• The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is complete! Next step: launching later this year! The NGRST is a next-generation telescope in the mode of Hubble, and will, according to the NASA website, “settle essential questions in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets, and astrophysics”.

• Moon joy, magnified—why human eyes are better than cameras at seeing stuff on the moon.

• Plans for a “satellite mirror” that would illuminate parts of the Earth at night could disrupt sleep and ecosystems worldwide.

• NASA is slowly adding to their gallery for the Artemis II mission. Check out these images from the lunar flyby!

• Favourite places, favourite foods—read on for what was shared in the conversation between Artemis II astronauts and the ISS—the farthest-ever call in space.

• Well would you look at that: bureaucracy be bureaucracy-ing. Despite all of the wonder that they gave all of us this month, NASA continues to face steep budget cuts.

• If you are still following the Artemis crew, like me, you’ll know that Rise, the zero-gravity indicator aboard Integrity, has now transitioned into life as Reid Wiseman’s own mascot/personal support gravity indicator/favourite plushie/third child. Who’s complaining? Certainly not me.

• The origins of Uranus’ rings hint at a hidden moon. (Every now and again my mind gets boggled at how we can look and deduce and determine things that are happening so far away. Science is wild and wonderful. The end.)

• Behold, the most comprehensive 3D map of our universe to date.

• Canada, in its continued push for space sovereignty, is moving to launch its own rockets. (If we can do this in a way that minimizes—or eliminates—space garbage, all the better.)

• Curiosity has found organic molecules on Mars. But there’s a long way to go before we get excited! This isn’t proof of life, even if it is pretty darn cool.

• In non-space but so-cool-as-to-feel-otherworldly news: scientists have discovered that treetops glow during storms.

  

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• For all of my conspiracy theorist friends! Check out this deep dive on UFO-ology! (For the record, I am not saying that UFOs are a conspiracy theory! How could you not believe in aliens in a universe as vast as ours? But, you know. The theories…they go to some wild places. That’s all.)

• The peace that a solar eclipse brings, wonderfully expressed in this Nautilus essay.

• Only twelve people on Earth—a remote research team doing work in Antarctica—saw this recent, rare annular solar eclipse.

And finally…

• Last fall, the comet 3I/ATLAS flew past the Sun. Turns out its chemistry make-up changed during that process. (See? Science! Amazing!)

Hundreds of thousands of very smart people pulled hundreds of thousands of pieces together over a span of many years and sent four people in a tiny rocket shooting up into the great velvety blackness of space. Those four people—astronauts, poets, people who loved each other and the world—took pictures for us, and video, and as they got closer to the Moon they said that they felt like giddy little kids. (Part of their training for the mission involved taking photography classes so they could operate the cameras, and as they neared the Moon Reid Wiseman asked NASA to send them some vocabulary (“about twenty new superlatives”) so they could adequately describe what they were seeing, which was a very nice reminder that the arts does, in fact, have a crucial role to play in scientific expeditions such as these.) They dedicated an unnamed crater to the memory of their commander’s late wife, Carroll Wiseman. They cried. We cried too. They hugged. I am 101% positive that everyone watching wanted to hug them too.

They crept closer to the Moon. They told us they could see colours—greens and browns—on the lunar surface, and when they passed behind the Moon and lost communication with us for a while they shared a package of maple cream cookies to mark the moment.

They saw a solar eclipse from directly behind the Moon.

And then, after eight days of cataloguing and doing experiments and hosting press conferences while spinning in space and telling us all, here, how much we are loved, they looped back around to our planet and landed safely in the Pacific Ocean, right down to the minute, exactly as NASA had predicted.

I’ve been weepy all week. How about you?

When the Orion spacecraft launched on April 1, I moved my computer downstairs so I could have the NASA livestream on during the day while I worked. I ended up having the livestream on pretty much constantly, turning it off only when I went upstairs to bed. It was a supremely wonderful exercise in remembering how nice competency feels—how wonderfully exhilarating it can be to watch people discuss dry and technical things with confidence and calm.

Look, I would think, over and over, as I watched CAPCOM discuss degrees and thrusters with four humans traveling far away in space. Look at how calm and boring everyone is. This is wonderful.

It wasn’t boring, of course. It wasn’t boring at all. But as high-level NASA figures got up and spoke to press members every day about the launch progress, I was struck both by how professional everyone was and also by how delightful it was to see an absence of polish, which is to say, watching the livestream and the live press conferences reminded me of what it is like to watch real humans do real human things. There was no bluster, there was no spectacle, there were no fake eyelashes (I mean, maybe there were, and no judgment if there were, but the fact that they were not the focus of anything was fantastic), there was no heavy make-up, there were no tirades at the lectern. (This is also, as it happens, the way that I often feel when I watch Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, give a press conference. Dry and technical and overwhelmingly competent. What a strange feeling, this reminder of what it is like to have adults constantly in the room.)

But the best part about all of the dry and technical stuff was, of course, all the non-dry and non-technical stuff sprinkled in around it. I loved how the fifteen-second delay in communications between Integrity and Houston often made for awkward moments, with people speaking over one another and then stopping, politely, to give everyone room. (Did I love the extended awkward pause that came during a certain press conference? Maybe. I had to mute much of that conference in particular. For reasons.)

I loved how it was understand in the NASA communications room that the person relaying information to the audience on the livestream would stop speaking every time communications came in from CAPCOM or from Integrity. I loved discovering that NASA had planted a little scavenger hunt on the shuttle with items for the astronauts to uncover. I loved the fact that the crew was woken up every day by music that NASA sent to them from Earth. I love the fact that the astronauts themselves picked the music even more.

I loved that they stopped and ate maple cream cookies when they flew around the moon and lost contact with NASA for a bit.

I loved the fact that Mark Carney did a little happy dance in his chair before he started talking to the crew. (Dry and technical and overwhelmingly competent, yes, but this is also a man who isn’t afraid of joy, and I love it.)

I loved the fact that there were so many women visible, at all times—Christina Koch on the shuttle, Canadian astronaut Jenni Gibbons on CAPCOM, Leah Cheshier-Mustachio doing an absolutely wonderful job at narrating the NASA livestream for much of the missions’s duration, Dr. Kelsey Young getting so excited over the team seeing impact flashes on the Moon, and so many competent, calm women in those press conferences. It was great. It was amazing. It reminded me of how far we have come in so many ways, even though there is still so far to go. The last time humans went to the Moon, in 1972, North American women couldn’t get credit cards in their own names. And now look. Horrifying and wonderful all at once.

And I loved, of course—of course of course—the fact that the crew named their spacecraft Integrity, and then proposed naming a crater on the moon in honour of Commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020. How could I not?

In the press conference that took place after the moon fly by, NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said, “If you can’t take love to the stars, then what are we doing? Why would we even go?”

And, well. That about sums it up for me. I loved every minute of it. I loved how much care was woven into everything—for the astronauts, yes, but also for all of us watching the broadcast and following the mission along. If you were watching re-entry in particular, and dealing with a little bit of anxiety, like I was, perhaps you also loved how NASA Public Affairs Officer and Mission Commentator Rob Navias mentioned the “front porch”—the inflatable raft that is placed beside the Orion capsule for the astronauts to sit in for a little while when they disembark—approximately 1.5 million times. Perhaps you also loved how precisely he repeated the stages of re-entry—the six-minute window when the plasma shield around the re-entering capsule would cut-off communications, the stages of deployed parachutes, all of which deployed perfectly on time, the explanation of what Commander Reid Wiseman meant when he reported that all four crew members were green upon re-entry. (Green means good! Not seasick!)

If we can’t take love to the stars—if we can’t weave love into all of the extraordinary things we are capable of doing on this planet, and off of it—why even go? Why even do what we do, indeed?

One of the things I keep reminding myself of as we move farther and farther into what feels like the darkest of timelines is this: life on Planet Earth has always, on some level, been atrocious and hard. There have been pockets of calm in certain corners of the world, sure. But there has never been a time in human history when everyone, everywhere, was at peace. You can look at the calmest, most peaceful civilization that ever existed (contenders, anyone?) and even then, during those brightest of times, there was someone else, somewhere else on the planet, doing and being and thinking terrible things. We cannot escape the fact that we are capable of both great good and also great evil—sometimes I think this is exactly what makes existence so extraordinary. The fact that we are capable of so much on either end.

We can, if we choose, come together and do things like fly to the Moon. We can also, if we choose, come together and do things like go to war. It is, in some ways, entirely that simple.

I’ve seen several friends and acquaintances posting about the Artemis mission and saying things like who cares about space when there are so many problems to solve here?—and I do understand the sentiment. I do! But I would argue that this has always been the case—there have always been Problems For Us To Solve down here on Earth, and there always will be. Do we put a halt on achievement and scientific progress until the peaceful world we want is itself achieved? Or do we commit to ensuring progress in whatever ways we can in our own paths in the world and go from there?

I think it’s extraordinary that we put four humans up into space. I think it’s even more extraordinary that those four humans were so normal—just lovely, intelligent, emotionally aware human beings who were ready to grapple with grief and wonder and awe in ways that we so often seem to have forgotten here on the ground. When NASA held a press conference with the astronauts on April 11, Canadian Artemis astronaut Jeremy Hansen said that everything humans have been admiring about the astronauts is a mirror—we’ve been admiring in them all of the qualities we have in ourselves. That’s the point. We’ve spent years outsourcing awe to spectacle and fanfare, letting the world devolve into an ongoing episode of trainwreck reality TV. But what would happen if we changed that focus—if we shifted the lens of our awe and looked anew at what is wonderful and normal and boring about being human instead?

We think it’s beautiful that a group of humans went to the Moon and honoured a member of their family by naming a crater after her. And it is indeed beautiful. But people here on Earth also do this all the time. People dedicate benches to loved ones, and trees, and schools, and rocks, and parts of ocean beaches that hold specific memories. People go out and do extraordinary things in the world, carrying the memories of their loved ones as undying torches in their hearts. We all do these things. We are all capable of the camaraderie and love that the Artemis II astronauts have shown us. We might not ever get the chance to show it in zero gravity, but the awe is here, all the time, everywhere you look.

One of the things I often think about when I think about space is the fact that we’ve discovered planets where diamonds rain from the sky, and we treat this as some extraordinary thing while forgetting that we have yet to find another planet where trees grow at all, never mind in abundance. We’ve become so used to certain things that we often forget how rare and wonderful other “ordinary” things actually are in the context of the deep, dark universe in which we spin our lonely way.

It’s extraordinary that we sent four humans up and around the Moon. It is. It is 100 percent a cause for joy. I think in many ways it feels particularly joyful right now because we’ve been mired in a 24/7 news cycle of terrible things—we’ve come to see the terrible things we are capable of as the standard way of operating. Despair has become our everyday companion, and so to be lifted out of despair by this reminder of what humans are capable of has felt extraordinarily sweet.

But the truth is that we’ve always also been capable of the good and wonderful things too. We are all of us capable of camaraderie and love and acts of great giving and compassion—around the Moon and otherwise. We contain multitudes! We always have, and always will! And you know what else? So many of the extraordinary things we accomplish come about because of a million tiny, small, boring decisions and tasks that get done along the way. Four humans went up and around the Moon because of hundreds of thousands of people who contributed to this mission and many others. People who created and read and tracked endless spreadsheets, who drew prototypes and analyzed data and sat in Mission Control watching numbers blink on a screen for hours on end, just making sure they stayed within acceptable limits. People who work in the HR departments and payroll and ensure that everyone gets paid. People who clean the buildings where all of these endless tasks get done. It’s all important, and it’s important because we all have a shared responsibility in seeing these possibilities become real.

I’d be lying if I said that the moment where the crew dedicated the crater to Carroll Wiseman didn’t strike me right in the depths of my sore and beating heart. I know—as do countless others—what it feels like to look up into the sky and feel both insignificant and crushed by the weight of both the cosmos and grief. To feel so small in the face of these things that feel so vast and big.

But we are capable of so much in our smallness. We are ordinary human beings who get to experience the extraordinary weight and measure of love, and loss, and possibility, together, and this is always a gift, even if (and when) it sometimes feels so unbearably heavy.

It’s extraordinary that we went to the Moon. But sometimes I think it’s even more extraordinary that we are here—that we are living and loving (and laughing! Imagine that!) and figuring out complex calculus and physics equations that allow us to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere in a way that doesn’t make a spacecraft explode, in a way that allows us to predict and determine exactly, to the minute, when a craft will splash down in the ocean.

