I was on day 3 of pretending I wasn't sick: gurgling chest cough, limbs that felt leaded, my brain in the clouds.

Back at Blue Bottle, a man and a woman were seated on a bench. Maybe colleagues. Maybe killing time, too. She wore a pencil skirt. I listened to their conversation about tech, about robots, automation, “AI agents.” All are terms I’ve started to mentally mute like white noise dialed to the Impending Doom channel.

The thing about AI, he is saying, is that they just never get tired! She nods knowingly; I yawn (see above re: lethargy) which triggers a mini coughing fit.

When it’s time to leave, a man walking ahead of me gets himself fully stuck in the revolving door, and a fireman has to come dislodge the panels to free him. “The body is not a thing, it is a situation,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir.

I’ve been thinking about how perhaps the opposite of being alive isn’t being dead. Maybe the opposite is actually living in automation: going through the motions until the motions are all there is. Repeating your routine until deviation feels threatening. Saying you want pleasure, but actually just doing everything possible to avoid the possibility of pain. Seeing your body as something that always needs to be corrected, or better controlled.

To be a human is to be flawed. It is to be embarrassing. It is to be wrong, and tired. It is to sometimes carry grief and fear with you like a dead leg. It is to be the exact opposite of artificial intelligence, by nature if not by design: built to wear down, to break, to end.

But there are certain things, noble and inexhaustible robot, that will simply never be yours:

• Have you eaten burned toast? Slurped down the disgusting delight of a raw oyster?

• Have you fought a fever — willing yourself into wellbeing — only to be brought to your knees by a single shiver?

• Have you felt ecstasy that starts at your toes?

• Have you ever had to say, you need to pull over the car so I can throw up?

• Have you cracked the crystalized surface of a creme brûlée with a cold metal spoon?

• Have you ever jumped into water that is, unquestionably, the perfect temperature?

While we were home for Christmas, my eight-year-old niece offhandedly referenced her body as: “my cage.”

The body keeps the score, and thank god it does. We need somebody keeping tabs.

This month’s prompts are about being here, in a body: the one you didn’t order, can’t fully control, and can’t give back. The cage that makes you undeniably, sometimes inconveniently, human.

1. RUNNING ON FUMES

When you’re totally depleted, what reliably goes first? Maybe the sleep, the fridge, the exercise, the patience?

Name your physical tells: your clenched jaw, or stiff neck, or mounting isolation, popcorn for dinner?

2. SELF SURVIVAL KIT

When you’re in the situation above, what’s your actual system for saving yourself?

Examples: the emergency walk around the block, the little rubber ball you bought off Amazon to release pressure from your shoulder, the very very long and hot shower, the friend you call who always answers.

3. BEAUTY MARK
Take an inventory of your scars, marks, physical anomalies, permanent alterations. Which one is the most interesting?

4. YOU LOOK TIRED

Read more

1. SYSTEMS TO SAVE YOURSELF

I endorse collecting some quick hits of delightful oddity, unswerving beauty, and reliable recalibration… and keeping them in close proximity.

Maybe you have a secret little folder of images, or a page in a notebook, or things pinned to a board on your wall. Your system is yours.

When you’re down in a ditch, you’ll be glad your past self had the decency to throw you a bone.

2. SPECIAL MUG

I have been staying in an AirBnb this month. The AirBnb is fine, but inexplicably the only mug I can find in the entire apartment has the Facebook logo on it, which I can’t bring myself to use (bad karma).

Over the weekend I marched myself across town to see a beautiful ceramics pop-up from Simone Bodmer-Turner, where I treated myself to a beautiful new mug to use for the duration of my stay.

It is very heavy, with a thick glaze like fondant icing. It arrived wrapped in a solid yard of honeycomb paper wrapping, and I carried it proudly, swaddled in my arms, for 30 blocks.

While on the topic of containers:

• Footed glasses begging to hold chilled martinis on a tray.

• A beautiful book on the vessel as metaphor.

3. SOLITARY & SHARED

This season has felt steeped in friendship and its endless layers; it contains everything.

Two things:

“It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster to not be found.” — psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, 1965.

“Our self-conception depends on the durability of our private mythologies, reinforced by those friends who might help us believe, all evidence to the contrary, in our own confidence.” — Megan O’Grady, in How It Feels to Be Alive

Read more

I won’t get into the ‘why,’ because it is complicated and I didn’t fully understand it and it doesn’t really matter. What I could see clearly: the carefully stacked art books, the organized refrigerator, the many tiny wabi-sabi ceramic bowls, the routine built on highly functional structure. And then the question: what if we just walked into the unknown instead?

