shenanigans in that world. Wilderness, yes. Violence, yes. But few giggles.

But again, what would I know about a hawk’s business? I am curious though, I can wonder. I also wonder about all the birds I am not noticing here at the house on Kent Street. The ones who also roost right outside our windows, but make less of an impression.

Are their songs softer or am I just attuned to the most distinct and powerful kinds of animals? What is it about me that I’m only picking up on certain shiny bits?

*

2
The shadows agreed to build me an office and thank god, I’m tired of this one, I need something more mystical, where I can play with my utopias and hells, and hopefully there will be a balcony where, when I get tired and tip over from childlike to into immature, I can commune with the crows and take a smoke break because after all, one cigarette has never failed to change everything.

It’s the perfect time to move heavy objects here at the end of the industrial age and on the precipice of something different. I don’t know what will happen but I do know that I am ancient and good and that the absurd miracle of the earth has always kept us in a state of wonder, with tropical storms and torrential downpours, yellow cobwebs and cosmic sunsets.

It may be that I am trying to experience life through gritted teeth, which is so emo of me, but what can I say? It all rings true. We’re all just trying to figure things out, even in the presence of stressful and enticing loud bangs that penetrate my bones a little. Maybe it’s the weather!

*

3
I want a crisp white button down and the smooth, unblemished limbs of my 20s. I want a home sauna and central air conditioning and eternal life for my dog, or maybe she just dies exactly when I do so we can go together. I want a pedicure and time enough to watch all the British crime dramas in peace. I want cold brew and sparkling conversation. I want multiple international trips per year. I want radiance and vitality and to remember to feed myself before I get hangry. I want to call my mom, who is dead. I want coffee with my grandma, who is also dead, in her breakfast nook every Sunday morning.

I want an armful of gold bangles. I want better teeth. I want to buy all my friends houses. I want to write more. I want to talk about it. I want to never again see footage of someone being killed. I don’t want to have to kill mice or bugs, even roaches. I want everybody to live. I want to be in service of life always.

I want to return to the unvanquished certainty of my youth, where I thought if I just did everything the way you supposed to it would work out the way you wanted.

I want to stop suspecting that for some people, that actually is how it goes.

I want a perfect quesadilla and to speak fluent Spanish. I want to drop out of society and live the salt life. I want to be untroubled by complex moral issues. I want to know if I actually mean this. I want to know why I’m like this, why any of us is like this. I want to know if I can smoke one cigarette per day and not die of cancer. I want to end cancer. I want to be seen. But maybe not really seen, that seems intense. I want to know what the druids knew. I want to know what a fox knows, and a fly, and a rhinoceros.

I want to know what you want. I want to know what I want, and why I think this matters. I want to know if it does matter. I want to stop negging myself. I want to neg other people more. I want to have a raucous fuckin’ party. I want everyone to leave. I want everything to be OK. I want it all to be over. I want to feel like it’s all just beginning though. I want you. You and me and everyone we know, and everyone else besides that. I want it all, just not right now.

*

4
This isn’t a masquerade
I’m tapped in like a radio
I’m lounging down the motherfucking wall
Congratulating myself for all these impulses unfollowed,
Inhabiting this liminal fucked up space
It’s amazing that a place like this exists
Where we lust after bloodlust
And fix or not fix all our broken parts
Comprehending things fully is not an option
And I’m scared but I listen
Because the things I hold onto don’t always help
I don’t want to be drowsy or demolished
I just want to hear the bell ring
I’m like a dog off leash, testosteroned up and killing freely
Getting a wild high from transgressive acts
Probably not the best upper, admittedly
But I’ll never wonder if I should have been more rebellious or more forklike
I’ve evolved over many big bangs to glow in the dark
I urge you to look more closely
I’m not powerless as I seem

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A few weeks ago my brilliant friend Robert Holliday and I joined forces to put on our first sound bath, and we’re gonna do it again on April 19th at 3pm at Groundfloor here in Echo Park. We’re billing it as “something that is technically a sound bath, only a little bit weirder, more mysterious, and alive. Think reverb, relational meditation, and ASMR.” Come through and support your girl!

Oh, and two recent talks of mine on the ACZC Podcast:

Hot Flash! (Energy) — A pep talk of sorts on finding sustainable energy in an exhausting world. What’s the difference between grinding and joyful effort? Can we know a good use of our energy when we find it?

Chad (Zen & Dating) — A candid look at modern dating as an endless opportunity for working with compassion. Should we give people the benefit of the doubt or is that just a recipe for getting let down…again.

Before I go! I need to plug two very cool projects from friends of Tiny Revolutions.

The multi-talented Matthew Sherling has a new book out, a lovely slim volume called Cultivating the Soulscape, with some wise observations and guidance for tending your headspace more intentionally. In his words:

“If you do resonate with this framework, you can go through it in your own way, and if it helps you like it does me, you can see it as a strange voyage, a poetic, personal transmutation, a creative alchemy, a beautiful art project, a romance with reality, a new type of intimacy with youself, and, yes, a fruitful experiment.”

Get it here.

Jay Bushman, a stalwart at my Thursday morning Writing Circle who has done a lot of really cool experimental media work, has a new project launching on Kickstarter that I’m super excited about:

Sleepy Hollow, 1998 is “a cozy, nostalgic reimagining of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, delivered to your mailbox as letters, sketches, and artifacts from the era of cassette tapes, flip phones, and zines.”

Get notified when it goes live.

Thanks for reading, as ever.

😘

Sara

p.s. If this resonated, tap the heart or share it with someone who’d dig it.

p.p.s. Some other shiny bits from my Sublime library. Use the code TINYREVOLUTIONS for 20% off a paid subscription.

One of my favorite recent musical discoveries happened late last year. The rapper Danny Brown, whose range I always appreciated (“hipster by heart / but I can tell you how the streets feel”), recently got sober and put out a new record in which he collaborates with a bunch of hyperpop artists. I recommend it if you like hip hop, but the reason I mention it here is because god, do I love a redemption arc. Seeing a guy in his mid-40s keep finding new tricks in one of the world’s most ruthless industries is genuinely inspiring. On a creative level, yes, but also just on a personal level. Danny’s an entertaining personality and that makes a lot of people willing to follow where he leads, but it still takes guts to get in the arena with 21-year-olds without worrying you’ll make an ass of yourself. I admire it.

I love to read about magic. As a kid I liked stories of witches and wizards, people who were able to pull something out of the world the rest of us weren’t. There’s a whole steep rabbit hole about magic you can go down (I love Mitch Horowitz’s newsletter), but the magic that appeals most to me in this moment is that of conjuring.

What can we do with our lives as they exist right now, given our curiosities, commitments, constraints, and conditions? It’s a conversation we have at the Zen Center all the time (it’s maybe the conversation we have at the Zen Center all the time), and the fascinating thing is that you can have it constantly without getting bored.

And that’s because the people and the conditions are in a constant state of change. We are a constant state of change.

When I think about conjuring, it’s about hope and possibility and imagination. Grab an ingredient from the cupboard, nip out to the market for something else, stir in a few things we’re really not sure about, and see what happens. That’s a project, but it’s also a life.

In my case, at 49, I find myself living in a 10’x10’ room off the kitchen of a house I share with three dudes. I ended up here because the house is also home to , a place where we carry on a spiritual tradition with roots going back thousands of years.

And then outside of that I read, I write, go for long walks, and look at websites that want to influence me or maybe sell me shoes and sweatshirts, and do all sorts of things most women my age do. Listen to experimental music on NTS, devour fantasy and historical fiction, care for my scruffy old lady dog, who loves to cuddle and have you try to pry stuffed animals from her fearsome little jaws.

I’ve written this newsletter for years, which is brilliant because if I come here and tell you I’m really into, say, Arthurian legend right now, I can assume with some certainty that you’ll go with me. (I had a whole reading arc last summer.)

And then maybe it inspires me to create a new coaching offer, one in which the client goes on a quest. The offer is inspired by my experiences with past coaching clients, of course, but then everything I do is inspired by my Zen practice, and all the things I’ve picked up not only from the teachings, but from the business of running a Zen Center. Which is all influenced by my entire career history, from its beginnings in working in restaurants to all the different types of client service I’ve done in PR, comms, marketing, etc. And then there’s my lifelong love of reading and travel, and obviously, my relationships with everyone who steps into my orbit.

It’s all a stew of me. Or rather, a potion. A conjuring. Yes, there’s a dash of imagination, but it’s mostly just building on everything I’ve been into up to now.

The thing about the world right now is that it’s easy to see how the internet is killing us and forget how much it can open us up. I love Katherine Dee’s thesis that we should be thinking about the internet as a portal to the Otherworld. It can be a gateway to everything you’ve ever been curious about, it just should all be regarded with the understanding that everything you encounter is at least a little bit (and sometimes VERY) warped.

But if you use it to let your fancy go wherever it leads you, there is so much it can unlock. Dee’s essay reminded me of how much I like reading about the Fae. In recent years I, like so many other shameless grown women, have read the A Court of Thorns and Roses romantasy novels, in which they are objects of desire, but I’ve also expanded my horizons into other books about fairies. Fairy lore is part of my cultural heritage (I’m mostly British and Irish), so I found some good books that took me deeper into that world.

And you know what? That’s fun. Allowing myself to go down those strange roads is fun. It feels good, it feels freeing, it feels like being pulled along by something bigger than me.

This is completely different from being online when you’re seeking approval, or when you need the internet to define you or give you something. When you’re led by curiosity and finding a path, you get the rush of connections, a juicy spark inside you that’s very different from the dopamine rush of a like. Curiosity pulls you forward into the unknown; approval-seeking pulls you backward into what already got validated.

We used to understand this better, I think, before social media became a thing. You could surf blogs and read articles and travel relatively unfettered in the time before the super-networked web. Before everything you did was immediately fed into an algorithm that ranked, rewarded, or ignored it.

The spark is something that lights you up that you might want to return to. It’s like when you’re strolling around in a new city and you come across a little shop or pub or something that has that je ne sais quoi that calls to you. You might not want to stop and explore it right then, but you do want to make a note so you can return. So that maybe when you’re next in the act of conjuring, you have things you can pull in, in new combinations.

I don’t think anyone actually decides what they want. You can force yourself to pursue something because you think it’ll benefit you or pay off in some way, but actual desire? That’s mysterious. You’re either drawn to something or you’re not.

What I see often is people not allowing themselves to follow their desires. They’re afraid they don’t make sense, or they tell themselves they’re silly or ridiculous, or, darker, that they’ll lead to their destruction.

And then there’s the financial pressure. It’s hard to let your curiosity about, say, Appalachian hand weaving in, because you quickly determine that it’ll never be useful or profitable. We’ve absorbed the truly cursed idea that if something can’t be optimized, scaled, or automated, it’s a waste of time. Both of these are cages, and the approval economy and monetization mindset keep the door firmly shut.

I know people are scared right now. Work is unstable and the machines are getting better at the things we were told would make us indispensable. “Follow what lights you up” can sound like advice given by someone who’s already made it. (Reader, I have not “made it” in any traditional sense.)

But the irony is that following what lights you up isn’t a detour from getting ahead. On the contrary, it’s the only way I’ve ever seen it happen without breaking the person in the process. So when you view it from that lens, wizardry isn’t opting out of the world. It’s learning how to move through it without burning yourself out trying to outguess it.

Yes, my weird stew of ingredients has become my (admittedly modest) livelihood. Coaching, Zen practice, writing all came from following the sparks and relationships I cultivated in the process. But I could never have planned it that way. The only way it all happened was that I was willing to follow without knowing where it all was going to lead. Which is not to say that I haven’t been scared. I’m scared all the time, but it’s like a good scared.

And also: some sparks just stay sparks. They make your life richer and stranger and more yours. Not everything has to become a business. Especially now, when so much of what’s being rewarded is efficiency, mimicry, and speed—things the machines are very good at.

It’s why for years I haven’t known what to tell people I do for a living. Lately I’ve just been saying I’m a Zen teacher because it’s fun (and true), but that doesn’t fully cover it.

It’s been a shift into trusting that whatever “this” is is fine. I often think of Esther Perel saying we’re now in an identity economy, one where instead of asking “what am I going to do next,” you’re asking “who am I going to be next.” If you spend one third of your life working, don’t you want it to be in service of something you care about? The question may be existential, but I say if you’re going to do something, go with what you already know, just in combinations that are specific to you. The parts of you that don’t make sense to an algorithm are often the most alive.

This is also what we talk about at the Zen Center, actually. Developing the ability to get out of your own way and trusting that when you stop grasping so hard, something shows up that you could never have come up with on your own.

And that’s the wizardry. Bringing all the varied aspects of your life to swirl together to help you find a way forward. There’s no recipe anymore, no path to follow. Just bushwhacking our way to the next thing and the next thing and the one after that.

So in that sense the wizardry is just permission. Allowing what lights you up to light you up and seeing where it leads. Every last one of us already has the ingredients. Time to start conjuring.

And speaking of conjuring! This issue represents a historical Tiny Revolutions first (lol), in that it’s sponsored by the aforementioned Sublime. I’ve been using it since its early days because I love the way it moves with me on my roaming across the open web. I use Sublime to collect interesting things I come across—quotes, articles, images, ideas—without having to stop and figure out what they mean yet. Over time it becomes a searchable archive of everything I've been curious about, ready to pull from when I'm working on something new. It also turns me on to related ideas and is fun and beautiful to use, which matters more than people think (look at the above branding!). You can view my public library here, and if you’d like to join me, use the code TINYREVOLUTIONS for 20% off a paid subscription.

Escape Artist

Here’s my latest talk on the ACZC podcast:

“It’s sad that we humans have to learn this way, but it seems to be the case.”
Sara takes a hard hitting honest look at commitment, its phobia, and the choices we seem to be making for better or worse. What are we committing to whether we avoid it or not? Is regret the truest path to wisdom? Is there still time to take the path not taken?? Find out here!

Tell me about what you’re curious about lately.

Thanks for reading, as ever.

😘

Sara

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p.s. …

After 20 years (give or take) in LA, I still subscribe to New York Magazine. I doubt this is unusual for anyone who has lived in NYC and migrated west, especially if they spent formative years there, as I did. But my interest in NY media is not because I consider it the best — if anything, leaving the city and discovering how utterly blind that milieu is to the realities of living in places that are not New York has taken it down a number of pegs in my estimation — it’s because I consider it a comforting throwback to a time when things just made sense.

I can open up The Cut or The Strategist and discover the right issues to be up in arms about, the right reaction to them, the right sneakers to buy, the right way to style them. I can find the right books to read, the bands everyone is talking about, the movies that are doing numbers, the hot fashion designers to wear to signify you’re in the know. 20 minutes there can make me feel cool and informed and erudite, like I’ve got the drop on what’s happening and can go about my day thus assured. Covered!

It was always a fantasy, of course, but it sure did make me feel good. When I go to scroll those places now I’m aware of what I’m doing. It’s not so much that I’m looking to be informed (though of course I’m making a note of stuff that seems interesting) as that I’m revisiting a time in my life when I thought those kinds of answers could be found in places like a magazine. LOL! The phrase that comes to mind here is “was anyone ever so young?” A simpler time, it was.

What is unfortunate though, is that I took enough of this stuff seriously to form an opinion on what was acceptable. Because I was a person who was always trying to find a way to belong, I picked up lots of arbitrary external standards for how to do it right. Which is fine, I think most of us do that, but when it came down to it a lot of the stuff I unthinkingly adopted as gospel did not suit me. Once again, nothing new here. I think getting older is about realizing a lot of the shit you signed up for is not your deal, and then working your way out of the knots that hold you to them.

But it is curious to me that I still return to these sources of information, especially when I know that they hurt me. For all I tell you that I don’t take them seriously, that I know they are bullshit written for a person I no longer am, I still am absorbing something. Still clinging to a way of being that doesn’t serve me.

But there comes a point where you take in so much that you don’t know what you think about it, or who you are in relation to it, and that’s the kind of thing that I’m way more interested in these days. My own inner workings. What stirs me, what shuts me down, what makes me so uncomfortable that I want to avoid it entirely. That’s where the way forward is.

And the reality is, paying attention to that shit is hard. It’s way easier to pull up the Approval Matrix and see what other people are feeling. Safer, certainly. Someone else’s feelings might upset you, but at the end of the day you’re not getting judged for them.

