I’ve shared first the text, second the short video with voiceover.

And just below, is a photo of Emily from 2022, at the wedding of Cindy Lu and Gilbert Galon. 2022! Precious, ouch, weird, lush year! I wore a dress! With globular earrings!

Have a look at the poem, the video, the dress right here. And, as ever, I’m curious to discover what follows “And then…”

AND THEN—

If you’re like me, here: just a few things—

You hunt for your way, you harbor a dream, some magic stays, some people leave.

You gauge the odds; you tend to that ounce of belief, but you make a mess. Your spirit shrinks. Paths peel away. The world grieves.

Slow, in a blink.

But then — ah, again — your heart billows big. Now the selfishness shrinks.

You rally in the hurting, you hoist someone’s burden. You remember that you can create, that your service can be the art you make.

So… you try in earnest.

But—

Your best work sinks.

You see your parents, you scream on the beach, you rifle through rhymes, you waste your time, you double back down, you obsess over why,

you spend too much on gas—

—you just like to drive.

You merge with a screen. You yearn for the sky.

You need a hug, someone to stop by, and you hear on a podcast: “It’s healing to breathe.”

So you close your eyes *inhale mid-cry* — and land once more on one sure bet:

That hope is adamant. You can’t not try.

Insecurities, be damned. We are still alive.

So.. You humble yourself,

keep on toward the light.

You dive back in, you make a thing. You almost quit. (Again.) You fix your car, you make amends, you have a cry, you pay the rent, you cancel plans, you call a friend, you hunker down, your courage… ends.

You swear you’re stuck.

You’ll fly again.

You stand back up.

And then...

I had the course flags though. However long the stretch between them, I trusted those flags with my life — planted inch-deep in dry earth. Or tied to the fingertip of a California shrub. The flags marked the turns, the route. And they threaded me 32 miles through unknown switchbacks and a-left-not-a-right, and this-trail-here, not-that-one. Through to the finish.

I ran unplugged not because I’m hardcore. I’m just minimalist — by inheritance from my Dutch minimalist dad — and also: I had a lot on my mind and little room for screens.

Tonight, I looked through quotes I’ve saved.

4 years of quotes.

When I die at some ripe age after a surprising life — more surprises ahead — and when the people I love search through my notes and journals (and get surprised) they will find quotes. Too many. All wonderful. They will also find inscrutable poetry, vulnerabilities, self-address, and sharp handwriting.

This 4-year collection of quotes feels like course flags, because these 4 four years alive have felt like a hell of an ultramarathon without a Garmin.

I save quotes that give me a vision of which way to go, to move, to live.

In the spirit of planting a course flag — of tying it to the sprightly sprout of a California shrub at a sharp turn, I offer my selection of quotes to mark the trail for anybody, everybody, who travels this route.

For you.

Come let us hurtle down this mountain and up the next.

November and December practically burst: mythical, expansive, crisp.

Crisp is a plucky word.

I intend to like January. I’ve softened. My latest effort is punting a few favorite activities from December till January — to spruce things up.

For instance: my favorite films of 2025.

At the conclusion of a lush & spiced December, I almost posted my top 10 films. People are pensive and hopeful around late December, and everyone gobbles up year-end lists. Top 10 everything / anything of 2025!

Before reality snaps back with the drab J.

But January folded her hands quietly — patiently she brushed the pleats in her slacks, cleared her throat — and asked me to please consider her as a potential good time. I think January is female.

My best friend just wrote to me that “February is entirely a girl month: pretty with a nice plump, sumptuous body.”

So January is leaner, wiry, but persistent. She is polite. Yet unrelenting. “Give it a go,” she says crisply, pluckily, as we aim to transform, and as she bears witness to our 4 or 5 or 7-day resolution streaks — dissolving.

Try again, she nudges, and it’s not so drab.

I’m talking myself into liking her, so yes: January, you may have my TOP 10 FILMS of 2025.

The terrible thing about a Top 10 Films List is that it feels eternal once written down — engraved upon stone on the mount of God. Anytime I definitively organize my cinematic affections into 1st, 2nd, 3rd place, etc, I’m certain I will disagree with myself later.

That’s the wonderful thing about the list too. It’s me: now. Willingly offering up my momentary delight for this film or that one, subjecting myself to heated debate.

Anyway: this list was indeed engraved upon stone on the mount of God. Unreal experience.

So have a look at the movies that moved or delighted or altered me — strung in the order of my interest.

Today, in January (hey, girl) of 2026, it’s time.

EMILY’S TOP 10 FILMS OF 2025

10. K-Pop Demon Hunters

Back in the spring, Ji-Young and I caught up at Steep in Chinatown. We swapped life updates, and she mentioned voice acting (as Zoe) for a lil film called K-Pop Demon Hunters.

“It’s actually really good,” she said to me — prior to the film’s release on Netflix — “I hope people find it and watch it.”

Well.

They found it. And they watched it, Ji-Young. More people than ever before on Netflix.

It is good. I watched it early, before the wave (says me, with a hair flip), and I was delighted, moved, entertained. I savor a bright, deft animated film.

9. The Phoenician Scheme

Wes Anderson is hit or miss for me. This one hit. It’s got a funky sweet theme at its heart: a father-daughter love story. The ensemble cast is a hoot. It was silly and bold in a magnetizing way. And charming. Entertainment, baby! I grinned as I departed the theater.

8. Train Dreams

On paper, this film is for me. Shot in Washington State, using primarily natural light, Train Dreams is gorgeous. Visually rich, earthy, elegant. My home State in all her glory. The trees seem to speak in this film. We’re immersed in forests, and they groan as they are stripped. That struck me: this world where forests fall, and where time and human hunger remake the face of the earth. I wanted to adore this film. I wanted it to blow my mind. In the end it was beautiful, and it was a solid #8.

7. A Little Prayer

Thanks to Al Fernández for recommending this small, potent film — which quietly layers intimate detail until its closely-observed “everyday pain” culminates in one of the most tender, poignant endings to a film this year. IMHO.

6. Wake Up Dead Man (Knives Out)

BE MY PRIEST, JOSH O’ CONNOR. I love the vision of faith in this film. I love the nascent bond between a skeptic of the faith (Benoit) and a full-on follower of God (Jud). This is a fascinating, fun, riveting alchemy of entertainment and tenderly observed spirituality. Cheers, Rian. You spoke to mystical things like forgiveness and grace more keenly than those within the fold. And the murder mystery is nifty too!

5. Sorry, Baby

Sorry, Baby is a distillation of Eva Victor. I love it for that reason. It empowered me. Inspired me. Like a fresh North Star. Eva, you made a movie that’s so you — undiluted, winsome, with uneven seams (which I like). Sorry, Baby makes filmmaking feel possible to me all over again.

4. Hamnet

Chloe Zhao’s been my girl since 2017’s The Rider, which I watched in grad school, experiencing chills up & down my body in a kind of “so this is something I could be allowed to do?!” epiphany.

Since then we’re a bit tumultuous (Nomadland wasn’t what I hoped, still good tho! But Eternals was ouch), but I am committed to Chloe because I feel some weird kinship, of which she is totally unaware until we meet and immediately hit it off one day, maybe soon, who knows! ANYthINg CaN HAPpeN!

Anyway, that has nothing to do with me explaining Hamnet, which I ADORED for 60% of the film… for real it was in my top 2 favorite movie of 2025 for all of that 60% … until I somehow lost my resonance toward the latter third. I’ve watched it twice, and I’ve had the same experience both times, which is apparently the opposite experience that most people have. I hit my emotionally connected peak at the climactic tragedy moment, riveted, then lost that connection. BUT: I admire and appreciate this movie deeply — regardless. Jessie Buckley is a tour de force of tears and groans and smirks and unabashed emotional grunts.

Cinematography, production design, composition, lighting… delectable.

See you soon, Chloe!

3. Caught by the Tides

Ok, folks. Let’s dispense with the traditional idea of “plot,” “structure,” “narrative,” just for a moment? And let’s settle into a hypnotic, slow-burn, floating experience over time and travel and the changing of the world.

One critic (thanx, rogerebert.com) called it a “non-linear, experimental, elliptical documentary-fiction hybrid, whose plot is incidental.”

So.

This might not be for you.

But… if you want to immerse yourself in a vividly poetic world — an actual and specific world — so distinct — over decades and drastic change, then dive in.

“Caught by the Tides is assembled from 22 years of footage, including many of Jia Zhangke’s previous characters and locations (leftover footage and outtakes from his previous films too). As a result the actors naturally age, including the lead character, Qiao Qiao, who is played by Jia's real life wife, actress Zhao Tao.”

(citing Wikipedia here, muah.)

I was hypnotized, and I felt the transformation of the world keenly.

2. One Battle After Another / Marty Supreme

A TIE. BECAUSE THESE ARE “GUY” MOVIES. And usually guy movies of this level of Guy-ness, capital G, are not in my top 10. But what’s cool about each of these films is the spark of vulnerability at their entertain-your-brains-out-core. I am intrigued by myself. Why would a PTA and a Safdie film be my collective #2? It’s new for me. But I am opening my heart (as Chloe told me to do in Hamnet), and… I dig the sensitivities I felt amidst the thrill ride of each (the only sensitivity in Marty is at the end, and it worked on me). Both of these films (noting the male-gazey sizable objections, ahhh, will I regret this choice?!?) were 100% entertaining, but also ended with that dad-centric turn of grace, of slight awe and vulnerability that father’s feel for their kids, and I dug that, and maybe I’ll regret this placement, but here we go… message me any thoughts… I’m doing it. They’re getting #2.

and onto:

1. Sentimental Value

This. Film. Was. A. Feast.

