November 2025

Hey there -

This lands in your inbox on the eve of what feels like the slippery slope into the whirl of the holiday season. Here's what I'm thinking about this early morning.

I'm learning how to ride horses again. When you first learn to ride, you get the first set of instructions. Pull to stop, kick to go, pull left to left, right to go right. Easy, straightforward. And then eventually, you get the second set of instructions, the real ones that almost completely obliterate the first set. You learn the bits and pieces of how to have a constant nuanced conversation / dialogue / negotiation with a creature very different from you while in constant motion. The cues shift as you as you go depending on circumstance, what kind of day you're both having, and most of the time, it feels more like finessing piano keys, rather than what you were told initially was a push button start.

Painting can be like that too. We learn as kids to call something by its color. That's red. That's blue. Categories. Simple. And then you start to paint, maybe as an adult or a person parading as an adult, and you start to realize that if you want to make something look like the actual thing and not a caricature of it, nothing is actually a simple color, a simple form. That apple is actually more purple or blue in its shadows, there's a sheen of green coming through towards the center, the way its skin folds in more streaky yellow brown as it reaches the stem and how, oh how, do you get the little flecks of gold/brown/yellow that come through the burgundy red too.

I think this is the best way, at least for today, to describe what I'm feeling about this reach into holiday season. There are rituals and things that we do because we've always done them. It's the easy setting, a weird version of comforting to roll in a well worn track. But if you're a human in the world, there are many, many signs telling us that the current play book is defunct. (Fear is a funny thing. Sometimes it just makes us play the old tunes louder, in the hopes that it'll drown out the new unknown.)

This holiday season, let's decide to feel and move through the world just a bit differently. To pick and choose with care what rituals we nurture, which we discard, which new threads we weave into our everyday lives. To be subversive in the most of beautiful of ways, to create softness where there is none, to winnow the closest version of truth we can find, to live in a way that holds us in integrity with our inner values.

It's hard work, but a priceless gift for the world, isn't it?

xx,

Grace + the SfCL crew