Why this exists
One thing I keep coming back to
I came home from a week among the poor in Costa Rica — the kind of trip that’s supposed to fill you up — and somewhere over the ocean I wrote in my journal how empty I was. Not tired. Empty. No idea where I was going, except seventy, eighty hours of volunteer and nonprofit work — another week of building things I quietly feared no one wanted.
I flipped back through the journal to see if it had always been like this. And I found a pattern in my own handwriting I hadn’t noticed living it: I leave the center, and I can do nothing. I come back, and something grows on the inside that — maybe, who’s counting — grows on the outside too.
That’s all this is. One thing I keep drifting away from and keep coming back to. I’m not writing from the far side of it; I’m still drifting most weeks. But I went looking for company, and I found a whole crowd of people across the centuries who hit the same wall and made the same turn. This is their library, and a single move you’re welcome to borrow.
I can’t promise you the fruit. I can only point you back to the vine, and tell you it keeps holding when I let it.
— Mark