Tiny Revolutions №102: On Walkabout

+ A love letter to LA

Hello, friends, especially those of you who subscribed a while ago and are now wondering who the hell I am. My posting schedule is pretty erratic these days — I aim for once a month, but it’s been a weird year! Here’s the latest on my end. Hope you enjoy.

When I moved into the Angel City Zen Center in August of 2020, I had a feeling it would be the last stop in my 15 year stint in LA, but I had no idea where I’d go when I was inevitably ready to move on from the semi-monastic life. Throughout my shit spring this year, when it became clear it was time to go, I kept my eye on places to live next. I went to Trulia and set up an alert for pet-friendly one bedroom apartments somewhere in northeast Los Angeles, thinking, hey, maybe I just haven’t found the right spot yet. But the more I looked, the less excited I got.

The sands in my LA hourglass had run out.

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When I was writing an earlier draft of this newsletter, I gave a lot of reasons for why I was leaving LA. Reasons like: it’s gotten too expensive; I can’t afford to live there in the way I want to live; it’s a different place than it was when I moved there; I’m a different person than I was when I moved there; I didn’t need to live there when I could work from anywhere; there were too many fucking helicopters, etc.

The reasons were all valid, but when it came down to it, what I realized is that for a very long time I felt like I physically *needed* to be in LA, and that was no longer the case.

When I arrived in my late 20’s, the city’s relentless sunshine had a way of compensating for what were often overwhelmingly dark conditions in my mind. There were endless blue skies and grand vistas and hikes within city limits! You could happily spend every day of the year outside! There was no humidity! I spent at least the first five years awash in endorphins, sun drunk and vibrating with joy after years of the humid and (to me) infuriatingly variable weather of the east coast. I couldn’t believe you could live like this.

The physical sensation of the climate — light, airy, warm, PREDICTABLE — was medicinal, a miracle cure for a depressive who felt constantly dragged around by moods. Moods that were often triggered by muggy, overcast weather. More to the point, it offered a glimpse of a bright future: one where I was happy and thriving and the darkness could never fully take over. LA felt like my ally in that battle.

And it was, truly. In the 18+ years I lived there, I did undergo a profound transformation, but it was not the one I imagined. I thought I would use all that sunlight to kill the dark parts of my mind. What actually happened was that I used it to stop pushing them away.

Buoyed by the climate and the endless walks and the open-hearted communities of people and healers and practices I came across, I gradually learned that it was safe to let go of all the ways I thought I should be and accept how I actually was. Which was many things at any given moment, including curious and hopeful, ambitious and energetic, playful and irreverent, sad and angry, greedy and vain, selfish and manipulative, and, above all, desperately afraid of getting it wrong.

I cared so much! I wanted so badly to live right and do good! I still do. I just have a very different understanding of what that entails. And it’s not about achieving a fixed state of excellence and perfection, which is more or less what I used to think. It’s about accepting and learning to work with the entire dynamic spectrum of feelings and character traits that make up a human being, not just the ones I prefer to inhabit.

To put it in LA terms, it’s not about stopping the waves, man. It’s about learning to surf.

Well, I surf now. Not always well, but I have gotten the hang of it.

Ironic, isn’t it? The unofficial world headquarters of ~positive vibes~ helped me come to grips with my least appealing qualities.

But back to the leaving part. I was clear that it was time to move out of the Zen house, and I was clear that I wanted to get out of LA, at least for a while. But what next? That part remained murky.

So I did another very LA thing that I really only do in moments of extreme paralysis and frustration, which was go see a psychic. Claudia at the Indigo Collective suggested I put my stuff in storage for a year and experiment with living in different places. She saw me drinking my morning coffee somewhere very green. “You take the beauty of LA with you wherever you go now,” she said.

This was not a new idea. I’ve had dozens of conversations over the years about doing this exact thing. But sometimes you just need to hear a thing at the right time, from the right person, to make it click. And this time it clicked, in the back room of a crystal shop in a Pasadena strip mall, of all places.

So yeah, that’s exactly what I did. In the four weeks after I visited Claudia, I packed my earthly possessions into two UHaul pods that are now in storage somewhere deep in the Inland Empire. I left LA on the 2nd of July, and have so far spent time with family in Atlanta and St. Simon’s Island in Georgia, with my collaborators at Foster in upstate New York, and now with my sister and her brood in Minneapolis.