And when we live and love—and lose? When life suddenly moves from the lush green of those trees and deposits us on some grief-stricken landscape far away where nothing seems to grow? How extraordinary, then, to look back out at those memories, green and lush and spinning in the blackness of space. How extraordinary to slowly and surely pull ourselves back to all that is bright and good.

“[U]ltimately,” said Christina Koch, “we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.”

I think we do choose this, over and over and over again. When we go to the Moon and when we get up in the morning. When we reach for each other and when we reach for something else, when existence calls for a new beginning.

I hope that the wonder and awe that has affected so many of us who’ve been following along with the mission—space enthusiasts new and old!—colours all our days forward. I hope it continues to remind us of what we’re capable of when we come together and do all of the million small, boring things necessary for the extraordinary things to occur. Most of all I hope it keeps reminding us of how extraordinary a thing it is to be here on this planet at all—to love each other and hug each other and smile, to be there for one another in whatever ways we need to be, for however long. What a gift, truly.

Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman called this era the “golden age of space exploration”. Later this year, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope will launch into orbit, just as the JWST launched back on Christmas Day in 2021. Planning for the next Artemis missions is already underway. We’re learning new things all the time, a wonder in and of itself.

There’s just so much to be in wonder about, even as there is also, always, so much to grieve. My hope as always is that we can use the wonder to stoke our desire to make things better here, to fight for the possibilities above us and around us, always inching forward.

We live in an extraordinary and also terrible time—a time of wonder as much as a time of monsters. I hope this helps us to remember how to hold the wonder and the rage and grief all at once.

Breathe in, as the Plum Village family would say. And then breathe out.

One step at a time. Giant and small and all steps in between.

• Also in case you haven’t heard: there was toilet trouble on the shuttle shortly after take-off. Astronaut Christina Koch was able to fix the issue after walking through the machinery with NASA technicians. Now she thinks of herself—and rightly so—as the space plumber.

• Also also, have you seen this video of the launch system’s upper stage and Orion capsule separating from the rocket about eight minutes after launch? Look at that velvety black of deep space in the background. LOOK AT IT.

• Now that the focus has shifted back to the Moon (and rightly so—exploring deep space becomes significantly more achievable when the Moon, rather than Mars, is the first step), NASA has plans to spend upwards of 20bn on a moon base.

• This private space company has a radical plan to “bag” an asteroid. The idea would be to bring the asteroid closer to Earth’s orbit and then use it as an orbiting base. Long term plans would see things built on said base and moved out into space from there, rather than building things on Earth and then going through the process of shooting them out into the cosmos.

• Webb and Hubble combined forces and have now given us these snazzy new images of the planet Saturn.

• Researchers have spotted two new planets forming around a star.

• According to a new study, the Moon might have far less water than originally thought. Too bad for all of those Moon base advances in For All Mankind, sigh.

• Meet the woman who alerts the world when an asteroid is on a crash course with us. (My favourite thing about articles like these is how they mix the truly extraordinary—asteroids! Outer space! The cosmos!—with the utter mundanity of government bureaucracy. The human capacity for bogging the most incredible things down in the minutiae of everyday life (and before anyone objects—I know why we do this! Never fear!) never ceases to amaze.)

• For slightly less awesome/more anxiety-inducing news, let’s read about how a satellite smashing chain reaction could spiral out of control.

• BUT LET’S FOCUS ON NICE THINGS AND NOT INEVITABLE CATASTROPHE. Here’s how you can track the Artemis II mission as it completes its ring around the Moon.

• Have I mentioned that one of the astronauts going ‘round the Moon is Jeremy Hansen, the first Canadian to do so? We love a little CanCon in space.* Read more about him here.

• What exactly are scientists hoping to learn from the Artemis II mission, anyway? In short: lots about space, and lots about human health, too. Read on to find out.

• Read more about the crew of Artemis II here, including Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Mission Specialist (and Canadian, did I mention that?) Jeremy Hansen.

• Astronauts quarantine before—but not after—their space missions. Folks over at Nautilus explain why.

• What will the astronauts get up to while on their way around the moon? Here’s a day-by-day breakdown of the mission.

• Finally, check out this photo taken by the Artemis II astronauts. Earth in the rearview mirror. Blue and beautiful and entirely ours.

*As a Canadian I am contractually obligated to point out where, when, and how Canadians appear in any kind of culture/news/world significance.

Astronomers have discovered an extremely rare star from the ancient universe.

• Could the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way actually be a clump of dark matter?

• Can this nonprofit help to protect Earth from asteroid impacts?

  

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• Surprising exactly nobody, SpaceX has shifted its focus away from Mars and back to the Moon.

• Here’s how you can try to see Venus with a super-young crescent moon tonight!

• Speaking of the Moon—here’s a little more about the “more achievable path” that scientists will be taking to get back on our favourite satellite.

• Here’s how we’ll most likely find aliens, when and if that happens.

• Astronomers have discovered a new exoplanet that most likely smells like rotten eggs. (Its atmosphere is packed with hydrogen sulfide, known for its rotten egg stench. Delicious!)

• Scientists might have found a new kind of molten, mushy, “liquid” planet. Will wonders never cease? I hope not!

• A meteor that traveled over Ohio yesterday, March 18, caused a boom that was heard as far away as Pennsylvania.

• A little (just a little—this is always how it starts!) genetic engineering could help future space pioneers survive the challenges of off-world living.

• An oldie but goodie: retired NASA astronaut Natalie Stott talks about making art in space.

• It’s always stormy out in space, in one way or another—and that storminess might be getting in the way of alien messages.

• Thanks to upgrades at the Large Hadron Collider, scientists have discovered a heavier version of the proton, opening exciting new doors in physics.

• World-renowned planetary scientist Dr. Sara Seager is coming home to Toronto! She’ll be a professor at Canada’s Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics as of this September.

• And finally—check out this beautiful new image of a portion of the Milky Way, captured by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (Alma) in Chile.

The latest excuse—my favourite, if I’m honest—is that I’ve been working on a new novel. Last September, right after I finished the first round of edits on The Possible Universe and sent them in, I had a visceral, whole-body sense of longing.

Please, said some small voice inside of me, please, let the next thing I write be something fun.

(Which is not to say that the writing of this memoir has not been fun too, in its own way. But it’s been a different kind of beast from start to finish. A vibrant, beautiful blessing all in its own category.)

Anyway. I put that request out into the world and let it do what requests do. And then a couple of months later I was out having coffee with a friend while I waited for my winter tire swap on my car, and I told her about that request, and how I could feel myself just waiting for a new idea to come and sweep me away. We talked about what it means to be prepared for art, to know what you have to do when opportunity strikes. We finished our coffee and she took me back to the dealership and left me there with a hug in the parking lot.

And I went back into the dealership and started playing a game on my phone, and then…it happened? An idea came drifting down around my head in glimmering bits, like dozens of little fireworks. A fun, fantastical, magical idea.

I didn’t have any work lined up for the start of 2026, so I told myself I would try not to worry about money (setting the stage for abundance, right?) and instead just take advantage of the time to write. And that’s what I’ve been doing.

I’m just over 90,000 words in. The only time I’ve written something else that rapidly was when I wrote the first draft of Wild Life, 75% of which came in during a 10-day stretch of time in the summer of 2021.

So! All things considered, it’s been a busy few months of writing, even if I haven’t been writing in here.

And…speaking of Wild Life? Last week it was longlisted, along with 14 other amazing books, for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction—the largest prize for women and non-binary writers in the world.

It’s been a time, as they say.

I am hardly the first writer to talk and think about how long and lonely the writer’s life can be. It is lonely, and it can be so strange, not least of all because the loneliness is the thing that you ultimately keep choosing, over and over. No to socializing, yes to staying at home in front of my computer, typing and then deleting a whole succession of words. Yes to blocking off entire stretches of time for plotting and sketching and thinking. More yes to plotting and sketching and thinking even when you’re not in front of your computer—when you’re walking the dog, when you’re in the shower, when you’re out getting groceries, when you’re out doing anything and everything else.

I found this harder when I was younger, when I felt like there needed to be other demands on my time. I couldn’t spend all of my time writing or plotting or thinking when there were jobs to do and friends to see and maybe even dating to think about. When there were a million different ways to expand my life and make it take a hundred different shapes.

Anyway. Over these last few years I’ve been feeling myself go in the opposite direction. Instead of adding things to life, I’ve been simplifying, trying to figure out what’s most important, trying to trim away any excess so that I have the time that I need to do this thing. The simplest thing, as it turns out. Because publishing is always up in the air and accolades may or may not come to visit, but the actual act of writing is the one thing you have some measure of control over. I can choose, as it turns out, to order my days around writing and trust that the money will work itself out. (So far it has, even taking into account the no-work-lined-up that started off 2026. I’ve been lucky.)

I keep reminding myself that enough is, in fact, abundance. It is enough to know that opportunities are coming my way, that there are already things lined up for later in 2026 that I can’t talk about quite yet but will see me doing more of this writing thing in the world. It’s enough. It always has been! Millions of dollars and a bunch of publishing deals would be wonderful—it really would—but it’s enough to keep doing the work. It really is.

There will always be stretches of time when I lose the thread. This happened as recently as last October, when another round of failed US submissions got me right back down in the dumps. The thing that saved me wasn’t another publishing deal or opportunity but this new idea that came parachuting in on that day in November. The chance to do the work, all over again.

So the problem is the same problem that it’s always been, really. How to keep doing the work? When I focus on that, everything falls where it’s supposed to be. That’s where I have to keep facing.

What work do you have to do in the world, friends? Where do you have to put your attention? How can you shape and simplify your life to help you do that?

Through it all, of course, the stars keep spinning over and around our lives. I look up in the sky and I think about how we’ve told stories for centuries about the Big Dipper, this picture we’ve drawn in the sky with our hands. The Big Dipper isn’t real in the way that you and I are. It’s a concept, a way of making sense of our place in the nature of things. We look up and tell stories and we look out and tell stories too. Sometimes, on my good days, I can remember that prizes and advances and big book deals are like that. They are both real and not-real, things that can bolster a career and also things that can get in the way of doing the work when it matters.

So! The goal with the new book was to get a (bad) draft done by the beginning of April. I think I’ll have to re-jig that timeline a little bit—this new book is becoming its own kind of beast. Maybe I’ll get a draft done by the end of March, maybe it’ll be the end of April. Maybe, as spring leads into summer and things get busier for me, it will be later than that.

But the work continues either way, which is its own kind of gift.

Shortlist for the Carol Shields Prize is announced on April 21, and the winner is chosen on June 2!

Whatever happens next, a friend wrote to me after the longlist was announced, I hope you revel in it.

I sure as heck am going to try.

It was a difficult time. Someone I love very much was having medical issues, and we were all worried—the kind of anxiety that keeps you up at night, curling in the gut—that something terrible was going to happen. I remember not being able to sit still for very long then, either physically or mentally—in the moments when I could sit down my mind just went everywhere all at once. I would go to bed and get up and walk through the day and the anxiety felt like it might consume me whole.

Jess, I would call, silently, each night before I went to bed. Jess, please help. Please send me a sign. Please let me know that everything will be okay.

In the morning I would get up and go about the day, trying to be cheerful and optimistic, hoping against hope that the new year would indeed bring us all abundance and security and a welcome pivot away from the worry that wove through every room in the house. The abundance jar was a welcome distraction.

But, again, no walnuts. In order to build this particular abundance jar you were supposed to perform the ritual on December 31. The morning of that day, my brother mentioned that he was going into town, and I asked him if he could get a walnut for me.

“A single walnut?” he said, disbelieving.

“Yes,” I said. “I know it sounds crazy.”

He just shrugged. “Oh I don’t care. Just wanted to make sure I heard you right.”

Half an hour later he came back from the store, purchase in hand. I was watching TV with my mother.

“They didn’t have bulk walnuts,” he said. “So I had to get you this.”

This is what he dropped into my lap.

If you’re new here, you should know that one of the main signs I ask for (and receive!) from Jess is a compass. This is partly a joke—Jess was terrible with directions when she was alive, as am I!—and also partly a thing of belief for me now, in the way that it was a kind of belief when she was alive. The belief that no matter what was happening in life, as long as we had each other things would somehow turn out okay. I could find my way through life as long as I knew she was out there, somewhere, muddling her own way through life just as I was doing in mine.