For me. I was nourished with sumptuous cinematic nutrients, and I savored every element of the art and story, which was even richer and more textured upon my second viewing.

THE PREAMBLE OF THE HOUSE. 💯
THE PERFORMANCES BY RENATE AND INGA AND STELLAN (you too, Elle). 💯
THE UNFOLDING TENDERNESS BETWEEN SISTERS. (THAT ONE SCENE! IYKYK!) 💯
THE EDITING! 💯
THE LAYERS OF CARE, WOUNDS, CONNECTION, BITTERNESS, HISTORY, & QUIET CATHARSIS. 💯

I’m a nerd. I’m a Sentimental Value girly.

I know this is some deeply-internalized Nordic processing.

And I’m down.

In a lovely turn of events, I got to meet Stellan and Renate at a screening and talk to them about things like world politics, David Lynch, black licorice, and that one time in 2024 when I met Bill Skarsgård on the red carpet press line for Nosferatu while I was working the gig for Snapchat with pre-ordained (silly) questions like “What’s Nosferatu’s love language?” and Bill looked at me, peeved, and shook his head like “ugh, this blonde” and said to me (he actually said), “**** off” but in a sort of charming way, so that I wasn’t offended, but more so thought to myself: “he must be tired of ridiculous questions,” and when I told Stellan this story about his son, he threw his head back and laughed, and he took my hands in a firm, cheery embrace and told me, “Oh I have to speak to him about this, about you.”

So I hope Stellan is chatting to Bill about me and my lame, mandatory question, and congratulations Stellan, on your Golden Globe for Sentimental Value, it’s my favorite film of the year.

Congratulations also to January, for winning me over.

🖤

P.S.

I’m here for all your vehement disagreement or ebullient syncing of tastes. Whatever. Lay it on me.

And!

HONORABLE MENTIONS GO TO:

• The Testament of Anne Lee (the most enthralling, soul-rousing musical sequences I’ve seen in a while)

• Zootopia 2 (I HAD SUCH A GOOD TIME!)

I STILL MUST WATCH:

• The Secret Agent

• The Mastermind

• It Was Just an Accident

• If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Adieu.

Listen along for audio sumptuousness, but read along, too, for links, vids, photos.

The Gift is some good sh*t.

I wish I’d read it earlier. But books find us at the right moment, they say.

Picture me, slip-sliding into 2025’s final stretch: straining to make money via filmmaking. Planning and hustling and sobbing and trying to “make a marketable, sellable, distributable movie” while I barely making a living.

I’ve gotta get investors and get the film into production and put it on the market, where it might be bought, but for a negligible price, or not bought at all (and then is it worthless?).

Just a commodity with a price.

(If that tumbling Panda Gif is stressing you out, me too. That’s me in 2025. keep reading! scroll down! peace cometh!)

Is my joy in receiving inexplicable inspirations while writing this film (5 years of creative labor) reducible to a product sold for X amount in an anemic film market that hardly cares?

Everything in me recoils. “Give up then!” my gut screams.

Because frankly that’s depressing.

Here enters Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, published in 1983.

What is this book? I love David Foster Wallace’s take:

The Gift actually deserves the hyperbolic praise that in most blurbs is so empty. It is the sort of book that you remember where you were and even what you were wearing when you first picked it up. The sort that you hector friends about until they read it too. This is not just formulaic blurbspeak; it is the truth. No one who is invested in any kind of art, in questions of what real art does and doesn’t have to do with money, spirituality, ego, love, ugliness, sales, politics, morality, marketing, and whatever you call ‘value,’ can read The Gift and remain unchanged.
—David Foster Wallace

The Gift is a lovingly, brilliantly crafted defense of the inherent value of creative expression (art)… of it’s presence as a gift, given and received amongst us all, rather than a mere commodity bought, sold, owned.

“The artist,” says Joseph Conrad, “appeals to that part of our being… which is a gift and not acquisition—and therefore, more permanently enduring.”

Lewis Hyde gives loving attention to this essential part of our being that is a gift—rather than property, product, commodity.

Do we “own” the air in our lungs? Or what’s the price for the way the light refracts through a prism and greets our retinas and awes us with myriad colors? Is that your property or mine? How much? How much shall we pay for the ever-new stream of sunsets painted fresh night-to-night, year-to-year, across the sky? What about a transcendent singing voice, a mind that channels poetry, an ebullient storytelling gift, or brushstrokes across a canvas?

Silly geese, we are.

GIFTS. The awe and reverence and transcendence within us recognize

gifts.

It is within this reality that my filmmaking (and your own creative expressions) dwell… an economy of giving and receiving: open-hearted, attentive, generous.

Intuitively we know that artistic expression and creativity operate this way.

“A work of art is the emanation of its maker’s gift” and it is received as a gift too.

I won’t get into how art still flows in and out of a “commodity economy,” because it does (Lewis covers this), even as its enduring home is the gift economy. You might pay 9.99 a month for Spotify, but the transcendence you experience listening over & over to Rosalía’s “LUX” album has no proportion whatsoever to 9.99. It is experienced as a gift. And in the gift economy of art, we are delighted to give the gift away again (and thereby enjoy it even more). We can’t help ourselves when we experience transcendent art or expression: we simply have to share it. We have to show people that film, play them this song, bring them to that gallery, read them the poem.

Gift economy thrives in motion.

What is freely received is freely given. And our joy increases.

Creativity stagnates when it’s hoarded as “mine,” “yours.”

“If we think of the gift as a constantly flowing river, we may say that the one who treats the gift correctly does so by allowing herself to become a channel for its current. When someone tries to dam up the river, one of two things will happen: either it will stagnate or it will fill the person up until he bursts.”

Volumes could be written about this sort of stagnation and bursting— billionaires compelled by greed, hoarding wealth, the stench of that (of Scrooge himself), the stockpiling of resources that dam up the human spirit, that deprive the needy. Even a child who refuses to share a toy, who misses out on delight! Or the inner sickness of an artist who is dammed up with fear, insecurity, self-abuse — who longs to “flow freely” but is shut up within themselves.

A stagnant river grows sick and festers. Rivers are meant to flow. When they flow, they nourish all lands through which they pass.

The one who freely gives freely receives as well.

So here I am. Late December, 2025, having strained to make money, to commodify, but —like clouds breaking and sunlight flooding— I’m reminded that my creative expression operates within a different economy.

I write and dream and create because I cannot wait to share the gift with you. I know this beyond doubt as I sit now in a coffee shop: heart open, hands afire, typing typing typing, as a current passes through me, all passion and eagerness to offer these insights to you.

I receive a gift — my spirit enlivens — and I give this gift away.

I can feel my heart grow “three sizes” (The Grinch story illustrates this very point about a stagnant vs. flowing river), and:

“in the spirit of the gift, I love to feel (myself) open outward..” as “the gift leaves all boundary (of property) and circles into mystery… the passage into mystery always refreshes. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom… When the gift passes (onward) and then returns, we are enlivened… for we are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved.”

Let the river flow.

In the spirit of the gift, I offer these thoughts to you.

And in 2026, in the spirit of the gift, I hope to make a film for you called Chambers Bay.

A labor of love.

🤲🏼

But hot dang! The gifts I’ve received this year! I must now share those with you.

2025’s GIFTS

1. FIRST THINGS FIRST

Thank you forever to Christina Gonzalez-Ho, who gifted me with The Gift. At her urgent recommendation, I chose to read it. In gratitude, I now share it with you.

2. I DREAM A WORLD

Thanks to my dear friend, Nathan Roberts for gifting me the awareness of Isaac Julien, an artist who knocked my socks off. In May, I traveled with friends to witness Isaac Julien’s “I Dream a World” at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.

I sat before Julien’s multi-screen immersive installation with a knot the size of a plum in my throat. My body afire. Good fire. This artist speaks to me.

3. PURE MICHIGAN

Deepest thanks to Yani K. De Leon for gifting me this song. More than a song though… it’s… auditory cinema? An entire world via soundscape? Nostalgia distilled as music? I invite you to don your finest headphones, find a quiet perch, and listen - uninterrupted - to this 8 minute 19 second piece.

👉🏼PURE MICHIGAN👈🏼

I hope to make films that feel the way this song makes me feel.

Thank you for this work of art, Julian Klincewicz.

4. LUX

I’ve written about this.

I’ll say it again:

I first listened to LUX on a drive - the entire album in one go. My spirit soared to my throat. My ribs expanded. I grabbed the steering wheel like I was flying. This struck me as music that had always existed. Like this album is eternal? inevitable? essential?

And yet shocking. Shocking in an exquisite way. Over and over, I’m listening, re-listening, like: how does this exist? I’m so happy this exists?!?!

A gift. Thank you Dri Sommer for urging me to listen. Compelling me, practically. Thank you, Rosalía. I hope you receive 100-fold the gift you’ve given.

5. MARY OLIVER

Grief toppled me this year. We said goodbye to the best friend I’ve had. If you knew Sarah, then you knew her existence as a gift. No hyperbole. It’s astonishing and true. Losing Sarah was brutal, still is.

In grief, the poems of Mary Oliver came to me.

HEAVY (by Mary Oliver)

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
“It is not the weight you carry

but how you carry it—
books, bricks, grief—
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled—
roses in the wind,
The sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?

I love you. Thank you. I hope you can give and receive freely.