These moments don’t come around often; where the door is genuinely open and you can proceed with blind possibility. Most of the time you can’t, or you won’t. But we opted for the former: packed it all up, gave things away, embarked on temporary plans that turned into months that have turned into a year.

Narratively, a plot twist is often a necessary device to drive the story forward; it is fuel for the engine. But on the inside it can be less dramatic. You’re not always standing at a crossroads, flipping a coin; you’re already down the road you chose, looking back at the version of you who made the call, still a little amazed they did it.

Sometimes change begins with just adjusting the frequency. Seeing how the tools you’ve been relying on aren’t the only ones available; how commitment is different from passive continuation. You are, almost certainly, more adaptable than you think.

These prompts are about the arc of changing the plot: the incremental shifts. The secret rules you’re living by or purposefully breaking. The ways you’ve done this before, and you’ll do it again.

The May Prompts:

1. Q or A

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer,” wrote Zora Neale Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Which one is this for you?

2. Past Lives

“How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?” – Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers.

List some of your past eras or ways you’ve reinvented yourself before.

Examples: the summer where you got into lap swimming at 6am. The spontaneous move to the city you’d never been to (Philadelphia). The month in the Marais hotel. The fabulous year of bleached blonde hair. (Followed by the year of the fried-out bob).

3. Background Shift

What is one small, accumulated thing that is different from six months ago that you haven’t yet given yourself credit for?

4. Diplomatic Immunity

10,000 daily steps. Monogamy. Home ownership.

Read more

While waiting for a table to open up for lunch we stopped in a shop. It sold ceramics, books, things in small jars. The photographer I was with bought a mug. It’s probably a good mug, the kind of object a person is pleased to own. I found a tiny pot of beeswax hand salve made by the owner’s neighbor. I can’t translate the label but it smells like lemons, and it fits in the hollow of my palm, and it cost about $3.

As we were leaving, he asked what I’d bought. I showed him, and he said, ‘I could have been in that store all day and never seen that.’

I’ve been thinking about this. Not the salve specifically, but the whole category of thing it belongs to. I will always find this object. I have been finding it, in different shops, different countries, different forms, for as long as I can remember. It finds me.

There are things I return to, reliably, no matter what. They include: Walking. The long bath. El…

Read more

Hot off the press: 2 Moon Lists “in situ” prompt booklets.

Focused, analog prompt books with sets of questions for when you need a different quality of focus.

William James wrote that experience is “what I agree to attend to.” These booklets (and Moon Lists writ large) are an exercise in that agreement:

The choice to invest and find value in the parts of life that will never be automated, that resist surface-level summary, that get richer the more deliberately you show up to them.

Shop the booklets

Read more

Before we moved to California we rented a craftsman house built in the 1910s. It was very creaky, riddled with dust bunnies, and had a roach problem but… there was crown molding and a wraparound porch. We make the compromises we think we deserve, etc!

We slept in the front bedroom, under a little window we thought for a few months was stained glass before realizing, actually, it was a decal meant to look like stained glass.

This is where the pattern started: awake and alert at 2am, up until 4 or 4:30, then back to sleep until 6. Every night, every time zone, repeat.

I don’t fight it anymore. I’ve made my peace with this window of the night. Occasionally I dabble in a little toxic doomscroll, sometimes I get up and make a piece of toast with jam, or I listen to an audio book. But mostly I just lie there.

“How was night duty,” Michael asks in the morning.

I’ve developed a private connection with these hours, a volunteer on a shift we’ve otherwise agreed can just pass on by without supervision. Here, the world belongs to me.

There's that fragile quality of consciousness in the place between awake and sleep, where everything feels intimately familiar and completely unknowable.1 Sometimes 3am arrives and I’m boiling from the inside out with anxiety about something objectively ordinary. Other times I’ll wake up with an answer, or a fully formed idea2; or a person’s name in my head. Honestly, most of the time my brain is just doing banal admin, outlining what needs to get done.

April's prompts are about my fellow colleagues taking the night shift:

• On sleeping and not sleeping.

• What Mary Shelley called her “waking dreams.”

• The hours no one else sees.

• Negotiating with your brain to (please for the love of god) switch off.

• The version of you when you’re alone in the dark, in between yesterday and today.

Wishing you a few winks.
LP

April Prompts on Insomnia

1. LOUISE BOURGEOIS’ COCA COLA

I love this YouTube interview of Louise Bourgeois where she her lists her current fears and how much space each occupies, one being how she is perceived, another that they forgot the Coca Cola she requested.

Make an objective inventory of where your mind tends to goes at 3am (or, in the minutes before sleep, or whenever your thoughts run unsupervised). Fears, fantasies, logistics, rehearsals, grudges, replays… list out what occupies the real estate.

2. TURNDOWN SERVICE

Sleeping with one sock on. Needing a light on in the kitchen. Two beverages on the nightstand.

