Hello friends, I have returned from a few months of deep rest and unexpected creativity.

I'm filled with great energy for the time ahead.

I settled in for much of the summer in Berlin, where I spent most of my 20s in the 1980s when a wall ran through that city.

It was a fault line of the Cold War and a world on a cusp of transformation, the likes of which none of us until it happened could fathom.

I still have dear friends in Berlin and it was fantastic to reconnect and have slow drawn out time to just do ordinary things together.

At the same time, I experienced the city in all its dimensionality and complexity past and present in a whole new life-giving way.

It had a feeling of homecoming that I did not expect and it grounded me in the cathartic ways that place in that late century formed me.

Berlin now again has come to infuse my view of time and history and the callings of our present, our newly cathartic century.

One of the gifts of this summer that I want to share with you was a deepened experience of a ritual I've come to think of as contemplative reading.

I began each day with an over-large sketchbook on my lap and a book open on top of it.

I made a beginning on the science fiction opus of Octavia Butler, who Adrian Marie Brown introduced me to an hour early summer on being conversation.

I also picked up books that Mary Oliver published after my conversation with her and savored them a word, a line, a paragraph at a time.

And I devoured an important new work by a British technologist and artist, James Bridal, called Ways of Being.

This became for me a continuance of the theme of emergence, a deep dive into how we might pattern our thinking and organizing and growing around the intelligence of vitality as it is revealed to us in the natural world.

So morning after morning, I read and interspersed with reading, I wrote by hand, I had to go slowly as my handwriting is very, very messy.

The going slowly was good for me and so was the distance from a screen.

I kept thinking of and experiencing that wisdom of Naomi Sheep Nye that when we write in a journaling mode, one of the things that's happening is that we are getting in touch with the many selves inside ourself.

My child and adult selves, my private and professional, pre and post-pendemic selves were romping around on those pages with my very present time traveling 25-year-old at large in divided Berlin.

I was also inspired by something I learned from Dr. Christine Runyon that when we write by hand as distinct from typing, we are processing emotionally as well as mentally.

I have realized in recent years that I, in general, sink conversationally. These days, I learn conversationaly.

And so making this further move of reading conversationaly was exhilarating. Sometimes I was copying sentences and paragraphs that moved me or sparked something or were simply beautiful, which is so often true of the words of our friend Mary Oliver.

These jottings would then often lead into my own reflections and surface all kinds of memories and stories that I would start writing down.

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