-Em

1992 film starring baby-faced Christian Bale as Jack “Cowboy” Kelly in New York City - 1899 - amongst a raggedy cohort of newspaper-hawking kids. It’s a musical. I grew up with it. I’ll forever be biased. It’s cinema. I’m so open to Christian Bale singing about orphanhood & Santa Fe.

“I’m alone but I ain’t lonely; for a dreamer night’s the only time of day.”

My nieces and nephews (7 of the 10) recently watched Newsies. Then rewatched it 4 times.

Home for Thanksgiving last week, I witnessed them break out into unified song at least a dozen times.

They’d shout: “That’s my cigar! You’ll steal anotha!”

You guys… movies are alive. Still. Kind of. Actually.

My older brother Josh has this Instagram account that came as a total surprise. He’s a father of 3, works full-time as an engineer, wrote a trilogy of fantasy books for kids, taught himself to paint superbly with water color (another IG account for his paintings), does some woodworking, renovates his own house, and (AND!) just wrote a children’s “puzzle-packed mystery adventure book” in which the kids are the heroes who must solve puzzles as they read, in order to triumph and rescue their fam.

He calls it “Solve to Survive.”

I’m in awe?!?

Siblings are fixtures… like… take-them-almost-for-granted-fabric-of-our-lives. But… catching the right light, all in a moment, we can see each other anew - refracting all the dimensionality and surprise that familiarity conceals.

Josh is extraordinary.

I’m inspired by him, as if I’m following the journey of some curious and open-hearted renaissance man whose body of work I admire. The lovely part is that he’s my brother forever, and the inspiration remains close.

(Josh, thanks for reading this… my highest form of complimenting you is by writing about you.)

My father has Parkinson’s. Thirteen years of it, and it’s aggressive. He’s got gnarly arthritis in his hips and lower back too.

I’ve written about his steady heart, within a faltering body.

This time, while home, I was struck anew by the inverse relationship that a body and a spirit can have.

I mean that my dad’s spirit seems to grow younger, while his body creaks and groans.

We had the loveliest talks. He sincerely wanted my thoughts and ideas about how to open up. New ways to experience the world.

He cries readily - at all the vital things a person should cry about.

He sat on his green armchair one night - I sat on the couch opposite - and I told him about the film I’ve written. The film I want to shoot next year. There’s a character in it with Parkinson’s, and I said, “Dad, this man is like a father to the lead character. He tells her words in her dark hours that every person should hear from a good father.”

My dad cried.

I cried.

Amidst a debilitating ailment. Amidst his body betraying him.

I’m scared of such illness. I always have been. But the way my dad’s spirit is soft… it’s worth crying about. It’s worth good tears, like rain, that make things green.

His spirit is green and fresh.

The hope of that is stunning to me, juxtaposed with the pain.

Nicolette is my mom’s name, an elegant name.

She wakes up each day with exuberance. She’s a morning person, and it’s beautiful, but sometimes startling, but mostly empowering. She’s ready to talk, ponder, share an excerpt or idea, or process something potent.

One morning at home, I emerged from my room to a fat folder on the table where I usually sit. My mom had sorted through old things and found this collection of every single report card I’d ever received. She saved them all.

I opened the folder and spent an hour with my jarring history of perfectionism - working my way back from high school to 4 year-old Emily’s preschool evaluation.

I found this (such crisp cursive) from Tamara Walters, my preschool teacher:

“She has improved a great deal in self control.”

I’m tickled. I love a good euphemism.

Nicolette is the best for saving so much of my life and history… for also being a woman with “joy that bubbles over.” “Always eager to participate and help.”

I’m like my mother. I dig it.

Zootopia 2 premiered while I was home for Thanksgiving, so I caught a 10:20AM matinee with Josh and his kids (Giselle, Theo, and Mercy).

I am in love with the personalities of those kids.

I’ve written about Mercy before. She’s 8.

She’s the kind of child that, upon re-uniting with me, will clutch my face - earnest, intense - and say “BABY, I LOVE YOU!” with the force of 100 suns.

She has also clutched my face out of nowhere and said (with gravitas and pregnant pauses): “For we… are… heroes.”

Mercy sat to my left in Zootopia 2 and held my hand throughout the movie, unconsciously tracing lines on my palm while she stared at the screen.

The moment the credits rolled, she turned to me and said:

“That was a real knee-slapper!”

Kiddo, I love you. I agree.

GLIMPSES -

(The cigarettes are prop cigs. Entirely fake. I exhorted all of the children to never smoke, I illuminated the perils of smoking. But yes, we did play with them.)

Zooming in on Mercy…

And…

I cat-sat for Rachel (is it cat-sitted?). Prince is 10-years-old. He has 3 legs. He’s a cancer survivor. He purrs like his throat’s a V6. He’d purr if I just looked at him. Luna leapt onto my chest at 4:46AM one morning. Her “meow” sounds punk rock. It’s not demure; it’s Joan Jett. She wanted to lay on my hair, on my very pillow. She was insistent.

*Prince is foreground; Luna’s the black silhouette.

While cat sitting, I was also Associate Producing for an independent feature film here in LA.

By Associate Producer, I mean that I was deeply concerned with the crafty selection - purchasing Gushers and Limón Lays mid-shoot as a rousing pick-me-up for the cast and crew.

Wednesday, I had a day off from set. I drove to Costa Mesa (hi, Serena!), El Sereno, Alhambra (hi, Yani!), then back to Koreatown to feed Prince and Luna. I was amped to watch an early screening of Hamnet at the DGA theater with my friend Arjun. This screening included a Q&A with Chloe Zhao & Jessie Buckley (!!).

That film will make you sob, they told me.
It will mess you up, they said.

But as I rushed to feed Prince and Luna their fortified diet (props to you, Rachel, they’re so healthy!) and get all of the crafty foods loaded back into my car (Gushers!), and as it rained, and LA grew sluggish with cars sliming along, I wanted to cry for different reasons. Basic stress: timing and traffic. I waited at an intersection that was entirely blocked by cars. These folks had just pulled right into the center of it … like:

“This is our time!”

5 cars barricaded the intersection - for the full duration of my green light - and the drivers stared straight ahead, petrified of eye contact with me because they knew… they knew they were being naughty.

I verged on tears - windshield wipers raging - and at last…

I called Arjun: “I won’t make Hamnet in time.”

45 minutes to travel 6.6 miles in the heart of LA.

I should’ve climbed out and run.

I still plan to watch Hamnet and cry for cinematic rather than real life reasons.

Next morning - Thursday - I was back on set as Associate Producer. Which meant filling 10 small bags with fake cocaine (Vitamin B-12 powder) for Yani, our Production Designer.

After preparing these baggies, I dropped in on Doubting Thomas. They’ve got the most delicious passionfruit cream pie. Oof. Rosa’s rec. Please stare at these photos.

Leaping to Saturday, I woke at 5:25AM (I’m on a streak of irregular sleep hours) and drove to Tujunga to convene with Chloe, D, Rosa, Horacio, and JO - amongst a dozen other friends - for a 17 mile run in the Angeles National Forest. Winds whipped. Los Angeles was crispy-clear as far as the eye could see. I like when rains pound pollution clear out of the sky. Everything gets green/blue/brisk.

It was 50 degrees. We climbed 2,400 feet in the first 7 miles, then careened 5 miles down to the streets of Tujunga for our last 5. We flew. I’m training for a 50K. I gotta stay healthy (keep me accountable).

So… I need those regular sleep hours.

This had me pondering my slumber all week. LISTEN?

2 morsels more from this panoply of Nov 15 - 22:

*4-ingredient cookies from Do (and Michael): oats + banana + peanut butter + dark chocolate chips.

*LUNA^

(thanks to Yani and Oscar for several of the photos within this panoply)

-em

Baffling. I feel that way.

Diane said she doesn’t.

While drinking a Spindrift (the blood orange flavor), I told them I’m a deeply conscientious yet simultaneously transgressive person. By transgressive, I think I mean that I’m often falling short of my standards. I want to be so good and so alive and thoughtful and prolific and healthy and diligent and gracious and open and growing and grounded and learning and hospitable and humble and ambitious and well-adjusted but singular.

(I hope you tuned out halfway through that list. blah.)

Like I said: I’m often falling short.

The Tom Kha Gai was delicious, by the way. I recently discovered that I love Tom Kha.

Does your chest ever feel heavy or tight or achy? Maybe it’s anxiety or the strain of figuring things out, but I visualize cracking my chest open - nicely, kindly, like the satisfying crack of a farm egg - and all of the tightness dissipates and all of the clean light and breezes get in.

When the air is like this after so many showers - a sky billowing and crisp - I want to get out into it and be consumed. I want it to change me. I don’t want to be be separated. I don’t want to separate myself with strange and complicated standards.

I just want to let the freshness in.

Side-note (on freshness): thank you, Yani and Sierra, for introducing me to this artist:

8:56AM. The rhythm falls - discordant. When I step outside to run, no one else will be running. I’ll have the sidewalks of El Sereno, South Pasadena, and San Marino to myself. Angelenos hunker down in the rain.

I’m drawn to rain (thank you Washington State childhood). I’ll wear water resistant earbuds while I run 10 miles. I’ll listen to LUX, the new album from Rosalía.

I’m thinking nonstop about Rosalía. She’s 33. She’s a genius. It’s totally fair to say that. I promise. Look her up. Dive into the vortex. You, too, will bear witness.

LUX is unbelievable.