What are your private sleep rituals? The things you’d do in a hotel room, alone, without thinking about it?

3. CLOCK #1

An artist friend, in a year of intense insomnia, began painting clocks; there is a mania in watching hours pass, one by one.

Read more

Moon Archives:
Attention Inventory - full archive
Prompts for Dabbling in Transcendence

1. Spiral Bound

I collect a variety of self-published, plastic ring-bound books that I like to buy at library book shop, on eBay, Etsy, and at estate sales.

I mostly gravitate toward cookbooks from bygone health food restaurants, spiritual esoterica, and examples of hyper-devotion to the incredibly niche (i.e. miniature bonsai or Schnauzer grooming).

There is something beautifully honest about this format. Because they were so cheap to print, most were produced via true community, and largely by groups of women as fundraisers for churches, schools, or arts organizations.

I consider these both such incredible relics of scrappy ingenuity, and also some of the finest examples we have of American regional identity in both graphic design and content.

A few titles that have caught my eye recently:

• Stretches for a “strong and supple back”

• A recipe book for popcorn lovers, or another on “magnificent snacks”

• An illustrated guide to ornate glass pitchers

• Cooking with beans and lentils (”the protein twins”)

• Obsessed with this title: “Living High on the Sugarless Hog”

2. Soft Refresh

To spritz: A friend introduced me to these hydrosols: herbs and flowers distilled into, as the website explains, "pure mountain water sourced from a pristine well."

The jasmine one is divine. The Helichrysum (or, immortelle) is also wonderful but harder to describe: honey-like, but also hay?

Store in the fridge and spritz liberally.

To sip: Enjoying cold-brewing tea, specifically Waka Waka's Dim tea with red shiso and sencha, and Kettl's superior Soba Cha.

I highly recommend cold brewing the soba cha so it doesn’t get bitter. I add roughly 2–3 tbsp of buckwheat to a liter of filtered cold water, then steep overnight in the fridge. Finish with a splash of sparkling water. Yum.

3. Sensorial Snack Plate

To listen: Michael, my partner, started a label with Devon Turnbull of Ojas. Their first release came out this month; it is called Unna and it is incredibly lovely.

To smell: I have been eating cinnamon toast for breakfast (on a crumpet. The only place I can find them is at Trader Joe’s). Anyway, the warm cinnamon-sugar smell is INTOXICATING. I recommend this breakfast for the aroma alone.

To feel: No matter the season, I run very HOT while sleeping and am experimenting with the best bedding combo. (This = me.)

Read more

The center in Austin was on the second floor of a suburban strip mall, between a store that sold pool supplies and some medical offices you’d dread having to book appointments at. It smelled abstractly like chlorine. The instructors were a couple who reminded me of Marty and Bobbi on SNL.

I sat in an itchy chair that felt deliberately engineered for liminal spaces while Marty and Bobbi sketched an outline of the conscious mind on a white erase board. There were many pamphlets to read. I fidgeted and tried very, very hard to determine whether something vital about life might be hiding inside this beige room next to a podiatrist’s office.

I never went back, so I guess we’ll never know. But I do still think about it sometimes.

Recently, the topic of Hilma af Klimt came up at dinner. We went around the table trying to reconstruct what we half-remembered: the transmissions from higher beings, The Five women, divine geometry, snails, etc etc. We all admired the devotion required to take the invisible seriously.

I’ve been thinking about Hilma, and her states of transcendence. She wasn’t irrational or naïve. She was formally trained, scientifically literate, and living in a time of rapid mid-demystification: the discovery of X-rays! Evolution! The unseen architecture of matter being measured and named. And yet… she kept the door open to what resisted being seen.

Outside my window, a climbing rose bush has sent out a thin, spiraling young tendril. It is searching for something to anchor itself to. It doesn’t know what it’s reaching for, it just keeps extending toward light.

I understand the instinct. When you’re moving through the world with no map, and the visible forces feel insufficient and corrupt, it helps to imagine the unknown might be on your team. Maybe larger patterns could be at work.

This month, our prompts consider dabbling in transcendence: extending beyond the strictly provable, making something sacred just because, stretching your arms out toward whatever light you can sense. You're not certain it's there. But what else are you going to do?

1. THE FIVE

In the 1890s, Hilma af Klint gathered weekly with four other women in Stockholm. They called themselves The Five.

Friday evenings were devoted to séances, prayer, writing, and diagramming messages they believed to be transmitted from higher beings. Over time, the sessions evolved into the creation of complex diagrams, symbols, and eventually the monumental paintings Hilma is now known for. (Loose slips of paper found in The Five’s notebooks, ca. September 1903, reveal the following message: “You are bewildered by what we have told you, but the phe-nomenon we are trying to explain is truly bewildering. What is this phenomenon, you ask? Well, beloved, it is the phenomenon of secret growing.”)