Anyway, needless to say: everything went a little topsy-turvy for me at that moment when I saw the nuts and took them in.

Imagine: I had asked for a walnut. Someone else had gone to get it. Of all the mixed nut companies, the store that he went to had to be carrying these. The compass right there, on the cover.

I knew then, the way that I’ve known few other things in my life, that everything would be okay. But I also knew that “okay” didn’t necessarily mean a way forward out of the medical abyss we were in, even though that was what I hoped. I knew only that I would meet, and survive, whatever was to come. That we all would, in one way or another. I knew that we were being held. That was her message to me. That was all. It was a small thing, and also it was everything at once.

I opened that package and retrieved a single walnut from the bag. Then I put the walnut in the small glass jar and buried it in sugar, repeating this mantra: With this walnut, I plant strength and stability; with this sugar, I sweeten my path to prosperity and abundance. When the walnut was buried, I screwed the cap on the jar and tied the red ribbon around it. A few days later, I brought the jar home and stuck it in the back of the pantry, as the instructions suggested.

I tried to forget about the jar, and mostly succeeded. But sometimes I would think about it.

Abundance, I would wonder. What exactly does that look like? Will I recognize it when it comes?

I didn’t actually believe that sticking a walnut in a jar and covering it with sugar was going to make me rich. I don’t believe in magic of that kind—but I do believe in intention. I do believe in the power of training your mind to see the world differently, in understanding that when you open yourself to opportunity, opportunity comes. It might not look like what you’re expecting, but it comes all the same.

The start of 2025 was the start of my first official year as a freelance writer. I began 2024 on a leave of absence, with the intention of returning to my full-time job in the summer. Then I decided not to go back, and to trust that the universe would bring me what I needed. (More importantly, perhaps, I decided to trust that I would know opportunities when they came, and reach for them whenever was necessary.)

The universe delivered. I lived on savings for the latter quarter of 2024 (thank you, RRSP!), and then got good news about a grant application, which in turn saw me through three-quarters of 2025. Inch by inch. Bit by bit. The safety net sometimes felt like it was materializing at the last possible minute, but materialize it did.

The grant money ran out at the end of September, but other things came in to fill the gaps. Mentoring. Freelance contract work. A new opportunity to (!!!!) write for TV. I got to go to Vancouver in October for a literary festival and I caught up with old friends and marvelled at bonds that are still there, still going strong, nearly twenty-five years later.

I wasn’t rich—I was never in the same galaxy as rich—but all my bills got covered and I stayed on top of debt. I even managed to pay some of it off.

What was abundance, I started to realize, if not that?

What is abundance if not having enough?

Then, halfway through September, we found out that my parents’ dog had cancer and would likely be gone before Christmas. I went back to my parents’ for a while to help look after him (and so that he could be around Sitka, because they are best friends) and be there as everyone began to swim in the waters of anticipatory grief.

Just a dog, you might say, but we are a very dog-centric family. It was hard. I would look at his sweet trusting face and think, how can life be abundant when things are also, always, being taken away?

And then I would feel terrible—just a DOG, Amanda, when there are so many larger griefs in the world! Who are you to feel so sad when you’ve been given so much?—and try to work through it, and sometimes I succeeded and sometimes I didn’t.

It was…a hard couple of months. There was the stuff with the dog and then there were other things, both professional and personal, that were difficult to wade through. It was not, to say the least, a time conducive to writing this newsletter. In fact I barely wrote at all. I knew that the intensity of feeling would wane over time, and it did, and I knew also that there was nothing for it but to trudge onward and understand that eventually things would change. And they did. There were plenty of days when life didn’t feel very abundant at all.

But it was never very difficult—even in those hardest of moments—to shift my gaze a little and ask myself what abundance really meant. To see how much was still around me and holding me up, even when things felt like they were this close to falling apart.

We said goodbye to Buddy on Halloween. It was hard, and also time. I still feel him in the house when I go back to visit.

In November I came across a post on social media that said something to the effect of: don’t measure how rich you are by how much money you have in the bank, but by how many couches you’d be able to sleep on in the event that things got rough. I can’t find the original post now, but the spirit of it is living in my head non-stop. By that metric alone, my life overflows. And when I think about grief, and how the bargain that we make with love is knowing that all that we’ve been given will, eventually, be taken away, I can’t help but think about how things overflow there, too. How impossibly lucky and rich and abundant a thing it was to get to be a part of Jess’s life, to have her as a soft place to land and to be that for her too, even if it wasn’t forever. How lucky we are to have dogs who love us the way that our dogs do, even when it means that their leaving breaks the heart.

How lucky and abundant a life I lead, even when things are hard and sad and even when I’m not sure what the next steps ahead might be.

Abundance. Truly. Even when things are being taken away.

I emptied the abundance jar at the beginning of this new year, as per the original instructions in the post. (I was a few days late, but like I said: I don’t believe in magic! Intention is intention regardless of whether it happens on December 31 or not!) And then I put a new walnut inside of the jar—this time I found a single solitary bulk walnut at my neighbourhood grocery store, and put it through the self checkout so no one would think I was crazy—and buried that one in sugar, and I repeated the mantra until the jar was full.

With this walnut, I plant strength and stability; with this sugar, I sweeten my path to prosperity and abundance.

I don’t know what the year holds. Maybe more grief, hopefully more joy. There is no financial safety net beneath me at the moment, but I am choosing to believe—to trust—that abundance and prosperity will come in whatever way I need them to. That enough will be with me wherever I go.

It almost feels like 2024 and 2025 were soft launches for my freelancing life. And now the training wheels are off and the safety net is gone! Time to really truly trust, Leduc. Let go, surrender, and just see what happens.

I hope the same for you, my loves. May 2026 bring you many things, magic not least among them.

The news is this: a recent study, completed jointly by the Chicago Botanic Garden and Northwestern University and written about in The Guardian, has shown that wild bees visit different flowers over the course of the season to balance their intake of protein, fat, and carbs.

The bees—they’re just like us! Counting their macros alongside the best of us!

To undertake the study, the authors observed eight species of wild bumblebees in the Colorado Rockies over a period of eight years. They paid close attention to the different flowers that the bees visited over the course of the seasons, and then they collected samples from all of those flowers and analyzed their macronutrient content—determining how the pollen broke down into protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Then, the study authors compared each bee species’ physical traits against their diets, and patterns began to emerge.

The protein content of some flowers, for example, is as high as 86%, while the protein content of others can hover around 17%. The protein content of certain flowers can change with the seasons, which in turn influences how often bees visit those flowers, and where else they might go for protein when a certain area is depleted. Spring flowers, the study noted, tend to have a higher protein content in their pollen, while autumn flowers have a macronutrient profile higher in fat and carbs.

Even more interestingly, the physical make-up of the bees themselves dictated their protein requirements: larger bees with longer tongues preferred diets higher in protein, while smaller bees with shorter tongues went for pollen higher in carbohydrates and fat.

I always thought, when I looked at bees hopping from one flower to the next, that I was watching bees who had noticed the depletion of nutrients in that flower. I never thought to consider that the bees might also be trundling along to the next flower to add a little variety to their meals.

Yes, I’ll have some steak, thanks. And now I’m going to head over to this flower for a helping of potatoes.

I’m not exactly sure why this study delights me so much. It just does. I find it indescribbly wonderful to think of all of our tiny bee friends, making their way through the world, filling up on pollen and balancing their diets. It reminds me of Matthew 6:26: Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. It makes me want to find some land somewhere and plant an entire field full of wildflowers just to feed the bees. Let’s throw a party, and serve pollen, and let the bees be our guests of honour.

How grateful I am for these fuzzy little neighbours of ours. How lucky I am—we all are!—to live in a time when there are bees.

Earlier in July, the Buddhist scholar and teacher and environmental activist Joanna Macy died at the grand old age of 96. A few days before Joanna’s death, the poet Andrea Gibson—truthteller, spoken word artist, seeker of wonder in all aspects of life—died at the age of 49, after living and writing with ovarian cancer for several years.

I was floored, for a time, by Andrea’s death—I didn’t know them personally, but like so many others around the world, I have turned to their writing and poetry and spoken word as a way to grapple with the wonder and the grief of daily life. To have Andrea’s death followed by Joanna Macy’s in such close succession felt like another kind of being bowled over—like being submerged by a tsunami only to find yourself going under again just as you’ve clawed to the surface. Both of them gone, just like that.

But as I sat with the grief—my small, just-briefly-connected-to-these-souls-through-their-work kind of grief—it was hard not to look at the richness of their lives. One person lived to 96; the other, just shy of 50. They both packed decades and decades and decades of love and wonder into their time here on this planet. It reminded me that we each get a certain amount of time here to do the things we’re meant to do, and then that’s it. A few decades—close to ten, if we are really lucky, but what is even ten decades against the 4 billion or so years that the planet’s been here?—and then that’s it. We go back to the dirt and the moss and the rocks. We feed the trees. We feed the flowers.

And then maybe, one day, when we’ve transformed enough, we feed the bees as well.

There’s been a lot of talk this year around AI, and the way that it is coming first and foremost for many of our creative industries. (In many places, it already has.) Here in Canada, I feel like I can’t go a day without seeing another post about how AI threatens to put writers out of business. Two weeks ago it was the Eden Mills Writers Festival debuting (and then cancelling) an event with an “AI author”; this week it was this AI teaching assistant, recently launched by Simon Fraser University. (I am cautiously interested in the approach that the course instructor, Steve DiPaola, seems to be taking with it—apparently the TA is not going to replace an actual TA, but is functioning as a real-time AI component of the course that students can interface with when they have questions about AI and its applications. There’s a whole other host of things to say about the fact that the AI avatar, styled as a Black woman, was created by a white man, but I’m not going to get into that here apart from noting that it feels more than a little gross.)

So much of this is a new spin on what remains, to me, an ongoing, very old problem: namely, that the creative industries have never been all that “viable”, as such, in a world that runs according to capitalist dictates and structures. It feels like there is constant pearl clutching in my literary communities these days, and a very real dread around the fact that the world around us is changing so rapidly, in most cases not for the better. So many of us artists have tried to scrape by for so long, only to be faced with the looming reality that even our subsistence lifestyle looks like it’s about to go down the pipes.

What a terrible time to be an artist, I’ve found myself thinking over these last few months. As my own money dwindles, as the prospects for work dry up, as the certainties of publishing and promoting one’s books evaporate into something so ephemeral it feels strange to imagine that people used to thing publishing was a sure thing at all.

What a terrible time to be an artist.

But also, maybe, what a wonderful time. A time unlike any other.

Joanna Macy was interviewed on the Plum Village podcast, The Way Out Is In, a few years ago, when she was 92. In that interview, the podcast hosts, Brother Phap Huu and Jo Confino, asked her what she had to say about living and doing The Things—whatever those things might be—in these times of ours.

What a terrible time to be alive, the question seemed to say. How do you make peace with the reality of being alive in the midst of so much grief and upheaval?

Joanna’s answer was so simple. Terrible? she said. (I am paraphrasing, here, but the gist is the same.) No, no. I would say: what a wonderful time to be alive, right now. Even if—perhaps especially if—certain things are ending. How lucky are we, to be here to see and catalogue and love these things that might soon be gone forever?

I listened to this podcast episode for the first time last year. I listened to it a second time last week, and her words struck me in a whole new way the second time around.

How wonderful to be alive at a time when we may very well have to say goodbye to so much. How lucky we are to be here, to bear witness to the fact that some things might disappear from the world soon enough. Bees, maybe. (And from the bees, the flowers, the food systems, maybe even us, sooner rather than later.)

How wonderful to be a writer, truly, in this time when the publishing world as we know it is undergoing so much existential dread and change. It’s like the Mary Oliver poem “In Blackwater woods” all over again.

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go

What is publishing, after all, but a human enterprise, and therefore a mortal one that we have to let go of at one point or another? When has the artist’s life ever promised something free of upheaval and worry? When has being a human being on this planet ever promised a life free of pain and grief and sorrow?

It’s baked right into the whole thing, isn’t it. Our own complicated mix of macronutrients. We are just like the bees, only we flit from different project to different project, from happiness to sadness to worry to joy, through one season of grief into another.