I first listened to LUX on a drive - the entire album in one go. My spirit soared to my throat. My ribs expanded. I grabbed the steering wheel like I was flying. It felt like music that had always existed. Like this album is eternal? inevitable? essential?

And yet shocking. Shocking in an exquisite way. Over and over, I’m listening, re-listening, like: how does this exist? I’m so happy this exists?!?!

If you’re baffled by LUX, I get that. If you’re indifferent, try again? This album is the antithesis of easy listening. It’s more like kneeling in a cathedral at Golden Hour while a Thunderstorm rages. It’s like being in a forest during an earthquake and all the woodland creatures emerge.

These are weird analogies.

But I wake up excited about this album - excited to my core. I’m aware that this is an ARTIST at work (she sings in 13 languages. These are like ARIAS).

Rosalía’s album is maximalist, breathtaking, enlivening. I’m hyped at this very moment to shut my laptop and run through the downpour in Los Angeles, listening to this entire album. I’ll play out the fullness and the ineffable and the exhilarating in Brooks shoes on splashed pavement.

And then maybe I’ll write poetry, or revise my screenplay. You guys! this! music! catches fire in me! and I have to go be an artist too.

It’s 9:40AM. The rain falls harder.

“Divinize” is playing, and I have miles to run.

Cheers.

(Please listen to LUX, and tell me what you think.)

My days, recently:

I grew up in Tacoma, Washington. I never thought that was special. Not like New York City or Los Angeles or London or Seoul. Not even like the mythos of Kansas and tornados.

It’s just Tacoma. Familiar, nondescript, drab.

Unless it’s September. The Northwest is vivid in September.

There’s a real thing called nose blindness. It’s a temporary condition where a person loses their ability to smell certain odors - often due to prolonged exposure to that odor.

I think I developed nose blindness to Tacoma. From 7 till 23, I sprouted in its soil, under all its drizzle and gray, I ran and learned, I was content; I suffocated; and increasingly… I pined for something beyond it. So I left. I traveled the world for 7 years. I got a scholarship to earn my Masters Degree in Southern California, and I fell in love with Los Angeles (a tumultuous relationship).

My parents and my siblings and all of their TEN CHILDREN live in Tacoma. They’re thriving. They don’t seem nose blind - while I’m insatiable… curious… always aching for some fresh crosswind.

I’m back in Tacoma as I type this. A 10-day trip. I’m writing the 9th draft of my feature film, set here, and I can smell it again - a scent from childhood, before I went nose blind. There is actually a bigness here. This city is kitschy, fresh, rooted, intrepid, a skosh tacky, hearty, and kinda Nordic. These are all opinions. But I smell it potently. Rain on the pavement. Evergreens. Saltwater. Dirt. Blackberries.

Distinctive.

Writing this film is an exploration of a real place that really shaped me. I’d like to take my roots seriously. Even as I’ve grown upward and away. I’m feeling out what it means to be an artist from Tacoma. The way that Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee are New York artists, or Greta and Joan Didion grew roots in Sacramento, or like all the more flashy birthplaces of art.

Tacoma’s got more to it. I’m coming around. I’m open again. This place is special.

8/29/25

Grace and Esther (nieces, twins, 9 years old) asked me to come up with names for them. Like… “superhero names, but actually like musician names, and kind of like a band name.” It was a tall order. I did some investigating:

“What’re your favorite things to do, favorite colors? Favorite foods?”

Grace loves beets. Surprising. She’s also often drumming.

Esther is obsessed with pink. She loves soccer and plays forward.

I pondered. They stood before me - rapt - awaiting the bequeathing of their new monikers. They trust me so much, and I wanted to live up.

At last, I had it:

to Grace:

“Beat Babe”

to Esther:

“Pink Striker”

They’re thrilled, and I’m thrilled that they’re thrilled.

The names are badass, but I can’t tell them that because my sister wouldn’t like me to use the word “ass” in front of them. I agree.

Still: badass names.

8/28/25

Blackberries dangle everywhere. Late August is plump with berries. They hang in turgid clusters. They drop - ripe - and stain the sidewalks. It’s 20 minutes work to fill a plastic bowl… enough for a pie. We picked this morning for Dad’s birthday. My sister’s kids ate a berry for every one they plucked, but I was focused. Metronomic. I wanted an entire bowl of only the bursting-est berries. The thorns are no joke, and as I threaded my body through vines, I drew a little blood, but picked that entire bowl.

Only two spiders in it.

Esther, Grace, and I washed the berries; mom baked a pie. And it continues to be the most wholesome and storybook tradition.

Here’s Mercy’s recent take on Adulthood, while we wandered a playground in Tacoma. (She’s 8.)

3 of the 10 little humans. (Mercy is on the bottom left.)

It’s surreal.

Scanning these words I’ve written feels like: what the actual heck?

Death is shocking, even as it forms slow and inevitable on the horizon -

Cancer, YOU ARE THE WORST. If you know someone suffering from it, or if you’ve lost someone to it, I wish to embrace you.

oof.

There’s also bittersweet warmth, potent memories, and a strange type of humor. (I’ve laughed so hard with friends who loved her, with her husband, over the weirdest of things because … again … what the actual heck?)

Friday, August 15th, at 3PM, we celebrated Sarah’s life in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, at a sprawling church (the size of a college campus) flanked by cornfields with 6-foot stalks.

Here is what I wrote till 1AM the night before…

It’s only 1 thing. I hope to say more about her for all my life. She held abundance, and she was imperfect, and she was wonderful.

Letter to Sarah, read at her Memorial Service:

Dearest Sarah,

Someone asked me once in LA if I’ve trained professionally in improv comedy…

So…

I called you and thanked you for professionally training me in improv comedy.

During 13 years of friendship, we managed to do unintentional sketch comedy in the Dubai airport, on an elephant in Thailand, waiting out a 14-hour layover in Kunming, China, and huddled under a blanket on a roof at the border between Syria and Jordan watching 1997’s Cinderella, starring Whitney Houston and Brandy.

I feel the exuberance of your laughter now, here, you singular woman with your springboard mind, your warmth, your wit, your specific twinkle toes dance, and your eternal willingness to receive my roller coaster heart. You sheltered me 1,000 times in shame storms, in honest confessions, on redeye flights in middle seats surrounded by the Ethiopian National Men’s soccer team,

you…

so vivid,
lit bright,
my very best friend,
losing you feels like darkness, like a fist, like night.

I’m terrible at grieving, or maybe I just want you to be near while I grieve, to talk about it, even now I want to read this aloud to you and hear what you think and link arms as you’d cup these faces I see before me, beloved of so many, Sarah, we adore you, we still do. Look at this garden you grew, these exquisite lives you cherished, you knit together, you knew…

How terribly it hurts to say goodbye to you.

I want to shake you gently and clutch you tight and say that you lived the most astonishing gorgeous life.

You’d remind me again and again:
“Em, let’s stay soft-hearted… willing… open…”

And my God, you did.

A friend who met you just once wept over you:
“Emily,” she said, “some lives are so big.”

So… Sarah Elizabeth, where do we begin?

With your heart (and lungs) open wide: you gave us a glimpse of Joy in this life, Joy beyond the walls of the world poignant as this grief.

And I feel something I can’t yet see… the freshness, the beauty of what you believed. That you are held, and so are we, and you were an optimist, and you were honest, and you did not ignore what happens in the center of the pain, facing the cusp of night, you discovered a Hand clutching yours, mine,

a few words - vivid, soft - are left to be said:

“Joy is inevitable,
belly laughter will come again.
You can weep, dear heart.
This is not the end.”

El Sereno is home now, and I’m learning the neighborhood while being the exact type of person who’s changing it: gentrification. I’m part of that, so… GAH.

A tall man (maybe 6’4”) walks the sidewalks of the area. He looks vaguely Canadian, or Dutch. Mid-30s. He’s tidy and lean; he wears a forest green canvas rucksack and featherweight glasses.

I’ve seen him half a dozen times - lanky strides and sweeping arms - making his way down Huntington Drive or Eastern.

I’m deeply curious about him. Does he wear sunscreen? Does he have a car? Is he channelling Jack Kerouac? He’s neatly composed, yet carries that rucksack like it’s all the world’s given him.

Thursday, I visited my favorite coffee shop for a latte. I slipped out of my car.

There he was. We met on the sidewalk. I was forward about it:

Me: “Hi. I’ve wanted to meet you. I’ve seen you around the neighborhood.”

Him: (extends his hand) “I’m Ocho.”

Me: (shakes it) “Emily.”

…

Me: “Can I ask a little about you? I’ve been curious...”

He smiled at me - the way a kid might when a grown-up compliments his sketch: eager, open… shy and proud at the same time.

We talked for 10 minutes. He said things that did indeed seem lifted from Jack Kerouac’s world, which I only know of from excerpts I’ve read on “BrainyQuote” - for instance:

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
- Jack Kerouac

Ocho told me his house was “just up the way” and pointed to the hills between El Sereno and Alhambra. He said one of the windows was busted, so his belongings were vulnerable to plundering if he left them for the day. Thus, he packs everything into his rucksack and walks about Los Angeles by dawn.

He paused.

“The landlord doesn’t know I’m there. But it’s my home.”

I nodded. “Ok, gotcha. So…”

“I’m a squatter.”

He said it the way I might say, “I’m tall.” … apparent, impeachable. (I wasn’t about to impeach him for it.) (I would like a peach now.)