Imagine you are hosting The Five’s Friday session. Set the scene for your own ideal séance:

• Where are we? (A Brooklyn brownstone? An Airbnb in Joshua Tree? A conference table at a Hilton Garden Inn?)

• Who are the other four people in attendance?

• What are you wearing? (I’ll be wearing this.)

• What’s the scent in the room? (Palo Santo? A spritz of Thierry Mugler’s iconic gourmand fragrance, Angel? It better not be the Flamingo Estate tomato candle!)

• What music is playing? (I’m envisioning this album from Mary Lattimore and Julianna Barwick)

• Are snacks served?

Devotion lives or dies in the details - be specific!

2. PAST LIFE

What’s something you know, or do, or are inexplicably drawn to that you have no good explanation for?

3. BEIGE ROOM

Recall a moment when you went looking for insight, transcendence, some kind of inner shift… and things didn’t turn out how you planned.

4. ACCIDENTALLY SACRED

Read more

Moon Archives:
Attention Inventory - full archive
February Prompts for Read Receipts

1. GOLDIE’S BASKETBALL TEAM

My seven-year-old niece, Goldie, started playing on a basketball team this season. Michael went to one of the games while he was visiting and called me afterward to recap: Pure chaos.

Tiny kids hyper-focused on their own velocity. Staring at their feet, sprinting full-speed down the court toward nothing. Holding the ball, then forgetting what comes next… just standing there, bobbing in place. Shooting into either team’s basket. Shooting anywhere but the basket. At one point the ball was launched with such conviction that it wedged in the gym rafters and multiple parents had to be recruited as a response unit, using broom handles to dislodge it.

Total commitment, zero strategy.

This is the exact willingness and unselfconscious verve I suggest we bring into the Year of the Horse; I am wishing you a year of shooting your shot!

2. WORKDAY MOTIVATION

Notable finds:

• Spiraling, Skinky-like notepads, made from deadstock/recycled paper by a family-run printer in LA.

  

• Archival book boxes. Around here, we go Museum Grade only.

  

• A dream drafting desk inside the Ljubljana home studio of Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik. (“The house is marked by the master’s constant research spirit and asceticism, and many an architectural experiment turned out to be the right solution for his later work. In his report to Suhadolc, Plečnik himself calls his house an ‘experimental hotbed.’”)

3. TASTING NOTES

• A nearly extinct pre-colonial Filipino salt, made by a handful of remaining families in Bohol. The process takes months: coconut husks soaked in seawater by the mangrove, burned to ash, filtered, boiled down in clay pots over a wood fire until the pot cracks open to reveal a solid orb of salt. It looks like a dinosaur egg and (apparently) tastes like the sea ran through a fire.

• Treats:

Read more

I wanted to know everything about her. And also to stay far away. The writer Chris Kraus calls figures like this “Ciphers,” or people “you’d rather not know, because you might be looking into your future.1” Looking too closely meant admitting she wasn’t another species; she was a woman who was once a girl. Understanding her too well would collapse the distance that made me believe old age could never happen to me.

II. I keep watching this TikTok. In it, an influencer does aggressive gua sha, narrating each motion into her phone. Her sister stands in the background - awkward, highly frumpy, watching. She’s not “in” the video, exactly, but very much there.

There’s something unsettling about it. I can’t tell if her presence makes the moment less or more real …or both?

The performed self and the witness occupy the same frame. The version you choose, and the version that exists anyway.

III. Asymmetric observation is a strategy.

Someone names; someone gets named. Someone watches; someone gets watched.

This setup has always favored those in control. Politics rely on it. Platforms monetize it. Language makes it feel neutral, using lean words2 that flatten people into functions so you don’t have to imagine they contain interior lives, contradictions, weather.

Yet for all its scale and force, this structure is fragile. It cannot withstand actual intimacy. (The kind of intimacy that is stubbornly inefficient. Unscalable, unable to generalize, insistent on the particular. The kind that dismantles the fantasy of exemption; that you can observe without being observed in return.

This is where we start with February’s prompts: What are you already seeing? And who is seeing you?

FEBRUARY PROMPTS FOR READ RECEIPTS

1. LEFT UNREAD

The most morally loaded, vaguely implicating sentence of our time: “by the way, your read receipts are on.”

Recall a recent moment when you realized you were weren’t as unobserved as you thought.

2. CONTEXT COLLAPSE

I am eavesdropping on a conversation between a white-haired man with a strangely young face (giving Julian Assange) and his colleague. Julian A. is talking about the disarming experience of stumbling upon his son’s social media profile: “Who is that guy?!”

