Recently at a new-ish clothing store in Los Angeles I was prepared to drop an admittedly exorbitant sum on an embroidered T-shirt. Needing validation, I asked M what he thought. “It’s cool…but it won’t be in a year.”
At first I was defensive, unwilling to admit that this thing I liked was, in fact, hype. The blinders of a trend are fun!
But also: can’t there be freedom in the awareness that relevance does not last? Sustained interest asks for continual evaluation.
Moon Lists began as a way to locate routes back to some semblance of “myself.” To better match up what I want with what I’m doing. To continually trick myself into finding new narratives instead of getting cornered into a stale script.
There’s an aside in Anne Truitt’s “Turn” where she writes:
“We dwell as strangers on the earth to become its wrack. We invent it for ourselves. We name it land and sea and sky. We divide its reaches arbitrarily into degrees of latitude and longitude, supplemented by a contrivance we call time. We forget, because we have to in order to endure our plight, that these are rationales of our own logic. Indifferent to us, the earth rolls under our feet. I contemplate all this with curiosity and wonder, and then return to my daughter and grandson.”
[Kind of the same “After ecstasy, the laundry” adage that Buddhist monk-turned-meditation guru Jack Kornfield wrote in his book about enlightenment. I find Kornfield’s thesis insufferably cheesy but I guess in mentioning it I just mean that maybe everyone is always trying to figure out how to live in between layers of narcissistic myopia and letting go, and who am I to judge for the nomenclature of its expression?]
What’s my point again?
I guess just: If you are receiving this email you’ve in some way become part of the Moon Lists fold and might resonate with the paragraphs of (well-intended) navel gazing outlined above. Over the last year Moon Lists has: printed an updated guided workbook, started a (secret) Discord channel, and we are presently working on a few new things that I suppose serve the idea of finding and following blind curiosity.
Finally, if you’d like to stick around for future Moon Lists emails we’ll be sending them a little more frequently, and they will be coming henceforth in the form of this Substack newsletter. You don’t need to do anything. If you’re reading this you’re in the right place.