He told me next that he wandered in from other states (“other parts”), and that he walks a different neighborhood each day, so as not to become conspicuous in any one. He was surprised I’d seen him so many times. I said “I like to pay attention, and you are hard to miss.”

He shared about some work up North that he heard wind of - near San Luis Obispo - that he might hitchhike there, see about that job. Or go East.

I asked him what’s the work? He said a farm, looking for extra hands.

It felt like 1957.

We parted with a mutual sentiment: “hope I see you around.”

We shook hands. His were warm, calloused, enormous hands.

And off he went. Stepping over jagged cracks on the busted cement of an El Sereno sidewalk in 2025.

But… like a small town, with lazy evenings and porches and travelers drifting in, with rucksacks and “gigs up north,” we shared a bubble and channeled an old world,

and I’m glad I met you, Ocho.

I wanted to tell you to wear a bit of sunscreen. If I meet you again, I will - wherever that might be.

As Jack would say:

There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.

My seat-back screen was dark: no films, no series. No pretzels, thanks.

I cried in row 33 - shoulder pressed to a stranger, and I thought to myself: we’re in different realms now - all you nice humans in economy; you attendants rolling carts, asking about hot coffee or Sprite Zero… and ice with that?

Isn’t it absurd?

An everlasting wealth of tomorrows smashed down. Violence within me.

But honestly: “What beverage would you like, hon?”

I wanted to say: “They told her she has a few weeks” while staring straight into the eyeballs of the thin-lipped, kindly flight attendant.

Passengers nearby might’ve related because… probably… some have loved someone who’s heard

“a few weeks”

a handful of weeks, sitting here in my palm like a cluster of grapes with turgid skin - compact, definite.

A few weeks to do all her living, which is dumb; it is dissonant because she is a serial entrepreneur in her very bones, and she has 14 ideas hovering, ready to fly. She will have children, and I will watch them for a few weeks each summer, in a kind of bff-child-swap-comedy-summer-camp-movie, and her kids will be mischievous and quick-witted, also silly and unafraid, but if they are afraid, she’ll hold them and sing to them - homegirl can belt - and we will make voluminous salads in mixing bowls and sometimes splurge on too many soft cookies, and we’ll go to South Africa again, twice, to see everywhere we frolicked in our 20s; somehow we’ll get back to the Middle East, it won’t be as heavy as last time, and her home will be cozy, well-lit - I’ll fall asleep on a soft rug after running 7 miles - and she will photograph 200 more weddings and the couples will belly laugh because that’s what it’s like when Sarah shoots your wedding. Your abs hurt.

She just had her own wedding.

John is waiting too, when I land in Pennsylvania.

We’ll sit on either side of her, but she will not bop or sing or bake, she’ll be tired and drowsy and high (meds are heavy), and I’ll look at John - his enormous, gentle hands clutching hers - and I’ll imagine that he gets the woman I knew in 2013, 2016, 2018 (before…) for 5 decades more.

But

He will love her with his whole heart (his earnest, clear heart)

a few weeks longer.

Vacation happens “in a few weeks.”
School starts “in a few weeks.”
I begin a new job “in a few weeks.”

What of death?

I’m not organized to understand that. I don’t know how to realize her absence from the center of my living breathing being.

My sanity is interrupted. My eyes hurt.

So I eat no pretzels and I drink no beverage, but I close these aching eyes. Tight. I close them against the screens playing Squid Game and Minions and Sex and the City.

I just sit.

The great hum of the plane falls away,
and I’m not kidding: I see my own film… vivid and clear against my eyelids: it’s Sarah and John. Standing at the lip of a great shadow.

Remember those empire-building video games with undiscovered swaths of space all around? Games begun in a little visible plot, but you’ve gotta explore that shadow and press forward into it?

It was like that.

Sarah and John stood hand-in-hand before a horizon of night: vast darkness - an entire sky top-to-bottom - and it wasn’t bad or awful or heavy. It was… unknown.

As I looked at them, the wind flushed my face as if from a winter-window, ajar.

Fresh. Cold. Good cold. Like the outside.

But then looking wasn’t enough, and I felt that I must move.

So I walked toward them - at that very lip, that edge - and I reached out. I clutched her hand so that she had John to her right, me to her left, and here we were… staring into a foreign darkness that offered no clues, no terrain, no “I see what this is like,”

There was no fear either.

I knew we’d step forward. I knew I’d accompany them, wherever. And the certainty wasn’t in seeing. I could’t. The certainty was in the warmth of our hands, a string of three, the certainty was fellowship - at the edge of all things, facing the dark.

The goodness of that contact flushed me to my feet. I felt our hands. I felt the wind. I felt willing.

And I opened my eyes.

Here was my row 33 seat mate, his iPad flickering. Here was my leather journal. There was the window, the wing, the clouds, and a hard, real world.

There were still a few weeks.

The plane landed. I trained from Philly to Lancaster. Karolyn - Sarah’s sweet mom - fetched me. John and I sat next to Sarah in her recliner chair. She was funny and bright and pained and tired, and we talked, and we helped her pull off this wild idea of a 24-7 prayer tent, 80ft x 40ft in her family’s backyard, and I rubbed her feet with magnesium lotion because of the neuropathy. I laid down next to her in the evening, body pressed to her side, and I watched her breathe. We met with the palliative care doctor who modulated her meds, curbing the nausea,

then I flew back to Los Angeles.

Weeks became months, and I went to her twice more. I saw great tears drop from John’s eyes onto her cheeks in the hospice facility as she clutched his cheeks and said “You’re gonna be ok.”

I cried with him - this man she came to love so late, so perfectly, so bumpy, so honest, all the way to the cusp of her time.

And my God how he loves her too.

Her family spoke to her in sweet quips, soft words, and they couldn’t help but laugh because she was funny. Still. She joked through the molasses of her medicated state, her comic timing ever on point.

In early July, I held her hands while my throat quivered a hurricane. I managed: “Thank you for being such an extraordinary friend to me. You’re the best one I ever had.”

She smiled.

I said “I’m crying.”

She gathered a tear: “Thank you for your tears. I love them. I love you.”

And I thought that I wanted this to be a movie. Fiction. I want to call “CUT!” Great scene; we all cried. It isn’t real.

But that cluster of grapes sat in my open hand - dwindling.

I wanted her everlasting tomorrows back, for John and Greg and Karolyn and all 8 of her siblings who she gathered and adored - more like a hen with her beloved chicks than a sibling - and for Malakhi, and for my own dream of her on the set of my first film, photographing behind the scenes, wooing the cast and crew with her indomitable likability.

We did come to the cusp though.

Feet at the edge on July 17, 2025, here was that step into the great shadow that is neither evil nor wrong, but… unknown.

We know so little while we love so much. It hurts like hell. We stare into a foreign darkness that offers no clues, no terrain, no “I see what this is like.”

But the wind is fresh, cold. The outside.

I’ve resisted. I’ve raged. I’ve numbed. I have been afraid…

I close my eyes.

And the certainty isn’t in seeing. I can’t. The certainty is in the warmth of our hands - still, I feel it - the certainty is fellowship - at the edge of all things, facing this night as if I am held, and so is she, and so are you, and call me an optimist, call me a fool, but I cannot ignore what happens in the center of the pain, toes to the edge of the world,

discovering here a Hand clutching mine,

ours,

for our everlasting tomorrows, or months, or few weeks.

I have loved you, Sarah. We have. We do.

And here we begin, hand-in-hand.

I love when my friends drop me or fetch me because I can hug them.

I really like bookending trips with hugs. I’m eternally grateful. I will hug you goodbye from the airport, or hello, and I’ll wave to you as I’m swallowed into LAX, or emerging from it as if from the caves of time. I would like to be hugged because traveling so much is too much, and hugs regulate me.

Thank you dear friends who’ve hugged me.

When I’m outside of LA - for instance in Chicago this morning at 5AM - I must call an Uber and hope it’s never again $169.

Just as dawn was twinkling upon the remnants of a thunderstorm, I bopped outside The Residence Inn by Marriott, Room 1211, and I saw Gary idling in his forest green SUV. Gary was 65, let’s say. He was polite and took my bag and booped it into his trunk. He played classical music for me, and he managed the temperature nicely, but Gary did have an aggressively jarring type of acceleration. That’s ok, dude.

I felt forlorn this morning when I woke at 5AM (3AM PST), but Gary’s many-stringed music and temperate-car-climate buoyed me. The Chicago sky was newborn - spritzed by rains and thunders and lightnings - and that buoyed me too. As we pulled into Terminal 3, I was refreshed.

I hopped out of his SUV, and as Gary grabbed my bag, I turned - warm and bright toward him, I spread my arms, and stepped up…

For a hug.

But then… I remembered: Gary doesn’t know me like that.

My mind was tired. I did very much want a hug. But not from Gary.

I dropped my arms, snatched my bag and tossed a “have a lovely day!” over my shoulder. I never looked back.

And now I type this from Row 12, seat A on a small plane, anticipating the next hug. It’s like hug hunger.

It’s nice to give attention to hugs.

Not from Gary, which is totally ok, but from a friend who chooses to play my fun game with me and extend their bravery to the highways of 405 or 110 and beyond.

I adore friends.

Hugs.

Even Gary.

Because I’ve traveled way-2-much these 4 months. 40 flights. In order to remain tethered to sanity, I’ve paid attention to details - anchoring myself in stuff like:

• the perfume of this eager chick in the TSA line. It’s citrus and musk and light. (I don’t call anyone “chick” but I’m trying it out, respectfully.)