I don’t know, I’m just sick of the fucking internet and everyone’s opinions. Sick of how the economics of the media industry have weaponized our takes against us and sorted us neatly into tribes, which, conveniently, war against each other and drum up more clicks and ad dollars for the ones purveying it.

I still scroll Twitter and NY Mag and Instagram. I’m just grossed out by it all. And more dedicated than ever to understanding my own point of view, uncertain and scary and mysterious as it is.

And if I’m gonna get philosophical for a moment, I do think the only way we get out of this mess is to get real with ourselves. It’s definitely what I’m most interested in reading — people telling the truth of their lives as they see it, not what they think will get the most approval. Fuck the Approval Matrix!

For a while last fall I was working on a long essay I had titled Authenticity is the New Currency. I still buy it as an idea but have lost confidence that anyone needs a bloviating essay about authenticity being the new currency. Just fucking do something real and tell me about it, you know?

Anyway, Happy New Year. Let’s be crankier and more confused and earnest and passionate and weird this year than ever.

😘

Sara

p.s. Share this with someone who needs it.

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Someone recently asked me if it was bad that they were considering blowing up their life. As a person who has blown up their own life multiple times, my response was something like, well, I am a person who has blown their life up a bunch of times, so obviously I’m a fan.

But more broadly, what does it even mean to blow up one’s life? The use of the phrase “blow up” implies that it’s negative; like you’re detonating something that was chugging along just fine. But what if a detonation is what’s warranted?

Was it bad when I quit my job at Sony in the winter of 2005 and left New York City to return to Atlanta to live with my parents? My NYC life was a good life, and the prospects seemed great in lots of ways. Was it bad when, a few months later, I turned down a really good job offer in Atlanta and decided instead to move to LA with not much beyond a beater car and a few thousand bucks in savings?

Both were more or less rash moves; I didn’t have a master plan in mind, I just knew that was how it had to be. I’ve done this many times. I once broke up with a very good man because even though most of the time we got along great, there was one week of the month where I couldn’t stand him.

I had to leave NYC because I didn’t want to have a New York life as I saw it laid out before me. I didn’t want to have an Atlanta life because I didn’t like what I saw laid out for me there either. And I sure as hell didn’t like the life I saw with that guy, one where for a full quarter of our time together I wanted nothing to do with him. Surely this was hormonal and I suspect a lot of people would have just accepted it as the price of being in a relationship with a good and stable man who loved them, but I have never been great at compromise. When I ended things he said he was worried about me and told me he’d keep the light on for me. I thanked him. But I knew I wouldn’t be back.

At the time I was living in a neighborhood that had a lot of hills, and shortly after the breakup I was driving over one of them at sunset, windows open, warm air rushing around me. I was 38 years old and I thought, “I don’t think I’ll find another guy to marry and have children with in time for me to do it naturally.” It felt true then and it ended up being true. There was death in that moment; I knew I was killing something. But the light was so beautiful; my life was so beautiful. I didn’t regret that choice then and I don’t regret it now, eleven years later.

To get up off the ground you always have to use the ground. Unless you have to use space. Or, you know, something else entirely. I think we only discover what in the falling.

I wrote the essay above to serve as commentary for my teacher Dave Cuomo’s/ ’s new translation of Dogen’s Inmo, a famous Zen text. Here’s the relevant portion:

There’s a saying that’s come to down to us from antiquity, come down to us from the West, come down to us from the Heavens above:

When you fall down because of the ground
You get back up by using the ground
Trying to get up without using the ground
Is impossible

That saying has been held up and revered as a great revelation - it’s the way body and mind drops off… But still, if we only understand it like this and don’t go on to understand it not like this, it’s like we haven’t studied the saying at all. Actually there is only one possible way to get up:

If you fall down because of the ground,
you have to get up by using space
trying to get up without using space
ultimately makes no sense

If you fall down because of space
you have to get up by using the ground
trying to get up without using the ground
ultimately makes no sense

If you don’t yet understand these words, you don’t yet know how to measure ground and space in the buddhist way.

I love Thanksgiving so much! Truly. But it always makes me a little sad for the life I didn’t have. I hope wherever you are, you’re feeling at peace.

I’m grateful for so many things, one of which is you. Thanks for reading, as ever.

😘

Sara

p.s. If this resonated, tap the heart or share it with someone who needs it.

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It’s always startling to hear someone talk and realize they have a cop living in their head. Always keeping score of the transgressions of themselves and others. Things taken, things done improperly, things done that are simply Not Done. Never offering good faith, always reducing events to their pettiest, most uncharitable interpretations. NWA said “Fuck the Police” and I mostly agree, but for my money it’s the cops on the inside who are inflicting the most damage.

Be better, try harder, get smarter. Point the gun inward, finger on the trigger. Stay like that for years, a heartbeat away from obliteration. White knuckle it through life, always waiting for clarity and distinct definitions of right and wrong, mistaking that for liberation.

My internal cop is not as loud as she once was, but she shows up here and there, often without me even noticing. When I listen to my cop, I make safe, stilted work that only reaches the shallows. I sand down my edges, making sure nothing I say could possibly be used against me.

But seeing as I’m close to entering my fifth decade and Shit is Really Off Out There, I’m doing this thing where I’m trying to zoom out and enter the mythic instead, which just seems good preparation for my crone years. Be another kind of being, one who sails the sea, rides the rails, judges less, questions more. The shapeshifting wizard, unafraid to peer into dark realms without being consumed by them. A plumber of depths, an ascender into light, a being who knows that it just doesn’t all add up neatly.

This tension has new stakes now that I’m moving into this new role of teaching Zen. People come to the zendo expecting wisdom, guides who have their shit together enough to point toward liberation. The irony isn’t lost on me: I’m supposed to help people see their internal cops while mine still tries to run the show. And yet how else would I recognize it when the cop takes over?

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “The revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.” The revolution doesn’t end because the conditions never stop changing, and change creates tension. The work is to notice the gap between what we know and what we fear, and to keep going anyway. To stay present to who we’re becoming, not who we were.

I started my first blog in 2003, and wrote under a pseudonym for years. I worked in corporate PR at the time, and I kept my personal and professional worlds very separate. “Jane Donuts” was sharp, irreverent, and free. She could say anything because no one knew who she really was.

Then in 2011, Salon ran a personal essay I wrote about struggling to be productive after leaving my corporate job to freelance. This was long before productivity discourse and the ensuing backlash, but it hit a nerve. I must have shared it on Twitter, even though I wasn’t really “out” as Sara Campbell the PR person at the time. A journalist from a popular tech blog that I often worked with found me through the essay and asked if I was the same Sara Campbell who sent him press releases and arranged interviews with executives, and I never replied.

I was creeping up on being a person who could articulate the absurdities of modern work culture without fear of repercussion, but I just wasn’t there. I didn’t feel like I could live in both worlds as a person who both made a living off of high profile PR work and also critiqued the culture (and companies) that underwrote it. Whether I could have is debatable. What I know is that in my mind, trying to do both was flying too close to the sun.

At some time during those years, I casually mentioned my creative writing in an interview for a job I was really excited about. I didn’t get the job because the executive I’d met with said he didn’t think I would be 100% dedicated to it. Just thinking about it still makes me angry, because it seemed to prove the cop right: that speaking the truth would cost me.

But I kept writing anyway. And ironically, some people hired me because of my personal work — they wanted help speaking from the heart.

And yet here I am, 124 issues into the newsletter I started to speak the unfiltered truth as I saw it, and I still feel like I have to pry myself open with a crowbar to get anything honest on the page.

For years, I figured eventually the cop would see all the evidence and update its priors, and I’d finally be free of this exhausting back-and-forth. But no matter how much counter-evidence I accumulate, the cop is still there. Which has led me to wonder: What if the issue isn’t that the cop is outdated or irrational, but that I’ve been waiting for a kind of certainty that doesn’t exist? If I’m channeling the wizard, creating from within paradox is the only way.

Because the thing is, the journalist could have used my essay against me. That executive did decide my interest in creative writing made me a bad hire. What the cop gets wrong isn’t the existence of risk, it’s the idea that something being risky means it shouldn’t be done.

There is no amount of evidence that will make the next story from my life feel completely safe to share, because that kind of safety is a mirage. Life is dynamic. I’m always changing. The conditions are always changing. What felt right to share last year might not be right today. What felt too naked yesterday might be exactly what needs to be said now.

Anyway, this is all a long way of saying I’m back and am planning to publish weekly through the end of the year. Not to prove the cop wrong, but to practice being in a relationship with her.

The cop will still be there next week. And the week after that. And I’ll still be here too, wrestling with her and feeling salty and insecure about it. That’s the work. That’s the revolution. And because I’ve given up on it ever being finished, I have a way to, once again, begin.

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Thanks for reading, as ever. See you next week.

😘

Sara

p.s. If this resonated, tap the heart or share it with someone who needs it.

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My sister told me recently that I think about death too much, and I’ve been brooding about it. First of all, it’s probably true. Second of all, what of it?? The way things seem to be going, I often wish more people would.

Maybe she’s right and I could stand to lighten up, but in my defense, the past couple of years have been marked by a shift for me, physically. A slow-going change that’s surprised me, and maybe even turned my life upside down — I’m still too close to it to tell. Yes, I am talking about The Change. And yes, I knew it was coming, but, like many other women I talk to, I truly had no idea what I was in for. It’s been eye opening, to say the least.

I’m not going to bore you with a treatise on the realities of perimenopause, (though I am tempted, I feel like someone opened a drain at the bottom of my life that has sucked out all the energy), I’m just saying I’ve kinda been going through it. Let’s be real, I’m always kinda going through it, that’s basically my whole brand (Tiny Revolutions!!), but between this physical metamorphosis and the metaphysical one happening via my commitment to Zen teaching, it’s no wonder I’ve been pondering the inexorable truth that one day we’ll all return to dust.

***

OK, thanks for allowing me to do a little throat clearing. Despite being stymied on the newsletter front, I’ve actually been writing and speaking quite a lot this year. Just last weekend I dressed up as Annie Hall and read some poetry and stories at our bi-monthly variety show at , and had a blast doing it.

Here’s one of the pieces I read:

If you listen long enough to the crows, you can’t help but come away with the idea that it’s all just a game that goes on and on forever. Life occurring, obstacles arising, tricks and strategies and alliances to surmount them, a lot of impassioned caws and matter-of-fact clicking. Silence and pondering, maybe a shoulder to perch on or an ill-behaving human to target and brood over. Or not. Who am I to say I know a crow’s business?

What I can tell you is that sometime in the past week or so, a hawk has shown up on our block. Which is not surprising, being that the block is chock full of other critters, including skunk, squirrels, possums, coyotes, and this one black cat who wears gold Cuban links around her neck.

The hawk is different, a different kind of imperious than a crow. Its cries are piercing and from a great height. The better from which to see the prey, I suppose. I haven’t seen this new character yet, but I hear it, imagine it surveying the urban landscape so full of discarded whippet canisters and empty cans and bottles of Modelo. It’s a place of abundance, Echo Park. Many varieties of experience, including avian. You hear Canadian geese a lot, too. Bird giants all around us.

When I lived in Atlanta there was a big red tail living in the oak tree in my dad’s backyard, and there were also barred owls, a.k.a. hoot owls, which make a really crazy noise that sounds more like it comes from a land animal.

I used to listen for overlap. How do all these birds interact with each other? Are the owls and hawks in competition over the tastiest rodents? Or do they each have a lane they kind of stick to? Is there a hierarchy? Do the crows stay clear of their bird of prey brethren? Is their food easier to find and that’s why they’re more trickster-y, because they can be? These are questions I could probably find answers to, but it’s more fun to wonder. Why are some humans more trickster-y than others? Why are some all business, imperious and predatory, and others mostly in it for the LOLs?

Do hawks LOL? I read a memoir about a woman who worked with goshawks and I gotta say, there did not seem to be a lot of shenanigans going on in that world. Wilderness, yes. Violence, yes. But few giggles.

But again, what would I know about a hawk’s business? I am curious though, I can wonder. I also wonder about all the birds I am not noticing here at 2526 Kent St. The ones who also roost right outside our windows, but make less of an impression. Are their songs softer or am I just attuned to the most distinct and powerful kinds of animals? What is it about me that I’m only picking up on certain shiny bits?

As you might be able to tell, there’s been a lot of wondering going on around here this year. Not a ton of conclusions and God knows not much certainty, but lots of space for the imagination, and that’s helped keep me sane and moving forward.

Aside from that, I’ve been applying the same level of attention and questioning to my dharma talks, some of which have made the ACZC podcast. Here are some good ones:

• The Economics of Enlightenment (Abundance?) w/ Sara Campbell

• Imperially Alone (Loneliness) w/ Sara Campbell

• The Big Gulp (Healthy Desire) w/ Sara Campbell

(Note you can listen on any podcast platform, not just at the links above.)

These talks are all about looking closely at the conditions of our lives, using Zen teachings on impermanence and interdependence as reference points. You don’t have to be into Zen to get something out of them (or so I hear).

I also had a wonderful conversation with my dear friend , who writes an excellent newsletter called that you should read. This is a podcast, to be clear, but he shared some highlights in the text that you can click through and read if listening is not your style.

Solvitur Ambulando

A Conversation With Writer and Lay Zen Teacher Sara Campbell

Welcome to Solvitur Ambulando, which means "Solve It By Walking." On this journey, we explore the alchemic potency of walking for sorting through life's puzzles, exploring our world, and transforming ourselves. Like a good walk, you will encounter distinctive ideas, remarkable people and gorgeous scenery. I hope you will enjoy a beautiful walk today. An…

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7 months ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Russell Smith and Sara Campbell

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Have I mentioned that this has been one of the hardest AND best years I’ve had in recent memory? Change is intense and my schedule is demanding, but I do feel truly alive and very much like I’m exactly where I’m meant to be. I don’t always enjoy it, but I don’t think that’s the point.

A lot of my time is spent around community building IRL these days, which feels amazing and very correct for the time. I love being back in LA and holding down the fort at the Zen Center, so if you’re in town, do swing through and meditate/meet some cool people who are trying to get right with themselves and the world.

I’m also helping out with the LA Eastside meetup, which is every other Thursday morning at LA Mill coffee shop in Silver Lake. Everyone is invited, no pitching allowed! (For real though, it’s a bunch of people in media/marketing/creative/adjacent industries who just…talk about whatever. A nice way to make connections in person.)

Excellent, you’re still here! I’m planning to share more pieces between now and the end of the year — essays, talks, invitations, maybe a few surprises.

How about you?

Thanks for reading, as ever.

😘

Sara

p.s. If this resonated, tap the heart or share it with someone who needs it.

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When I was doing my Zen training this spring, I became addicted to Big Gulps. This was not intentional! One hot, dusty afternoon my dog and I rocked up to 7-Eleven for 32 delicious ounces of diet fountain soda and crushed ice, and discovered that if you signed up for their loyalty program, you could get a Big Gulp for one dollar instead of two. One dollar!! Obviously I signed up. The local 7-Eleven is just a half mile from my house, the perfect distance for a quick jaunt there and back, and before I knew it I found myself getting Big Gulps a few times a week.

Big Gulps of Diet Coke (OK, I also splashed in some regular Coke, too) don’t sound very quote unquote Zen, do they? I told my teacher about it and he was understandably horrified. Possibly questioning his decision to take me on as a student. There’s the grossness of Diet Coke and artificial sweeteners, yes, but then there’s also the wastefulness of the plastic, not to mention the poor optics of becoming a spiritual teacher with such openly trashy habits.

It made sense to me, though. Our daily schedule was intense — a lot of meditation, obviously, but also ceremonies, chanting, work practice, running the center, hosting sits, community outreach, preparing talks, volunteering with other Zen sanghas, and lots of other little things besides. Of course I wanted a zingy caffeine pick-me-up here and there. It was only a dollar! I recycled the cup! I sometimes didn’t even drink the whole thing; it was more like what it symbolized, which was a shocking bit of tacky freedom in a life of high discipline. You can think poorly of me for this, and I don’t blame you if you do, to be honest. I just think of it as indicative of where I was at the time.

