Stacking stones into 2025

You're getting this update because you signed up for a Substack I started shortly after October 7th last year to share some of my thoughts and processing around the unfolding tragedy in Gaza. Thank you so much for tossing your email address in there. I really appreciate your interest.

I apologize for the long silence since then - I didn't continue writing after the first few weeks because I felt other people with stronger words finally started offering their thoughts, I was overwhelmed and I got busy with other parts of life. Also, my main focus these days is on creative pursuits and that's where I chose to spend my energy last year. But I did take action, and I think it's important to say this. I'm not idle and I do work when I can.

I helped start a group - the Ceasefire Action Committee - and I wrote contextual narration for a number of episodes for the podcast Gaza Voices, which is an effort to share stories of people in and from Gaza. It's moving and difficult to listen to these stories and I do recommend it, I think, for people who want to hear a very personal explanation of what it's like to be in Gaza and from Gaza in the last year. There's a lot to say about what you do with tools like this and how they are or aren't effective, but that's not important right now, what is important to me personally so that I can sleep at the end of the day is that I keep my hands busy when I can in what is an extremely difficult time, easy to drop out of. But this work is important.

And then we had this year and the continued rise of international fascism and what I've been calling the "politics of unkindness". And at the same time I have to somehow be an artist and figure out how to make a living. So that's why I'm writing you now.

I've abandoned Substack because they are a home for Nazis and they profit off of them and I can't support that. I took all your signups from there to this new Ghost blog that's attached to my website (cool!) to thank you and let you know what's coming. Please consider unsubscribing if my next steps aren't interesting to you. But if you choose to stick around (or find me on Bluesky), thank you so much. I promise it's interesting! At least, to me :)

Next Steps

In general, I hope to write about a broad range of topics in the new year. I keep thinking about my personal brand but honestly I'm at the "fuck it" moment where I know I have many diverging interests and I'm just going to be fully me here. From now on, I'll be writing about acting and performance, tabletop role-playing games and creativity, peacebuilding and community organizing, and honestly anything I find interesting and important.

I need to write and build a home for my thinking as well as promote my artistic work, and I can't sustain separate political and artistic blogs. There's just not enough hours in the day to have separation! I write so little political thinking and the events of last year were so dramatic and unique in the moment that they prompted some heartfelt work - it might not all be like that. Also, all of my work is political somehow - like my upcoming short documentary Is This A Dad Thing? about my journey inducing lactation and breastfeeding my child. (This is a fundraising link, because we want to finish the film!)

Also, starting in January, I'm publishing The Witches of Wederra Keep, a novel-length actual play, an improvised story told by a group of talented actors using a roleplaying game. It’s about three witches struggling to balance the mortal kingdom and the underworld and keep their little coven. This has been my main personal project for a while, and I'd be incredibly grateful if you choose to follow along with this serialized story.

Stacking Stones

Finally, happy new year. This one, 2025, is going to be a tough one. We're facing some serious crises that will get worse before they can hope to get better. I encourage you to hold the line - you know what's right and what's not right, and for the last year we've been watching our elected officials in the US and Germany and many other places completely compromise on any pretext of values for... honestly what? I don't know.

So I leave you with this meditation that I'm taking into the new year from stonemason James Taite on Bluesky. He talks about the promise of permanence - the one that fascists use to claim an older time was a better one - and how it's unrealistic. His framing is rooted in deeply in the material world, the physical construction of architecture. Buildings crumble and without care they disappear.

I can't help but quote him (and I do in my own thread).

"It’s precisely because they are ephemeral that we care for them... Things only live on in their caretakers. And when caretakers fail monuments tumble...

But another kind of solace is offered by the perpetual re-piling of stones, the retelling of stories, and the renewing of relationship.

In this other scheme, we stay in place only by ceaseless hustle, only by pushing forward, by finding a new balance. By making things good again. Again and again."

And this is it, this is the core of the problem and the core of our work. Some people have decided that they don't need to care for what we've built together. And we watch monuments fall - in norms and expectations, in civil rights and social programs, in the ways we treat each other and expect to be treated.

My work in the new year as a storyteller, as a peacebuilder, as a community member, is to continue to stack my stones. To undertake the constant and unceasing work to care for the world around me and to create what I think is important: embodiment and modeling the core kindness we hold for each other that makes our growth together possible.

And with that, I'm deeply grateful you've come with me this far. Happy new year. Happy 2025!