• the jade earrings of the lady scrolling Tik Tok, cap pulled low, rims of her glasses inching down her nose.

• eye contact with the Lisa (she looks to be a Lisa) clutching her McDonalds brown bag, in her tennis skirt, tossing her buoyant “BLESS YOU!” like a softball, because I sneezed twice while she passed.

Thank you, Lisa.

People are everywhere at airports. It’s wild.

Smushed close in human schools of fish, swooshing through terminals. When I look up from my phone & cease to dilly dally (gr8 phrase!!! Bring it back!) - when I pay attention - I feel less bonkers for being awake at 5AM in Chicago. Less adrift, more myself amongst other selves.

So - I was saying - I Googled “quotes about how attention is healing,”

And here are some good ones that you could’ve Googled too, but I gotchu:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

David Foster Wallace

Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

Susan Sontag

I like that David uses the word “unsexy,” although attention is actually a skosh sexy (vocab: skosh), or - as one of my best friends says - it’s “punk rock.” Because aren’t we all vortexed into our phones all the time? And isn’t it cool when someone makes brief (not too long, or it’s unsettling) meaningful eye contact with you… a stranger who smiles your way and acknowledges your singular life upon this earth?

Wouldn’t David have called that kinda sexy?

Susan would think it’s sexy, because her quote talks about how attention is vitality, and vitality is sexy.

If you would also like to practice attention (and be a little bit sexy), stay tuned, because in this Substack cozy corner, I’ll share vignettes of attention: episodic details I’ve loved, noticed, and experienced with care (and humor) lately.

Please - in the meantime - tuck into this photo series, as I sit elbow-to-elbow with this tall grandma at an O’hare work station near L9.

See ü soon.

We covered 400 miles - 8 of us - southbound from the border of Canada straight into Manhattan. We ran ~133 miles for 3 days, like stages of the Tour de France - by foot - finishing at a campsite each night, having a trailer shower, then sleeping four-to-a-tent until:

Wake at 3:55AM, splash my face, pull on shorts and a dry-fit tee, and away we go.

42 of those miles were mine. I redlined 6 min/mile pace as long as I could manage, broken into 1/2 mile to 3 mile segments.

Our baton was a GPS tracker, a boxy thing the size of a GoPro. We passed it off with the fervor of high school track athletes in a 4x400 relay. I’d hop out of the van on the shoulder of a New York highway, shake my legs out, and wait for my friend (Rosa or Vince, or maybe Dan or Ale). They’d blitz around a bend or up an incline, barreling toward me, arm extended with that GPS thing… like we’re at the State Meet… and it’s go-time.

I extend my hand too, flushed with adrenaline from temples to toes:

HANDOFF.

I sprint down the highway - flanked by bucolic pastures, lethargic cows, horses, Hudson Valley towns bedazzled with American flags, and a blue jay or two.

It’s kind of ridiculous.

13 of us (3 crew, a journalist, a photographer, and 8 runners) swapping between a swamp of a van, and a Ford Transit “recovery” vehicle stocked with sunflower butter, pumpkin seeds, Sour Patch Kids, dates, dill-flavored potato chips (they came through), and electrolytes.

It’s also… kind of essential…

Doing this strange thing for a brand (thanks for paying, Merrell), but primarily

for each other.

I have a complicated relationship with running. Like a marriage that was first gorgeous, then fraught, fractured, healed, renewed, again and again.

For 3 years I’ve had a string of injuries (not to mention high school and college injuries, so many so much so ouch). Mostly self inflicted. That’s how distance runners get injured: we plow straight into it. Each time I’d rest a bit, then dive in and run through it - another race or experience with Koreatown Run Club or Loose Footage - my teammates and friends.

“I rest in motion.” (I’d say)

And I’d almost recover.

Running is a hefty part of my LA personality and social life. A fat slice of my time pie. “Independent Film Director” is weird and so hard and kind of like winning the lottery as a career. Running is achievable. Pick the distance; run the distance. Accomplish. I can make tangible progress. That feels wonderful.

These past 3 years I was often broke and beleaguered with car issues. Just effortlessly fulfilling clichés of the girl who moves to LA to make it!

Opportunities dissolved in my palms. So I leaned hard into running.

I’m not married with kids. I don’t have an Oscar, or a car less than 10 years old, or a single 2-hour movie made, but I have a solid recent half marathon time!

By November ‘24, I’d recovered from a brutal injury the last time I ran an ultra relay, and I began training for the 2025 LA Marathon (held in mid-March). I ramped up mileage, demolished track workouts, and felt the bliss of gliding 18 miles easyyy. I got fit fit. And I was like: WE ARE SO GOOD NOW. Running became (again) my haven from other arenas I could not control. That was nice.

But (MUAHAHA, PREDICTABLE PLOT TWIST) during a track workout in January: sudden. global. foot. pain. I could barely limp to my car without a breakdown. WHY NOW?!

(I like to expect different outcomes from my recurring issue of overtraining.)

My LA marathon went on ice. I felt that old flush of disappointment, the betrayal of my body, to whom I said: why can’t you do everything always forever healthy?

But… and this is seismic… that old flush faded quickly. Somehow, maybe via maturation and grace in equal measure,
I surrendered.

I sat in the orthopedic doctor’s office, hearing about the inflammation in my foot, between bones, the mandate to rest for a month, and I just let go.

There’s an iceberg here, so much more I could say about surrender (are you tired of hearing it from me?), but I’ve been practicing letting go for a while. By practicing, I mean that it has been forced upon me because I live ridiculously, and I get myself into all kinds of messes. I had to learn the kind of letting go that differentiates between identity and image. The kind of letting go that takes responsibility for the life beneath the veneer. Yes, I dip back into performing my value sometimes, but I’ve been broken down enough to see that who I am is not what I accomplish.

I just cringed typing that. It’s so on-the-nose.

“You are more than what you achieve.”

Duh, dumba$$.

But… there’s a difference between a cliche that’s typed into my tidy Substack here… and a stomach-deep epiphany, engraved through pain, realized in the stormy moments when I’ve wanted to quit forever.

That cliche is actually gorgeous. That cliche points to something potent, ineffable:

I am not my efforts to have a sexy career as a filmmaker in Los Angeles (ugh).

I am not my interesting life with lots of travel and cool experiences with cool people and cool foods and cool fits.

I am not a potential family I’ll have or mid-Century-naturally-lit-warm-wood-tones-Japanese-style-home-I’ll-own, nor the income I’ll earn.

I’m here right now, with you, and you with me - our attention meeting - and yes, our shallow-image-selves might skirmish, but Something Solid (it haunts me, you all know that I write about it obsessively) rests beneath us, imbues us.

{ “CLICHE” WISDOM IS BEAUTIFUL! LOVELY! TRUE! }

I felt that Something Solid in the orthopedic doctor’s office, so I said:
“I’ll take the month off. Kibosh the marathon. I’ll rest. I’m down.”

This was also when I had less than $400 to my name. My car was 300,000 miles into oblivion, just like me - barely viable on the freeway - and I had no prospects for work in the career I’d chosen. There were fires across LA; I missed my family terribly; and people dear to me were in the throes of horrible health crises.

I clung to running because of all of that. Then I let go.

Hear me: this is not tidy, nor is it some cosmic solution. It is just one more good step. I’ve been pondering the idea that: “Healing and growth are about subtraction, not addition.”

Releasing rather than clutching.

Open hands receive new things.

(Another gorgeous on-the-nose insight.)

New things… open hands… brings me to the next next step.

I suddenly had a lot of time in January, because I wasn’t acting like a full-time athlete to shore up my insecurities and career deficit, so I started writing again.

I’ve been working on a screenplay since 2020. Crafted with my friend Nathan. I’m writing a film about a woman (Ava) who was orphaned at 19. She raised her little sister (Lilly) alone: 14 years younger. As the film opens, Lilly’s a freshman - poised to be a prodigy cross country star - and Ava is 28, now a mother-sister-coach to Lilly. Ava’s a runner. She taught Lilly to run. It’s her fluency.

It’s the one thing she has. (She thinks.)

Like me, Ava discovered running early. Carefree at first, hurtling into it, she became obsessed. Running has healed and haunted her entire life. (Familiar?)

It’s the way she metabolizes pain and organizes her toughest questions. She sweats shame and anger on her runs. Feels grateful and sour. And… she gets injured.

Yes, I decided to write a devastating injury into the story for Ava too, because I wondered what would happen to her if she didn’t have this one thing. Where would she turn, what would she choose, and how could she transform?

Ask my character my own questions. That’s my motto.

My favorite professor in grad school urged us to “write what haunts you.”

So I turn to the character I’ve written:

Ava, what will you do if I make it hard on you? If I take away your favorite means of accomplishment, your crutch, your comfort?

Will you take that one, next, good step?

I don’t mean to punish or hurt you, I just want to see you grow, but you’ve held on so tightly that you can’t grow. You don’t want to be stuck.

You are a snail, and your shell is too small. It hurts, but I need you to leave it. To expose yourself, and look for a spacious place.

You need to let go.

The best part of a story is that sometimes, in real life, it gets wildly redemptive. Good things surprise us after hard things.

All that turmoil of January, February… gave way to May.

I stood at the border of Canada with my team (I was very undertrained, thanks to all that rest and subtraction and surrender), and I was down for whatever. My “let go” muscle was fit. The team was strong; they kindly knew I might have to take fewer miles, rather than plummet again into injury. I had no expectations of greatness. I just wanted to be with them. I was there for morale. Hopefully my body could hold up.