My current plan is stick around in this area for the fall (I have missed seasons!) and see how it goes, so if you’re in the area, or know someone here I should meet, let me know. I’m planning to do some meetups and co-writing circles.

I’m also planning to spend more time on this newsletter, so perhaps I’ll see more of you in the inbox, too. But more on that in a second.

As for LA, I love you! I miss you already! There’s no way I could have become who I am without you. I’ll see you again, I’m just not entirely sure when. You have my eternal gratitude in the meantime.

The Plan from Here…

I’m making changes professionally, too. I’ve been working in brand communications for most of my career, but in the past few years I’ve increasingly been moving into writing, coaching, teaching, and community building. That’s where my heart is, but getting to a point where I can fully support myself with this work has been slow going. I’m excited to be moving more fully in this direction, and will talk more about new stuff I’m working on in the coming weeks.

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Settled Questions

If you’re curious to hear how I came to live in a Zen Center and some of my reflections on the experience, you can listen to the talk I gave before I moved out on theAngel City Zen Center Weeklypodcast.

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On to some things I found worth sharing recently…

The Bear

I liked the first season of The Bear a lot, but the second season is the best thing I’ve seen on TV in quite a while. On the surface it’s a story about the gritty realities of a family restaurant business, but more than that it’s about people doing the absolute best they can while working through their demons. I can’t stop thinking about the last few episodes. Amazing soundtrack, too.

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Phony Negronis

Speaking of culinary adventures, I’m alcohol free these days, but I still love a good cocktail. I stumbled across the Phony Negroni at an Italian restaurant in NYC this spring - it’s a premade, non-alcoholic version of a drink I never thought I’d have again. And it’s shockingly good. I’ve been ordering them by the case and sharing them with friends. Here’s a link to a discount if you’d like to try some yourself.

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The Emerald Podcast

With the rise of AI, we are entering an era whose only corollary is the stuff of fairy tales and myths. Powers that used to be reserved for magicians and sorcerers — the power to access volumes of knowledge instantaneously, to create fully realized illusory otherworlds, to deceive, to conjure, to transport, to materialize on a massive scale — are no longer hypothetical. The age of metaphor is over. The mythic powers are real. Are human beings prepared to handle such powers?

One of my favorite discoveries in the past year is Joshua Michael Schrei’s The Emerald, a sporadically produced podcast that “explores the human experience through a vibrant lens of myth, story, and imagination.” Each episode is a revelation, but I loved this one: So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers (The AI Episode). Other recommendations: The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized, a critique of the rise of pop psychology, and Animism is Normative Consciousness, about how foundational the animate worldview is to the human experience (just listen!).

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For Girls of a Certain Age

As I watched the band play their set, watched the kids sweat and sway and go spastic in the presence of such a great band—the way we did for the bands that we’d loved 15 years prior—I had a powerful sense memory, a feeling I hadn’t had since all of those years ago. It felt like the freedom that comes from knowing you belong exactly where you are, and it was gone as quickly as it came. 

The wonderful

Kim France

has moved her

Girls of a Certain Age

blog over to Substack, and is publishing installments from the memoir she never finished about her career in fashion magazines. (Including the beloved Sassy, which I read religiously as a teenager.) This one is great.

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Authentic Spirituality?

Great rant here from longtime astrology writer

Rob Brezsny

about spiritual teachers who talk about spiritual practices in destructive terms.

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Oldster Magazine

Q&A with Sasha-Frere Jones

Because Americans are incapable of processing death, there is a pathological fear of aging and its attendant marks, especially anything visible. It’s nuts. Learning and making mistakes and learning again and getting older is not only the best game in town, it is the only game in town. The only other option is delusion. There is a sign that hangs above our table: THE WORK IS SLOW.

Loved this interview with

Sasha Frere-Jones

in Oldster. I’ve heard him mention the idea of the work being slow in other places and often think about how true it is and how seldom we hear it. The real work is fucking slow!

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Passage - A Poem by Victoria Chang

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That’s all for me this time. I’m headed off to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota next weekend, and looking forward to being away from screens through Labor Day. Hope you’re getting some late summer downtime in, too.

Thanks for reading, as ever. See you soon.

😘

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!