“To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe — to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it — is a wonder beyond words.”

— Joanna Macy

Andrea Gibson was diagnosed with ovarian cancer shortly after they began their Substack, Things That Don’t Suck. In their introductory post, they wrote that the initial intention with their Substack blog was to list and speak about things that brought them joy. Their cancer diagnosis, understandably, threw a wrench in all those plans.

“I know what you’re thinking,” they wrote. “I thought it too. This is the worst timing for a newsletter called “Things that Don’t Suck.”

But then I had another thought. This is the best timing.

These words from Andrea echo so much of what Joanna Macy has also said, I think. How wonderful that we are here, now, and able to say what we can while we can.

How wonderful that we are here to feed the bees and study the bees and learn some sliver of knowledge about their buzzy little lives. How wonderful that we can grieve these things, and feel pain for the possiblity of their loss, and perhaps let that pain galvanize us into doing our part to protect the world however we can.

How wonderful to have grief underline for us how precious everything is.

In another one of their Substack posts, Andrea writes with wonder about the fact that there are planets in our universe where diamonds rain from the sky.

Wonder-full? Absolutely.

You know what feels even more wonder-full to me? The fact that we know there are planets out there that rain diamonds, but we have yet to find another planet where there are bees and flowers.

This is it, so far as we know. Those bees, bumbling on their merry way through the wildflowers that grow in the Colorado Rocky Mountains? They are special. They are unique in the entire universe. And so are you, and so am I.

And so the days go on, and so do we. Publishing will survive somehow or it won’t. Writers and storytellers will survive somehow, or we won’t. Maybe we won’t be publishing paper books in twenty years. Maybe writing will only ever be the hobby that brings in pocket money as opposed to a viable career. There are so many maybes.

May-bee (har har) the bees will survive, and with them, all of us. I certainly hope so. Or maybe they won’t, and we won’t, and all of this cataloging and bearing witness and loving and acknowledging and grieving will all be to say this: we were here, for a time, and the world was beautiful, and we loved it very much.

I was here, for a time, and the world was beautiful, and I loved it very much.

What else is there to say, really?

Currently Reading: Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang.

Currently Watching: Foundation, Season 3, Episode 8. This show just keeps getting better and better. (I’d watch a spinoff focusing on the next few thousand years of Demerzel’s life, please and thank you.)

Currently Eating: It’s coronation grape season in Ontario! One-and-a-half more weeks (give or take) to go! Eat all the grapes you can for they are temporary and ephemeral, here and then gone, etc etc.

Currently Listening: The Pema Chödron Audio Collection. (I love listening to her voice. So soothing! Highly recommend.)

• The UK Space Agency is being scrapped to cut costs. | It will be folded into the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology in 2026. Predictably, this is raising worries about the agency’s capacity to keep up with international competitors.

• Experts’ best travel tips for seeing the solar eclipse in 2027. | Hint: choose your location according to where the sky is most likely to be clear.

• Astronomers have discovered the first exoplanet in a multi-ring disk of debris around a star 430 light-years away. | Isn’t that photo neat? Talk about literal out-of-this-worldness! The planet has been named WISPIT 2b (how cute), and is expected to be a gas giant around the size of Jupiter.

• Dark matter could create black holes that devour exoplanets from within. | This new model and theory of dark matter could mean that scientists could use exoplanets as a way of further studying that dark mystery.

• Current space law doesn’t protect a large swatch of area (historical sites, mining operations, bases) on the moon. (Despite what those early seasons of For All Mankind might have imagined in that better alternate universe of ours.) | Here is a framework that sets out how we could do just that.

• NASA will announce a new astronaut class in September. | Happy early welcome, astronauts of 2025!

• The building blocks for further exoplanets have been discovered in the remnants of the Butterfly Nebula. | From death, also life. Isn’t that always how it goes?

• A model of the Starship Enterprise…made entirely from pumpkins! | Check out this fun German attraction that boldly goes where no gourd has gone before.

• SpaceX’s Starship Mars rocket has nailed its 10th test flight. | The Starship did everything it was required to do during the test, a nice change of pace from the struggles of previous months. Watch it return to Earth here.

• More science progress! Inch by inch, row by row! | Scientists are inching closer to discovering where the infamous WOW! Space signal came from.

• Minerals discovered in samples retrieved from the asteroid Ryugu are older than Earth itself. |

• Come on a tour of the seven most extreme planets in the universe! | That we know of, anyway. There’s probably a few (quadrillion) more out there that we don’t know about yet.

• Looking for life’s source on the dwarf planet Ceres. | Long story short: Ceres, which orbits in the cold stretch of space between Mars and Jupiter, may once have had a hot core, which could have supported microscopic lifeforms.

• If you find yourself near dark northern hemisphere skies tonight, try to look up and see if you can catch the Summer Triangle. | Altair, Vega, and Deneb—oh my!

• We are inching ever closer to detecting ripples in the universe from the Big Bang. | What’s even wilder to me is thinking of the theoretical physicists who posited these frameworks and possibilities decades, even centuries ago. Think about that: their ideas stretching forth into time and space, just like those ripples through the universe.

• Speaking of ripples in the universe: a new dark matter detector—hidden over a mile deep beneath the French Alps!—is set to start searching for that elusive 95% of the universe that we don’t see and don’t yet understand. | I wonder how our understanding of the world will change if and when we finally begin to unravel what dark matter is. What might this blow open, I wonder?

• “It’s not easy being green(-blooded)”: a deep-dive into the portrayal of Vulcans on everyone’s favourite sci-fi franchise. | Side note: anyone else absolutely love Patton Oswalt’s Vulcan portrayal on ST: SNW this week? Man was made to be a Vulcan! (Ethan Peck is still my fave, though. Followed closely, of course, by the OG, Mr. Leonard Nimoy himself.)

• NASA has decided to “move away” from climate-focused explorations. | Why bother working for a better climate here when we can settle for a terrible climate on the Moon, or on Mars, for a few “lucky” people in the future?

• Hubble has discovered a rare star born from a cosmic crash. | Most white dwarf stars come about as a result of the death of their preceding red giant selves. The star cited in this study, however, appears to have come about as a result of a collision between two stars. THE MORE YOU KNOW.

• Who knew: wild orbits prime planets for life! | This recent study’s findings show that wide shifts in a planet’s orbit lead to wide variations in temperature, which in turn allows for a wide variety of life to emerge.

• Scientists have managed to recreate the universe’s first ever molecules. | This is fascinating news. (And maybe just a smidge terrifying. Doubtless it’s the plotline of some disaster movie SOMEWHERE.)

• After a few months of news about explosions and failures (oh, the tragedy), SpaceX will launch its Starship Flight 10 test flight on August 24. | In other news, the much-hyped Tesla Diner has drastically reduced its menu only a few short weeks after opening. (If I was Nikola Tesla and had lived long enough to see my name used for…this…I would be so embarrassed.)

• Astronomers have discovered the brightest-ever fast radio burst. | They were able to track the burst back to its source, which means that scientists will now be able to study these phenomena in more detail, opening up a wide path for discovery and learning.

• NASA and Google are testing an AI medical assistant for trips to the moon and Mars. | Because an AI assistant needs even less oxygen than a human to survive, right? Maybe we won’t need those magnets after all! /sarcasm

• Calling all my fellow Trekkies—check out this list of characters who originally appeared on TOS and are finding new lives on ST: Strange New Worlds! It could be because we share a birthday, but I have to admit that I’m partial to Paul Wesley’s portrayal of Captain James T. Kirk.

• Our favourite Mars rover, Perseverance (I mean, favourite in tandem with Curiosity, of course), has spotted a mysterious “helmet” shaped rock on Mars. | CUE THE CONSPIRACY THEORIEEEEEEEEEEES!!!!

• These tiny flying saucers float on sunlight alone—how’s that for futuristic? | They could be used to explore lesser-known parts of the Earth’s atmosphere in the future.

• It’s a New Moon weekend, which means the stargazing will be—excuse me—LIT. | Check out some of what’s up for grabs (literally, not figuratively) in the sky this weekend, if you have a dark patch of sky and a desire to look up.

• Astronomers have tracked a massive light explosion back to its beginning, 12 billion years ago. | It will never not amaze me to know that this means the light from that explosion has been travelling to us for twelve billion years.

• The presence of Venus, Earth, and Jupiter might be mitigating some of the impact of the Sun’s most ferocious solar storms. | Scientists are saying that the planets’ rotations and placements may act as a kind of “pacemaker” for the Sun. Isn’t that neat?

• Some cheerful words from The Guardian on LIPs, the Earth’s planetary crust, and our steady march toward the sixth mass extinction. | The gist: planetary scientists have discovered that the mass extinctions that have taken place on Earth thus far were by and large not caused by meteors but by a giant expulsion of CO2 into the atmosphere over a number of centuries, aka a “geologically brief” timespan. Kind of like—in fact exactly like—what’s happening right now, with climate change.

• Check out this video of a fireball falling over Japan! | (AKA—take heart, friends. The fight is long and dire but there is still so much around us to wonder at and love.)

My God, I remember thinking. This has happened to him too.

I was absolutely sure of it. He had also lost someone, also felt this kind of bone-shaking despair. In the moment it felt like some kind of woo-woo realization, as though the veil between this world and the next had been parted for me, again, if only a little. Looking back on it now, I know that it could just as easily be seen as the wider, far more prosaic reality of life: everyone, at some point, will experience the kind of grief that brings you to your knees.

In the days after that moment I remember walking around filled with a strange sense of rawness, as though I had woken up (momentarily) from the utter obliteration of grief and been thrust into a new world where I didn’t have any skin. Everything I saw—the trees, the sun, the flowers, the people I walked by on the street—made me want to cry.

How beautiful, I would think. And then, how small, how fragile, how soft.

It is hard not to feel tender in the face of something like this—hard not to feel the frailty of your puny human heart beating in sympathy for someone else who’s been torn apart in a way similar to you. Hard not to see how it could be so easy for someone to run away from that rawness in favour of building and retreating back into a shell made of anger, rage, righteousness. All of these things that we construct to keep us away from the soft vulnerability of our squishy human selves.

These years on from those first few months of obliterated grief, I find myself coming back to that vulnerability again and again. I see it everywhere—in the grief of loved ones’ loss, yes, but also in the grief of everything else. Everywhere I look these days, it seems like people are grieving and terrified of their squishy inner selves. Terrified of losing the world that they know, terrified of the changes that are bearing down upon us. Terrifed of vulnerability and unsure what to do about it.

Loss, loss, loss, everywhere I turn my head.

And also: beauty, beauty, beauty.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft published a list of the top 40 professions that are in danger of being eliminated thanks to AI. Writer/Author sits at #4. Yesterday, the Eden Mills Writers Festival—a literary festival run in the town of Eden Mills, Ontario—caused an uproar by announcing a workshop and a panel featuring Aiden Cinnamon Tea—an AI “author” of a book that will be featured at the festival.

Truly a great time to have made the decision to try and write full-time, wouldn’t you say?

The backlash to the EMWF announcement was swift, and as of this Sunday afternoon, less than twenty-four hours after the announcement, the workshop was pulled from the festival’s line-up.

I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling like this is not the end of something at all, but really just the beginning. We are barrelling toward—and already mired in—so many terrible, profound things that are set to irrevocably alter the world we live in. AI, climate change, genocide, late-stage capitalism—to name only a few. The world is aflame—literally and figuratively—with a number of crises that only look to escalate as the years go by. In the face of all of this, it might seem strange to highlight one random thing—a small literary festival that much of the larger world probably doesn’t know anything about—as an example of this grief. But grief is always inextricably bound up in change, isn’t it. It is always hard to accept change because there is always grief for the thing that was woven into the mix. Sometimes that grief is large. Sometimes it is so tiny as to be almost imperceptible. More often than not, grief comes buried in annoyance and anger over the way that change often seems to make life so much harder than it already is.*

But we all feel it. All of us. Some of us get angry and brittle and some of us get sad and soft. Probably, we all feel a mixture of these four extremes.

Sometimes I feel like being a writer is simply being aware of one’s own increasing irrelevance and trying to put words to that fact. Publishing is dying, we say. People are not reading anymore, we say. AI is going to put human authors out of jobs, even though those jobs paid laughable amounts—if at all—to begin with. And still we write, and sometimes we publish, and sometimes we even get money for what we publish, and somehow we manage to find a way to keep doing the thing.

