Category: inspiration

every day a new sky

A year ago, I traded the narrow grey skies of New York City for the blooming vastness of my hometown’s sunsets. Then I found myself bobbing and weaving through the Dutch canals reflecting sea-like rainclouds on my cruiser bicycle with the blue basket tied to the front. I didn’t set out to seek new and different spaces to occupy, but life’s little ship granted me temperate weather from the bursting spring of the New Jersey suburbs to the apple cider season of upstate New York to the strangely warm winter of Texas to the budding summer of Amsterdam.

Starting with my time in New Jersey at the very beginning of lockdowns, I went for walks every day. On those walks, I thought about how lucky I was to be able to take walks. On days when it seemed that absolutely nothing was happening in our immediate surroundings within the walls of our homes but also everything was collapsing outside, I would wake up knowing that I would walk, and then I would go to sleep knowing that I had walked. For some reason, this tiny purpose made me feel a sense of direction during a decidedly directionless, uncertain time. Then when I returned to Texas, I decided to start photographing the sky. Every day, for one year, I took a photo of the sky; sometimes it was while running, sometimes it was clumsily with one hand on my bicycle handlebar and one hand aiming at the sun. Sometimes I forgot to post, but it gave me a reason to look upwards every single day. It prompted gratitude, sometimes awe. Even when it was raining, even the day it snowed in Houston, even when the power went out. Even while devastated by the country’s and world’s politics, disasters, and climate change- what better reminder of the need to stay engaged, to fight for change, than our determined and steadfast sky? Today is the one year anniversary of the project. I hope the photos provide you a bit of peace to browse through, and a reminder to look up.

We have been treading water, starving for togetherness while also forgetting how to be in the company of others. I remember thinking often: I don’t feel lonely, is this a privilege or a curse?

What did we allow in, when none of us should have been allowed out? I recorded my dreams in a notebook next to my bed, and some moments when nostalgia knocked at the door I let its muscular hope overtake me, quietly and then loudly and all at once.

Here, across the ocean, we comfort each other with little remnants of home; but what is home? Of course just like those who keep running from something or towards another, I want to say (and believe): different geographies cure us. But no, time runs just as quickly here and days pass just as slow. Moving doesn’t cure loneliness, it just gives it a different color, it gives it a different sky.

Activites and suggestions for COVID-19 coronavirus quarantine time

I’ve been compiling a list of things we can do together while living apart. I’ll keep this updated! Stay safe, miss you, but there are lots of ways we can keep socializing while maintaining a healthy distance. These are just a few of the things I’m trying.

Virtual Social Activity and Work Ideas

  • Regular on-nomi (digital happy hours with friends)
  • Weekly virtual TED Women in Tech happy hours on BlueJeans/Zoom (h/t Claire)
  • How people are using Zoom outside of work via Morning Brew
  • Virtual Pomodoro sprints with Superorganizers on Zoom (h/t Dan Shipper)
  • From tinyletter writers: We’re All Stuck At Home But We Can Still Be Brilliant – a Google Sheets collection of personal projects that can be done at home
  • Virtual book clubs – one method is Book Club by Numlock, but lots of fun manual ways to do this too!
  • Play Codenames board game – free online – Codenames Green
  • Netflix Party Chrome Browser Extention to watch Netflix with friends Netflix Party
  • Create a Slack private instance for asynchronous group chatting with friends!
  • Daily noon meditation on the Waking Up app (free 30 day trial) with a group of tanguero friends (h/t to Avik and Robin) – you can create a group on the app to facilitate regular meditation.
  • Daily writing prompts as a group!
  • Learning fun choreography virtually (yesterday we worked on Ciara’s Level Up)
  • Cook new recipes!

The Arts

Free Exercise / workout offers

Wellness / Mental Health

Addendum March 22, 2020:

From all of us at TED:

  • TED is running a daily series of conversations with wise minds such as Bill Gates, Susan David, and Gary Liu.
  • TED Ed at home is launching to support students, parents, and teachers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Sign up to stay updated.
  • TED Circles allows you to watch TED Talks and engage with your friends 100% virtually!

relationships are non-linear

Relationships are everything. Connection is everything.

“I remember as a small child seeing the geese flying south. Firefly season. A cicada that lived for a while in the cracks of the cement bricks that made up our porch wall. A flash flood sweeping cars away while we were huddled under an overhang on a picnic. Lightning felling a tree in our backyard. I guess I learned that everything will pass.

But also, and equally true, it will all come back again.”

Karen Joy Fowler

Every week, S. and I have a call to talk about one thing, but we almost always begin with another. On Thursday, we began by discussing this incredible piece (The Crane Wife) in The Paris Review. There has been an undercurrent of thinking about the shapes we believe we have to take in order to invite love in; of how we make ourselves smaller, ask ourselves to need less in order to appear worthy of love.

The next day, I finished reading Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living, in which the author reminds us: “To separate from love is to live a risk-free life. What’s the point of that sort of life?”

AK is always talking to me about maintaining my mountain pose, and he asks me if my stubborn patterns in building relationships (or stumbling on/upon them) feels to me like accidentally stepping to a different dance that I already know the steps to. Absolutely! I respond. You can always tell what someone’s home dance is, based on the habits their bodies hold onto as they learn a new one.

I take time to remind myself that almost nothing in life is linear. Not our outward portrayal of success, not our bodies and health, not love, not friendships, not the greenness of my four plants in the windowsill, not the rhythm and pace of sleep. We are who we are right now in order to become who we will be. Growth doesn’t always look or feel like growth, sometimes it’s underneath the soil, sometimes it’s within our leaves, sometimes all your leaves turn yellow and red and then brown, then drop to the ground in order for new life to grow again.

My sister and I grew in a womb together, and when I spend time with her I feel in awe at how little I know about her, and how much we have both changed. The way we regard (crave or don’t crave) touch from men, and the way we talk about love languages. She asked me to re-take the Myers Briggs test and we marveled at the disparity between us. But we still buy the same flavor of Pop Tarts.

In yoga class, J. implores us to love the transitions just as much, if not more, than arriving at the pose itself. S. and I contemplate water and earth. One shapes the other.

Brecht says: But love is like war; it always finds a way. Perhaps he originally said it the other way around, but still.

On a Tuesday, we are in Korea Town claiming that we’ll go in for “just one song.” JD, whom I am meeting for the first time, says that he never sings “just one song”- it’s either hours, or nothing at all. We get a room for 8 people and stay for 6 hours (I mean, Jia did it too), because it’s cathartic to sing with strangers you’ve just met alongside friends you’ve known for decades. I’ve always had the intuition when I meet someone: is this person for good, or for just now? Either way, karaoke has been a pretty good proxy. We accidentally sing from every Disney movie, shake it like a Polaroid picture, butcher Jay Chou songs, and twirl in the bouncing, ridiculous disco lights. The night deepens as B. serenades me with “Every Rose Has Its Thorns” while I am laughing, I am laughing so hard. “You’re so happy,” he croons, “why are you so happy?”

“I’m not, it’s just… it’s just all so true,” I gasp.

Afterwards, we put down the microphones and he two-steps slowly with me in a circle, in a hoop that never ends.