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“…Our happiness, satisfaction, and our understanding, even of God, will be no deeper than our capacity to know ourselves inwardly, to encounter the outer world from the deep comfort that comes from being at home in ones own skin, from an intimate familiarity with the ways of one’s own mind and body.”

“This is what Jungians call soul work, the development of depth of character through knowing something of the torturous labyrinthine depths and expanses of our own minds.”

“The awareness is not part of the darkness or the pain; it holds the pain.”

“Inquiry takes on a life of its own after a while. It permeates the pores of your being and breathes new vitality, vibrancy, and grace into the bland, the humdrum, the routine. Inquiry will wind up ‘doing you’ rather than you doing it.”

“Mindful inquiry can heal low self-esteem, for the simple reason that a low self-estimation is really a wrong calculation, a misperception of reality.”

“Inquiry is not just a way to solve problems. It is a way to make sure you are staying in touch with the basic mystery of life itself and of our presence here.”

“Questioning, questioning, continually questioning.”

October in Central Park, believe it or not. Can the leaves please not change color and fall off the trees this year?

Looks like a calming slice of landscape, but this was the HILL FROM HELL.

I ditched my plan to bike through Central Park bc of the gargantuan hills everywhere and decided that biking down Columbus Avenue as far as my legs would take be would be easier. Well.. Lincoln Center was a gd mess on Saturday. Hot, smoky, crowded, noisy, construction everywhere.

I could sense the overstimulation coming on, so I hopped onto the sidewalk…. right in front of the building where my very first news internship in college was, TEN YEARS AGO. So much has changed in my life, how could I even begin to put it into words. I just stared at this building, the one I never thought I would gain entry to, caught my breath, gave thanks, and pedaled on.

Flashback to Friday: Treated myself to a box of Greek honey balls aka loukoumades. I love that a shop dedicated to just to them has opened in Astoria. I got them once before and they were great, but this time they were disappointing! Not enough honey and cinnamon on them, so I had to amend at home.

Flash forward to Sunday: Did all sorts of wacky things. Traveling via ferry is the best.

You don’t need to know why I was here. Just be thankful that 1-hour photo places still exist!

Here’s the aforementioned wacky thing I did on Sunday: I traded my two borrowed wheels for eight!!

I was completely inspired by Marawa to do this, having just discovered her brilliance from Dita von Teese’s Night of the Teese special on Friday night. I am absolutely inspired by her. I’m dusting off my hula hoop next!

Is it possible to be in love with something you’ve only done maybe five times in your life, all before the age of 20? My youth experience did not involve too many roller rinks — the odd birthday party notwithstanding. But every time I’ve had the chance to roller skate, I’ve never wanted to stop. It is the ideal “party” atmosphere I’ve always resonated with: music, motion, laughter, lightheartedness.

I’m psyched that I did this and I’m psyched to learn how easy it was to find. Pier 2 in DUMBO is a covered, outdoor, affordable, and accessible parks & rec treasure, overlooking the incredible vista of lower Manhattan and the East River. With the spray-sanitized skates strapped on tight, I was able to overcome the initial “I’ve made a huge mistake” feeling as soon as I got on the rink again and remembered that equanimity, breathing, and lowering your center of gravity is all it takes. And smiling. I was on the rink for roughly an hour, skating along to a top-40 playlist of songs, all featuring Nicki Minaj. How much colorful lycra have I bought from ThredUp since returning those wheels? Several outfits’ worth!

I don’t know what’s going on with me lately but I am in motion and happy and happy to be in motion. All I want to do is talk to people about what makes them happy and what little goals for happiness they want to achieve. That is all I care about now.

OMG I biked over 70 MILES IN SEPTEMBER (+ the last day of august). This is honestly nuts to me. I’ve already logged 10+ miles in October so far, soo….. let’s see if this nice weather keeps up.

And yes, I’m keeping track in a google doc lol.

WQXR has me feeling very emotional tonight! (In a good way!)