Which is kind of like life, isn’t it? Somehow, we keep trying to find a way to keep doing the thing. We strive to keep doing the thing even though the world around us is rife with pain and terror everywhere we look. As I write this, Palestinians in Gaza are being starved to death, and children in the Congo are working in the mines to produce the phones and the computers that we consume, voraciously, all around the world. Garment workers in Bangladesh are labouring to produce the clothes that we might wear for one summer and then throw away. People are dying in wildfires caused by man-made climate change. People are being bombed and raped and murdered and mutilated everywhere, no matter the country.

Somewhere in the world, right this very instant, someone is being cut open by pain. Someone is dying. Someone is being tortured. Someone is doing the torturing. Someone, somewhere, is making the choice to enact policies that will make people starve, will withhold medical care, will visit cruelty and death on the smallest of children.

All around us, people are choosing to let rage and grief harden them into monsters in the hope that the shells they build will insulate them from all the grief to come.

But grief is a sneaky bastard. It will find your softest core no matter how many layers you build around it.

One of the greatest gifts that grief has given me—and grief has given me many gifts, unwanted and unlooked-for though they might be—has been the recognition that loss is both entirely personal and also entirely universal, something at once extraordinarily hard and also unremarkably commonplace. We all feel it, even though the first time that grief really hits you always feels like a uniquely lonely experience.

Another gift that grief has given me has been the recognition of the need for quiet, and observation in the wake of loss, and how that quiet and observation, together, allows one to recognize the signature of grief and change as it winds through everything else in life. When I am angry or irritated or upset now, it is easier than it was years ago to sit with my feelings and dig deep and really understand what’s happening.

You’re upset? says that tiny inner voice. Why? What are you afraid of?

In the case of larger world crises, it becomes easier to sit with the grief and say things like: I am afraid that we are ending. And in the case of ostensibly smaller (but maybe not?) things like literary festivals and AI, it becomes easier to identify that same thing.

I am afraid that this is ending, too. I am afraid that this dream of a world where everyone has what they need and is able to do what they love—I am afraid that all of this is disappearing.

But none of this was ever really guaranteed, was it. Good things come into our lives if we are lucky and we grasp them and think that they will last forever. And then bad things come into our lives and we weep and gnash our teeth and rail against the sky and God and the universe, and we forget that the same holds true for both the good and bad. Nothing lasts forever, no matter how much we might want something to, or no matter how much we might wish that something never visited us in the first place.

Also? Some of us get to experience much more of the good than others. It is so easy to forget this too.

Those of us who are in comparatively safer parts of the world look at the horrors of the news and think: how is it possible that people can do this to one another? How is it possible that people can be this cruel? Some of us buckle the way that the impossibility of grief buckled me for the first time those years ago. Some of us find ourselves awash in the greyness of despair.

But I think the truth here is that we have always been this cruel, just as we have always, also, been capable of great acts of love. In my late June Sunday letter I talked about conditions, and about how all that is needed for something to flourish is for the right conditions to be in place.

Rage flourishes in the world we inhabit right now because we’ve all given rise to the conditions for it. None of us are exempt from this. I have the seeds of rage in me, and so do you. If I chose—if I welcomed the conditions for this rage to flourish—I could let those seeds of rage make me into a monster. All you need to do is visit one comment section to see people who would bill themselves as warriors for justice overflowing with rage and vitriol and contempt (and yes, grief and despair) for the actions that others are making.

What kinds of conditions does this rage set up? What does that kind of rage make easier, sometime down the road?

In his book Peace Is Every Step, Thich Nhat Hanh talks about it like this:

“Consciousness exists on two levels: as seeds and as manifestations of these seeds. Suppose we have a seed of anger in us. When conditions are favorable, that seed may manifest as a zone of energy called anger. It is burning, and it makes us suffer a lot. It is very difficult for us to be joyful at the moment the seed of anger manifests.

Every time a seed has an occasion to manifest itself, it produces new seeds of the same kind. If we are angry for five minutes, new seeds of anger are produced and deposited in the soil of our unconscious mind during those five minutes. That is why we have to be careful in selecting the kind of life we lead and the emotions we express. When I smile, the seeds of smiling and joy have come up. As long as they manifest, new seeds of smiling and joy are planted. But if I don’t practice smiling for a number of years, that seed will weaken, and I may not be able to smile anymore.”

How does grief, then, give us an opportunity to examine the seeds that we plant and nourish within ourselves? How does this ever-present feeling of despair at the modern-day world invite us to nourish different kinds of thoughts and seeds?

How do we look at the bleakness of being a human in the world and decide to keep doing the thing, in much the same way that writers and artists are increasingly forced to look at the bleakness of making art in a world that doesn’t value art, and decide to keep on making that art anyway?

Sometimes it feels like such an impossible question. But really I think the answer is easy. You just keep on doing the thing.

If you’re a writer, you write. One word at a time. And if you’re a human being, you keep reaching for that tiny, soft, intensely vulnerable heart of yours instead of that hard outer shell. I think we have no choice but to reach for that world where we all wake up without skin every day. We must learn to welcome the tenderness, the itchiness, the despair that lies at the heart of being human.

“For the warrior, this experience of sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness. Conventionally, being fearless means that you are not afraid or that, if someone hits you, you will hit him back. However, we are not talking about that street-fighter level of fearlessness.Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world. You are willing to share your heart with others.” — Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

It sounds like such an impossible thing, doesn’t it. We are used to a kind of despair that can be all-encompassing. But despair and joy can also go hand in hand. Together, as Francis Weller notes, they can stretch your heart into something vast enough to give and hold the world.

This has been another lesson of grief for me. Maybe the hardest lesson of them all.

And so: what does the future hold? Who knows, really, apart from the astrophysicists. Life is hard. It is probably going to get harder for most of us. And some day long in the billions-of-years-from-now future, we will be little more than a signature of silicon and dust in and around the light from our Sun.

We might have moved on to other planets by that point. We might not. Maybe we have a few thousand years left. Maybe we have less.

Which is to say: nothing that you or I can do matters, and also, everything that we do matters all of the time. We have to carry the seeds of rage and despair that lie inside of us and figure out how to be gentle with them, because this is all we have. We have to learn how to sit with the feelings that come up as a result of the grief that we all hold about how the world is constantly, inevitably changing. And we have to learn how to see the ways in which everyone else around us carries grief, to reach past the outer shells and go right to the squishy human underneath.

Can I build space for that? I hope so.

Can you?

Currently Reading: Making Friends with Your Mind: The Key to Contentment, by Pema Chödrön

Currently Watching: Foundation, Season 3 (Demerzel FOREVER!)

Currently Eating: It’s peach season in Ontario! Why would I eat ANYTHING ELSE?

Currently Listening: “Boadicea”, by Enya

*For a great little dive into exactly how the chatbot behind Aiden Cinnamon Tea was built and structured, and some thoughts of what this might mean for the future possibilities of publishing, check out this Substack post from Sean Cranbury.

• What a nuclear reactor on the Moon really means for NASA’s future. | They talked about this—or adjacently-to-this—on the fourth season of For All Mankind. See? Who says science fiction is all just made-up fluff? (Not me, never.)

• Check out these stellar (see what I did there?) photos of this week’s peak Perseid shower moments! | Life is like a meteor shower—there and then gone from one moment the next.

  

  Notes From a Small Planet is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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• Less than one year (and counting) to go until the 2026 solar eclipse! | This one will slide over parts of Spain, Iceland, and Greenland. Anyone up for an eclipse trip???

• Virgin Galactic’s new space plane could fly as early as fall 2026. | Virgin Galactic: where “all are invited along for the ride”…except if you don’t have any money. No money? Then space isn’t for you.

• Check out this real-life “Eye of Sauron”, aka a blazar that’s beaming straight at us from billions of lightyears away. | Blazars emit neutrinos, which are tiny particles that don’t interact with the electromagnetic field, which means that they don’t interact with any of the particles that make up physical space, which means that there are trillions of neutrinos passing through you right this very second that you’ll never be able to detect, which is why neutrinos are also nicknamed ghost particles, which is a very fine thing to know on a Friday, I think.

• A new flyby mission to Pluto might be able to send us images of the dwarf planet’s hidden ocean. | If, that is, it manages to get off the ground.

• A draft order from Trump that aims to exempt space launches from environmental review would be bad for the planet and good for people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. | How utterly shocking. I KNOW.

• The Xenomorph according to a zoologist! | This article is worth reading for many reasons, not least of all because I’d never heard of the tongue louse, which basically latches onto and then destroys the tongue of its host, and then…becomes the tongue itself? In a way? NATURE IS SO WEIRD.

• Scientists may have found a new space object! | They’ve named it Punctum, from the Latin for “point” or “dot”. It sits in the galaxy NGC 4945, which sits about 11 million lightyears away from us, and is radiating intense amounts of energy.

• A meteorite that punched a hole through a roof in Georgia might be older than the Earth itself. | The meteor came from this rare daytime fireball. Talk about dashcam footage!

• What if we’ve been thinking about dark matter all wrong? | Want to feel your brain explode? Read this.

• The JWST has discovered 300 “mysteriously luminous” objects way out in the distant past of deep space. | This discovery could potentially challenge current models of the early universe. Science! Always learning, always growing!

• Check out these stars forming in the Tarantula nebula, thanks to these images from Hubble. | It never ceases to amaze me when I look at photos like this and think: life could be spinning all oblivious to us out there. Think of all of the things that might have happened around those stars and on those planets in the time that it has taken for the light of these still-forming stars to reach us…

• Also on the topic of amazement and wonder: look at this amazing photo of the galaxy cluster Abell S1063, as recently taken by the JWST! | Think about everything that’s happened up there in the billions of years that this light has been travelling. Way to make one feel miniscule and infinite all at once, isn’t it.

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• Spain has offered to revive the Thirty Meter Telescope, a NASA project on Mauna Kea currently under threat of cancellation due to NASA budget cuts. | But the telescope on Mauna Kea isn’t without its share of controversy, as you can see here.

• In fact, as much as I love telescopes, perhaps the telescope project on Mauna Kea shouldn’t be a thing at all. | Read on about native Hawaiians’ fight to prevent the telescope’s construction. (How often do we destroy things in the name of progress and so-called enlightenment? If you’ve studied history at all, you’ll know that the answer is: often. Very often indeed.)

• Experts have calculated that the universe will die in 33 billion years—in a long, drawn-out death that will begin roughly 10 billion years from now. Give or take a day or two. | Looks like last post’s members of Team Fiery Sun Death were wrong, and Team Lifeless Husk will come out on top!

• Check out these new images from NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope! | Think pink seems to be the order of the day…

• The new Skyfall Mars mission would drop up to six scout helicopters on Mars from the air. | Obviously, James Bond will explode from one of the helicopters and scout the area for the glory of MI6 and King.

• In slightly more depressing news, satellite data reveals that Earth’s continents are drying out at a rapid rate. | Maybe the scout helicopters are looking for new digs? We do, after all, have such a storied history of colonization on this planet. What’s another world in the mix?

• On this day in space! (Well, a hundred and seventy four years and several days ago.) | On July 28, 1851, the first-ever photo of a solar eclipse was taken.

• In completely shocking news, analysis has revealed that Starlink satellites interfere with information that comes to us from radio telescopes. | Imagine that: inventions meant to usher in progress are actually, in some ways, impeding progress. Hmm. This sounds…familiar? Where have I heard this before? Oh…wait.

• JWST has discovered black holes that “waited patiently” before devouring nearby galaxies. | I get this. I have to ramp myself up before a big buffet too.

• Speaking of patience: scientists are saying that our galaxy is being dragged into a super-super cluster. | The name for that super-super cluster is Laniākea, which is Hawaiian for “immense heaven”, and which I absolutely adore. The name was chosen to honour Polynesian navigators, who used their knowledge of the sky to navigate the ocean.

• The planets! They’ve gone rogue! | Astronomers have spotted a rogue planet in old data from the Hubble telescope—with a little help from Einstein and the magic of gravitational lensing.

• Check out this wonderful shot of the aurora as seen from a crew member on the ISS. | Look at all of us, contained in that beautiful green glow. (Thankfully not the incandescent glow that Tom Lehrer, may he forever RIP, once sang about.)