Which was — and frankly, still is — a person caught between worlds. Driven by a higher purpose but also desirous of small treats and consolations. There was a time when my bio on Twitter was “half hedonist / half monastic” and that still feels true. My waters run both unfathomably deep and shallow as hell. And you know what? I don’t fight that. It’s too exhausting to pretend otherwise. If there’s anything I’ve taken away from Zen practice, it’s that there is nothing more important than accepting ourselves exactly the way we are. And for better or for worse, I am a person who’s discovered a deep and abiding love for long periods of sitting whilst staring at a wall in the company of friends. I am also a person who wants shortcuts and fantasy and indulgence and kicks of all kinds. A thrill seeker, a wanderer, a wastrel. Can this be OK? I believe it can.

I guess this is my way of giving you an update. I finished my training last month, and spent most of July traveling, visiting family, and regrouping before returning to LA this week to root down here at for the fall and beyond. After having spent much of the past two years in flux, I’m excited to park myself in one place and see what unfolds. If you’re local, come meditate with us in Echo Park! The door is always open, and we have a great, irreverent-but-sincere community of meditators.

Chief on my mind, beyond becoming the bestest lay Zen teacher I can be, include: reconnecting with local friends and collaborators via coffee/hikes/walks, starting a regular mahjong group, hosting an ongoing coffee hang with local LA folks for shit-shooting, mischief-making, and maybe some lite 7-Eleven adulation.

Does any of this sound interesting? Please shoot me a note (just reply to this message) or let me know in the comments.

BTW, I am no longer addicted to Big Gulps. I didn’t ever really think of it as being a problem, and I kinda lost interest. I still get them every now and then, but it’s just not a thing.

Otherwise, here is what I am obsessing over right now:

📻 NTS - A 24/7 radio station (is that what this is called??) out of the UK with excellent playlists and live broadcasts. I don’t have as much time or appetite for my own curation these days and the algorithmic stuff from Spotify never gets me out of my own boxes, so I’ve found this site indispensable for expanding my musical horizons. Plus, I’m in love with their tagline: “Don’t assume.” Brilliant.

🥒 Greek Salads - On our last Zen retreat, Dave made a basic Greek salad that I ate leftovers of for a week. Simple ingredients — cucumbers, feta, tomatoes, red onions, olives, olive oil, lemon juice — perfectly executed. Throw in a couple of soft boiled eggs and a crusty piece of bread and you’ve got an A+ summer meal.

🛏️ Lying in bed and feeling my feelings - I mean this in an emotional way, yes, but I also mean feeling my way around the sensations in my body via a self-guided body scan. I usually do this at night when I am tired and can feel echoes of what happened that day recording themselves in my tissues. Does this sound weird? It really is. I recommend it.

📚 The books of David Mitchell - I read and loved Black Swan Green and Cloud Atlas years ago, and more recently I picked up a copy of The Bone Clocks and devoured it, which led me to pick up a copy The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I am currently still devouring. I love how his books are completely transporting without it feeling forced; somehow you’re just there with an eccentric group of friends in an exotic setting. As an author, he makes taking you to a new world seem easy. It is not.

🎨 This recent cartoon by Dave Cuomo. So good!

That’s all for me this time. I hope whatever you are getting up to this summer, you are letting yourself want what you want and finding pleasure in the everyday.

Thanks for reading, as ever.

😘

Sara

p.s. Tell me your summer indulgence(s) in the comments, or forward this to a friend who needs permission to want what they want.

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Following up on my last post about taking the Bodhisattva Vows, I'm sharing the dharma talk I gave at ’s most recent retreat. In it, I explore this question through the lens of Dasui's Kalpa Fire, a wonderfully dark and slapstick koan about cosmic destruction, three dead teachers, and what happens when we refuse to accept that everything burns in the end.

Through the lens of this ancient story, I share some of my own spiritual autobiography, which was essentially a humbling journey from thinking I could figure out how to do life “correctly” to discovering the relief of being just one speck in the vast fabric of reality. (Isn’t that usually how it goes???)

Note: I think this talk hits much better when you hear it in my actual voice! You can listen to the audio version here on the ACZC podcast.

Dasui's Kalpa Fire

The Koan

A monk asked Dasui, “When the great kalpa fire comes and the universe is burned up into nothing, will all of this be destroyed?”
Dasui said, “It will be destroyed.”
The monk asked, “And we go along with it?”
Dasui said, “We go along with it.”

The monk couldn't accept this, so he went and asked Longji, “When the great kalpa fire comes and the universe is burned up into nothing, will all of this be destroyed?”
Longji said, “It will not be destroyed.”
The monk asked, “How will it not be destroyed?”
Longji said, “It's all just the universe.”

The monk still couldn't accept this, so he went to see Touzi and asked the same question. Touzi went to the altar, lit some incense, and said, “The great Buddha appears!” Then he turned back to the monk and said, “You should go back and apologize to your teachers.”

So the monk went back to see Dasui, but by the time he arrived, Dasui had died. He went back to see Longji, but by the time he arrived, Longji had died. So he went back to see Touzi, but by the time he arrived, Touzi had died too.

The Talk

Hello everyone. We are waist-deep in this retreat, which is about the time I start to wonder what kind of deranged animal signed up for this thing and why they continue to do it. I love Zen retreats—I've done many by now and always look forward to them—but I always remember while I'm in them: oh wait, this is really hard.

This koan has been the focus of my training period, and I want to break down what I think this story is saying to us and how it's shown up for me.

The Know-It-All Monster

When Gyokei (ACZC’s Supporting Teacher) was talking earlier about entering the monastery at 19 and thinking he knew everything, it reminded me: do you ever think about what a monster you would be if you had gotten everything you wanted?

I think about that a lot. There’s a big know-it-all part of me. I remember one teacher in high school who didn’t like me, and I couldn't figure out why until I realized: oh, it's because I'm one of those little know-it-all people. I was a big reader, kind of nerdy, and had lived a lot of life even early on. I thought I knew what I was doing, plus I'd read like four million books.

I had this arrogance, this cockiness balanced with profound insecurity (which I think is still true of me). I had this idea that I could figure out how to do life correctly. And it worked a lot of the time. I sailed through school, was a hard worker, could figure things out. I propelled myself to do cool stuff in the world.

Then I hit my thirties and was gradually more and more horrified to discover that the typical milestones (husband, kids, house, etc.) weren't arriving. You know that cliché where people say “it happens when you're not looking for it”? Well, it just never happened for me. It was very disorienting and humbling.

For a lot of my friends and family, things worked out in mostly traditional ways. In my entire family of nine kids, I'm the only one who didn't get married or have children. I convinced myself that everything was my fault—that I just hadn't done things correctly, hadn't looked for the right kind of men, hadn't forced myself to work the right kind of job. I had very strong narratives about how things should be and how my life wasn't measuring up.

I was drawn to Buddhism and meditation, but I still couldn't let go of how I thought things should be from my family-of-origin story. It was profound self-absorption—really me being like, “Bad things shouldn't happen to me. Bad things should only happen to other people. I am a good person. I have done all the things correctly.”

That's what I mean when I ask, what kind of monster would I be if everything had worked out?

By my late thirties, I had tried so many different things. My refrain at that time was: “No matter what I do, things do not work out the way I want them to. Why do I even bother?” I was incredibly on edge as a human being. My self-trust was very low because I was holding myself to standards that weren't really what I was pursuing in life—this bizarre mismatch.

I had this sense that I was always one move away from completely imploding, really going into collapse mode. I once called my mom in my early thirties, miserable in my corporate PR job, making six figures, and said I was thinking about going back to school, and her response was: “You need to be careful. People are living in tent cities in Sacramento.”

That's the kind of black-and-white thinking that was happening in my life and world.

Breaking Down the Koan

So anyway, this kalpa fire koan—I love it. On one level, I'm like, “Hell yeah, we're all gonna die! Let this thing burn, fuck it.” It's so surprising. You don't expect to read something like this in a spiritual text. On a literary level, it's such an up-ender of expectations, with a slapstick feel I really appreciate.

First Section: Dasui's Response

“A monk asked Dasui, 'When the great kalpa fire comes and the universe is burned up into nothing, will all of this be destroyed?' Dasui said, ‘It will be destroyed.’ The monk asked, ‘And we go along with it?’ Dasui said, ‘We go along with it.’”

This is a very dark passage. The reality is we cannot avoid pain. Things are impermanent. This reminds me of the Flaming Lips song: “Do you realize that everyone you know will die?”

It's devastating. Someday all of this is going to be destroyed, and so will we. Nobody pulls any punches in Buddhism. I like that about it.

Second Section: Longji's Response

“The monk couldn't accept this, so he went and asked Longji... Longji said, ‘It will not be destroyed... It's all just the universe.’”

Now we're moving into the portion of “that's just the universe, that's how it is.” The nature of life is change and impermanence, one of the three seals of Buddhism along with suffering and no-self. You can't get around this. Everything is always in a dynamic process; there's no solidity.

This can be scary, but I also find it such a huge relief. We mostly either want to be in a pleasant state or assume we're going to be in one. When you're operating from this assumption that everything should be good, it's terrifying to think everything’s going to change and we’re going to die.

But one of the delightful things about these teachings is that if you're operating under the assumption that everything’s good or should be good, you’re willfully overlooking the fact that things suck a lot of the time. You're too hot in the zendo during afternoon zazen. The shell of the hard boiled egg you had for breakfast wouldn’t come off. You slept poorly. Your back hurts.

When you tune into that, impermanence is actually kind of great. You might get another hard-boiled egg and it’ll be easy to peel. You’ll rest and your back will feel better. You’ll get out of the zendo and have a nice cool drink of water. It's interesting that we’re always glossing over fully half of our experience because we think it should be the opposite.

When you think about it that way, you can really welcome impermanence. You woke up in a good mood today after a rough week. You've been unemployed for months or years, and you finally got a job. Impermanence can be a relief.

In this section, Longji is saying it’s all just the universe. We can welcome that. We can work with that, and that could be okay too, no matter what we think about it. These two sections look like Longji and Dasui are saying different things, but they're both true. We are going to die, AND everything's totally fine.

Third Section: Touzi's Response

“The monk still couldn’t accept this, so he went to Touzi... Touzi went to the altar, lit some incense, and said, ‘The great Buddha appears!’ Then turned back to the monk and said, ‘You should go back and apologize to your teachers.’”

Touzi is pointing out that it doesn't really matter. We're living right now. Let's light some incense. That's what we have. This is the same move from Dave's creation story yesterday about the Buddha, where the Buddha says, “I don't know any answers. I'm just here to end suffering.” It doesn't really matter why it came about.

This is another huge relief to me. It's beyond my ability to fully understand. I did some narrativizing in this talk, but I can go back and think all the things I want about how my thirties did or didn't turn out—those are just stories. Maybe some are true, maybe some aren’t. A lot of it is beyond me.

When I keep myself at the center of that story—the things I did or failed to do—I’m overlooking something massive: all the causes and conditions and everything else that contributed to that. It’s pointing to the universe being so much bigger than anything we can really understand. No matter what we think about it, things are just the way they are. The mistake we make is thinking they should be any other way.

I come back to that all the time. My version of the spiritual crisis is: I could not accept that. I could not let go. I could not take myself off the hook or just be like, “Okay, the life you’re having, even though it doesn't look how you thought it would look, is still fine.”

That's really what brought me here—lacking some fundamental level of perspective. That's very American, very Western. Main character syndrome, I think people call it now. I'm still working with that.

Also, because I was such a book reader, you can read all the books and think you know what's happening, but you just need reminders all the time. That’s essentially why I started coming to ACZC every week—I’d tried every other way but this way, and I was afraid it didn't work, so I had to go to ACZC every week and sit zazen.

It's an acceptance that I just need to be reminded of all these things and need to be among other people who probably also appreciate the reminders. I've heard Dave say that if he doesn't do zazen for a couple of days, he starts to regress. That's been true for me—putting things in perspective.

I found lots of ways to do that: therapy, walks in the woods, talking to people. All those things are true, but there's something about Zen practice that is different.

Final Section: The Teachers Die

“So the monk went back to see Dasui, but by the time he arrived, Dasui had died. He went back to see Longji, but by the time he arrived, Longji had died. So he went back to see Touzi, but by the time he arrived, Touzi had died too.”

This is the kicker. Doesn't that just track? You go to the mountaintop, you seek out the wisdom, you go out of your way to try and get it all right and find people who can give you the answers, and then they die. You miss them initially, so you want to go back, but they're dead.

This section is saying: life is just right now. There is no going back. I can’t go back and be the person I was who made the choices that led to me not having the things I wanted, or who was caught up in the flow of life in a way that steered me in a different path.

The irony is not lost on me that if I had gotten those things, I would not be here training to be a lay teacher, and I'm absolutely so happy to be here and grateful. Both things are true. All of it’s true.

The Hardest Pill to Swallow

The hardest pill for me to swallow has been the idea that there is no one coming to save you. It’s not that there aren’t life rafts—there are life rafts in terms of practice, community like ACZC, friendships, relationships. You get a great job that you love and it lasts for a long time. But ultimately, you are the one who has to row the boat.

The good news is that we are here to help each other. That's why we do this kind of thing.

What Zen practice has given me is tremendous faith that everything can be okay, even when it’s really bad. And this sense of liberation that it’s not all on me—this pressure that if I just do things correctly, it can all go great. I just don't think that’s how life works.

I feel so much more at home in this world these days. I’m far more aware that nothing exists in a vacuum—everything only exists in relationship to each other.

I don't really have that jagged sense of “shit is about to fall apart” that I used to have—that total lack of self-trust. Not that I don't have my moments, because I certainly do. You need people you can call and be like, “Please remind me that my life is not terrible and we're all about to die.” But it’s more relaxed.

It's like there's a fabric—I'm in a dense fabric of reality. It’s us, it’s the causes and conditions, it’s the culture, it’s the climate, it’s the food. It’s so many things. Having that perspective and the reminder and awareness that all of this is part of the deal, and I'm just one speck in the universe, is a huge relief.

A Different Kind of Ambition

I was pretty ambitious in seeking external goals when I was young—I wanted to hit the milestones, all that. I still feel ambitious in a way, but it's a totally different kind of ambition. The ambition now is: be responsive to life as it is, create things, do interesting projects with people, be there for each other, don't miss the opportunity to field the opportunities that are presented to me right here.

Don't be so focused on looking out for what I think I want that I miss all of these things. I think that was true for me before I found this practice. That’s said, there's a way you tell a story like “before and after,” but I had a pretty great life before all this happened. I had wonderful friends and family, but I couldn't see them and couldn’t appreciate them because I was too focused on the things I didn't have.

I’ve just come into more of a balance—accepting that a lot of conflicting things are true and letting that being okay, and not pushing the ones I didn’t like away. When I think about my earlier self, there was a lot of willfully refusing to accept life as it is.

My Zen practice has taken me to: Can I look at it even if it sucks? And that's a little easier. It's not fun, but it's a lot easier.

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A Note!

I decided to become a Zen teacher because after many years of seeking, it was the thing I did that most freed me from all the most insidious effects of our culture of toxic individualism, while at the same time making me more myself than I have ever been. It is imperfect as all systems are, but to this day I have not found a better one for learning to bushwhack your way to a life that’s truly yours. Turns out humans working together over thousands of years have managed to figure some things out and pass them along. I’m excited to be part of this grand tradition and help share it in the way only I can.

But I’m still doing other things, and I’ll be back soon to talk to you about them.

Thanks for reading, as ever.

😘

Sara

p.s. If this resonated, tap the heart or share it with someone who needs it.

p.p.s. If you’re curious about Zen, I’m giving an Intro to Zen talk on Monday, June 23rd at 7:30 pm PT at in LA, though you can also join via Zoom. All are welcome! We’ll start with 30 minutes of meditation (instruction provided) and then get into it. No need to register; just show up or reply to this email and I’ll share the Zoom link to join.

p.p.p.s. If you liked the koan above, I really enjoyed this essay about it by Dale Wright, who offers a much more literary analysis.