In other words, seeing the son he raised - fully formed, unrecognizable when presented to him in abstract.

Write about a time when someone you knew appeared in a context that made them feel like a stranger.

3. “CLASSIC ME”

Read more

1. Three Thoughts on Measuring Existence

A. “There is no such thing as time,” Isamu Noguchi is quoted as saying. This line is lifted slightly out of context1 but relates to how Noguchi thought about working with stone: a means of linking oneself to a history beyond time or place; to endure by disappearing into the material; to exist outside of what you can measure.

B. I was on a walk in West Texas a few weeks ago and found a small and unspectacular fossil, which for some reason reminded me of this specific image in my elementary school science book, where a child is photographed in the Permian Basin, seated completely inside a dinosaur footprint. To sit inside absence as proof of existence. Interesting.2

C. An excerpt from this all-time 10/10 amazing conversation between Harry Dean Stanton and David Lynch:

Lynch: How would you describe yourself?

Stanton: There’s nothing. There’s no self.

Lynch: And how would you like to be remembered?

Stanton: Doesn’t matter.

In summary: what endures has nothing to do with you!

2. Tasting Notes

I recommend returning to with fresh eyes to ingredients, flavor pairings, and/or textures you once loved. A few of my recent revisits:

• Recreating an afternoon snack my grandmother used to make me: warm flour tortilla, bit of butter, sprinkling of cinnamon and sugar, thinly rolled up like a cigarette. Divine.

• In college while working at a juice bar I was addicted to these very dense square bricks of compressed nuts, seeds, honey, spirulina, and cacao powder that I would steal from the bulk bin. Think Larabar-adjacent; hard as a rock. I recently rediscovered them in Rainbow Bridge Natural Foods, labeled “chunks of energy.” I have been partaking. I won’t say they are “good,” but they are important.

• Savory-style oatmeal-meets-congee, but also inspired by Japanese breakfasts. Here is how I make it:

Read more

Berger spent his career teaching people to see clearly, to separate what’s real and substantial from easy clichés. The implication being: you already know. You just have to do the work of discerning it.

That’s the work for this year: seek, hold, salvage. See y’all on the other side.

PS: all longer-form digital prompt booklets are available to download here.

Prompts for Seeking & Salvaging

1. GOT ME THROUGH IT

You survived 2025. Give credit where it's due. Who and what got you through the year?

The person:

The place:

The thing:

2. THE BACKLOG

In 2008, the National Archives reported that it had approximately one million cubic feet of records that were unprocessed, or: materials that had been acquired and shelved, but never fully examined or sorted. (The library science term is “backlog”: pending materials that are essentially hidden.)

Consider your own “backlog” and its various expressions: perhaps a Notes app list titled “Copenhagen ideas,” unedited since 2022? Screenshots of life-changing quotations you’ve never revisited? A sheet in an abandoned notebook outlining the ways you’re definitely going to change your life?

Choose a repository or list out a few. Dedicate 30 minutes to revisiting one lost corner of your archive.

3. GALLOP MODE

The Year of the Horse begins February 17, 2026, symbolizing forward motion. Less looking, more leaping. Pedal to the metal.

List something you’ve been waiting on to arrive that you could try galloping toward instead.

4. TRIVIAL PURSUIT

Read more

(I will link a few earlier installments here, should you be interested, here, here, and here.)

I keep a running note on my phone where I tend to the list over time. I don’t look at it often, but inevitably some entries will fall away—losing their charge or claim on my attention.

Last week, thinking about this post, I opened up the note and noticed that this time the “towards” far outnumbered the “aways.”

It isn’t that there’s nothing to discard. There’s plenty. It was more that the tone of the “toward” list resisted the logic I usually apply, and reading it through the lens of renunciation felt off. Or maybe I just kept wondering whether forward motion requires a corresponding rejection. Perhaps what I’m moving toward most right now is being shaped by accumulation; seeking what’s earned through experience, and time, and discernment.

Instead of balancing the ratio…

Read more

Here is this month’s Attention Inventory list, or: what I’ve been thinking about instead of whatever I was supposed to be doing.

And: there are just a few copies of the new “Prompts for Better Attention” booklet available. You may also learn more about it here. As a reminder, Substack paid subscribers also receive a free digital download of the book contents. The code is at the bottom of this email :)

Subscribe now

1. OLD MUSE

I have returned to this picture many times because I like every single thing about it. Bringing back:

• Hair in a topknot.

• A sweater cinched tightly, at this angle, around the waist

• The symmetry of: grey on grey; matching rouge and lips; double bracelets

• Smiling. One thing I have noticed about Diana Vreeland is she was always photographed smiling and/or talking with her hands. Inspiring. (Examples: one. two. three.)