• Early black holes, born right after the birth of the Universe, may have helped form the first stars. | All of these theories and guesses and science, all of it beautiful, made even more beautiful by that that you and I are here, right now, looking back on all of it. Aren’t we so lucky?

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• Following on from our previous discussion of otherworldly lightning—check out this photo of a sprite as seen from the ISS. | Sprites, according to astronaut Nichole Ayers, are also known as Transient Luminous Events. Which kind of feels like something I’d call my life, as well. Something that flares in a brilliant flash of red against the darkness of the cosmos, and then is gone forever.

• It’s definitely NOT a train, a plane, or an automobile. | What we know about interstellar object 3I/ATLAS.

• A recent rare snowfall in the Atacama Desert forced the world’s most powerful telescope into survival mode. | AKA, this is what happens when the planet goes dark because of climate change—the skies above us will go dark forever too.

• It’s a sci-fi summer! The best kind of summer! | The third season of Invasion hits the small screen on August 22.

• Check out this photo of asteroid Donaldjohansen as seen from the LUCY spacecraft. | The asteroid is named after the paleoanthropologist who co-discovered the Lucy skeleton. Is he related to Scarlett Johansen? I don’t think so. Do I still see Scarlett Johansson in my head when I read about this asteroid, knowing it has nothing to do with her at all and her name isn’t even spelled the same as Donald’s? Absolutely.

• These tiny galaxies operate in the shadow of the Milky Way. | Just some small, brilliant galaxies minding their own shining business.

• More 3I/ATLAS news: it might be the oldest comet we’ve ever seen. | Should have named it Methuselah! A definite lost opportunity.

• China has made the first-ever attempt to refuel a satellite in high orbit. | There’s a lot we don’t know about the operation, not least of all because apparently the Space Race is back on now? Corporations vs. China, India and others while funding gets gutted in crucial areas…nothing to see here, as usual.

• In happier, slightly more existential news/questions: will Earth die in a fiery explosion or perish slowly, over a parched demise lasting millions of years? | Me, I’m Team Fiery Sun Death. Also, Team Lifeless Husk rhymes with Elon Musk, which can HARDLY BE A COINCIDENCE.

• When did Earth get fire? Hint: much later than you might think. | The amazing true story of how oxygen gave rise to our fiery past.

• Scientists have detected the merger of two of the largest-known black holes to date. | Mannesmann and Vodafone ain’t got nothing on this.

• How particle physics will continue after the last collider. | Dr. Ethan Siegel’s Starts with a Bang newsletter is always so great, and this edition is no exception. What happens when we reach the limits of what technology and physics can show us, while still understanding that the actual limits of physics go far beyond what we can see? What happens then?

• Want a big piece of Mars? Who doesn’t? | Well you’re in luck: it could be yours for a cool 4 million dollars.

• The U.S’s Space Force Chief thinks that the technology for the Golden Dome is already here. | At a separate meeting, the U.S. Chief of Space Operations said that the US “must harness the benefits of technological innovation and emerging capabilities if we're going to be able to out-compete our competitors”, which has me depressed in ways that have nothing to do with space and everything to do with capitalism. Sigh.

• We’re entering a new moon phase tonight, which means that the Milky Way will be visible in darker locations! Get thee to a rural area this weekend and look up at the stars!

• Scientists believe they may have solved Europa’s water mystery. | Science! Just out here, solving mysteries on a daily basis.

• And finally: astronomers think they’ve captured an image of a planet forming around a host star for the first time. | Isn’t that just the coolest?

• Space meets con artist meets detective story! I can already see the movie! | The story of Robert Hunt, a man who posed as a fake astronaut and broke lots of hearts along the way.

• Watch these “baby planets” taking their first steps (i.e. swirling together out of their accretion disks) in a nearby stellar nursery.

  

  Notes From a Small Planet is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

• Mexico has threatened SpaceX with lawsuits over the exploding debris that keeps falling into the country. | I’m shocked. Like, totally, totally shocked.

  /sarcasm

• The shuttle that carried the most recent Axiom-4 astronauts to the ISS left a nebula-like cloud in the night sky after launch—check it out! | Looks almost certainly like an inter-dimensional vortex, does it not?

• Of the world, but not of the world. | The most otherworldly forms of lightning on the planet.

• Astronomers may have now discovered the third-known interstellar object! | Interstellar objects are objects that we’ve determined are making their way through the universe, not tied to the gravity of any particular galaxy. The two we’ve managed to confirm thus far are 'Oumuamua, discovered in 2017 ('Oumuamua means “messenger from afar who arrived here first” in Hawaiian), and 2I/Borisov, discovered in 2019.

• Lobster bisque and onion soup are on the menu for this French astronaut on the ISS. | Who says space food is boring?

• Are we doing enough to save Earth from a potential asteroid strike in the future? | Short answer: no. Long answer: no, but how can you prepare for this kind of thing anyway, aside from going with the flow like Timothee Chalamet?

• Oh look, another woman who was written off as someone who “assisted” male astronomers during her lifetime has been discovered to have, yes indeed, made crucial observations of her own. | Meet Annie Walker, who worked at Cambridge until 1903, and then resigned from the observatory (“[Her replacement, a man she’d trained on the telescopes, was hired by] Sir Robert Ball, a conservative who didn’t really approve of women working, particularly in astronomy. Walker’s career was blighted by his prejudice.”) and emigrated to Australia. She doesn’t appear to have continued her work with the stars after emigrating. PATRIARCHY IS A BITCH AND SHOULD ALL BE BURNT DOWN.

• Speaking of things burning down: the past two years on the planet have seen some of the most intense droughts ever recorded. | Not to worry! I’m sure that everything’s fine!

• Astronomers have captured an incredible image of a dead star that blew up twice. | How the heck did that happen? Space.com explains!

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We decided to plant him in the backyard, so we can hopefully see how he grows. He would not have survived—would not have been allowed to survive—in with the asparagus.

But maybe here, in his new home, he can learn to thrive even beyond what might have been waiting for him in that other bed.

This is the second walnut tree that has sprouted in the garden this year. I have named him Wally, which is hardly original but feels like it fits. My mother and I found the other walnut tree in another bed a few weeks earlier than this and planted that one in a bucket.

His name is Edgar, and he also appears to be thriving.

I have been thinking a lot about these walnuts over the last few days. I think about the walnut in its baby form, detaching from a tree somewhere in the neighbourhood, breaking from its parent and falling tothe the ground. I think about that parent tree, a tree that could be anywhere from six to over a hundred and fifty years old, fruiting with walnuts every year from September to October. Hundreds of nuts falling to the ground and waiting to be scooped up and taken away.

I think about the squirrels that come to take them. How they spend so much of their days in summer and fall searching for food and squirrelling it away. I think about studies that have shown how squirrels actively remember where they plant almost all of their seeds, and also that they engage in what is known as deceptive caching, where they will pretend to bury seeds in a particular area but instead bury them somewhere else, in order to distract other animals that might want to raid their supply.

This then makes me think of birds, and how birds do the same thing, and how the Clark’s Nutcracker has the astounding ability to collect as many as 33,000 seeds over the course of the August-December winter preparation period, bury them in upwards of 2,500 separate caches, and then, when the harsh days of winter come, remember where all of the seeds are. In some instances, Clark’s Nutcrackers were observed to be feeding their families from caches where they’d buried seeds over a year before.

Not all of the seeds, of course, survive in that state. Some caches are burned, or discovered by other creatures. And sometimes, as in the cases of Wally and Edgar, the burial of a nut or seed just so happens to be in a perfect place for something else to happen. The soil, the water, the air, the sun. Close enough to the surface to feel the warmth of our star, far enough away from the riverbed to have just enough moisture but not be overwhelmed. A spot of soil that isn’t dead, a place where the worms and bugs have done enough to make it possible for the walnut to become something else.

Sometimes, the squirrel or the bird buries food and something else grows from the food instead.

In Buddhism, this world of the walnut and the tree-that-comes-to-be is often spoken of in terms of conditionality, which is to say that things arise when the conditions are sufficient for them to do so, and they fall away or cease to be when the conditions change. In order for the walnut tree to sprout, a lot of things need to be in place: the parent tree, the squirrel, the bird, the water, soil, earth and sun. And some things need to not be in place: the thief who robs the cache, or the squirrel or bird who remembers and goes back to the cache before the seeds have a chance to sprout. A walnut tree can sprout when all of these conditions are in place and then fall away and cease to be if any of these conditions change.

Wally, for example, might start to thrive in his new home in my parents’ backyard, and then cease to be when a deer comes on the property and decides to have a snack.

Edgar might thrive in his bucket and then catch a case of root rot at some point in the future.

Everything, essentially, is dependent on everything else in order to come into being. And also to fall away.

A few days ago, a reminder popped up on my phone. It was a reminder that I’d set for myself exactly one year prior, after making the decision to leave my job and embark on a full-time freelance career.

One year in, Leduc.

How does life look? Think: freedom, magic, energy, manifesting. What have you manifested in this first full year of a writing life?

I love you. Sending so much love out to where you are from this bus crawling from Union Station back home.

I’d forgotten about that reminder. It was like I’d stashed some nuggets of protein and wisdom for myself in preparation for a time without sustenance, and then had forgotten about them entirely only to stumble on them in delight one year into the future. (As it turns out, I don’t have the memory of a Clark’s Nutcracker, but then I would wager that most of us bumbling humans do not.)

This, in turn, reminded me of another reminder that I sent to myself some years ago. In 2016, at a particularly low point in my life, I sent myself a reminder and set it for five years in the future.

July 13, 2016. 5:35am. One day, this pain will be less. One day, you will look back on this moment from a place surrounded by love and wonder how you could have thought this was any kind of love at all. I promise.

I remember setting that reminder. I remember checking it each day for weeks after I first wrote it in my phone. I would open my Reminders app and stare at the words I’d written and think: this day will never come, because I didn’t believe it then. Imagining a different world for myself, one where I was surrounded by the kind of love I was craving (I was surrounded by love already, and I knew that on some level, but what I wanted was a very specific kind of romantic love) felt impossible. Impossible. More impossible than the idea of a bird remembering the precise location for 2,500 caches of seeds.

At some point along the way, I stopped checking that reminder and forgot about it. Life swirled on—trudging on some days, and blossoming on others. Things began to change. I moved into a new house. I started a new job. The years gathered momentum and peeled away beneath my feet.

And then one day, five years into the future, the reminder popped up on my phone. Smack in the middle of this new life. I did not have the romantic love that I’d been yearning for—but also, at the same time, I did. Because I looked at that reminder and remembered the woman that I’d used to be, and then I looked at the woman I’d become, surrounded by the house that she had chosen for herself, the job that she had reached out for and wanted, the community of disability and disabled thinkers she’d been orbiting for some time over that five-year period. I realized that I was surrounded by love—again, that I’d always been surrounded by love, but also that the love I felt most strongly in that moment, five years into the future, was coming from myself. Like a seed that had always been waiting to blossom.

I’d been waiting for the right conditions to come into being. But even back then in those summer days of 2016, I’d had an inkling, or a hope, that they could happen. I had thrown a time capsule—or a lifesaver, let’s play a game of choose-your-own-metaphor-adventure!—out into my future and tried to believe that it would reach me. Tried to believe, even when it felt impossible, that my future self would be there and be okay.

What I didn’t realize, I think, is that my future self would only be there because I’d cast that capsule into the future. She would be who she would be only because she had been who she had been. There was no other way around it.

A year after Jess died, I had a dream where we were sitting on top of an old stone wall near a beach.

“This isn’t fair,” I told her. “You’re supposed to be here for all of this.”

She just looked at me and smiled. “I know,” she said. “But that’s just how things worked out.”

In these subsequent years after her death, I have returned to that dream and those words again and again. That’s just how things worked out. I draw such peace from them, such calm from the way that they don’t shrink in front of the grief and also don’t turn away from the pain of it.

I know, but that’s just how things worked out.

I know that this hurts. But it just is what it is. You can hold it. I promise.

One day, you’ll understand.

