There are birds chirping outside my open window every morning.

And yet my alarm goes off to the sound of birds chirping.

I’ve been thinking about the absurdity of that.

Most nights when I get home, I put on music with no words. I light candles and incense. I find one of those YouTube channels devoted entirely to nature and put a river on the television. Sometimes it’s somewhere in the mountains, sometimes deep in a forest, sometimes just water moving over rocks for eight uninterrupted hours.

I watch a river because I can’t be at a river.

I listen to recorded birds while actual birds are outside my window.

And lately I’ve started wondering how many parts of my life are like this.

Maybe I’m noticing it because I’m tired.

Or maybe I’m noticing it because something is changing.

The young people walking through the hallways at school are wearing loose, thrifted, layered clothes. Giant graphic tees. Baggy pants. Things that don’t appear designed to make their bodies look like anything in particular. Comfort seems to have quietly become cool.

Nobody made a big announcement about it.

The kids just started dressing like they wanted to be comfortable.

Which, conveniently, has arrived just in time for perimenopause, so thank you, children.

But I notice them because I remember wanting so badly to wear the right thing.

I remember wanting an Esprit T-shirt. I remember wishing we had enough money that my mom might casually say yes, sure, we can get something from United Colors of Benetton, because that was what the popular kids wore.

Wet Seal. Contempo Casuals.

There was a period of my life when I wore three layers of socks with a denim miniskirt and an off-the-shoulder sweater because somebody, somewhere, had apparently decided this was what girls were supposed to look like.

It went against every authentic bone in my body.

I even had a Boy George hat.

That one can stay.

And now I watch these kids walking around in giant clothes that look like they were discovered at a thrift store for six dollars, dressing almost exactly the way my heart was asking me to dress forty years ago.

Maybe that’s part of what happens when you get older.

You start noticing how much energy you once spent participating in things you never actually wanted.

And you start becoming very protective of whatever time you have left.

I don’t actually care about the news anymore.

That sounds terrible, especially coming from someone who spent most of her adult life believing that paying attention was part of being a responsible human being.

But I don’t mean I don’t care about people.

I think I mean the opposite.

I care so much that I can no longer process the machinery built around caring.

Duncan Sheik, one of my absolute favorite musicians, died a few days ago.

My heart broke for a moment.

And then the machine moved on.

Another crisis. Another headline. Another thing we were supposed to know about immediately and have an opinion about immediately and worry about immediately before the next thing arrived.

And I’ve started noticing how many people are making a living from keeping us in that state.

There are astrologers posting daily warnings about planetary placements. People with dowsing rods predicting the next enormous natural disaster. People promising disclosure, collapse, awakening, ascension, war, revolution, earthquakes, timelines, portals, retrogrades and whatever enormous thing is supposedly happening next Tuesday.

Some predictions are terrifying.

Some are hopeful.

Both get clicks.

Millions of views. Thousands of followers.

Meanwhile, I spent an hour the other day making a post about an all-natural fall candle with a fucking incredible label made by a brilliant local artist and approximately three people liked it.

And you know what?

I’m grateful for those three people.

I actually am.

But I can also see the absolute absurdity of the whole thing.

Because apparently “something enormous is coming” is an excellent business model.

“Here is a candle we made carefully with our hands” is not.

And I keep wondering:

What happens to all of these people if things calm down?

What happens to the channels built on emergency when there is no emergency?

Or maybe that’s the point.

Maybe the new currency is keeping people in a permanent state of anticipation.

Something is coming.

Something is shifting.

Something is about to happen.

Stay tuned.

Watch tomorrow.

Subscribe.

Follow for Part Two.

I’m fucking tired.

I love my job.

I really do.

I love being a teacher. I love young people. I love watching a brain make a connection it hadn’t made before. I love conversations that wander somewhere nobody planned. I love watching someone discover that they have something to say.

But I’m starting to see the cracks in the whole grind-of-the-matrix mindset.

Produce.

Perform.

Post.

Measure.

Optimize.

Monetize.

Repeat.

Even the things we love eventually get handed a business plan.

I started making candles because something about it felt ancient and human. Wax. Fire. Scent. Intention. Making something with my hands and giving it to someone.

And suddenly the world is telling me I need a website.

Reviews.

Shipping options.

SEO.

Content strategy.

Conversion rates.

A fucking email list.

I don’t want to launch a website for my candles.

Come to my house.

Come find me at the market.

Have a conversation with me.

Pick every candle up. Smell all of them. Hate three. Love one. Ask me why I made it. Tell me what it reminds you of.

Take one home because something about it speaks to you.

Come back six months later and tell me where you burned it.

I’m not making any money doing this anyway.

That was never really what it was about.

And maybe that’s the thing I’m finally starting to understand.

Not everything has to scale.

Not everything meaningful has to become a brand.

Not every beautiful thing needs an audience.

Not every question needs an answer.

Not every moment needs to become content.

Maybe some things are allowed to remain small.

Human.

Local.

Unoptimized.

Maybe three likes is enough.

Maybe one person standing at a table smelling a candle and suddenly remembering her grandmother’s house is more valuable than ten thousand strangers scrolling past it.

Maybe I don’t need another person on the internet telling me what Saturn means today.

I want to sit across from someone and talk about Saturn.

I want to wonder together.

I want conversations about planets and purpose and consciousness and whatever the hell we are doing here, not to predict the next catastrophe, but because human beings have always looked up at the sky and wondered what it means to be alive underneath it.

I want mystery without panic.

I want spirituality without urgency.

I want information without being told to be afraid.

I want music with words again.

Words that resonate so deeply with where I am that I catch myself singing along.

I want to wake up to actual birds.

No alarm.

I want to light incense beside an actual river at dusk.

I want to hear water moving over rocks without a television screen around it.

I want real connections with real humans.

I want to make things slowly.

I want to notice things.

I want enough silence to hear myself think.

Maybe that is what all of this has been trying to tell me.

The recorded birds.

The YouTube rivers.

The kids in their enormous thrift-store clothes.

The candle nobody saw.

The musician I loved disappearing from the news cycle almost as quickly as he entered it.

Maybe I’m not tired of life.

Maybe I’m tired of all the things we’ve built to stand between ourselves and actually living it.

I don’t want the sound of birds anymore.

I want the birds.

I don’t want the video of the river.

I want the river.

And I’m beginning to think there is a very big difference.