Fire Philosophy: Nietzsche, Zen, and How to Live

Wildfire Zen

Many religious traditions imagine hell as a blazing inferno and moral condemnation as being cast down into this torturous fire. Fire conjures up mental images of suffering in excruciating pain, death by overexposure to intense heat and flame. But we also suffer and die by exposure to fire’s opposite, extreme cold. Hell could have been imagined as a froz…

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a year ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Dale Wright

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But one of the best aspects of my training is that my teacher, Dave Cuomo, is a brilliant writer and poet, and has given me many little assignments to help me reflect on the teachings. Today I’m sharing something I wrote for one of his assignments: to go out and “complete” the Four Bodhisattva Vows—famously impossible—and see what came up in the process. It's good to be back in touch!

1. Beings Are Numberless, I Vow to Free Them

The amazing thing about recovery meetings is they never run out of people to join them. Beings are numberless and so are addictions, which are an obvious if highly flawed way to end suffering, at least for an instant, and, as we know, life is suffering. Addiction will be with us as long as suffering is with us, and that might be a while.

I go to recovery meetings for the same reason I practice Zen and write things on the internet—to feel less bone-crushingly alone. A recovery meeting is a miracle because for one hour we can save each other. In the presence of others who are willing to acknowledge how difficult it is to be a human, and how much pain is involved, we are free. We hold hands and chant the serenity prayer at the end of it. “God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

I go to the recovery meetings to free and get freed. We can’t do it alone. We need each other to create the container so that it can hold us in our efforts.

A man at the meeting on Friday night wearing a ripped black t-shirt and a black baseball cap pulled low over his eyes stroked his moustache as he told us how he’d been in recovery for four years now and it was all going pretty well—he doesn’t want to drink or use most of the time. And still, he said, “The thing I am most often wondering about is, ‘What do?’ I mean really,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing all the time. What do??”

I knew what he meant. I often look around at people and wonder how their agendas are so clear. Always one thing after another, a life that seems to me, the person looking in, like they have it all figured out. Or at least more than I do. It soothes me to know I’m not the only one confused about something that seems to come naturally to so many. What do?? It’s obvious some of the time but less so others. And if you’re not accustomed to numbing out, like those of who attend recovery meetings for our various addictions are, choosing how to spend your time can feel onerous. Some of us work too much or overcommit to some project or another. We conquer one addiction and then seek out new ways of suffering when the old ones aren’t available anymore. And then we figure out how to stamp them out before we move on to another one. I went on the 12 Steppers website and discovered 32 different types of recovery groups, but I’m pretty sure there are far more. New ones spring up all the time.

This is a good thing and a sign of hope, as far as I’m concerned. We may never run out of suffering or addictions but also we’ll never stop trying to help ourselves and each other to escape them.

2. Delusions Are Inexhaustible, I Vow to End Them

I can’t remember the first time I labored under the assumption that a man would rescue me from my life, but I do recall it becoming habitual sometime around junior high. As one of nine children, I was always surrounded by people growing up, but I was so often lonely. I started setting myself apart from the others early on, perhaps because most of my siblings were boys, but also, I don’t know. I felt different. A boyfriend would change that. I would feel less alone and I would feel more validated in being different and special. I wanted to feel special.

A school dance would be coming up and I would think, it’s fine, I’ll have a boyfriend by then. While making plans for vacation, I’d think, it’ll be sweet to miss the boyfriend I’ll have by the time that rolls around. Holidays? Well, I’d assume I’d just be hanging out with my boyfriend.

Sometimes I would actually have a boyfriend. Most of the time I wouldn’t. It didn’t stop me from clinging to the idea that I would. Years and years that went on. When I didn’t have a boyfriend all I could think about was how I needed to have the right boyfriend, and I would think my life sucked and I sucked because I didn’t have one. Only the fucked up thing was that when I did have a boyfriend I would basically be thinking about how he was not the right boyfriend for me! Which would lead me to…break up with the boyfriend. And then the whole dumb cycle would begin again.

My delusions are inexhaustible.

I’ve studied the twelvefold chain of dependent origination and concluded that there is a way out of this particular loop of suffering. I started to get off of it in 2020 when I took a break from dating because I had quit drinking and oh also there was a global pandemic that got in the way of us doing much canoodling with strangers. The past few years of dating had felt like a series of increasingly joyless jumps from rock to rock, with the rocks being men I was not actually interested in but felt like I needed.

How do you spend that many years trapped in the same delusion? I can tell you at length sometime if you’re interested, but it starts with not believing you are enough on your own. Then the pattern reinforces itself: you make well-intentioned but doomed attempts to connect with good men who actually care about you, while pining after ones who don't respect you. Eventually, you see yourself not just as insufficient, but as a menace to the very people trying to make you happy.

For the past five years I’ve been asking myself what it means to enter a relationship from a place of curiosity and desire, not one of desperation and fear, and practicing accordingly. I am no longer deluded about this one aspect of my life, and it feels like a much safer place to be. I don’t assume I will have a boyfriend at any time in the future, but I also don’t assume I won’t. I don’t know. It seems just as likely as not, and that’s about all I can say. Every day is new, and so am I.

3. Dharma Gates Are Boundless, I Vow to Enter Them

The looming specter of my career is making itself known. The end of ango approaches and so does the hard fact of the matter: after a few months of focusing fully on Zen practice and training, I need to start earning money again. Which brings up a wild array of feelings. Curiosity, excitement, dread, anticipation, hope, fear. The conundrum of my career, and how at wit’s end I often am about it all. Me, a person who has had wild swings of fortune, who has been restless and ambitious and confused and conflicted, sometimes very “successful,” sometimes broke, always in motion. Why’s it so hard, I think?

This is a dharma gate, and here I am entering it.

When I arrived in LA on February 28, I was spun up with anxiety about the coming three months and the fact that my plans to keep work coming in during ango had not gone according to plan. I wasn’t broke or anywhere close to it, it just felt that way. I’d been trying a lot of things to earn money in the past two years, and none of them had worked out quite as well as I’d hoped. The writing courses didn’t take off like we wanted them to; the coaching offers undersold.

But once the ango got underway and I gave myself wholeheartedly to practice and study, the pressure alleviated. I had money in the bank. I also earned some in the first month doing work for an old client, and got an unexpected tax return that helped a lot, and my sweet dad sent me helpful cash infusions via Paypal to ensure his girl kept all the wheels in motion. I am incredibly fortunate. I am also incredibly competent, and have never shied away from hard work. I love this about myself.

But thinking about going back out on the market to sell things brings a physical heaviness to my body. My throat constricts, my breathing turns shallow.

What is there to do but stay with the pain, the conditions exactly as they are? I can’t run from them, that never works. What if this, too, can be OK?

I’m just so tired of thinking I have to make things happen. I don’t know how to make things happen. Dharma keeps reminding me: it’s not up to me. It never was, and yet I still feel this pressure. How 21st century, how delusional. How human.

One more week of training and then I’ll find myself back in the hustle, knocking on doors and exploring who I can serve and how I will earn. I expect it will be uncomfortable. I expect I’ll be at turns optimistic and hopeful. I will be tempted to put my head in the sand and turn away from the challenge, to rest in the assumption some opportunity will drop into my lap without me having to do much about it. But even though that might be true, I find myself thinking of the monk asking Master Mayu Baoche why, if the wind is ever present, he is waving his fan. I have to wave the fan.

4. The Buddha Way is Unsurpassable, I Vow to Realize It

I often think about how lucky I was when my friend mentioned that there was a Zen center down the street from my house back in 2018 when I was looking for a new group to sit with. It was by chance that I walked into this place; I hadn’t been looking for Zen specifically, it just happened to be in the neighborhood.

Sometimes I think if I hadn’t found I would have fallen into another tradition—stuck it out at Insight LA or found some other secular meditation teacher’s group to join. But then sometimes I think it’s more likely that I would have kept hopping from place to place and not settling anywhere. I’d have gone to [REDACTED] and found it too stuffy. I’d have gone to [REDACTED] and found it too pretentious. I’d have gone to [REDACTED] and found it too weird. And then I would have grasped around blindly like a hungry ghost all my life, sometimes glimpsing the truth but more often shielding my eyes from it because it didn’t look how I wanted it to.

What a gift, then, that I found a spiritual community that spoke to me in a language I could understand. That put sutras and rituals in a palatable wrapper, interpreted through the lenses of people whose hearts had been just as pulverized as mine, who wanted to believe that there was a way out of suffering but wouldn’t trust one that was just handed to you on a platter. That showed me what I already knew to be true, which was that the only person who could save me was myself, even though it was the last thing I actually wanted to do. It was just that the only thing worse was not doing it, so here I am.

I’ve been a seeker all my life. I tried Catholicism, very earnestly, as a child. I tried books and writing and men and travel and yoga and climbing the corporate ladder and drugs and every other means to transport and lose myself, and I loved and learned something from all of them. But none of them has given me the truth that I’ve found in Zen practice. The sheer perspective and reminder that there is no other way, no other teacher but this very moment. Nothing else that can be trusted or relied upon at all.

How could I not have taken the final Bodhisattva Vow? The Buddha Way is truly unsurpassable, and I do my best to realize it every day. When I’m tired, when I’m disappointed, when I wake up listless and don’t remember why life is worth living — those are the times in particular when returning to the simplicity of the path is most essential.

I can think of no better aim for my life, no better way to spend my time than to find out what this thing we call reality is, to fully experience life exactly as it is. It is not easy, no, but it is simple enough that I can stay true.

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So! That’s where I am. How about you?

Thanks for reading, as ever.

😘

Sara

p.s. If this resonated, like this post or share it with someone who needs it.

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It’s exciting to see experimentation becoming more central to conversations about how we navigate uncertainty. Obviously, I’m biased! But I genuinely believe experiments offer us a powerful alternative to the rigid, linear thinking that keeps us trapped in restrictive patterns. They help us reconnect with curiosity, strengthen our ability to adapt to life’s constantly changing conditions, and embrace a way of living that’s more aligned with human nature.

I loved our conversation, and I hope you will too.

SC: About a year and a half ago, I started developing a program called The Fire Inside, which is focused entirely around moving forward in life through conducting experiments. This was inspired by an early experience of mine, getting stumped in a job interview by the question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” At the time I was 21 or 22, ambitious but unsure, because I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. I had always learned best through doing things.

I loved reading your book, and I’m curious to hear how you came to embrace this idea of experimenting yourself. Could you talk a bit about what led you to dive into this topic?

ALC: I love how you mentioned learning by doing, because that’s how I loved learning as a kid. But somewhere along the way in my career, I decided that I needed to have a clear plan, a clear vision, and just execute on that. That’s how I approached my work for half my life. I was focused on being successful according to traditional definitions: climbing the corporate ladder, getting the next promotion, and I was pretty good at it.

But at some point, I realized something felt wrong. Even though from the outside I appeared very successful, I felt empty on the inside. That’s when I started questioning the linear path I’d been on. Eventually, I quit my job at Google to join a startup. When that startup didn’t work out, for the first time in my life, I found myself completely lost—without a clear plan, vision, or even a sense of what my next steps should look like.

That experience opened the door for me to start experimenting and exploring. I began asking myself what I wanted to learn about, even if nobody was watching and even if traditional success wasn’t part of the equation. For me, that had always been the brain—why we think the way we think and feel the way we feel. So, I decided to go back to university, to graduate school, to study neuroscience. While doing that, I chose to learn publicly. I started a newsletter, writing every week about a topic I’d just discovered, translating scientific insights into practical use cases. That newsletter eventually became a business. I’ve now been writing it for about five years—it’s called Ness Labs.

I finished my graduate studies and now have a PhD in neuroscience. And today, I actually don’t know exactly where I’m going—and it feels great.

It's refreshing to hear you embrace that uncertainty, especially after accomplishing something as significant as publishing a book. Can you walk us through your approach to experiments, and how others might begin?

Yeah, that’s exactly why I shared these two chapters from my life—the first one being very linear and success-oriented, and the second one more exploratory and experimental. This contrast forms the basis of my book and this approach to experimenting.

Instead of clinging to a rigid vision of success, which tends to be binary—either you achieve it or you don’t—you become more like the scientist of your own life. Rather than focusing on a specific outcome, you start with a hypothesis or a research question. From there, you gather data just like a scientist would. You’re not trying to force a particular result. In fact, if a scientist already knew the outcome, running an experiment would be pointless—it would just be a waste of time and energy.

With this experimental approach, you genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen. But you feel curious, so you design your experiment, run it, collect data, and then make informed decisions. Afterward, you can ask yourself: Do I enjoy this? Should I continue down this path? Is it working? Maybe you find that it just needs a few tweaks—perhaps it’s promising but not yet ideal, so you iterate and keep improving it. Or, equally valid, you might discover that you hate it and decide to stop altogether. But now your decision is backed by real data that you’ve collected yourself.

It’s a completely different mental model. The traditional approach is linear, like climbing a ladder. This method, on the other hand, is cyclical—based on repeated cycles of experimentation. You trust that with each cycle, each loop of experimentation, you’ll evolve and grow, even though the path ahead isn’t clearly mapped out.

One thing that really struck me in the book is how experiments remove the pass/fail binary—everything becomes data collection. In my own coaching work, I've found this mindset shift can be transformative for clients. But I've also encountered skepticism, particularly from those who believe success requires ‘locking in’ and grinding toward big goals. How do you address that resistance?

I kind of want to question the assumption that you cannot lock in and go hard on an experiment, if that's what you enjoy.

I think it's worth asking why we're drawn to grinding, but I personally have found joy sometimes in going really hard on something when I'm very focused and excited about the project. I don't think that's necessarily bad in and of itself; you can do that with an experiment.

An experiment is a commitment to curiosity, and in that phrase there's commitment. And so you can say for the next month, every morning I'm going to sit down for an hour, and I'm going to write. And at the end of the experiment I'm going to look at the data I collected, and I'm going to decide whether I want to keep going, whether I want to decrease the scope of the experiment. Maybe one hour was too ambitious. Maybe let's just do 20 min every morning, or that felt so easy that it gave me so much energy. For the rest of the day I felt creative. I had fun. Let's actually ramp it up.

And what's interesting is that when you keep on experimenting like this, you might figure out things in life that you enjoy doing, that other people might look at and say, "How can you do this thing every morning like that? Sounds really hard. You must be grinding so hard and hustling to be able to do this." And you look at them and say, “No, actually, I'm having the best time. I'm really enjoying this.” This is how I feel about my newsletter— a lot of people say, “I can't believe you've managed to send this every single week for the past few years. It must be so hard to stay consistent and committed to this.”

That's not how it feels at all to me. I'm so excited every Thursday when I open my Google Doc and start typing.

So that's the first answer I would give, which is going hard and being hyper-focused on something is not incompatible with experimenting. An experiment is really just about defining an action and repeating it for a set duration, so you can collect enough data that you know how you want to proceed.

And the second part is that experiments can be as big or small as you want them to be. I called my book Tiny Experiments, because we do tend to have a maximalist brain when we want to go with the biggest, most ambitious version of it, but they can be very small as well, and you can play with that, too. That is part of experimenting. And so you can decide to go really hard and then say, actually, you know, I'm going to go for a smaller version or start small and then decide to become more ambitious.

It's your experiment. You decide on the parameters, and these parameters can change.

Your enthusiasm is contagious. In the book, you talk about making a ‘pact’ with yourself about the duration of an experiment, like meditating for 15 minutes daily for 30 days. Is there a minimum length you'd recommend for these experimental periods?

This is highly dependent on the nature of the action that you choose. Obviously, if you're going to write a weekly newsletter and you design your pact, and it's just one week, that is not going to work.

It's inspired by the scientific method, similar to how a scientist decides on the number of trials before they start the experiment. What you want to make sure of is that you're going to complete the experiment and you're going to collect enough data. That's what you should have in mind when you decide on the duration. If you're trying to see if going to bed at the same time every night helps you sleep better, maybe a week or two is enough to start seeing some change, because you're going to implement this every day. You might say, "I'm going to go to bed every evening at the same time for the next two weeks, and then I'm going to look at the data."

So I would really just look at the action itself and try to pick a length that feels reasonable, based on the actual action. Again, keeping in mind that you're not trying to achieve a certain outcome here. The only thing you're trying to do is complete the experiment, collect the data so you can look at it and decide whether you want to keep going, tweak it, or stop it.

I'd like to come back to something you mentioned about finding joy in experiments. In my experience, there's often resistance to the idea that personal growth should be enjoyable—perhaps stemming from America's puritanical relationship with pleasure and our culture of grinding. Have you encountered similar pushback?