2. COLOR, IN SITU

I’m working on more Moon Lists printed books. (Um… but I’m slow. It takes me a long time to write, as it does to untangle the logistics of how to go from the idea of a thing to the actual analog thing).

Anyway, one of my favorite subconscious fascinations is color, and thinking about how they look next to each other (a friend told me she had all the Moon Lists booklets displayed in a row on her shelf, which pleased me endlessly!)

Here are some color references I have been collecting for… something, someday:

• Truly hypnotized by the color of this raspberry jam (especially against the passion fruit, and the silver).

• The yellow of this industrial laundry cart.

• The green of Jean Prouvé and Charlotte Perriand’s 1952 built-in cabinets.

• The photo of Calamine lotion and the plastic bottle on the Wikipedia page.

• Chocolate and gold.

3. SPACE TO RECEIVE

“Yes indeed, the world is a scintillant and fascinating place when a half-remembered mystery leans within reach.” — from Claire Louise Bennett’s Pond.

I quite like this whole story. Particularly, I have been thinking about something it touches on in how we’re expected to respond to everything in the moment. For instance, to open a gift and react correctly, as if it is universally possible to summon our authentic feelings on demand.

There is something very generous and rare in the permission to receive without performance. To let a moment arrive and remain untranslated.

And on the abstract topic of gifts, here are some little things I like to give others:
A case of Bjorn Qorn. A list of reading recommendations that reminded me of the recipient. Instant coffee packs to keep in your bag (because sometimes you arrive at the AirBnb and there is only a Keurig with Dunkin’ Donuts pods). A beautiful facial oil, specifically blended for the season. A jam made with fruit from a far-away place. (Or, perhaps a shell or interesting little stone you found with the same kind of memory attached.)

4. IRRATIONAL REMEDIES

Remedies, by Julia Blackburn, is a repurposing of 9th-century “cures” drawn from an Old English book of invented medicine.

Blackburn cites Byzantine Era physician Alexander of Tralles, who believed his patients “must be defended by anything that gave them the courage to go on living.” He observed that images, amulets, and strange remedies often helped… even when (and mostly when) there was no rational reason they should.

The book is full of such proposals, i.e.: take a nail from a shipwreck, turn it into a bracelet, wear it on your left wrist, and “be astonished by the result.”

(Another line I wrote down: do not entice the fox with old bones.)

What sustains us doesn’t always require proof.

5. A LA CARTE

Miscellaneous pleasures, distractions, sensorial delights of the month:

• When you learn the word you’ve been missing; I enjoy all things Kiu Kiu / Q.

• Coffee ice cream with toasted slivered almonds.

• Persimmon season.

• These images of Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica kitchen in the late 1970s.

• Katharine Hepburn in a tree, 1981

• Learning about the superego vs id vs ego

Gratis:

Download the digital version of Prompts for Better Attention as a gift for paid subscribers. Code below.

Read more

I’ve been thinking about this in terms of attention.

The word attention itself is… tangly. It’s a vague assignment we’re all supposedly failing at. A moral shortcoming. A collective crisis. Look up from the phone. Focus!

It’s all an impossibly boring dialogue, if you ask me. May we rethink this entirely?

I’m pleased to share a new “In Situ” prompt booklet, Prompts for Better Attention.

It is structured in four acts that move from the granular texture of a single day to the bigger-picture concepts about what you want your life to be in service of; it’s on noticing where your attention actually lives versus where you think it should.

The prompts operate from an open-ended premise. I trust your intelligence to know what matters to you. Your attention is actively shaping your life right now, and these questions are meant to help you notice the form (and if you don’t like it, to find a new direction to stretch toward).

Prompts for Better Attention: 4 chapters, 32 prompts, soft cover saddle stitch booklet, bound with pigmented blue Colorplan cover stock. Order here, with complimentary shipping on orders $60+ with code: NEWMOON.

But also: there are pens!!

I wrote before about my favorite “magic” Japanese pens that I discovered in my travels and became mildly obsessed with.

Well… I’m proud/shamelessly admitting that on my last trip to Tokyo I located rare (but classic) colors of said pens, bought out the inventory—and an extra suitcase—and schlepped them back to the U.S. so I can share them with you.

It’s the kind of pen that makes you want to write things down. Not quite a marker, not quite a standard felt tip, just the right weight for deliberate note-taking, annotation, and underlining what matters.

As some background, these “Magic Pens” are named for the Japanese word for felt tip pens, or majikku. When they first appeared in the 1960s, the technology was new enough to warrant the moniker.

It comes in a four-pack: Editor’s Red, Studio Blue, Chestnut Brown, and Classic Black. (Personally I’m really into the Chestnut. Why are there not more brown pens?)