Here’s the miracle: it did.

3 years of overtraining and injury, then rest, blossomed into a powerhouse of a weekend, and my legs blew me away. I flew. I needed every moment of camaraderie and encouragement and pep talks and laughter, and I was overcome with gratitude, literally happy-crying as I ran. 42 miles. Handoffs, high-fives, cheers shouted down the highway, together with my team, it was a very nice ending.

A place to stop the movie. Maybe I’ll write that in for Ava.

Except it’s not the end. Clearly. Right now I’m facing several areas in which one more good step is necessary.

SURPRISE! I have more to surrender, more to traverse, more ways to grow up.

I loved the ultramarathon more than any solo race I’ve ever run.

I got to do it with people.

Kind of ridiculous.

To fly across the country and run 400 miles voluntarily, sleep deprived, and with such fervor, all as adults with regular jobs (I’m still working on that).

But … kind of essential.

Doing this strange thing - for a brand - but actually: for each other.

We’re all somewhere in our story: the hard bit, or the redemptive turn, over and over. Injury tackles all of us. And I adore the thought of letting go, only to find a team waiting - a friend on the horizon, shaking out her legs, arm outstretched by the side of the highway, eager to take the GPS tracker and run her segment, relieving me, then me doing the same for her, because who knows how all this will go, and we’re in it just the same, every one of us for each other.

BRB, HAVE TO WRITE THIS INTO THE STORY FOR AVA.

I adore you.
Keep surrendering.
Keep choosing that one more good step.

I’m still here, you’re still here,

… and we’re in it together.

GOSH I LOVE CLICHES, BABYYY!

Including:

• BEST PICTURE

• BEST DIRECTOR

• BEST ACTRESS

• BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

• BEST ACTOR

• BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

• BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

• BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

We gave it a go, without reference to the actual nominations for this coming Sunday (the true and real and actual Oscars). We picked our favorites, and Yani bore witness, then she chimed in to “throw our girl Aubrey Plaza a bone.”

And just before we all passed out due to waning oxygen levels in Yani’s Lexus, we concluded our podcast.

Enjoy this light, bright, quick 17 minute-pod on your commute to a coffee shop, or your job as a manager of somewhere, or as you shuttle your kids to activities, or drive yourself to a dinner or a date or a wedding.

We love you; good day to you.

Us:

This is PART 1.

With the Academy Awards ahead, PART 2 will feature our very own (again: biased) picks for the major awards like Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Screenplay, etc.

INTRODUCTIONS:

• YANI K. DE LEON

  • Yani is a production designer and art director who gives vibrant, loving attention to cinema, art, music, moments, and humans. Her taste is impeccable. As a friend and collaborator, Yani inspires me. And let’s give it up for HER NAME!? “Yani K. De Leon” 10/10.

• NATHAN ROBERTS

  • “Nathan’s work bridges academic and creative spheres to cultivate media that reforms our sensibilities in positive ways. He received his PhD in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University in 2023.” Nate’s an adventurous, warmly anarchic, and brilliant human with an improv sensibility, keen insight, and an expansive vocabulary with favorites like: armature and diegesis.

• ME

  • you know me.

• CINDY LU

  • Honorable Mention. Our one and only.

• LUNA

  • Heavy breathing @ the 6 1/2 minute mark.

SHOW NOTES:

• Please enjoy our surprise guest at 6:35. She’s a hoot, but we had to swap locations, so from 6:54 onwards, sound quality is WAY BETTER. Take heart.

• “Way better” is relative. I recorded this on my iPhone. muah.

• Yani, Nathan, Cindy, and I are part of a Filmmaking Community in Los Angeles that meets weekly to create, write, and screen films together. We offer hot takes with no limit.

• GO AND FIND THESE FILMS.

  • WATCH TRAILERS (linked below) ON YOUTUBE

  • GeT to The CINEma

  • or… STReaM them

  • eat treats like popped corn

  • think

  • ponder

  • savor

  • be nice to a cat (note #3 on my list)
    

❗️ SPOILER ALERT ❗️

Listen first,
then…

TOP 5’s:

YANI (chose only 3 films)

3. I Saw The TV Glow

2. Perfect Days

1. Nickel Boys
   

NATHAN

5. Last Summer

4. Hit Man

3. Evil Does Not Exist

2. Anora

1. Nosferatu

EMILY

5. Problemista

4. Anora / Sing Sing (TIE, whoops)

3. Flow

2. Nickel Boys

1. Perfect Days
   

BONUS: CINDY LU

5. Janet Planet

4. DiDi

3. Dune 2

2. Sing Sing

1. Anora / The Substance / Civil War (3-WAY TIE, mega-whoops)
   

WE LOVE YOU. CINEMA NEEDS YOU. WE NEED CINEMA.

Share your favorite films of 2024 with me.

(PART 2 - coming soon).

Good day.

Five days into our cruise, my family was nauseous. Barreling north along the Baja Peninsula, we cut the humid curtain of night, and canted with our ship, which was big - a floating slab of middle America. The thing had a casino, ice skating rink, karaoke bars, swimming pools, water slides, a “Flow Rider” surf wave, a rock climbing wall, tennis and soccer and pickle-ball, Starbucks, a Celine Dion impersonator, vaulted dining rooms with chandeliers and multi-course meals, and 1,000 cheery staff who deftly handled the revolving assault of 3,000 guests entitled to FUN.

Maybe the crew were truly so perky. Maybe they quietly seethed. I wouldn’t blame them.

It was an alternate universe. And our ship/city bobbed on a set of strong waves. Wobble, baby, wobble played from the pool deck, and the boat obeyed.

My dad wobbled too: his Parkinson’s tremors incessant. Twelve years into diagnosis, the disease now exacerbated vicious back and hip pain. He teetered with the ship.

I longed to steady all of it.

Eyes closed, I lay on my top bunk that fifth night - my 14-year old niece asleep on the bottom bunk - and I felt the ship dip left to right.

How do I absorb it? Where is the stillness?

I wanted a center of gravity.

Five days prior, we boarded the ship.

I careened into our vacation like a paper plane nose-diving. I’d traveled all summer prior: Pennsylvania, New York, South Carolina, Oregon, Sacramento, Tahoe, Pennsylvania again, Washington D.C. It felt like I didn’t live in LA anymore. Like I was an extraterrestrial: hovering, then dropping in.

Now: a cruise.

My family goes 100mph on vacations like these. No activity is left behind, and we win family trivia, and we sing karaoke - along with the surfing and the soccer tournament (my brother won) and the water slides and the Celine Dion show (the impersonator was weirdly good). My dad used his walker to get around. The stiff curve of his back made most chairs uncomfortable, most activities impossible. I sat with him and talked, and then bounced to the 17 other things the family had planned.

In my moments alone, to recalibrate, I ran on a treadmill. I listened to “Crying in H-Mart” on Audible and ran 55 miles in one week at the back of the ship, facing the ocean.

… Running on a treadmill
upon a boat
that is swaying.

Motion on motion. It’s my life motif. “I rest in motion.” (ha)

A day on the cruise went like this:

• Wake at 7:30AM in my snug cabin (shared with my niece and aunt)

• Coffee at 8AM with my mom + nieces + aunt (Starbucks’ burnt beans on Deck 4)

• Breakfast with all 10 of us in a chaos of conversation, melon, eggs, and 14 shapes of carbs with syrup.

• Treadmill and flying sweat alone at the gym.

• Surfing and climbing and trivia and water slides and swimming and excursions all afternoon...

• With a 2-hour window to write my screenplay as my niece (the one who’s 14) wrote her fantasy novel (honestly prolific) next to me.

• Dinner for 10 - swapping bites and singing nonsensical songs and my nephew Finn sitting on my lap needing cuddles and smelling like shampoo and sunscreen.

• 7PM evening show: a la Celine Dion-ish, or an abbreviated flow of pop songs from the past 3 decades with loud outfits and interesting dance moves, or karaoke (my niece asked me to sing “Love Story” with her. I agreed, and I got on one knee for the “marry me, Juliet” part. I did that thing.)

• Retiring to the room by 10PM to be best friends with Piper and my tender Aunt Marge and laugh about dumb/wonderful things I can’t remember but that warm me.

It was fun. It was feverish day after day. And I’d watch my dad participate however he could. I’d watch my mom watch him, with love. Concern. I’d prepare myself to leave the floating slab and return to the vortex of LA.

Motion upon motion upon motion.

So… by the time the ship hit those waves, in the dark of my cabin, a few feet removed from the tumult of the sea, I wanted it to stop.

I wanted rest.

I wanted to still the change, the shifts of age and Parkinson’s. I wanted to steady my father’s body - to absorb the grief of weakness - my mom’s burdens, the canted future.

Steady.

It was strange to look at my dad and resonate. To see incessant muscle tremors and feel like that’s me also, but inside.

I’ve lost my stillness too, Dad.

I’ve made myself so radically “flexible” in my Los Angeles life, that sometimes those who know me best ask me: “Em, where’d you go?” as I zoom and hover and land and perpetuate the joke that I can “teleport.”

I’ve embodied a radical flexibility that is both a superpower and sometimes… a problem.

I’ve believed I can thrive in motion (I often can),
rest in motion (sometimes, ya),
that I can hover with internal zen while hurtling forward at 90mph.

But the fact is, I’m still commuting 3 hours a day many days, criss-crossing, rarely putzing, full-tilting, and then changing outfits in my car after running 10 miles through the city, to make it to the next event.

