we see trees. what more do we need?

The Principles of Uncertainty, The Serviceberry, and Con Air

Jan 17, 2025

Last week’s full moon rising over Gates Pass in Tucson, Arizona.

Greetings, earthlings.

Welcome to all the folks who migrated here from TikTok! It’s good to have you here.

For anyone who doesn’t know, I went through a little spell of oversharing about my life on TikTok in 2022-2023. In the span of one week, I ended a four-year relationship and had an offer accepted for a house. I was feeling scared and isolated as I suddenly navigated the expensive and overwhelming process of moving into and fixing up an old shitty house alone in the middle of a Vermont winter. Without someone to process daily with (and not wanting to burden friends who had their own lives to tend to), I turned to the internet, making a handful of videos every day about my plans, my projects, my fuck-ups, my small wins, my crush on my contractor.

People think TikTok is a bunch of Zoomers doing little dances, and it is, but it’s also a million other things, including a community of badass women who offered me cheerleading and sage advice and commiseration when I desperately needed it. I had some wild times on there, including receiving over $4k of homegoods from said women to help me get set-up in my new house. Seriously.

I haven’t posted on TikTok consistently in a long time because when I feel content and well-adjusted I don’t feel the need to post as much on the internet (ha!). TikTok can be a time-wasting brain drain, but it also reminded me how kind, generous, and creative people can be. I hope the ban doesn’t go through, but if it does, I’ll miss it.

Here’s what I’m loving and working on this week:

1. A book I’m loving: Maira Kalman’s The Principles of Uncertainty

I have a Little Zine Library in my front yard where people can leave-a-zine or take-a-zine.

My Little Zine Library looks a lot like a Little Free Library where people can leave-a-book or take-a-book, so I understand why people started leaving books in it.

Even after scrawling in giant blue paint marker, “NO BOOKS, PLEASE!” on the inside of my Little Zine Library (which felt weird and wrong), books still appear.

Luckily, the latest stack of unwanted books included Maira Kalman’s The Principles of Uncertainty, “a compilation of Maira Kalman’s New York Times columns. Part personal narrative, part documentary, part travelogue, part chapbook, and all Kalman, these brilliant, whimsical paintings, ideas, and images form an intricately interconnected worldview, an idiosyncratic inner monologue.”

This sequence made me go AHHH!!! and charge my camera battery:

2. Another book I’m loving: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry

I love it when the sun spills through the clouds in a Jacob’s Ladder. It feels like an invitation to climb above the doomy cloud cover and bathe in the golden sunlight that’s always there but often obscured and easily forgotten.

RWK’s writing feels like a Jacob’s Ladder. She cuts through the gloom and reminds us of beautiful, simple truths that are so easy to forget when things feel dark: Berries are wealth. Reciprocity is the way. Relationships are everything. All flourishing is mutual.

“In the Anishinaabe worldview, it’s not just fruits that are understood as gifts, rather all of the sustenance that the land provides, from fish to firewood. Everything that makes our lives possible—the splints for baskets, roots for medicines, the trees whose bodies make our homes, and the pages of our books—is provided by the lives of more-than-human beings. This is always true whether it’s harvested directly from the forest or whether it’s mediated by commerce and harvested from the shelves of a store—it all comes from the Earth. When we speak of these not as things or natural resources or commodities, but as gifts, our whole relationship to the natural world changes.”

AHHHHH!

3. A super bad movie I loved: Con Air (on Hulu)

In my personal experience, this 1997 box office smash success about a bunch of convicts (Nicolas Cage! John Malkovich! Dave Chappelle! Steve Buscemi!) hijacking a plane is best watched while experiencing extreme turbulence while descending to an airport in the desert, burying your face in the armpit of the one you love while the sound of machine guns blares through your airpods.

But watching it from the couch will work, too.

I was thoroughly entertained. You’ll come away with an armful of amazing one-liners and an appreciation for bad writing and late 90s special effects.