I think experiments are fun, and they do make it more fun. But if you want to conduct your experiments very seriously, you can. It is not an intrinsic part of them. What they give you is more freedom in the sense that you're not trying to stick to a rigid plan.

They also open more doors for opportunities that you might not have imagined. Because as I said, you don't know what you don't know. So when you experiment, you will discover new ways of doing things, you will connect with more people, you will learn more about yourself as well, and so you will discover new paths that might not have been part of the realm of possible for you before you started experimenting.

And a lot of people find that to be more fun, which is great. But then some people think that experimenting is this very floaty thing where you just follow your heart and see what happens. But again, it's based on the scientific method, so it's actually pretty structured.

The beauty of designing experiments—especially when you clearly define your parameters—is that it works equally well for people who tend to overthink or stick rigidly to plans. An experiment explicitly says, “This is the thing I’m going to try for this set duration, and afterward I’ll look at the data.” It encourages both curiosity and structure. You get to become a bit more exploratory and curious while still having a framework that they can apply and just trust the process. They know that they're going to grow as long as they complete the experiment and they analyze the data.

One of the parts of the book I really like is when you talked about the cognitive scripts that we run that might prevent us from doing things this way. Can you speak briefly to those?

Cognitive scripts are a fascinating psychological phenomenon that was discovered in the late seventies. There was a seminal study that was conducted in 1979, where researchers discovered that if you place people in similar situations they tend to act in very similar ways.

So, for example, if we go to the doctor, we all know that we sit down in the waiting room and we wait there. Then someone calls our name. We go to the doctor's office, and then they might ask us to undress and have a look at whatever is wrong.

If the doctor walked into the waiting room and told us to get undressed right here in front of everybody, we would feel like something's off.

And that's because we're all following that same script. We all know what the script is supposed to look like, and the steps we're supposed to go through when we go to the doctor.That's very helpful for lots of situations.

The issue is that once they discovered these cognitive scripts, they realized that we were following them in virtually every area of our lives. We follow cognitive scripts when we make decisions in our careers, in our relationships, in books we want to read. We use them everywhere.

They can be very helpful when it comes to making quick decisions. You don't want to overthink everything. Standing in front of a door, you don't need to contemplate how to open it. So having some automatic responses is not necessarily a bad thing, but it becomes an issue when we follow these scripts in areas of our life that are quite important and that are going to have an impact on the direction of our life in general.

In the book I recommend noticing those scripts and questioning the ones that are driving some of your most important decisions, and I share three of the most insidious scripts—the ones that a lot of us follow.

The first one is called the sequel script. That's the one where we feel like whatever decision we make today needs to make sense based on the decisions we made in the past. It needs to make sense in terms of having a nice narrative, just like in a sequel movie, where obviously we want the story in the second movie to make sense based on the story from the first movie.

This is the kind of script a lot of people follow when they only explore careers that make sense based on what they studied in university. They don't consider other options at all; it needs to make sense.

The second script is called the crowd pleaser script, that's the one we follow when we put the happiness of other people around us above our own happiness. We want people around us to be happy with our decisions. These people could be our parents or our spouse or our friends or our colleagues. Whatever decisions we make, we want people to feel that it makes sense. ("That's such a good decision, we're proud of you, we're happy for you.")

The last script is the Hollywood script—the one where we chase dramatic impact. It's a very popular script.

This is the one where we make decisions feeling like whatever we do in life needs to be big, it needs to be ambitious, it needs to make an impact.

Because of that, we try to always follow paths that are aligned with what we think our passion should be—something that should be extremely exciting. Because of that, we ignore possibilities where it might be something we're a little bit curious about, but we don't know yet if that's going to be big or if that's going to have a big impact. We don't know yet. So we shut those doors down because we don't feel like that's going to be impactful enough.

I want to ask about another insight from your book: your critique of SMART goals. You point out how they depend on fixed conditions, but someone setting a goal in January 2025 is already facing a dramatically different world than they imagined.

Zooming out, do you see this type of approach replacing some of the traditional planning and strategy that we see in business culture and how most of the white-collar world operates? I'm curious if you thought at all about how adopting this approach might impact the way that we do business and the way that we work together and collaborate.

At a fundamental level, this is an approach that is designed to work with uncertainty. Not necessarily to get rid of it, which is impossible, especially in today's world. But instead, accepting that the conditions are going to change, the players are going to change, the rules are going to change. And so how can you design systems where this is actually welcome and something you can work with?

Obviously, there are areas of a business where maybe you do need to have this long-term planning, and it can be really helpful, but making sure that there's enough space for experimentation, and also making sure there is enough wiggle room if things change to a point where the plans we made actually don't make sense anymore.

A lot of our current systems in business, the reaction that we have is that everybody's panicking when that happens because the systems were not designed to be able to withstand that kind of uncertainty and that kind of change.

If from the get-go, you say, “This is our plan, and this is a best case scenario if nothing changes. But we know things are going to change.” Then you can say, “Here is also a little internal lab of experiments that we're going to keep running on the side, and also allow ourselves to change the plans as we go.” We can be able to tweak things, iterate, or stop something altogether—stop a campaign if it's not working because the situation has changed so much that it's actually not making sense anymore.

By adopting this experimental mindset, whenever things change and there's higher uncertainty, the reaction is not to panic, but to say, “Okay. Everything changed as expected. So how can we experiment and figure out a new way of doing things?”

I'll be curious to watch how your work unfolds and the effect this book has on the world. I am super appreciative of the time and energy you've spent on this topic for all of us!

Thanks so much for having me.

You can buy Anne-Laure’s book here.

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That’s all for me this time. Next time I’ll be back with some insights from my own latest experiment—deepening my Zen practice and training as a teacher in this ancient tradition.

Thanks for reading, as ever.

😘

Sara

p.s. If this resonated, like this post or share it with someone who needs it.

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Let's talk about fire. Not as a metaphor for transformation or an instrument of ritual—I mean actual flames. The kind that require wood and kindling and knowledge and patience. The kind you have to build yourself.

I’m a minor pyromanic who’s spent countless hours fire-tending, and you know what? It's a practice that will teach you everything you need to know about personal power, if you're willing to pay attention. You provide the fuel, you make the decisions about how and when to feed it, you work with whatever the ambient conditions are. But even though the reins are in your hands, it’s not about control. It's about learning to read the elements and respond to what's actually happening, not what you wish would happen.

The personal growth world is full of techniques for forcing our desired future into being. Vision boards. Affirmations. Perfect morning routines. Wade out into the internet and you'll see people talking about manifesting cars, houses, money, relationships. There are entire platforms devoted to it. In many ways, it's just another way we farm out our agency—placing our power in the hands of the universe rather than taking responsibility for building the life we want. And look, I love crystals. I love tarot cards and oracle decks and sound baths and so many other affectations of manifestation culture. I also believe deeply that there are far greater forces at work than what you and I can perceive.

But after years of practice, I've learned something radical: The deepest transformations don't come from pushing harder or visualizing harder or manifesting harder. They come from treating each quiet whisper of our hearts as an invitation to experiment and discover what's actually true for us.

This is the opposite of everything we've been taught. Instead of willing ourselves into a predetermined future, we follow the breadcrumbs of our curiosity. Instead of forcing ourselves to be who we think we should be, we get quiet and notice who we already are. Instead of manifesting our dreams, we build them—one small, brave step at a time.

I see this truth confirmed again and again in my work. The women I work with typically start small, with things like:

• Carving out an hour for yoga twice a week

• Inviting an acquaintance to hang out

• Releasing themselves from one obligation they always resent

And then they watch. What lights them up? What feels like relief? What wants to grow naturally? Their bodies become compasses. Their energy becomes data. Their curiosity becomes the path forward.

Growing up with six brothers, I learned early on that I couldn't compete with them in certain areas. I could match their wit and do many of the things they did, but when it came to strength, I just couldn't match them. This reality shaped my understanding of power in profound ways.

Somewhere in the wake of second-wave feminism, we took a wrong turn in how we think about female power. While masculine and feminine energies exist in everyone regardless of gender, in our rush to prove women's worth, we started measuring it against traditionally masculine ideals—physical strength, dominance, the ability to overpower others.

Look at our cultural heroines: women warriors, corporate titans, characters who prove their worth by beating men at their own game. But this fixation on matching masculine power obscures something vital: feminine power operates by entirely different principles. Where masculine energy excels at forcing outcomes through sheer will, feminine power thrives on reading subtle cues, adapting to changing conditions, and allowing solutions to emerge organically. Think of how water shapes landscapes not through force, but through persistent, responsive movement. Or how the most effective leaders often succeed not by dominating, but by fostering conditions where their teams can flourish.

I've spent my entire life trying to figure out how to be a woman in the world. These are the questions I ask: What does feminine influence truly look like? Who wields it effectively, and is it ever truly visible? What are we uniquely suited to do that men generally aren't? How can we leverage this for the benefit of all, not just ourselves?

There came a point in my early 30s when I looked at women 10, 15, or 20 years down the road in my career and thought, “I want no part of that.” The conventional path seemed like a way to deny the demands of my body and treat myself like a machine—an approach better suited to the biological rhythms of men. So instead, I got curious about how to do that given my own rhythms.

Which brings me back to fire. Instead of trying to manifest perfectly conjured blazes, what if we focused on learning to kindle them from the spark? My own journey through working on deeply personal projects like The Fire Inside, Angel City Zen Center, and Tiny Revolutions has been exactly this: a series of experiments in discovering what feeds my fire, where and when I burn brightest, and how to protect that energy once I find it.

Experimentation is more powerful than manifestation because it helps us discover what truly lights us up. It teaches us to identify what snuffs our fire, what to shield ourselves from, and most importantly, how to build sustainable lives instead of forcing ourselves to conform to systems and structures that burn us out.

This is why Steve Jobs famously said you can't connect the dots looking forward —you can only connect them looking backward. Each spark of curiosity we follow becomes part of a larger pattern that only reveals itself with time. The key is trusting that these seemingly random explorations will eventually connect into something meaningful. But you have to take the steps first. You have to trust the process of discovery more than the illusion of control.

To start your own experimentation practice, begin with these three steps:

1. Notice your energy patterns: Track when you feel most alive and engaged versus depleted. What activities, people, or environments consistently light you up?

2. Create small laboratories: Choose one area of your life—work, relationships, creativity—and design little experiments. Maybe it’s trying a new meeting format, setting a boundary, or exploring a different creative medium. The key is to keep the stakes low and your curiosity high.

3. Document and reflect: Keep notes on what you try and how it feels. Look for patterns in what works and what doesn't. Let these insights guide your next experiments.

The beauty of this approach is that it removes the pressure of getting it “right.” There are no failed experiments, only data points guiding you toward your own unique path.

This spring, while training as a lay teacher at Angel City Zen Center, I'm following my own curiosity. What will happen when I am endorsed to introduce more people to these ancient teachings and help them apply them to our very modern times?

Alongside that process, I'm running a new iteration of The Fire Inside—a 90-day container for women ready to trade manifestation for experimentation. Force for flow. Someone else's version of success for honoring their own wild intuitions and desires.

Because here's what I know in my bones: You don't need to manifest a perfect future. You only need to trust the fire inside you—that ancient knowing that flickers and glows of its own accord, waiting for you to tend it. Your desires aren't destinations to reach. They’re clues that lead you home to yourself.

The true reward isn't found in manifesting some idealized version of our lives. It's in learning to tend carefully to the life we have, one careful experiment at a time. Because the world needs your particular kind of fire—not some cookie-cutter version, but the one only you can build. The one that lights up not only you, but the exact people who need your warmth.

As I was saying!

For the past year, I’ve been running The Fire Inside workshops, refining a framework that helps women move from paralysis into action through conducting small experiments.

It works. And given everything happening in the world right now, I believe we need more women out there doing the things that matter—both for themselves and for their communities.

While I’m in lay teacher training at Angel City Zen Center this spring (my own experiment in moving from thinking to doing), I’m offering a 90-day version of this program. We’ll start on March 1st with just 10 women.

It’s designed to help you move forward in some area of your life—not by figuring everything out first, but by experimenting your way into what feels right.

You can check out all the details here.

This is a deeply feminine way of operating: not rigid or linear, not obsessed with control. It’s iterative, cyclical, intuitive—responsive to the world as it unfolds.

If something in you is curious, I’d love to chat. The link above will let you book a call directly. (You can also just reply to this email with questions.) I’ve got five spots remaining as of this writing.

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Thanks for reading, as ever. Last time I invited you to run some experiments of your own, so I’m curious: How are they going?

😘

Sara

p.s. If this resonated, like this post or share it with someone who needs it.

p.p.s.

January delivered me a bootprint to the gut in the form of the flu, which descended right around the 20th, and then—rudely!!!—stuck around for a good 10 days or so. I hated it! I’m a huge baby about being sick. I do not enjoy being incapacitated. I was never fully knocked out—I just felt like garbage and didn’t have energy to do anything more active than flop about the house.

It was probably exactly what I needed. I didn’t slow down all that much over the holidays and I didn’t do any kind of year end retrospective, which I generally like to do. So this was the universe’s way of delivering me ample time to ponder the State of Things.

The good thing about pondering the State of Things while you are tired and cranky is that it removes the usual rose tinted lens from the process. That probably sounds bad, but I mean it in the best possible way. I had a year of some big swings, and I was able to get real with myself about how they’ve shaken out.

One of my big swings was in introducing The Fire Inside, my group coaching program for women, last fall. I’d been thinking about the program in one way or another for years, so this was huge.

I wrote about it here, but the gist is that it was a comprehensive program designed to help you discover what you want and go after it through the practice of conducting experiments, assessing how they went, and then using that data to determine how to move forward.

The thing I didn’t talk about was how The Fire Inside itself was an experiment for me. I wanted to see how I liked working with all women, how the facilitations I designed performed, and, most of all, what kinds of results the women in the program experienced. Well, the first cohort kicked off in November, and now I have three months of data. So I’m sharing what I’ve learned—not just about the program, but about what it really takes to move forward.

Here's the thing about change: we often make it way more complicated than it needs to be. I know I did. When I first designed The Fire Inside, I packed it full of content, training sessions, one-on-one calls—the works. I felt this pressure to deliver ALL THE THINGS, as if more structure and coaching would somehow guarantee transformation.

But you know what actually created the biggest shifts? The women in the group committing to the simple act of trying something new. Any time someone took even a tiny step forward—especially one that scared them a little—the energy would shift. Suddenly we weren't just talking about change; we were watching it happen in real time.

One woman found a part time job in a new industry after leaving a big corporate career. Another committed to working with a financial adviser to assess retirement options, a decision she’d been putting off for years. A third finally started blocking out time for yoga and her creative practice in the middle of a busy mom life.

These didn’t come from making giant leaps. They started with small experiments, little probes into possible futures. But they created momentum that no amount of analysis or planning could match.

*

I also learned something about myself as a facilitator: I don't have to hold it all. In fact, the magic often happened when I got out of the way and let the group wisdom emerge. These women—thoughtful, competent, self-aware women who knew they couldn't go back to their old ways but weren't quite sure how to move forward—had so much to offer each other.

My job wasn't to micromanage their progress or have all the answers. It was to create a space where experimentation felt safe, where “failure” was just another form of data, and where small steps forward were noted and celebrated.

The conversations were rich, sometimes raw, often surprising. We talked about the fear of letting go of old identities, the challenge of putting ourselves first after years of pleasing and caring for others, the excitement and terror of following an inner calling that doesn't make sense on paper.

*

What I find most fascinating is how the urgency of real-time experience amplifies everything. When we're all navigating change together—trying new things, stepping into uncertainty with as much grace as we can muster—it creates a special kind of momentum. There's something powerful about knowing we're not alone in our experiments.

That's the heart of what I've learned: transformation doesn't require complex frameworks or exhaustive analysis. It requires action, witness, and the courage to keep going even when we're not sure where it's leading.

*

As I prepare for the next iteration of The Fire Inside (more on that soon), I'm letting these lessons guide me. The program is becoming simpler, more focused on action than analysis, more about creating momentum than perfect understanding.

Because isn’t that what Tiny Revolutions has always been about? A little bit every day over time. Small experiments that lead to big shifts. The courage to try something new, even if—especially if—we're not sure how it will turn out.