I would like to be still.

I’m nervous to be.

And the schedule isn’t the problem, actually. It’s this inner churning, the drive to make a connection between so many worlds, to make sense of it all, to outpace the void, and then… to maximize this time that I’ve got alive and to build a career that does some good and to be with people.

Steady.

(You might feel my waves even as you read this.)

So there I was, on a swaying ship with my family, my father and his Parkinson’s, my joyous/tired upheaval of a life, and… I  craved that center of gravity.

I stayed back with my dad on the ship one afternoon, while the rest of the family ventured to Puerto Vallarta. Eleven stories up (there were thirteen stories on that boat. Thirteen.), we faced floor-to-ceiling windows: the coast of Mexico sprawled beyond our temporary harbor. I worked on my feature script while my dad read next to me, his tremors in my periphery.

It’s vivid.

That moment.

I can feel the muggy air now. Pressed hot at our necks. Then: the splash of kids leaping into pools behind us. The feathery flip: my father turning the pages of a novel. And my sprinting mind, hard to focus, next to his steady spirit.

He read calmly, and I typed a few words a minute. He’d make a comment, or I would. He has a lovely sense of humor. And there was goodness in his presence near me. It settled me.

It re-forms even now within me. That memory was stillness.

A body can move involuntary, yes. Illness does that. But there is something within us that means more, that matters expansively: a spirit so grounded that it calms fears as it faces them, makes enough space for them to be what they are, but in the context of joy… a life lived toward Love.

My dad is this way. (Gosh, my mom too.)

And it is a different center of gravity.

Calm spirit, swaying body.

On a ridiculous bobbing slab of Middle America, with Celine’s look-a-like waiting somewhere in the wings, and all of the staff perky to the max, and the water slides and the ice skating rink, I feel something else.

What’s right here, behind the very real upheaval of things we can see, is another real thing:

It has carried us, whatever surface waves come and go, it is an ocean, and we - I - rest upon it.

Just for a moment, pause with me.

It is wonderful to sit on this couch now and recall the cruise with you. I picture my father, brow furrowed into his book, pausing to sip water, tremors ongoing, but his breath a rhythm too, and I look now out this window at the Jacaranda tree that blooms violet each spring. I stretch my legs.

That friendly tree bows over my street. Without fail. The sun rises and climbs the sky, then sets - day upon day upon day for us - and the ocean greets the shore, consistently, and a boat can sway, but all 13 decks of activities and dining rooms and all the chaos … floats,

and there is something steady
at the base of motion,

Available to us. We rest on it.

And I think I’ll call and say:

I’ve found my stillness too, Dad.

etc.

Funny to give “advice on Love” (stares out window for 37 seconds).

It’s not advice. It’s an offering - from my adventures on earth - a sample platter - what I’ve seen and felt and learned of Love. Incomplete. Work in progress.

Off we go, humbly:

1. This quote rings true of Love:

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   "Among the most beautiful things l've ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be:
   'What if we joined our wildernesses together?'
   Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet.
   And what if the wilderness - perhaps the densest wild in there - is our sorrow?
   And if it is, and if we join them - your wild to mine - what's that?..
   What if we joined our sorrows, I'm saying...
   I'm saying: What if that is joy?"
   
   - THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS, Ross Gay

2. When I’m home with my 10 nieces and nephews, and we watch Disney’s “Brave,” and Giselle (10) cuddles next to me, engrossed in the movie, all the while clutching my hand unknowingly - holding it softly, drawing circles on my palm, curving a little closer to me, trusting me unutterably, that is Love. It is Love to be someone’s safest place.

3. The un-sexy aspects of Love are wonderful. Like how it handles conflict. One question Love always asks (in heated moments; with genuine curiosity): “What does this feel like from your point of view?”

4. Ok, so the “5 Love Languages?” I’ll propose a 6th: offering personalized music and art and film recommendations. *chef’s kiss*

5. Platonic Love can have 1,000 dimensions. It’s a prism. It’s magnificent. Our culture is slow to celebrate this, but… we can still revel in a multi-faceted, lifelong friendship. There are more kinds of commitment than just “romantic.”

6. Note to self: prioritize friendship. Cultivate flourishing friendships with those who adventure toward the same horizon. This flavor of Love will heal you.

7. Speaking of commitment. Isn’t that astounding? That… through hell, high water, or personal evolution… someone looks at you and says, “I choose you.” and you can be the one who looks at another and chooses them too.

8. Forgiveness. WHAT THE HECK? That it even exists (?), A WONDER, that it can flood a heart and alter a trajectory and spiral a life upward, and it comes from beyond our selfish proclivities, and to forgive is to Love.

9. To be forgiven - when we feel the worm of shame - is to know Love, is to be changed. Eye-to-eye: someone saying, “I forgive you, I release you. Let us both be free.”

10. On that note: freedom. Love is wild because it is antithetical to control. How does a mother carry her child for months, grown from her own body, alive in her womb, and then spend her entire life letting go?!? … because she Loves, and even what comes from our bodies must become its own… a distinct being, Loved as separate, surrendered.

11. ^ Mothers are unbelievable.

12. I love my Mom.

13. Love might get angry (very), but it’s not vindictive. It has open hands. This hurts: to let go without calcifying into bitterness. People arrive and they leave, but the Love itself remains with us. We can stand back up in the strength of it.

14. Open hands receive new gifts, new Love. Fists are sweaty, so relax, ok?

15. Back to bitterness: it’s tempting. Fury feels more powerful than sadness - an “upper hand.” But anger, if we don’t metabolize it, can change us. Harden us. Shrink us. Bitterness can become a cold, lifeless prison, and we’ll starve for Love in there. We don’t want this.

16. That prison is locked from within. It is not too late to exit your bitterness.

17. Every Love evolves. We have our entire lives to grow into the kind of Love we hope to become. Tread lightly & bravely onward.

18. This, from David Whyte:

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    “We can never know in the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. When we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation before the revelation has flowered - we find ourselves disappointed and bereaved, and in that grief may miss the particular love that is actually possible but that did not meet our initial and too specific expectations... The act of loving itself, always becomes a path of humble apprenticeship... where we are asked continually and against our will, to give… in so many different ways, without knowing exactly, or in what way, when or how, the mysterious gift will be returned.”

19. From bell hooks:

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    “A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.”

20. And one more, from David Whyte:

    “Sometimes, you need the ocean light,
    and colors you’ve never seen before
    painted through an evening sky.
    
    Sometimes you need God
    to be a simple invitation
    not a telling word of wisdom.
    
    Sometimes you need only the first shyness
    that comes from being shown things
    far beyond your understanding,
    
    so that you can fly and become free
    by being still and by being still here.
    
    And then there are times you want to be
    brought to ground by touch
    and touch alone.
    
    To know those arms around you
    and to make your home in the world
    just by being wanted.
    
    To see eyes looking back at you,
    as eyes should see you at last,
    
    seeing you, as you always wanted to be seen,
    seeing you, as you yourself
    had always wanted to see the world.”

That’s it. All 20.
The sum total of my LOVE EPIPHANIES.

Kidding. I could write you an entire book, but I’d keep changing it, because I’m still in the thick of this wilderness of Loving and being Loved and trying to navigate through ecstasy and loneliness and a career and confusion and my family history and social events and Los Angeles and old ties and new tidal waves of feeling and quiet mornings with that one owl hooting and so I’m just going to keep

going.

Take me or leave me as the hilariously deep soul that I am.

And send me your thoughts on my 20 Love thoughts.

Someone recently told me, “You are an enigma,” and it’s true, even to myself.

We are mysteries to one another, to ourselves, and I hope we can wake up from our boredom, our malaise, our stress, our coldness, and forge out into the adventure of Loving and being Loved.

My wilderness is glad to meet yours.

🤟🏼

P.S. FOR INTREPID READERS, HERE IS #21 …

A LETTER TO MY NIECES & NEPHEWS, 

someday when your heart breaks:

If you love someone who does not love you back, or who stops loving you - while it hurts, and it might hurt terribly - I pray that you do not confuse their rejection with your worth. I pray that you do not calcify into bitterness. Whatever comes next, do not measure your value by their refusal. Don’t measure their value that way either. It’s hard to avoid doing that. When we love so much, and deeply, we feel the rejection in our cells - it aches. 

We curl in or we lash out. We deflate.

Heartsickness has been studied. 

You will cry. 

You will endure the painful aftermath. 

And then you will have to think of what to do next.

That is when you can choose to heal. 

Open a window. Don’t let the past fester inside you like it’s all you’re good for. The world is enormous. There is enough Love in it. Love holding us up through all our terrors. Enough Love to fill your heart till it could burst. 

We lose sight of this. We plead for Love from one source - dried up, wrung out - we forget the vast abundance. 

It takes a shift in attention. Attention to the texture of the earth, on which the sun lands 

just so - dappling, dazzling, soft - on which flowers grow, out of which blooms fruit… How startling that delectable grapefruits and melons and tomatoes and mangoes grow out of the dirt and on trees and little plump berries

on vines and grapes and orchards, and doesn’t that feel like someone loving you? 

Someone saying, “Come; eat. It grows for you.” 

 … season after season

You grow too. 

When you love someone who does not love you back, your heart will break, and then… it will have space to spread wider, to fit new volumes of love you haven’t met yet. 

The past might come to look differently.

You might make peace where your heart once went to war.

Do not be afraid of a broken heart. Take a full breath and carry it with you, into the wide open world - where abundant Love 

blooms everywhere.