Can you guess the mystery ingredient thats in the ooey-gooey middle of this blondie? It’s halvah! As in Claire Saffitz’s Salted Halvah Blondies. This recipe doesn’t specify the type of halvah used, but I def recommend the marbled chocolate kind if you can find it. It helps to sort of break up the very blonde-ness of these blondies.

I just had 1.5 of these as an after-lunch snack, and I really don’t know why I did this to myself. These are like eating straight butter. They are very good but omg… they’ll knock you out.

I could’ve gone more generous + chunkier with the halvah (it disappears into the batter if too fine) and more generous with the Maldon, too!

Had energy to burn on Friday, so I spent an adventurous evening taking the subway and then walking around Jackson Heights in search of a izakaya restaurant that ended up being way too busy and crowded for my comfort level.

Not mad about it though. It was a perfect night to be out doing something kind of pointless.

“Beauty always has an element of strangeness. I do not mean a deliberate cold form of strangeness, for in that case it would be a monstrous thing that had jumped the rails of life. But I do mean that it always contains a certain degree of strangeness, of simple, unintended, unconscious strangeness, and that this form of strangeness is what gives it the right to be called beauty. It is its hallmark, its special characteristic. Reverse the proposition and try to imagine a commonplace beauty! And how could this necessary, incompressible, infinitely varied strangeness, dependent upon environment, climate, habits, upon race, religion and the temperament of the artist, ever be controlled, amended, corrected by utopian rules, excogitated in some little temple or other of learning somewhere on the planet, without mortal danger to art itself? This element of strangeness which constitutes and defines individuality, without which there is no beauty, plays in art (and may the precision of this comparison excuse its triviality) the role of taste or flavouring in cookery; if the individual usefulness or the degree of nutritious value they contain be excepted, viands differ from each other only by the idea they reveal to the tongue.”

— Baudelaire (via Brain Pickings)

Annie Dillard’s perfect contact page.

“I lay low.”

Here you can see three pictures that I took in three different boroughs yesterday: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens.

Still, there are many things that moved me that I didn’t take pictures of. Every time the ferry at the Astoria landing turns to make its way south toward Roosevelt Island, the panoramic sweep of the city skyline, coupled with the rocking of the boat, always unsteadies me. I reach for my phone, realizing in that same second that there’s no way this vista can be captured by anything other than my own two eyes.

Also observed yet undocumented: The wild sunflower and lonely sailboat framing the Hell Gate bridge in the semidarkness of early evening; the only September firefly I have ever seen; the peace and vivaciousness of sitting right at the open windowed wall of a taqueria, sipping hibiscus tea, looking out into my neighborhood so new and strange and familiar, feeling trancelike as one salsa song flows right to the next without interruption of the tempo or key; my exhilaration in the discovery of using bike routes to stitch my way into a new familiarity with a city comprising neighborhoods previously known to me in fragments.

I did get a picture of me, happy to have survived biking across a new-to-me bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, connecting the LES to Brooklyn—as you can see above. I sent it to my mom and she told me, “you look so happy here.” Moments before (or after?) I took this, as I was processing the strenuousness of the ride and elation for having traversed yet another new bike route, a monarch butterfly fluttered across the sidewalk, up toward the bridge, as if about to make its own pilgrimage across the East River.

I hold the things I saw this mid-September weekend—but did not capture—in my mind, and then I let them go.

You will just have to believe me that what I am holding here is my first taste of AL’s nonalcoholic beer, sipped at the very delightful Big aLICe Brewery, located directly on the border between Astoria and LIC.

I have a lot to say on the topic of not-drinking, but I think I am also still exploring what it means to me and why I am doing it. This choice feels as though it is in active, constant conversation with my inquiries into the nature of consciousness and the weather patterns of my inner realm.

This pilsner-style N/A beer is light and wheaty. Very refreshing. A great end-of-the-day, end-of-the-weekend, just-2-more-miles-to-bike libation. Would quaff again.

le-corbustier