Both the pens and the booklets are available for sale on the Moon Lists website, in limited edition. Free shipping over $60 with code: NEWMOON

As an *annoying* caveat, they are only available to ship within the U.S, but if you’d like to download the digital PDF it is available as well.

If you are a paid Substack subscriber and want to download the content for free—this is my gift to you! A secret code is below :)

As ever, thank you for being here. All Moon Lists profits are donated to a rotating roster of organizations that support making access to education and self-motivated learning more readily accessible.

x
LP

code below for subscribers to download the digital version of Prompts for Better Attention gratis:

Read more

Also: a new Moon Lists prompt booklet will be coming next week! I’m excited to share them with you.

Subscribe now

1. DELIBERATE INSTRUMENTS

I’m always running surveillance on writing tools: paper stocks, journals, pens, the whole ecosystem. It genuinely delights me to have preferences about these things, to make things that can be used.

I’ve spent the last month working in Japan and am coming in #hot with some finds (and more to come - doing a big update on these deep dives on notebooks and pens).

In the meantime, I endorse:

• You heard it here first but I have procured some *rare* colors of my favorite “Magic Pens” and ... you’re getting them too. Stand by!

• If you like a writing pad, this one is excellent (and uses Tomoe River paper, long beloved by the notebook freak community for its crinkly texture and smoothness). This whole Etsy shop has great options for harder to find Japanese notebooks if you’re into that. I also really like the Monokaki options.

• I was introduced to Mucura, a small business in Kyoto making hand-folded and sewn notebooks with silk covers made from vintage kimonos. This would make an incredibly special gift! Truly cool.

• Uni Emott pens (marker-like, elegant - this set of “vintage” colors is quite nice.)

• Made in LA: New-to-me stationery line from deadstock paper.

2. GENERATIVE CREATION

I’ve been reading about the relatively recent invention of “creativity.” For most of history, “creation” belonged to the divine; the notion that an ordinary person could be creative wasn’t entertained until the late 1800s, and even then it meant something rare, almost mystical.

Creativity’s casual meaning (the one we use today) originated in 1950s America, amid Cold War panic about losing imaginative ground to the Soviets. At the time, the U.S. government invested heavily in divergent thinking and creativity “tests,” birthing the hell that is corporate brainstorms, the mythos of “idea guys,” etc.

Creativity as (literal) defense mechanism has me thinking more about how something marketed as personal, precious, and expressive is also just a pressure response. It’s reorientation. It’s adaptation. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Related, this interview on filmmaking:

Stewart: Making movies is inherently embarrassing because it’s egotistical.

Assayas: I see it as a privilege. It’s about understanding the world in ways that are not open to everybody. You have to be constantly aware of that, and you must be up to the task.

In summary: privilege, pressure, embarrassment, responsibility, response.

Above image: Hephaestus, Greek god of artisans, blacksmiths, carpenters, craftsmen, fire, metalworking, sculpture, and volcanoes

3. (NON) STOCK CORRESPONDENCE

Even a perfunctory space can surprise you.

Read more

Over the last few months I have felt a bit… lobotomized. Or that my ability to think past the first layer of anything has been co-opted by labubus and ambient anxiety. It’s like things have sped up so quickly that maybe they’re going backward now, or at a different angle than before.

I don’t mean to complain, it’s just that: there are no rules and nothing stays put! Everything is meaningless and for sale, precious and probably poisoned, dead serious and definitely a joke. The limit for stupidity does not, apparently, exist. “Confusion has made its masterpiece,” wrote Shakespeare. “I am learning nothing from this trivial world of men,” wrote John Muir. (It’s comforting in some way that we are not original.)

Friends, it’s time for an existential cleanse. Things will only get faster, more sloppy, more obtuse. I have been thinking about being buoyant: how to refuse binaries. How to arrange, rearrange, and keep going. When the bread goes stale, bake a new loaf. When the air feels stagnant, open a window. When nothing makes sense, make your own?

I liked this recent-ish New Yorker podcast with Zadie Smith. At one point she’s asked to read her own work aloud. She responds, “With pleasure. Kind of.”

This month’s prompts are about that feeling: not optimism, not nihilism, but a third position you build yourself. Inventive solutions, mash-up mindset, collaging your way through chaos.

It’s not refusing to choose; it’s choosing another way. We swim, we slip, we glide through honey.

Maybe when everything loses meaning, everything becomes possible again.

xo
LP

1. CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

Take credit for your detours. What is something you’ve done in your life (or maybe this week) that clearly diverges from the norm?

Maybe it’s quitting the steady thing, doubling down on the weird thing, or just like…not seeing the PT Anderson movie.

