As I get older, I find myself increasingly preferring the no-frills, walk-in massage place to my day spa.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a time and place for my bougie, self-care massage therapist. I still enjoy being tucked beneath a heated blanket while someone whispers, “Would you like eucalyptus or lavender?” But lately, I have become infatuated with the effects of this violence-adjacent form of massage.

My kid apologized to a stranger, nobody died, and maybe civilization has a fighting chance

On Suicidality, Ritual Funerals, and School Buses

Why manifestation culture mistakes control for attunement— and what depth psychology, synchronicity, and soul actually ask of us instead

Why healing isn’t a finish line, time isn’t linear, and your breakdown might just be your Soul in disguise.

So, here’s the thing: basically, you’re a chicken.

All my best friends have heard me tell stories about my deep affection for my backyard chickens and the many lessons they have taught me. The most meaningful one for me is the process of molting. If you don’t know what molting is, imagine an episode of Naked and Afraid on the Discovery Channel…but starring chickens.

I did something radical: I stopped trying to make the darkness behave.

I make a ritual each year of going to the first place I found morels with Bliss. I’ve never found one there since. Fear and familiarity keep us stuck in the past. I memorialize it, pay it its due respect, but I can’t dwell there long or I risk rumination.

Normally, I love my overactive imagination. It serves me well 90% of the time in my creative pursuits. The other 10% of the time, when either current events or encountering a cyber truck causes my brain to catastrophize the future, I fall into catastrophantasizing. The fantasy whirlwind of my and humanity’s inevitable doom consumes me in a way that can’t be summed up with a word as beige as “anxiety.” So I made up a better word.

Our life is a constantly evolving narrative. We can change the genre from drama to comedy anytime we wish with some mindset work. What if instead, we saw through the fictions of our lives a little more honestly so as to live as joyfully as we say we wish to?

The very first word in the history of Western literature is “rage” or “wrath.” It is how Homer’s “Iliad” begins. Mars is known for his hot temper. As is Neptune. And we all know that it is woven into the human narrative throughout time.

Grief is complicated.

Sacred memories, synchronistic occasions of happenstance have a quality about them that is indescribable. They can’t be pre-planned, or organized and they can never be recreated. When you recall them, it almost seems like the air was thick with magic. Probably because it was.