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A Tiny Invitation

Is there a small experiment that is calling to you today? Make it small enough that you’ll do it, but meaningful enough that you’ll do it. And then report back on what you find.

Thanks for being here, as ever. If I leave you with nothing else, it’s this: the world may be on fire, but we do have options!! Please don’t lose faith.

😘

Sara

p.s. If this resonated, like this post or share it with someone who needs it.

p.p.s. Here’s some stuff from the old moodboard, which I am assembling over at Sublime.app. Do you use Sublime? It’s great!!

Here we are, a shiny new year, and already it’s feeling intense. My friends and family in wildfire-ravaged LA are on my mind as I write this. What a brutal start to 2025!

For the rest of us, it seems the usual existential questions apply. How will we live sanely in an increasingly chaotic world?

It’s the question that has always been at the heart of this newsletter. December was a blur, but between writing “F*ck Happiness” and The Fire Inside Manifesto, it seems lately I’ve been ping-ponging between frustration and anger and a deep love and hopefulness for the world. It’s not exactly been a comfortable place to be, but when I step back and think about it, I know that’s a good thing. Necessary even. Change comes from discomfort.

In the manifesto I wrote about how our messy, irrational, deeply human qualities are becoming more precious, not less, in the age of AI. Writing and sharing that piece felt really powerful, but what good is a manifesto if you don’t put it into practice?

So, in that spirit, I’m kicking off the year with two free workshops to help spark action—my action leading to your action. Let’s get up to some shit together this year!

1. For women:
   Tiny Brave Moves: Making 2025 Changes That Actually Stick.

   Fuck resolutions — there’s a reason most of us give up on them. Instead, we're going to explore how to use play, pleasure, and tiny experiments as our compass for creating lasting change.

   Wednesday, January 15 | 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM EST

   Register here

2. For everyone:
   Defiantly Human: Writing That Stands Out in an AI World.

   Let’s combat AI slop by uncovering what you really want to say and creating some experiments that give you the confidence to say it.
   Tuesday, January 21 | 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM EST

   Register here

As I wrote in the manifesto, “The future belongs to those who dare to tend their inner fire.” Consider this your invitation to come tend yours with me.

Thanks for being here, as ever.

😘

Sara

Subscribe now

p.s. Say something spicy in the comments. God knows we all need the entertainment.

p.p.s. Share this with someone who someone who wants to shake things up this year.

p.p.p.s. Here are some quotes that have inspired me lately.

“He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.”

– Jean-Luc Godard

“To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything, except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.”

—David Whyte

“Nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

This is more difficult, because there is no zeitgeist to read, no template to follow, no mask to wear. Set aside what your friends expect, what your parents demand, what your acquaintances require. Set aside the messages this culture sends, through its advertising, its entertainment, its disdain and its disapproval, about how you should behave.

Set aside the old traditional notion of female as nurturer and male as leader; set aside, too, the new traditional notions of female as superwoman and male as oppressor. Begin with that most terrifying of all things, a clean slate. Then look, every day, at the choices you are making, and when you ask yourself why you are making them, find this answer: for me, for me. Because they are who and what I am, and mean to be.”

— Anna Quindlen

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The Fire Inside Manifesto

(It's time to BURN)

The Revelation

The machines aren’t just coming; they’re challenging us to rediscover our humanity.

As artificial intelligence reshapes the world, it offers a mirror, revealing the beauty and depth of what it means to be alive. The machines are mastering tasks we once thought impossible, and in doing so, they're forcing us to remember a startling truth: we’ve never been purely rational beings. Our greatest magic has always emerged from somewhere darker and more mysterious.

This is both terrifying and liberating. We can no longer hide behind our carefully constructed masks. And why should we? The inexplicable obsessions, irrational hungers, and wild impulses we’ve been taught to repress are becoming our salvation.

Tending the fire that burns in each of us is our path forward.

The Body's Wisdom Returns

As the cold empire of technology expands, our bodies invite us to reclaim their ancient intelligence.

Our bodies know. Before thought, before reason, before words can form, they know. You feel it in the clench of the gut, the tightening of the throat, the deep ringing in the bones when we recognize the truth. We are each of us flesh-and-blood prophets, receiving messages from the oracles of our cells.

This is wisdom older than language, and it speaks to us through sensation. The way we instinctively recoil when danger is near. The mysterious pull toward certain people and ideas. The rejection of paths that look perfect on paper but just don’t feel right.

These inexplicable truths beckon us deeper into the mystery of our own experience.

Into the Unknown

What was once the domain of mystics and wounded healers now beckons to us all. As we see through our comfortable illusions of rationality, we can no longer pretend that inner work is optional or reserved for the few.

But here’s the beautiful twist: this journey does not demand tragedy as its price of admission. The great adventure of self-discovery is becoming the path we must all walk. Not with heavy solemnity, but with curiosity and playfulness.

Each feeling becomes a clue, each desire a compass point, each moment of confusion an invitation to explore. As we learn to listen to our desires and take what lives inside us seriously, we find that transformation doesn't have to be born of crisis. It can emerge from wonder, from play, from the simple courage to start asking “what if?” and follow where it leads.

The Channel Opens

Creation isn't something we do; it’s what the universe does through us when we get out of our own way.

Our work begins in the uncertain moment when we follow an inkling we don't yet understand. When we pursue an idea that makes no sense by any rational measure. When we trust the whisper that says “this matters” even though we can't explain why.

Our flashes of intuition and deep inner knowing are innate guides into the magical, miraculous realm of the imagination. And as these channels open wider, they lead us naturally toward each other.

The Spaces Between

Human connection isn’t about efficiency; it’s about depth, recognition, and the mysterious lure of chemistry. As we discover our full complexity, we find that relationships are gateways to unprecedented possibility.

This is how the fire spreads: through the recognition of our profound interdependence, and all the ways we shape each other and the world around us.

We have before us an extraordinary opportunity: to explore the living web of consciousness that exists in the spaces between us, unlocking deeper ways of working, creating, and dreaming together.

The Threshold

We stand at the precipice of a new age, poised to explore the frontier of our own nature, more vast and unknowable than we've ever dared to admit. The universe itself is evolving through us. We are awakening to what we've always been: conscious channels for the creative intelligence of the cosmos.

The fire already burns inside each of us. The future belongs to those who dare to tend it: who choose to listen deeply, create boldly, and connect authentically. Who trust the wisdom of their bodies and follow the whispers of their intuition. Who gather in circles of shared imagination and collective dreaming.

We are its children. We are its fuel. We are its future.

The time for hiding is over.

It’s time to BURN.

The Kindling

In the spirit of recognizing other fire tenders, here are some contemporary writers and thinkers on Substack who’ve influenced me, and whose work has served as a reference point for this manifesto:

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Go read them!

There are so many others to cite. The ones who spring to mind immediately are Audre Lord, Esther Perel, Charlotte Joko Beck, Joan Didion, Lauren Groff, and Pema Chodron. But I could go on for days.

Also: thank you to my dear friends and editors who reviewed drafts of this piece: Alex Bruehl, Caity Graves, , , and . We all need collaborators and I am graced with great ones.

How I’m tending my fire in 2025

I'm heading into the new year feeling like none of us have any time to waste. It is not enough to feel things deeply or to have good intentions — progress requires action.

Here are three ways I’m helping others bring this work to life, and ways you can join me:

1. Tap into desire and experiment your way into a life you’re excited about through my group coaching program for women, The Fire Inside.

2. Cultivate and amplify your most unique, human, distinct voice — and your most ambitious work — through workshops and coaching for writers (more about that to come).

3. Ground yourself in ancient wisdom through the practice of Zen Buddhism at , where I’m training to be a lay teacher. I’ve found this practice instrumental in discerning what I have to offer the world, and removing the fetters that prevent me from acting upon it.

I’ll be hosting some free workshops soon to explore these ideas in action. Stay tuned for details and be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already.

Subscribe now

Thanks for being here, as ever. If this resonated, please like this post or share it with someone who needs it. These are not times to sit idly by.

😘

Sara

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p.s. More kindling:

Is it the stars, the internet’s obsession with a murderer, or the naming of a federal agency after a memecoin? Maybe it’s the singularity creeping ever closer? My late 40s body reconfiguring itself and fucking with my head? Something else entirely? Whatever the cause, I’ve been in a jagged mood all week.

Every time I’ve sat down to do something constructive, I find I'm so agitated I'm ready to give up before I even start. But as I sit with this restlessness, turning it over and trying to find something redeemable about it, I’ve had a revelation: This is a good thing! Because this state of supreme irritation has helped me get crystal clear about something vital: we need to talk about our culture’s obsession with feeling good all the time.

This state of agitation isn't new to me, and after years of fighting it, I've come to a counterintuitive realization: maybe it's not something to be fixed. Maybe these uncomfortable states are actually trying to tell me something important.

I've lost countless hours to this squirrelly feeling. Days when I wake up uncertain, disconnected from my sense of purpose, struggling to remember what I’m doing here. And while I'd call myself happy overall, getting there is a daily practice, not a default state. But I have to say, some of my best ideas, my most necessary changes, have come from exactly these periods of unbearable agitation. It's like my system knows something needs to shift before my conscious mind catches up, and all I can do is try to listen until the next right thing to do becomes clear. Yet in our “optimize everything” culture, this truth rarely gets told.

I've been here enough times to recognize the pattern. I wrote about it in 2021 in a piece called “Diary of a Meltdown,” breaking down exactly what happens when I get into one of these spirals. What's changed since then isn't the spiral itself; it's my understanding of what it's good for, and why these states might be exactly what we need to experience.

Take this very newsletter. It was born of a particularly dark period of both personal and professional frustration and disorientation. I'd walked away from a startup I'd poured a lot of time and energy into, and I felt like absolute garbage. Yet those feelings weren't obstacles to creation. They were actually fuel. That crushing sense of failure after leaving the startup didn't just make me feel bad, it pulverized everything I thought I knew about success and fulfillment. The resulting reckoning and restlessness pushed me to create something entirely new, something that felt far more alive and true to who I really was.

This process of creative destruction isn't unique to my story. Contrary to what the wellness industrial complex would have you believe, the real work isn't what you see on social media. It's in the messy, unglamorous business of wrestling with inner demons, forcing yourself to move when you feel paralyzed, and sometimes just white-knuckling it until bedtime. These days I feel like my main job is maintaining my mental state so I can actually show up for my obligations and push myself to try the new shit I want to do. Which, in my case, takes a lot of work.

What I've come to understand is that “negative” states aren't the enemy. As awful as they feel, they're not something to be eliminated or optimized away. They're signals. Navigation points. Being in a heightened state of anxiety is not a character defect, it's more like a compass. And if anxiety can be a compass, maybe it’s time to completely reframe how we think about feeling bad.

Let's suppose for a moment that other ways of being are not just OK, but DESIRABLE. What if instead of waking up refreshed and starting every day with perfectly curated mornings and spotless emotional clarity, there's benefit to being an anxious, cranky, fearful, jittery wreck some days? What if we start recognizing that the jagged edges and rough mornings aren’t signs of failure, but essential features of fully lived life? After all, isn't it our discontent with the absolute state of things that drives us to make the changes we need to make in our own lives?

As far as I can tell, this pattern repeats throughout history. The suffragettes’ fury at their lack of representation, MLK’s dissatisfaction with the white supremacist status quo, the outrage of pre-union factory workers risking their lives in unsafe conditions. Their emotions weren’t distractions to be soothed with meditation apps or dietary changes. They were born from the raw, combustible energy of dissatisfaction, that uncomfortable but essential force that powers transformation, both personal and collective.

Here is the hill I am prepared to die on: we as a culture have to stop believing that the goal is to eliminate discomfort. It’s time to dig deeper and learn to use these states rather than be used by them. To recognize that sometimes feeling like shit is a feature, not a bug.

Is it so bad to feel the weight of the world? Is it so bad to let it get to you sometimes? Is it so bad to get off track and feel like retreating to a salt cave indefinitely? Don't all these things just help propel us and/or get back on track?

Let me be clear: I've been exercising regularly my entire adult life. I've logged hundreds if not thousands of hours on the meditation cushion and counting. I am incredibly well hydrated! I'm not writing this from some place of resistance to developing healthy habits. I’m writing this as someone who’s done the work and still wakes up some days feeling like I want to burn this motherfucker down. And honestly, I think part of that is because we’re living in a time between worlds. The old systems that have held us for so long are in a slow process of disintegration, and the new ones haven’t fully emerged yet. It’s scary, heartbreaking, infuriating, and so many other things.

But I feel this way because I’m so deeply invested in this place. I haven’t told myself some story that we can just move to Mars when it gets too hot. I’m not here to give up on this world or its people, flawed as they are. These jagged, restless feelings aren’t just mine, they’re the growing pains of something bigger, the friction of an old world giving way to something new. And I don’t think the weight of all that is something we’re supposed to eliminate. I think it’s something we’re supposed to bear, to hold, and to transform.

True wellness isn't about feeling good all the time. It's about having the capacity to feel everything and still show up. It's about recognizing that our darkest moods, our most difficult states, our moments of pure frustration aren't failures of self-care. They're part of the full spectrum of human experience, and sometimes they're exactly what we need to move forward. I'm not suggesting we should wallow in every dark mood or ignore the warning signs of genuine mental illness. There's a difference between productive discomfort and destructive patterns. But it seems we’ve gotten to a point where we err too far in the other direction, treating every negative emotion like a problem to be solved rather than a message to be heard.

If you're one of those naturally sunny people reading this who wake up every day happy and excited about life, zippedy-fucking-doo-dah and good for you. I imagine you're either puzzled or concerned right now. I used to envy you. I used to think you were so lucky, sailing the seas of life with so little friction! I don’t anymore. I just think you are one type of person and I am another. And for those of us who are more like me, who don't always wake up ready to seize the day, who have to fight for our equilibrium, who sometimes feel everything too much — I want you to know you're not broken. You're not failing. You're just experiencing the full complexity of being human. Consider this: your uncomfortable feelings aren't obstacles to overcome; they’re the very energy we need to create the change we're all desperately seeking. For you, and for everyone.

Because right now, that is exactly what the world needs.

Speaking of feeling everything and showing up anyway – this is exactly what we practice at . Next spring, I'll be starting my training as a lay teacher, learning to help others navigate their own complicated relationships with... well, everything.

If this piece resonated with you and you're in a position to support this kind of work, please consider donating to ACZC's annual fundraiser. Your contribution will help fund not just my training, but all the ways we make space for people to experience their full humanity – no toxic positivity required.

Donate here

Hey, thanks for being here, as ever. In this attention economy, it means everything!

😘

Sara

p.s. Tiny Revolutions is free but not cheap. If you’d like to support my work, please share this post with someone who’d appreciate it, or just like this post!

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In the grand tradition of sensitive aging women, I’ve fully evolved into a bird lady. I’ve always been bird inclined — fond memories of sitting with my grandma in her breakfast nook while cardinals and robins came to feast at the feeder and all that — but a real affinity has sprung up in recent years. I walk five miles outside most days in my heavily wooded neighborhood, and I’m noticing more and more about these animals.

Lately what I’ve clued into is just how messy an operation flying is. When you watch a bird flying from afar, it looks so seamless, doesn’t it? A confident, purposeful glide. But if you really pay attention, the whole endeavor is much more chaotic.

Ever watched a bird get going? It’s not pretty. There’s an awkward jump and flap takeoff phase where they wobble and shudder before hitting their stride. You can see the effort, and it is indeed a not insignificant effort every time! Even though they do this hundreds (thousands?) of times a day.

Was it just me who thought it was a neater process? Like it’s not til they’re mid-air that things smooth out a bit. But even then they’re still flapping their wings like mad.

And you knew where this was going, surely, but I’m finding it’s a great metaphor for my life during this phase of building a new business.

Most of my energy this fall has been directed at getting my new coaching program off the ground and damn it! It’s hard.

Or let me take that back and say that in some ways it’s the easiest, most natural thing there is — I’ve been coaching people for years in various orgs and capacities — but making it a business of my own is hard. Like the birds, I know what I’m building toward but each little effort is…wait for it…a massive effort! So many new things to start doing, systems to establish, things to tweak and improve upon as I go. It’s truly never-ending.