The dream is another time capsule, the way that memories often are. The way our memories shoot forward into the future to meet us at precisely the moment when we reach back for them, whether we reach back consciously or not. Sometimes they pop up the way that the reminders on my phone popped up for me, and sometimes they come when we call them, the way that I went searching for information on squirrels and their caches and then came back to that fact I’d read some time ago about birds and their memories. All of it is linked together in this brilliant web of conditions. We meet and love and learn and grieve and because of this, other people meet and love and learn and grieve too. I am, even now, burying caches of seeds for my future self in all manner of places. Some of the seeds from these caches will feed me into the future.

Some of them will sprout into unexpected possibilities, just because the time is right. The sun, the ground, the water, the air. All of it together.

The other thing I think about when I think about conditions is time. The way that everything—everything!—that has transpired on our planet needed to happen the way that it did in order for Wally to sprout in that bed of asparagus. However many thousands of generations of squirrels leading back to that first squirrel ancestor, that first mammal that crawled out of the ocean, that first bit of bacteria that wriggled into something else and other deep in the depths of the sea. The billions of years that it took for plant life to emerge on the planet. The other billions of years that it took for the Sun to become the star we all needed it to be. The additional billions of years that it took for other stars to grow and become and explode out into the universe, seediing that expanse of the cosmos in the very same way that the squirrels and the birds seed the ground.

What a marvelous thing time is, even though sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. In the first few months after Jess died I remember feeling horrified, all of the time, at how time was just always, relentlessly, pulling me away from her. How I hated the idea that my life would go on without her, would grow and change and welcome new things and become softer and wider and more expansive with every breath I took after she was gone.

Softer? Who wanted a softer life in the wake of so much grief? I wanted edges. I wanted everything to hurt all the time. And also I wanted the pain to stop forever, and I had no idea how any of this was going to happen, in the same way—different situation, but similar shape—that I’d had no idea, in July of 2016, how I was going to reach and move forward to a world filled with love.

It all felt impossible.

And yet, here we are.

Sometimes I feel like grief is everywhere now, no matter where I turn my head. Grief and rage and sadness, on and on. And also joy and love, yes, but mostly grief, mostly terror and worry and fear. When the combined forces of these things threatens to overwhelm me—to say nothing of the comparatively insignificant and yet sometimes all-too-real anxiety of freelance writing and keeping a roof over one’s head in a world that seems destined to grind the value out of art—I find myself coming back to this reality of conditions. What conditions do we have in the world now that stoke the fear and rage? What conditions might I nurture, instead, to bring something else into being?

How do I look at what is breaking in the world and find both the strength to fight it in whatever ways I can, and also the strength to look at the breaking and say, the way that Jess said to me in my dream, sometimes that’s just how things work out?

It sounds callous as I read it out, and yet I don’t mean it that way. Sometimes conditions will fall away and all that we hope for will not come to pass. Sometimes we nurture things like rage and terror and grief in ways that make monstrous things come into being.

Sometimes, in the face of grief, we flinch and turn away and other things rise in us instead. You can look at any of the terrible things happening in the world right now and see that all in action.

But even all that is terrible and awful about who we are and what we do to one another as human beings changes eventually. (Sometimes in equally terrible ways, like trading one form of torture or war for another. Same shit, different day, different name.)

And sometimes things grow in the most inhospitable places.

This is true too. This is what it means to look at grief, and not to look away. Sometimes things grow in what you might have thought was inhospitable soil—sometimes conditions are just biding their time.

Sometimes, the walnut surprises you.

And so here I am, writing yet another essay about the way that life has surprised me just like the walnut. It’s been a year since I took that first initial leap into the “full-time” writing life. (What is writing if not 25% anxiety and 25% work and 50% procrastination?) I have, in fact, manifested magic, even though it looks less like magic and more like a regular day in which I have the time to do the things I need to do and the space and energy with which to do them. (Life is practical, but feels magical, and might as well be made of unicorns! I like it a lot!) I wrote myself another reminder and set it for a year from now, with questions about this second official year of freelance writing—how it has felt, what I’ve been doing, what things have sprouted and reached for the sky.

I am manifesting all manner of things even without realizing it. In conversation with a fried a few days ago I mentioned that moving from a “regular” job to the freelance life felt like I’d lived all my life as a fly in some greater web only to wake up one day and find out that I’d become the spider—I’m still in the web, but the web makes sense now in a way that it didn’t before. I can tug this thread, or that one, and something will happen—a contact, a connection, a work possibility—to make conditions fall into place. Things will happen in ways that feel much more active and purposeful. As though flinging that capsule into the future back in 2016—an action that felt so instinctual and tied to desperate belief at the time—has become standard practice. Now I throw things into the future all of the time, and I understand that sometimes conditions will come together to make something happen, and sometimes they will not.

If they don’t? That’s just how things worked out, and let’s move on.

Wally and Edgar might survive into the future. Maybe, if all goes well, they’ll outlast every one of us, and live to see a new day and age at the farm. Or maybe they’ll be eaten by the deer, or uprooted by a windstorm, or find—just our luck—that the soil in the backyard actually isn’t good for them at all. One of so many things could happen depending on so many factors. Everything arises, and also everything eventually falls away.

Back in that summer of 2016, I was looking desperately for a way to see through and beyond this, begging for a future that was at once filled with change and would also stay forever. Now I see through it and also understand that to see through it means to know that it keeps going. Rise, fall away, repeat.

What will I understand in a year’s time—or five years, or twenty—when that reminder comes again?

Currently Reading: One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This, by Omar El-Akkad

Currently Watching: Andor

Currently Eating: Life is sunshine and hot days (too hot, ugh) and Carina Wolff’s Hot Honey Halloumi Bowls again!

Currently Listening: To the wind. Doesn’t it sound angry to you?

• Finding the universe’s missing matter in cosmic fog. | “By precisely measuring how the light slows down, we can weigh that fog, even when it’s too faint to see.” Some people on our planet do things like this. Some people, like me, write tiny newsletters. This is fine. Totally fine.

• A new model might be able to help scientists find which exoplanets host life. | I can’t help but think that one day, when our understanding of life expands, we’ll look up at the sky and realize: life is everywhere.

• Check out the new Cosmic Dawn documentary about the JWST! | I’m still waiting for the day when Deep Sky releases on streaming. Feel like crying in front of the TV again.

• Also, check out this photo of the Milky Way over Kitt Peak National Observatory. | The world might be going to hell, but at least the sky will be pretty long after we are gone!

• “The models were right!” Astronomers have located the universe’s “missing” matter—in the cosmic structures that make up the universe itself. | Once again: years from now, when we understand so much more, it’ll be neat to look up at the sky and know: of course. Of course that’s where it was—right in front of us. There is seeing, and then there is seeing, and sometimes the only difference between these things is time.

• This distant, supermassive black hole is “eating” a neighbouring galaxy so quickly that it is “burping” material from the galaxy back out into space. | Looks like a case of stellar indigestion to me.

• This photo of the Sculptor galaxy spans 65,000 light years. | Talk about a commute! From one end to the other is almost like driving from one side of Toronto to the next!

• Everyone’s favourite space telescope has directly imaged a previously-unknown exoplanet for the very first time. | Hi there, TWA 7B! How’s it going? (Side note: anyone else feel like we name exoplanets the way that Elon Musk names his kids?)*

• The first photo from the Vera Rubin Observatory was unveiled on June 23. | See the top of this newsletter—10 million galaxies, an untold amount of stars.

• NASA has been pulling out of major astronomy meetings—and scientists are feeling the effects. | Decades from now, we’ll be able to trace progress—or lack thereof—back to moments and decisions like this. It’s like tracing gravitational waves back to black holes, except that the yawning darkness we find here is swallowing a lot more than budgets.

• After a few delays, the Axiom-4 astronauts have landed on the ISS! | By the time this mission heads back to Earth in two weeks, one of the crew members, Peggy Whitson, will have spent a cumulative total of almost 700 days in space over the course of her many missions.

*I kid. Mostly. But also, kind of not.

• India is sending its first astronaut up to the ISS. | Shubhanshu Shukla is part of the four-person crew that departed for the ISS this past Tuesday. Isn’t it amazing that going up to SPACE is more or less a regular, weekly occurrence now?

• Not a space story, but more a reminder of how beautiful—and ALIVE—our world can be when we prioritize plants, greenery, and living in harmony with the world. (So I guess this is a space story in its way, isn’t it?) | The city of Medellin’s sublime return to nature.

  

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• Astronomers have been left puzzled by high-altitude clouds forming on a young planet. | The planet, along with a similarly-sized gas giant neighbour, circles a relatively young (only sixteen million years old! ) star in the constellation Musca in the southern sky. There is still material swirling around this planet, which is confusing astronomers as observations have shown that usually, dust and debris that swirls around planets as they form usually dissipates after around five million years. Science! Always learning!

• It’s the end of the Universe…as we know it. (But also, just in general.) | Four different ways that the Universe could come to an end.

• Astronomers are closing in on the source of the universe’s highest-energy particles. | Hint: looks like our own galaxy might be the culprit.

• Astronomers have discovered a strange new object about 15,000 years away from us in the Milky Way galaxy. | Possible candidates: a neutron star, a white dwarf, or (obviously my favourite) “something exotic and unknown”.

• China has launched a probe to study an asteroid chunk that may have come from the moon. | The probe’s mission will last a decade, and will send back samples from a near-Earth chunk of debris before embarking on a voyage into deep space.

• Here’s a first look at the Sun’s South Pole as captured by the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft. | Data gleamed from the Solar Orbiter will help scientists learn more about the Sun’s cycle, which in turn may help us learn how better to deal with solar storms.

• Astronomers have travelled back 13 billion years to see the light of the Cosmic Dawn via the magic of the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS), a land-based group of very large telescopes situated in the Atacama Desert in Chile. | Just think—they’re looking at light that has taken 13 billion years to reach us. No biggie!

• On this exoplanet, sand rains from the sky. } Cue all of the Anakin Skywalker sand-hating jokes!

• The singularity at the heart of black holes—the place where matter and time become so dense that they cease to exist as we understand them—has puzzled scientists for over a hundred years. A recent theory that was proposed to solve the issue is now falling short, according to some thinkers. | Like I said! Science! Always and forever a two-steps-forward-three-steps-back game of progress!

• The moons of Uranus: weird and strange moons for a weird and strange planet that hold all kinds of icy, magnetic mystery. | Because Uranus is tilted almost entirely on its side and spins vertically, scientists have long expected the planet’s moons to show evidence of the planet’s strange magnetic fields (through virtue of the planet’s magnetic radiation harming particular sides of the moons as they orbit). But as it turned out, scientists are seeing the exact opposite of what they predicted. “You know,” says one of the scientists who authored the study, “data always surprise you.” I love this about science—its ability not to confirm our hypotheses but instead to upend our expectations at every turn. I really, really love it.

• Finally: SEASON THREE OF FOUNDATION IS ALMOST HEEEEERE. | Who’s ready for some Brother Day? (And also Hari and Gaal, and Demerzel and Brothers Dawn and Dusk, of course.) Me, that’s who! (And also I am still sad that Bel Riose doesn’t get to follow us into another century. He was my favourite, mostly because Ben Daniels can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned.)

What strange times we live in, indeed.

But then I suspect that no matter when and where you lived, there was always going to be something strange about being a human on this planet. Some days it just feels, to me, as though we feel we’re in particularly strange times because we can turn on the news at any moment and see catastrophe no matter where we are in the world.

Everything feels like it’s burning, yes. Everything is burning.

But this has always been the story of the world, hasn’t it. Humans being wonderful and also terrible to one another. So I guess then the question becomes: how do you choose to be wonderful, in your own life, in this particular stretch of time when we are all doing wonderful and also terrible things?

I have started writing again, after a five-monthor-so hiatus. I have been waiting for what feels like forever for my editor to get her notes back to me, which has been frustrating for a whole host of reasons but also clarifying for others, not least of all because this has, almost without exception, been my experience of publishing right from when I first started publishing books. (See the title of this post: everything is different, and also everything is the same.)

Hurry up and wait, publishing says. We want to publish your book NEXT YEAR, and so we MUST have your manuscript by this date, but also, lol, gotcha! Turns out there are other, more important books—the ones that bring us money—that we have to prioritize and so we’ll have to wait on yours. I’ve been through this several times now and every time it manages to be both surprising and entirely predictable.

The funniest part about all of this, though? That surprise and predictability has somehow turned out to be magic.