2. YOKO ONO

Name something that’s considered serious, sophisticated, or “good taste” that you will always think is overrated, boring, or just… bad.

Read more

This installment includes: a trip to Barbara Hepworth’s house in Cornwall; monastic menus; the self-motivated curriculum of senior citizens; a secondhand story; and some other a la carte cultural recommendations.

1. BARBARA HEPWORTH’S SMOCKS

I visited Barbara Hepworth’s home in St Ives, where she lived and worked from 1949 until her 1975 death by studio fire (likely caused by a cigarette). She called finding the “home a sort of magic,” a place with a studio, yard, and garden where she could work in open air and space. It remains as she left it: light-soaked, orderly, full of tools and half-cut stones. (Please watch this amazing video!)

I always love being inside artist’s homes, seeing the ways they arranged their world and the spatial logic of their attention.

A couple details that stayed with me:

1. A row of her smocks hanging by the door: originally worn by fishermen, these were cut from sailcloth: sturdy, cheap, practical layers. The shortened sleeves kept cuffs from getting wet; the tight fit and high neck protected against the elements. When St. Ives became an artist colony, painters and sculptors adopted what the local crews wore.

   

2. A small box of Grecian stones: in August 1954, Hepworth traveled to Greece with her friend Margaret Gardiner, visiting Athens, Delphi, and the Aegean Islands. She brought back a few rocks that remain in her studio, souvenirs of a trip that would shape her work for decades.

Sometimes what you borrow is functional; a solution that already works. Sometimes it’s formative, shaping everything that follows.

(While you’re in St Ives, I recommend pairing Barbara’s studio with lunch here. A dream of an afternoon.)

first image: vintage British fisherman’s sailcloth smock, ca. 1970s

2. SILVER FROGS (PART II)

The Silver Frogs are back in session. (Context: Silver Frogs is the senior citizens-only, ongoing education courses my husband’s mother is enrolled in. More here.)

I genuinely cannot get enough of this.

I demanded a list of the classes she was considering for the upcoming semester.

Here is her list:

Read more

Moon Lists has always been about separating signal from noise, but what about when you are the noise?

[Related aside: when I’ve stayed up too late, my contact lenses start to cloud over and my vision gets soft around the edges. I take this as a little cue that it’s time to call it and go home; to stop trying to see things half-clearly because I guess I can. When everything gets blurry, the answer isn’t usually more light.]

The same logic applies elsewhere. You can stop doing things that make you feel bad. You can stop forcing what’s “supposed” to feel good. Sometimes clarity comes from closing your eyes, not squinting harder.

This month’s prompts are for when you need to retune the signal: to clear some static, find the right frequency. To remember you have a pulse. To trust your nervous system over an inner monologue.

Getting out of your head isn’t the opposite of thinking, it’s just remembering that thinking isn’t the only form of intelligence. Stop narrating for a minute. Go outside. Touch something. Let the world remind you that you’re part of it.

x
LP

1. EARTH ANGEL
We begin with a two-parter!

• The word “grounded” has been co-opted by people selling you things…but the concept itself is honest. I want you to rescue it: write your own definition of what “grounded” actually means to you, free from all the performative wellness subtext.

• List one thing that keeps you tethered to the planet. (Examples: your grandmother’s hand-me-down cast iron skillet. The corner bodega guy who knows you want a cup of ice + a lemon wedge with your crispy Diet Coke. The specific weight of your favorite coat.

Read more

In many ways I make a livelihood out of my attention. Moon Lists is something I do purely for pleasure, but with time I can more clearly see how it’s also become a necessary, if selfish, container for the systems I use to pull my focus.

As trivial as it can feel to catalogue these preoccupations, I think there’s a case for a touch of delusion-induced delight to maintain a degree of impossible resilience. (An aside, somewhat related: I did a Google search to spell-check “apoplectic,” and it asked if I actually meant to look up: “appletini.”)

Sometimes instead of feeling like I need to to answer big questions, I can find a more honest source of short-term vitality in just arriving with a bag full of things I’ve gathered, a record of what’s been noticed. It doesn’t resolve chaos, but it does carve out a pocket of coherence. Proof of what’s happened, and what is still happening. Proof of being here.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Initiation Song from the Finders’ Lodge,” an excerpt I’ve probably shared before, but one that reminds me of how I want to show up - with a platter of strange things, et al.

“Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
And the ways you go be the lines of your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
And your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well-loved one,
Walk mindfully, well-loved one,
Walk fearlessly, well-loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
Be always coming home.”

— from Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home, 1985

This installment of Attention Inventory includes: 3 books worth reading, 2 specific London recommendations, revelatory tinned fish, a history lesson, and a resounding endorsement for the Pleats Please of tote bags.

Read more