I love it and it’s fun and exciting but man. Do I want to lie in a pile a lot of the time? Yes, yes I do. Do I also question whether I shouldn’t just go and get a job? Also yes! And yet.

What fascinates me most is the way desire and difficulty are intertwined in this process. Like my bird friends, I'm possessed of this innate drive to take flight, even though my wings strain with each attempt. The pleasure doesn't negate the effort; the effort doesn't diminish the pleasure. They coexist and are dependent upon each other. Every day I watch the birds hurl themselves skyward again and again, and I think: they're not doing it because it's easy. They're doing it because they have to.

All of this is to say that I trust that building this business is the right thing for me right now. But that doesn’t make it easy. Most things worth doing are not, in fact, easy.

But I make this point because I WANT to build this business. Like, bringing this new entity into the world is giving me pleasure and purpose and life. And a lot of discomfort. Both things are true.

Things I love:

• Those moments when a client's eyes light up as they see a new possibility for themselves

• Coming up with ideas for workshops and events that help people and attract prospective clients into my world

• Cultivating a look and feel and vibe to everything I’m doing — taking what can be a really gross-sounding category of business (life coaching) and making it mine, something I’m proud to offer because I know in my bones it has value

Things I don’t love:

• Having to be my own sales/hype woman (I’m probably more adept than most when putting new offers out into the world, but it’s never exactly comfortable)

• Anything involving spreadsheets — that is just not a format my brain readily embraces

• Feeling like I’m surely forgetting something important? All the time???

Do you see what I’m saying? Desire is a funny thing. Sometimes it’s pleasurable, sometimes it isn’t. And it’s easy to get lost when we feel like things should be all one way or another.

Not so ironically, this is what I’m working on with coaching clients. Supporting them in trying new things that sound interesting AND encouraging them to look holistically at how it feels to do them. It’s so seldom we do things we’re 100% wild about, you know? It seems to me that the right things do feel good but are not without their challenges. Like, you could try pickleball and be over the moon about it. And in becoming a person who is wild about pickleball, you discover that while it’s your absolute favorite hobby, you only need to do it a couple of times a week (and with the right people) to be sated.

When we take ourselves out of fantasizing about doing things and actually start running little experiments, we give ourselves a chance to discover whether they fit in our lives, and how. Not only that, we give the other people in our lives an opportunity to respond to the new person we are being. All of this is always enlightening!

Kind of like the birds, you know? I always think of the Mary Oliver line, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” If you’re a bird and you’re not flying because it kinda sucks getting off the ground every time, that is about the saddest thing that could happen to you. So the question I’m asking at this point in my life, and the reason I feel convicted about building this blessed/blasted new endeavor, is how might I make it easier for you to do the things you’re meant to do? How might I use my superpowers to clear your flight path?

Alright enough with the bird business! It’s the end of the year and I’d like to help you get set up for a new one that you can actually get excited about. ‘Cause fuck shoulds.

I have so much to say about desire, which is something I’ve been working with a lot this year. How our desires are so important because they drive our actions, and, as I’ve written about before, our actions are our only belongings. And yet desire can be scary, especially for those of us who are wired to prioritize others (looking at you, middle-aged women). At some point, we can become so alienated from what we truly want that even acknowledging our desires feels dangerous—like opening that door could lead to blowing up our lives.

There’s a skillful way to work with desire that I feel like we don’t talk about enough. A way to operate in the world where you honor the desires that are core to who you are but don’t let them drag you around. Because you need desire. It’s what makes you feel alive, and what else are we going for here in life?

In that spirit, I’m offering this free Zoom workshop on Wednesday, December 4 at 3:00 ET:

Burn the Blueprint: Building 2025 Around What You Truly Want

​What if the key to an energized 2025 isn't making yourself "better," but giving yourself more permission?

​In this end-of-year workshop for women, we'll turn conventional planning on its head. Instead of focusing on goals and resolutions, we'll explore how to tap into and trust your desires as reliable signals for what wants to emerge in your life.

RSVP here

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The Erotic as Power

“Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”

- Audre Lord in Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

Thanks to my brilliant friend for reminding me of this great essay about the radical power of desire in our writing circle this morning.

A Tiny Invitation!

What are you always trying to talk yourself out of? Is there something that feels irrational or silly that you want to do or have? Journal about it, see what you uncover.

If it’s not too revealing, share in the comments to this post. There’s something about feeling like the world’s on fire that makes me wonder about what’s on everyone’s mind.

Thanks for being here, as ever. Attention is sacred and I appreciate you sharing some of yours with me.

😘

Sara

p.s. Tiny Revolutions is free but not cheap. If you’d like to support my work, please share this post with someone who’d appreciate it, or just like this post!

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In 2009, I lit my career on fire.

I was at the time a VP at a well known PR agency where I was managing a team and a pretty big book of business (about $75K/month, a wild amount of money to me at the time), but instead of feeling like a badass, I felt like a charlatan who would be exposed any minute. It was, in a word, not good.

This was long before concepts like “imposter syndrome” and “emotional intelligence” had entered the zeitgeist. All I knew was that despite having an enviable life by most standards — I was 33, in great shape physically, lived kind of a glam existence in L.A., made a good salary, had lots of friends, etc. etc. — I was miserable and didn’t know what to do about it.

And every day I did not do something about it, the weight pressing down on me got a little heavier. Until one day I woke up and found myself in a state of total dysfunction. I could barely breathe or speak, let alone lead meetings, advise clients, and manage people. My body had simply shut me down.

So I took a leave of absence from work to try to get my shit together. It was embarrassing! There were rumors. I was so good at putting on a happy face and pretending that everything was fine that most people I worked with were shocked. I was actually kind of shocked, myself — I had no idea how I would support myself without that job.

But what I did know was that if I kept going in the way I was going, I would not ever find my way into a life I was excited about. And that was what I was really after.

Brutal as it was, I did find a way. I ended up leaving that gig entirely and trying lots of other things personally and professionally to find what did make me come alive, and had many wild swings of fortune in the process. (Read basically any past issue of this newsletter for context.)

Fifteen years later I feel great about my life, imperfections and all. I like how I spend my days and nights, but more importantly, I like who I am. But you know what? I had to fucking bushwhack my way here!

Because most people I knew at that point thought I was crazy. Which was part of the problem — I had to find my way to other people who got it. Other people who got that even when you have what feels like everything you could possibly ask for, you can still want more. That it’s not wrong to admit that even though you might have a life a lot of people would kill for, it’s not the one for you. That it’s not wrong to pursue a life that feels like home, and that’s better suited to the person you are and want to become.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a big part of what I do now is help other people give themselves permission to want more for themselves, too.

I write this newsletter, of course, and if you’ve been following me here for a while, you know I never give up seeking out what feels right. In my work with , the writers collective, I help people write their way into more expressive ways of being. In my work with , I help people use these ancient teachings to learn who (and what!) they are.

And now I have a new avenue for teaching that I’m soooooo excited to introduce. I’ve been talking about the concept for the last year (you can read my first post about it here), but have finally had the time and space to put it all together.

It’s called The Fire Inside, and it’s a group coaching program to help women navigate change without resorting to setting their life on fire the way I did.

When I had to figure out what was next, I did it the hardest way possible: by jumping headlong into the abyss. I didn’t know what I wanted to do next, so I thought I had to blow it all up and start over. It did work in the long run, but it cost me a lot and there are other, less perilous ways to do it.

Here's what I've discovered about finding your path:

1. You don’t have to know exactly where you’re going to get there. A better approach is to try new things or experiment with doing the usual things in different ways and let how you feel about these experiences guide you.

2. You don’t have to hustle or improve yourself to move forward. In fact, you probably need to do a lot less! This is about moving away from stuff that shuts you down and toward stuff that lights you up and makes you FEEL GOOD.

3. It’s really hard to do it alone. You need others who get it to be with you on the path to keep you going and help you see yourself from different perspectives.

Honestly that’s kind of it. The hardest part is showing up, staying consistent, and keeping it light and fun.

Which is where The Fire Inside comes in. I love this program for many reasons, but mostly because I designed it to be FUN and expansive! We all have way too much to do as it is; there’s no need to pile on more shit we’ll feel guilty about skipping.

Instead this is an opportunity to explore doing things you look forward to. To go on an adventure and a quest to get to know yourself on a deeper level. And to give you an excuse to cut things or people out of your life that are not serving you. Because honestly, they gotta go.

When you do this work, over time, you feel clearer, more at ease, and more capable of making changes in your life that have been on your mind for years. You stop fighting yourself. You gain confidence that you can do hard things. You gain self-respect.

OK! So here’s how it goes:

The Fire Inside is an ongoing program that consists of four Zoom meetings per month:

• 🌑 One New Moon Session to generate new experiments for the coming month (and assess the previous month’s)

• 🌓 One Expansion Session for exploring new practices, often from guest speakers

• 🌕 One Full Moon Session to break through blocks, get unstuck, and adjust

• 🔥 One Private Session with me for individual coaching and support

It also includes a WhatsApp group chat for ongoing support and discussion — and the occasional inspirational/salty/fiery voice note from me.

If you’re intrigued, I’d love to connect. This is not like a lot of large, impersonal programs you come across online. I’m gathering a small, curated group of women who each bring unique wisdom to the experience. As I mentioned above, that chemistry matters.

I’ve already got a handful of women on board, but am looking for the others. Maybe that’s you??

If so, the next step is to schedule an introductory call with me to say hi and discuss whether this program would be a fit for you.

You can read more about The Fire Inside (and me) on my website. You can also email me with any questions or comment on this post.

And hey, if you’re still reading, 1) thank you! and 2) please share this post with anyone you think might be interested. The internet has a way of helping us find each other, but we all need a little assistance along the way.

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Speaking of !

We’re collaborating with to offer a Creative Titration cohort next month. Great for anyone who wants to both deepen your creative practice and connect more fully with your body. (Hint: those things go hand in hand!!) Read more here if you’re curious. Gonna be fun.

Thanks for being here, as ever. This is my first time recording voiceover for an issue of Tiny Revolutions. So if you liked it, let me know! I’m slowly inching my way up to launching a podcast — another thing I’ve been talking about doing for years. :)

😘

Sara

p.s. Tiny Revolutions is free but not cheap, to borrow a phrase from the great . If you’d like to support my work, please share this post with someone who’d appreciate it, or just like this post! I love hearts.

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Friends, I have been having an absolute blast this summer. Which feels weird to say amidst the general chaos. But it’s true! It kicked off with my trip to Japan, which I wrote to you about last time, and it has continued with so many little experiments and paths of inquiry. If I had to give this summer a theme, it’s been that I have allowed myself to dream in ways that I never really used to. If the world is ending, which it so often feels like, why the hell not?

Mind you, I’ve been in a phase of exploration since I left L.A. in July of 2023 after 18 years. My intention when I set out was to be a digital nomad for a year and see where it took me before making any decisions about where to land. I’ve spent the largest chunks of time in Atlanta and Minneapolis, where I have family, with frequent side trips to places farther afield.

You might remember from my last email that I planned to host a community-building experiment in the Hudson Valley town of Kingston, NY, where my friend and friend and collaborator lives. (Thanks to everyone who got in touch — lots of us out there looking to spark new relationships with like-minded folks!) We got as far as gathering a bunch of great people and setting up the parameters for how we might convene — and I got as far as reserving an Airbnb where I could stay and host friends and events — but I ended up calling it off. On the surface level, the trip was going to be expensive and I had upcoming doctors appointments and an aging pet that needed care. But on a deeper level, it just didn’t feel like the right move. My mind hadn’t seemed to catch up to something that was beginning to feel true in my heart, which is that I wanted to stay closer to Atlanta, my base of operations since the beginning of the year.

Which didn’t stop me from visiting Asheville, North Carolina for a long weekend last month, falling in love with it, and loudly proclaiming that I was going to move there! And then realizing as weeks passed that I wasn’t making any material steps to do it. Which was, again, a sign that my heart wasn’t in really in it. At least not right now.

I’ve pretty much always been this way. More heart than head driven when it comes down to it. My mind likes to conjure up big ideas that don’t always match up with my actions. But what has been interesting this particular go around is realizing just how much I have been expecting to feel more convicted about wherever I decided to land. One of the reasons I decided to be a nomad for a year is that I wasn’t stoked to move to any one place, I just knew it was time to get out of L.A. In fact, not being *excited* about anywhere was one of the things that kept me from leaving that city for years. I didn’t like the idea of running away from a place; I wanted to run towards another one.

And I wouldn’t exactly say I’m *excited* about Atlanta either. Without going into it, there’s a lot I don’t like about this city and never have — that’s why I left nearly 25 years ago. And yet I…keep coming back? Turns out the “right” place right now has less to do with the geography/culture/climate, and more to do with the people. Which in hindsight was probably always going to be the case, but you know, I sure liked to think I was gonna start over in some perfect city that checked all my little boxes.

Have you ever heard someone say, “If it’s not a fuck yes, it’s a no”? Let’s be honest, I probably never have either — it’s a textbook example of the kind of reductive bullshit that gets passed off as wisdom on the internet — but I was waiting for a “fuck yes” that never came. I think what’s more true is that sometimes “not no” is about as clear as it gets. I could list a dozen reasons why Atlanta is great, but this decision is coming from my heart, and I’m pretty sure my heart is smarter than my head 99% of the time. At the very least, it’s taking in way more information than I’m consciously aware of, and it’s telling me that the work ahead is to make this place mine, warts and all. Like, maybe the “fuck yes” only shows up after you’ve put in the effort. (Fans of The Little Prince would surely agree.)

I will say that what I am excited about is digging in here and opening a lot of new doors. As I wrote in a recent issue (one in which I emphatically declared that Atlanta was merely “a stop along the way” lol), “I miss being in rooms with others who are excited about the things that I’m excited about. I do that all the time on Zoom, but it’s not the same. It just isn’t.” When I wrote that I thought I needed to go to where the people I already knew were. But I think what I actually need to do is reconnect with old friends and find new ones to hang out with IN PERSON. So here we go, Atlanta. I’m excited to meet you again and do fun stuff together.

On to some things I found worth sharing recently…

Love and Magick are Our Best Hope

I loved this recent essay from , who is apparently feeling the same way I am about reading or publishing anything online these days:

People don’t listen to facts, anyway. They find the facts they need to fit their story, whether or not the facts are contextual or even true. Saving ourselves and each other is not a matter of convincing anyone of anything. What we need to offer each other manifests less like words than an embrace. It happens in real life, and through artistic or spiritual interventions that bring us together in pre-cognitive ways — before our belief systems mangle the essential transmission.

Q̾u̾i̾c̾k̾ ̾F̾i̾r̾e̾: Creation anxiety

And here’s another piece of writing from the creative studio that captures the zeitgeist. The whole post is well worth reading, especially if you’re making any kind of creative work online, but here’s the kicker:

Culture emerges from the connections between people, and I believe these are always strongest in person. Face-to-face cultural engagement is necessarily participatory, online cultural engagement rarely is. Nearly all of my most fulfilling and exciting experiences, those that have made me feel part of a community or moment, have happened in person. I think the feeling of being surrounded by likeminded people is unparalleled. And don’t tell me you’re an introvert, this is something we all need.

Let’s take more affirmation from the people around us, people who can see us as whole beings and not merely as collections of achievements. A creative practice is not a substitute for living alongside people, for sharing memories and learning from each other. A portfolio is not a substitute for a community. 

What I’m up to, how you can join, and I need your help!

Over the past five years I’ve gotten pretty dang good at facilitating community spaces. Between workshops, retreats, and writing circles at , talks and meditation at , and workshops I’ve been hosting for The Fire Inside, I have been putting in major reps.

I am now looking to host more of these types of events in person, including but not limited to:

• Fireside talks and hangs

• Facilitated group writing sessions

• Public meditation sessions

• Group and 1:1 coaching sessions for women who are looking to find their next chapter

• Coworking at Switchyards

Are you interested in joining any of these? Do you know someone I should invite? Do you have a space where I could host? Do you know someone in Atlanta I should meet? Are you in need of a facilitator or creative consultant for how you can host your own impactful community space?

Please get in touch! I’ve got some things brewing, but would love to find some co-conspirators. You can reply to this email, comment on this post, or email me at sara@tinyrevolutions.co.