I needed these last few months of not-writing. I needed these last few months of time in which to read and think and sleep and be, to deal with family things and worry and try to imagine myself in the future—a year from now, five years, a decade. (And also, naturally, time out to promote the product of some of the writing time of these last few years! WILD LIFE, available in Canada wherever you buy books! ) What does a sustainable writing life look like? It doesn’t actually look like giant book deals, though of course that helps. It looks like connection—with readers, with my editor, with my agent, with every person who comes along to touch a book and help it on its way. It looks like all the ways that I’ve been reaching out and doing things small and large over the years to foster a place where I belong.

It can be easy to forget about these things in the rush of finishing a draft. Somehow I always forget (everything is different, and also everything stays the same) how obsessive a pursuit writing can be, particularly those last few weeks and months of finishing that first draft of a project. When you’re on a roll with the story and everything else falls by the wayside. When every word you type into your computer feels at once perfect and important, before other eyes have seen it and the facade is ripped away.

How strange and yet also familiar, then, to step out of the weeds of creation and back into that space of having-done-the-thing, that new and yet old space of waiting for other ideas to take root.

I come back here every time, and every time it feels like new ground all over again.

I’ve been looking into the immortal jellyfish as one part of the research for this new project. The immortal jellyfish, Latin name Turritopsis dohrnii, is a species of jellyfish that is found in warm to temperate waters all over the world. The jellyfish moves through regular jellyfish stages—from larvae to polyps to free-swimming medusae, where they break off from their colony, move through the ocean, and propagate in their sexually mature form.

But unlike regular jellyfish, when threatened or injured, Turritopsis dohrnii flips a switch in its genes and reverts its cells back to polyp stage, essentially turning back the clock and rewinding itself back to that stationary stage of polyp-hood. In this way, the jellyfish is functionally immortal. While it can still be eaten and killed at any point during its life in the sea, the potential is there for Turritopsis dohrnii to revert back to childhood and grow to adulthood again and again and again. There is, so far as science can tell, no limit to how long the jellyfish might live.

I can’t help the way my head swirls around this bit of information. It makes me think of so many things—how impossibly strange and beautiful our world is, and also how uncomfortable and cruel. In order to discover these facts about the jellyfish, scientists subjected Turritopsis dohrnii to all manner of experiments. Scientists withheld food, increased the temperature of the water, reduced the salt content in jellyfish tanks, and prodded the jellyfish with forceps and scissors. You could argue, I think, that all of this amounts to torture. (To say nothing of all of the other innumerable ways that science has tortured animals—human and otherwise—in the pursuit of knowledge and information.)

The strange beauty of the world in one hand, and the things we do to uncover that beauty in the other.

Does Turritopsis dohrnii retain its memories, I wonder? When it chooses to revert back to that stage of polyphood, does it do so while thinking maybe, this time, things will be different?

Every new project that comes to me feels like The Project I’ve been waiting to write my whole life. My first novel was like that, and so was my last. The memoir that I’m writing about grief felt like that the whole way through my first draft. Still feels that way, if I’m honest. Obsessive and compelling and strange in the way that books can often be, mesmerizing and intoxicating in equal measure. Addictive, you might even say. And every time I come out from that first round of writing it’s been a surprise to discover that more ideas await--that yes, this project which has been so all-consuming will eventually consume me less and less, will eventually recede into the background to make space for other projects.

It is everything and all-important in the moment, and even it, too, will make space for something else eventually.

I worry that this seems like a strange and callous comparison, but I find comfort in thinking about this tiny immortal jellyfish, bobbing its way through the ocean. So much about it stays the same while around it so much is wildly different from one moment to the next. Turriptosis dohrnii, living its immortal life as the world rages on and on, as the forests burn and civilizations crumble and the joyous, wicked thing that is human life stays the same and also changes with every breath that you and I inhale. In this way I think of grieving—of how the deep inner breath that we take when we think of our loved ones feels every bit as white-hot as it did in those moments when they first left, but also how our—and the world’s—capacity for wonder and awe continues even in the midst of all that is terrible and wrong. We are capable of so much that is both horrible and awe-inducing. We choose, like the immortal jellyfish, to go back to that moment of beginning again and again. Pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, head back out into the world to see what’s next. Manuscripts and lives and all that we hold sacred mushing all together.

Maybe this time, we say. Maybe this time things will be different.

And they are different, even if only a little, and also they are always the same.

What lessons are in all of this for those of us who want to learn?

I’ve been reading Pema Chödron again on audio while Sitka and I go for our walks. I’m about halfway through a re-read of Comfortable with Uncertainty, and struck all over once more at how the patterns repeat here, too—how we grasp at pleasure and turn away from pain, always searching for that one thing that will make all that is hard and unbearable vanish. Like our tiny Turriptosis friend, choosing to go back and back to a state of newness, to that place before all that is terrible happens. How we long for a world where the enemies—be they corporeal or mental, spiritual or otherwise—are vanquished and there is nothing left but bliss.

In the book, as with so many more of her teachings, the advice is always the same: the path is not to turn away from pain but to let it go through you, have its way with you, let it change you into something different and also something the same, some shade and shape of you that was always, in some way, inevitable. The potential that we all have for growth, for different-yet-familiar iterations of ourselves. As I ride the waves of yet another round of Life in Publishing, of writing and becoming this different-and-yet-same version of myself (five books instead of four, but always and forever the writer) I am trying to hold tight to her words and also to that image of our microscopic jellyfish friend. The words and the jellyfish were both born from stars long ago, as were you and I. We come from the same place; we are made of the same things. We have the same potential to reach for and believe in a world that is different while also existing in a world that seems to stay the same. Magic at its infuriating best.

And so I turn back to the world in all its absurdity, beauty, and horror. What a terrible, beautiful place we have in the universe. What a terrible—and yet crucial, wonderful, so filled with possibility—time it is to be alive. We do our small things and our large things and we hope for the best, and sometimes the best comes and sometimes it doesn’t, and eventually we sink back into the earth, into the river. Those who come after us pick up the same struggle and see the same things: sometimes the best, sometimes its opposite. Over and over and over.

It is not exactly the same as our jellyfish, no. But also, in other ways, it isn’t all that different.

Currently Reading: Savage Fae (Ruthless Boys of the Zodiac #2)—don’t judge me, I am replenishing my capacity for magic after that year of astrophysics broke my brain, also I’m linking to the Simon & Schuster page for it because it has no cover art and if you see the cover art you really WILL judge me)

Currently Watching: Mobland, S1, season (series? I hope not?) finale.

Currently Eating: Smitten Kitchen’s take on Aloo Gobi, also this, forever and ever.

• What was the universe like before there were stars? | Hint: lots of chaos, but also lots of potential, and a few unlikely heroes.

• Speaking of which: the universe has already made almost all of the stars it will ever make. | Isn’t that just so strange a thing to contemplate? There are billions of years of future ahead and yet, in some ways, some things are already over.

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• How the Sun and solar storms might be stranding whales. | I feel like there’s definitely a Star Trek joke in here somewhere. (Deployed with appropriate gravitas, of course. Something something scrambling the voyage home, etc.)

• Lost your marbles, anyone? Have you thought to check the Moon? | How glass beads on the moon hint at a long-ago asteroid impact.

• More news from the weird universe: how strange circles on Venus may hint at underground tectonic activity. | Venus: she keeps her gases close, and her secrets even closer.

• Astronomers have captured images of two galaxies “jousting”—one piercing the other with deadly radiation. | The cosmos: it’s all just one long dick-measuring contest, everywhere you look.

• The strange similarity between neuron and galaxy networks. | Or perhaps this is not so strange. What are we, after all, if not the universe made manifest?

• A general from the US Space Force has been selected to lead the Golden Dome project. | (Not this Space Force, unfortunately, and more’s the pity.)

• Axiom 4’s next private astronaut launch to the ISS will take place on June 8. | Isn’t it funny how sending people out to literal space, and docking them at a station that allows them to survive, has become so commonplace?

• Jupiter used to be two times as big as it is now, says a new modelling study. | It could have held two thousand Earths. Cue my eternal shock face.

• Perseverance has rolled onto the “crocodile plateau” on Mars. | (The crocodile plateau does not, so far as we know, actually have crocodiles.)

• Happy 45th birthday to The Empire Strikes Back! | (I’m more than a few days late, but—better late than never, right?)

• Never mind Earth weather—the sun is at is 11-year solar maximum, which is creating all kinds of fun space weather to monitor. But are we ready for the worst of it? | Totally calming and not at all unsettling answer: we don’t know.

• Speaking of Star Wars: here’s a list of all of the upcoming Star Wars movies officially announced. | May the force be with you, always.

• Two sky surveys taken twenty-three years apart might (might!) show evidence of the mysterious Planet Nine. | But another theory says that this could also be a new dwarf planet, one so far out from the Sun that it takes 25,000 Earth years to make one orbit around our favourite star.

• What is space weather, anyway? | A look at how space weather impacts us.

• SpaceX’s May 28 flight burned up on return to Earth. | Plenty of space for another Elon Musk joke here, I know, but I can’t. I’m just so tired.

• Meet Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian: the woman reimagining space, space travel, and what looking to the stars could mean. | “Space, to me, is not a luxury. It’s not entertainment. It is a critical experiment – the ultimate test of what kinds of societies we are capable of imagining.”

• Jared Isaacman has been withdrawn as Trump’s pick to lead NASA. | Could this be because the Great Prophesied Rift between Musk and Trump is coming true? Probably not, but a girl can dream.

• We are close to translating animal languages—what happens then? | (If nothing else, the opportunities for CETI/SETI/Star Trek whale jokes are endless.)

• When the sun dies, could life survive on Europa? | (This is what’s known as next-level doomsday prepping.)

• We emit a light that vanishes when we die, says new Canadian study. | This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine—literally, as it turns out.

• Fear not, my fellow anxious humans! Apparently the Universe will die much sooner than expected, according to science. | Time to get out that bucket list.

• SpaceX will launch Starship’s ninth test flight next week—and Elon Musk will give a presentation about their Mars plans before the launch. It will be live-streamed on X. | (This feels like one of those sentences that sounds so cool and will inevitably be terribly dated in a decade’s time. Has echoes of all the MarsOne fervour from the mid 2010s. Remember them?)

• Varda Space Industries’ third space capsule has successfully returned to orbit. It had a 8.5 week jaunt around the planet before touching down at the Koonibba Test Range. | “We are working to make re-entry as commonplace as launch,” they said.

• The strongest solar flare of 2025 erupted just yesterday, causing radio blackouts across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. | We stan a fiery solar queen.

• China is sharing moon samples with international partners, but a 2011 law prevents sharing with NASA. | How long before this irks the Trump administration, I wonder?

• Speaking of NASA: the NASA Mars rover has spotted the first aurora on the Red Planet that’s visible to the human eye. | This means that when humans land on Mars, they’ll be able to see the aurora too.

• Echoes from “marsquakes” reveal clues about a hidden body of water on Mars. | Cue the Mars city conspiracy theories in 3, 2, 1…

• Trump’s 2026 budget will cancel the Mars Sample Return mission, instead arguing that all of this can be accomplished with human missions to Mars. | Don’t worry, Donald, Elon has your back—we’re gonna land humans on Mars in 2028! Originally it was 2022! And maybe 2028 might be more realistically phrased as 2031? WHAT ARE NUMBERS. WHO EVEN KNOWS ANYMORE.

• Auroras on Jupiter glow 100x brighter than those on Earth. | Imagine that. JUST IMAGINE IT.

• NASA praised this employee’s resilience on its website—then, after anti-DEI orders from the Trump administration, scrubbed her story from its website, and fired her. | NASA also deleted its “first woman on the moon” and “first person of colour on the moon” pledges some weeks ago, in case anyone is keeping track. Humanity? What’s that? Who cares?

• This is not a space story, technically, but it might as well be, given that the we-don’t-know-how-much-is-out-there vibe is very much the same: humanity has only seen and mapped less than 0.001% of the deep ocean floor. | Listen—I’m not saying that the Enterprise could be hiding on the bottom of one of our oceans, but then again I’m not not saying that, either.

• Finally, let’s take a moment to breathe in the sadness and the grief and the worry about our future alongside the beauty of the Eta Aquarius, some dazzling photos of which were snapped last week when they roared through the sky. | See? All is terrible and beautiful and we are so small. But wonder is huge. May it devour us all, in the best way.