Note that I will also still be hosting stuff online periodically! Watch this space for details.

I’ll leave you with this lovely bit from ATL resident Morgan Harper Nichols.

Thanks for being here, as ever.

😘

Sara

p.s. Tiny Revolutions is free to read but if you’d like to support my work, please share this with someone who’d appreciate it, or just like this post!

p.p.s. I kinda said this whole thing more succinctly on twitter.

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Hello! Last time I wrote I mentioned I was leaving soon to spend some time at Toshoji, a Zen Buddhist monastery in rural Japan that’s been operating since the eighth century (!). I traveled there with a couple of members of my sangha to visit our teacher, Dave Cuomo of , who was completing a 90 day training period there as part of his elevation to the rank of teacher in Soto Zen. 

It was a rare opportunity for lay people like us to visit this monastery. Contrary to what many westerners might think when they hear the word “monastery,” it is not a chill experience. It is more like a boot camp. Some people go there to deepen their Zen practice (me), but it was expressly designed for the purpose of training of monks who will someday take over their family temples, and as such, it’s pretty intense. In conversation I’ve been describing it as part meditation retreat, part work camp, which should give you some idea of what goes on there. The monks don’t just chant and meditate and train to run the temple, they also have responsibility for monastery operations and upkeep, which includes lots of chores. And while we lay visitors didn’t have a lot to do on that front, we did pitch in during work practice (samu) periods in the schedule. Anyway, here are some things I wrote about the experience while I was there.

+++

To my surprise I already had a pretty good foundation in Zen forms and rituals from my training with ACZC. When and how to bow and do gassho and shashu. How to be observant and follow what everyone else is doing. Familiarity with lots of chants and call and response refrains. Even the pattern of the bells I am mostly familiar with. A roll-down is a roll-down and they do it on lots of different bells and drums and clackers. Which is not to say I haven’t made a ton of little mistakes, but you make them and you just keep going. Do it enough and it becomes routine and you don’t make mistakes anymore. Or not as often. The more you pay attention, the more things are illuminated. 

Sort of like how all the monks look the same from a distance. All robed and crow-like, scurrying around in their sweeping drapes of black, doing things that are obviously highly choreographed down to the gesture level, but that are inscrutable to a stranger’s eye. Where at first you just see the lot of them, the longer and closer you look you start to see the individuals emerge. 

Some monk speaks in English and you detect a French accent or a “y’all” that hints at their origins. You spot an unusual gait during walking meditation. A sleeve slips down and reveals a tattoo. Personalities start to become apparent – a kind smile, a joke, a knowing head nod. Beyond the bald heads and uniform robes the details are revealed and the reality that we’re all the same and yet totally distinct is clear. Same in a monastery as on any city street corner. The setting changes but there’s always more to discover if you look. Like really look. But of course you have to drop your own self-centered concerns to be able to notice. And in a place like this you are absolutely supposed to drop yourself. I think that’s the whole point. 

It’s hard though when you’re also constantly making a mess of everything. You forget to take off your flip flops and walk through the dharma hall. You forget to put on your flip flops when you go to the zendo. You get caught reading in the library which you are apparently not supposed to do? (Sometimes you get corrected and sometimes someone will just give you a pointed look, I have found.) 

Over time the corrections take effect and you’re just trained to behave the way everyone else does. Everyone the same, yet everyone different. I think what stands out to me is that the way everyone differs is so specific to them and yet no one is trying to be different. They just are. And it just is. You don’t need to try. Just do what is necessary. Only you will be you. Just like everyone else. 

And as the strangeness of the setting fades, the song of the birds becomes more apparent in the background, and you start to detect that each bell or drum that sounds is meant to indicate something is happening. It’s all a practice in waiting, settling, noticing. How seldom we do this in our daily lives! 

The chores here are absurd. Two days I swept the road during work practice. Also for two days I picked up leaves and other detritus in the courtyard one by one by hand. It’s a painstaking effort that really does add up over time, but yeah, you’re crouched down picking up a little seed helicopter with the sun blazing down on your neck and you’re like, wait, what the fuck am I doing? And how did I get here? A blister appears on the webbed skin between your thumb and your pointer finger from the bamboo cane that serves as the handle of the broom (the broom itself is made of twigs banded together and bound with wire). Who am I, you think, and why am I *sweeping a road* in rural Japan with a medieval yard tool? And oh look, a cute little frog. And here come the temple cats mewing for someone to pet or feed them. Your perspective zooms in and out from the specific to the universal, and in and out again. Much like it does in any spiritual practice, or really just any human life where you are truly paying attention. Back and forth, here and gone, a powerful individual being and speck of dust. There’s a strange sort of peace in being present for it.

I’m not saying I’d like to stay here at the monastery for a long time. I wouldn’t. You’re constantly in discomfort. Discomfort in zazen, discomfort in doing the chores, discomfort in the knowledge that the work of life itself never ends. You have to do it everyday forever. Start over every time. Do it a little better every time, maybe. Get comfortable in the wild discomfort. You can live, you can breathe. You can appreciate that every little moment of joy is a unique experience that will never come again and it’s worth it to stay in the unrelenting effort of it all for those little glimmers. 

Even though most of it fucking blows, to be clear. Well, maybe “much” is more accurate. A lot. Stand around and chant. Sit with your aching back, your growling stomach, the memory from your childhood that brings tears to your eyes and a physical ache to your heart. This is how you do it. You just sit with it and know it will pass. It’s happening to all of us just the same, only each one of us is different. 

“Reality has a surprising amount of detail.” That’s the refrain that’s coming up for me after three days here. (And five+ years of Zen practice. And 47+ years of living a human life.) It’ll be different later, more and less rosy. It’ll be exactly what it is, that’s about all you can count on. 

Taking time to notice the way right before you is the way the larger path reveals itself. One step at a time and over and over again. 

Come Hang in the Hudson Valley?

Speaking of traveling along down the path, in my last issue I also mentioned that I was thinking of heading to New York to explore spending more time there. Movement is happening!

From July 21 - 31, I’ll be staying in the charming town of Kingston, about two hours north of NYC, near some of my collaborators at . Over those 10 days, we’re going to be co-creating some informal workshops and events to spend time writing, hanging, working on various projects, and finding ways to support each other.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in joining, reply to this email or leave a comment! The whole thing is emerging on the fly, but I can promise you there will be bright, curious, playful, open-hearted people who are interested in building relationships with other good humans and making beautiful things amidst all this chaos. We’re looking for like-minded others to join us. Is that you?

Or Just Come Hang with Me on Zoom?

I’ve got another free fire-themed writing circle coming up with Foster on Tuesday, July 16 at 2:00 pm ET. This is a 90 minute container for anyone who wants to get something out of their head — whether you consider yourself a “writer” or not. I’ll do some guided meditation and ice-breakers with other participants to ease you in and get you writing. I’d love to see you there.

RSVP here.

I hope your summer is everything you want it to be so far, and if it’s not, I hope you’re rolling with it all the same. Tell me how it’s going in the comments.

Thanks for being here, as ever.

😘

Sara

p.s. Tiny Revolutions is free to read but if you’d like to support my work, please share this with someone who’d appreciate it, or just like this post!

p.p.s If you’d like more visuals and sounds to go along with my scattered impressions of monastic life, here’s a documentary someone made about Toshoji recently.

Greetings from a rainy Memorial Day weekend. I am spending it in Atlanta, where I’ve been based since the beginning of the year. I say “based” because I’ve been gone so much. Costa Rica and upstate New York, which I wrote about last time. And then I’ve also been spending a lot of time down in St. Simon’s, a barrier island in Georgia about an hour south of Savannah.

For anyone paying attention, I’ve been wandering since last July, when I left LA after 18 years. The short story is that I knew I was ready to go, but I didn’t know what would be next, so I put my stuff in storage and set out to wander for a year and see where I landed. I spent last summer in Georgia and New York and last fall in Minneapolis, living down the street from my sister and her family. And then I migrated back south to Georgia, where, when I’m not traveling, I’ve been staying with my recently-widowed dad in the suburban house my family moved into when I was a senior in high school.

It’s been surprising to find myself enjoying it here, a place I left nearly 25 years ago and to which I never planned to return. I’m seeing this old place with fresh eyes — no longer as the place I had to escape so I could become the person I wanted to be, but as one of the places that made me into who I am. I never felt like I fit in here and I still don’t. I’ve grown eccentric and slightly feral in the way that 40+ women who never married or had kids can get, an anomaly in this bastion of the nuclear family. But I can appreciate what it has to offer. Space, and lush greenery, and all the suburban conveniences that I didn’t have access to in LA.

It’s only now becoming obvious to me how much of the past year has been about seeking comfort after decades in the metropolis (New York 2001-2005, LA 2005-2023). After all that time I was shocked to find myself still unmoored in the conventional sense. No husband, no mortgage, no babies, no job tying me to any one physical location. Which was especially glaring in the wake of the death of my mom, whose life was the polar opposite of mine in that she had all of those things in spades. I needed to be grounded in a way that I hadn’t been since basically childhood. It’s been good for me, spending this time around family and old friends. It feels deeply correct.

It also feels more and more like a stop along the way. To where? I don’t yet know! Atlanta is a much more appealing place than it was when I left nearly 25 years ago. Then I wanted to be a writer and to work in the media field, and that didn’t really exist here outside of broadcast media. So I had to go and find it. 

Cut to 2024, and things are different. You can work in media from anywhere, and I do. But goddamn, I miss the people. I miss the people so much. I miss being in rooms with others who are excited about the things that I’m excited about. I do that all the time on Zoom, but it’s not the same. It just isn’t.

And here’s the thing. I am so into my work, and the kind of work I am doing is an emerging field. It’s about raising consciousness through writing and coaching and spiritual teachings, but it’s also about organizing in ways that are less hierarchical and more collaborative. And as far as I can tell, I don’t see a lot of that happening here in Atlanta. Most of the people I work with are in the Hudson Valley and New York City, a place I’ve said for years I’d never return to unless I had a dream job.

Well, I don’t have a dream job. But I do have some pretty amazing collaborators.

It’s a strange place to be, nearing the half century mark and feeling called to return to a crowded, expensive, exhausting city. But I also think, being able to operate from a place of wholeness and agency there might make me way more able to enjoy the spoils of it than I ever did before. When I first moved to New York City at 24, I was very much looking for the city to make me into something — the person I needed to escape Atlanta to become. So the question I am asking myself now is, would returning with a clearer understanding of who I am and what I’m here on earth to do be supportive in this current stage of life?

I truly don’t know, but I suspect the people, the opportunities, the culture might give me energy. And that might make this the smartest possible thing I could do for myself at this stage of my life, where everything feels like it takes so much fucking energy!

It also feels like the kind of risk I’m more prepared to take than I was a year ago. When I left LA people would say, “You can go anywhere! Where will you go?” But I was afraid of being alone in a new place. I needed to be around my family and soak up that elemental kind of love and belonging, if that makes sense. The kind you’re born into, if you’re lucky. I still need the love and belonging but I’m also feeling like the kind of love and belonging that I need more of now is something I have more work to do to build for myself.

Which is scary! But you know what is also scary? Discovering you’re relying on scraps from a table an old version of you used to dine at. I’m starting to feel ready for a new table and a new meal.

It’s funny, when I write this all out it seems so straightforward. When you’re both unencumbered and financially resourced in the ways I am — and which most people are not — it’s almost like you have an obligation to exercise your ability to go anywhere, try anything. Like, if not me, then who? But there’s a cost to it. You do drink up new experiences and expand your horizons in ways that are basically impossible when you’re rooted somewhere. But on the other side of that, it’s hard to make new relationships when you are on the move. It’s hard to feel like you belong anywhere.

I feel that a lot, 11 months into my nomad period. A sense of being caught between worlds. Enjoying it just enough to keep it going. But also being cognizant that this period must someday come to an end. But when?

The “when” part is what’s trickiest for me. If you have been reading this newsletter for a while, you might know I face a lot of what one might call mental headwinds that I am constantly working on clearing. And on a bad day, fear and shame are so present! “You should be settled at your age.” (Shame.) “You should be more focused on preparing for retirement, growing equity in a house, etc.” (Fear.)

At their more insidious, the voices are more like “You’re a shiftless loser who cannot commit to anything.” (Shame.) “If you don’t just grow up and settle down, you will die broke and alone in a tent somewhere!!!” (That’s fear, what a guy.)

And of course all the positive narratives are in the mix, too. e.g. “I have an amazing life and people all over the world to love and work and play with.” “When you’re ready, the next step always becomes clear.”

Different things feel true on different days. I just do my best to dance with them and put more credence in the positive stories. In a world where I control so little, that is what I do have control over – the stories I tell myself.

So the story I’m telling myself lately is that the most important thing I can do is let go of all the shame and disappointment I’ve harbored about being so late in life and not really feeling like I’ve found my place. It’s OK to be that way. It’s probably way more common than we think.

Maybe it was just always supposed to be like this so I could sit here and write this letter to you. You who are not where you want to be. You who don’t understand it and have fought so hard against it, and tried to be who you thought you should be instead of loving who you are, exactly how you are right here and now. 

It is so easy to say that to others and so hard to say that to yourself. In the spirit of taking this all the way, in case it is not clear, I feel extremely naked talking about this. Here I am, 47, rich in so many things – wonderful friends, a supportive family, a vocation, a career I love, etc – and I still feel like it’s not enough. Like I need more. It’s exhausting to pretend otherwise. I have a lot and I’ve tried so hard to make myself OK with it and it’s just not OK. I want more. 

So the travels continue; in fact they feel like a bet I am placing on myself. That I am worthy of finding a place to settle in that I deeply love and want to build a life in. That it’s OK to want more and to go after it, even when you already have so much. And strangely there’s a bit of the hero’s journey here. Coming back to the east coast with a new perspective, a new set of skills, a new foundation of strength and self-knowledge. It’s all coming full circle.

So while I’d originally planned to be ready to settle somewhere by July, the self-storage bills and the digital nomading will continue. I think I’m gonna head north for a while, see what happens.

On a related note!

I’m heading to Japan later this week, where I'll spend four nights visiting my Zen teacher at Toshoji monastery in Okayama prefecture.

I'm hoping to master Zen by the end of it all, which you're not really supposed to say out loud. But nothing gives me as much as the practice does, or gives me more to offer others. Even when I struggle because it's boring or tedious or not the sexy new thing, it always feels like coming home. I am wildly grateful to be on this path of practice, which I only stumbled upon in my early 40s. I can't see how I'll ever reach the end of it, which is miraculous to me, a person who historically has always tired of everything after a while and moved on.

My first Zen teacher used to occasionally make remarks that he wanted to be a master early on in his Zen practice too, and he had some wistfulness about it because he said after a while you can't escape it. I can sort of see that now, and in the year since I left three years of residence at I've allowed myself to stray to see what it felt like, but I keep coming back.

Excited to keep walking along to see what happens. And if you’re curious about what I’ve learned in five years of practice, you can listen to a talk I gave about it recently here.

Finally, an Invitation

I mentioned my amazing collaborators above, and I was referring to the folks at , my writing collective. We’ve made a lot of progress in making what we’re doing more legible to the world, including introducing a new website that fully details who we are, what we do, and who we’d like to join us.

If you’re a stuck writer, a writer who’s out of practice, a wannabe writer, or a person who just knows they have a lot of untold stories they’d like to get out, I think we have something to offer you. Come join one of our free Writing Circles on Zoom, for starters. I’ve got one a fire-themed one coming up Tuesday, June 11 (RSVP here). Or if you’re interested in going deeper, join one of our Cohorts.

We have a Cohort starting next Monday, June 3 called Foundations, which serves as an introduction to Foster’s ecology of practices. The goal is help you write from a more embodied, emotionally-rich place, navigate more directly to truths worth sharing, and move beyond various forms of resistance to publish courageously and find like-minded others with which to share your work. It’s work that’s well worth doing and I’ve seen it change lives over and over again. If you’re interested in learning more, feel free to reply or comment with any questions.

Phew, was that a lot? That felt like a lot. Thanks for being here, as ever.

😘

Sara

p.s. Tiny Revolutions is free to read but if you’d like to support my work, please share this with someone who’d appreciate it, or just like this post!