buckwheat cookies and other notes app miscellanea

Dear friends, old and new, and many of you are new, so welcome to my Substack which functions as a diary (or, if I were a man, a posthumously celebrated “journal”),

Did you do your homework? What kindness have you performed that is beginning to flower for half a century? Please do tell me. I miss many things about our email correspondence, primarily your replies in my inbox. I urge you to engage in the comments section or even send me an email directly. I love to connect, it’s my raison d’être!

I have been going on more walks lately due to the fact that I now have a dog. If you had told me earlier this year that I would have short hair and a dog I would have completely believed you because life is full of mystery and surprise like that. Due to the additional fact that I have very little free time (shoutout to my perfect roommates for co-parenting with love and generosity), I have been squeezing in these walks, hurriedly walking past my favorite corners of jasmine and eucalyptus and pine around Beachwood and, fine, the Dell (if you understand this geographical debate, let me know where you think my home lands, I know what I know). Something fantastic about having a dog in addition to many other fantastic things is the complete hilarity of trying to go on a “hurried” walk. Forget it… to HURRY your dog? We have to laugh. This is their reading time. And my dog, because he is divinely connected to me and also possesses psychic abilities and sees quantum realities I do not yet (emphasis on yet) have access to, is particularly attuned toward collecting delights, and spends quite a bit of extra time assessing every flower, herb, and ephemeral beauty we pass. I’m teaching him how to give me a high five, I think he is teaching me how to be. (He has his work cut out for him.)

butterflies and high-fives

In a few days I’ll be leaving for my annual (which, this year, happens to be bi-annual and how blessed and highly favored am I?) Big Sur & northern California peregrination, the itinerary of which might enable me to transcend (finally).

the vibe that approaches me

Before I do, some musings from my notes app and a list of the best advice my mother has given me in the last few years, in honor of Mother’s Day (it is nearly upon us) and how much fun I had interviewing her for Health Gossip.

Mom Gossip: Deborah by Zoë

In my notes app I collect treasures, poetry, overheard wisdoms and amusements, clinical pearls from professors and mentors or formulas I’d like to remember for particular patients, dinner party concepts and guest lists, writing prompts, and recipes I usually never get around to.

1. A quote from one of my best friends who lives in Portland Maine and who is my favorite person to exchange memos with regarding our theories on divinity and magic (those two words create a joyful redundancy and it’s crucial to remember they are synonyms): Divinity is a riddle and an illegible whisper - you’re never fully sitting in the seat of divinity part of the point is being in the body.

2. A prompt from Ross Gay’s Substack, Mondays Are Free, in which he and Patrick Rosal send out daily writing prompts. (As you might have inferred, the Monday prompts are free.) It reminds me of the nonfiction writing seminars I took in college, obviously in a good way. If you took a class with Jeff Sharlet, you know.

   And at least a little bit implicit in exercise, or practice, is that what you’re working on now is also for what you’ll be working on tomorrow, and beyond.  Today’s sentence or line or image—whether it feels like a little scrap or like a thunderbolt of brilliance—will be a friend, and maybe even a kind of teacher, to the sentence or line or image you work on tomorrow. 

   Two things about that.  The first is that, to the extent that you can or want to or it feels useful, allow yourself to play.  I know I have gotten caught up trying to make every exercise some-version-of-beautiful-I-already-know, which can be kind of burdensome, kind of a bummer.  Stressful maybe is the word.  It can make what might be really kind of fun not fun at all.  So, like I said, if you’re able to stay playful, without a real sense of where you’re going or what you’re making, noticing it as it happens, wondering about it as it happens, and making some more, that might be fun.

   This writing prompt, like many prompts and suggestions offered by GQ’s sexiest most delightful man alive Ross Gay, is helpful not just for the craft of writing, but also for the craft of living. If you’re able to stay playful, without a real sense of where you’re going, wondering about it as it happens, and making some more, that might be fun. Today’s sentence or line or image (and here I’ll add — today’s challenge or grief or hiccup or stumble or perceived failure) will be a friend, and maybe even a kind of teacher, to the work of tomorrow.

   Lately I’ve been harvesting delight by remembering the many times in the last few years I have thought to myself: it simply can’t get any worse than this. That might sound sadistic, stay with me. (And there’s another email entirely on this topic of rock bottoms and difficulties, one in which I get really vulnerable, this time I mean business, but that’s for after Big Sur.) Life gives me (and you, I’m not special) the gift of perspective and hindsight, over and over again. Each time I thought life was trying to kill me, it was actually pushing me to live. To stay playful, wondering, listening to the sound of my own heart beating, making some more, that might be fun.

3. My In list from January 2025 because it’s in my notes app and why not share it now in April?

in: spending thousands of hours mastering your craft with complete total all consuming dedication, the barter system, giving me gifts, sideways hats (still), cashmere, renunciation, whole artichoke, spiritual pilgrimage, running into ex lovers, confused men in hot yoga, being an adult, accidentally falling in love when you least expect it, bullet journals, five year plans, stationery, compliments, networking, bangles and loud shoes (making noise with your ensemble), 1 mint, “my body is a temple”, overdressing for the occasion, the boudoir, forgetting your phone, impassioned discussion, sleeping in, pick up lines, scrabble, sexy intimate dinners, steaming, making out at the table, going with the flow, le grand peut-être, exaggerated reactions to wine (saying yuck to the sommelier if you don’t like your Grenache), no menus at restaurant

4. This recipe for gluten-free buckwheat chocolate chip cookies, I can’t remember where I found it, I have yet to use it because my tradwife era won’t begin until someone traps me into eternal monogamy and even then I don’t have much faith:

   1 cup almond flour

   1 cup buckwheat flour

   ¼ cup unsweetened desiccated coconut

   3 tablespoons cacao powder

   ¼ cup plus 1 tablespoon melted coconut oil

   ¼ cup maple syrup

   3 tablespoons water

   1 vanilla bean, split, paste removed, or ½ teaspoon vanilla extract

   ½ bar dark chocolate, chopped into chip-like bits

   Kosher salt

   Maldon salt

   Bake at 350 degrees for 14 minutes. “Rotate halfway” yeah right…

Things I have learned from or been told by my mother, in no particular order:

1. You’re not having a life crisis, you just need two nights of good sleep.

2. Some things must be done urgently, with zero self-consciousness and reckless abandon. For example, my mother tried out for the Berkeley dance team despite having zero dance experience. She did not make the dance team, but that’s besides the point.

3. A follow-up to item #2: The worst thing they can say is no. (Advice her father gave her when urging her to ask my dad out on a first date. And the rest is history!)

4. Stop reading “your self-help books” (by this she means Pema Chodron, Ross Gay, poetry, and nonfiction) and start reading romance novels.

5. Slow down.

6. Stop, smell the roses, pick a sprig of lavender and smell it. (I learned this advice from an early age, my mother is responsible for my ecologically unsound penchant for picking every flower I see, I’ve retrained myself to appreciate without needing to possess.)

7. A few years ago, she came to visit me in LA, and it happened to be the day after a catastrophic break-up (catastrophic in that an adult man couldn’t cope and sent me some seriously disturbed messages, told you this was a diary). I was emotionally fragile in a way I hadn’t experienced before (and haven’t since, thank you God, I learned my lesson!) My mom took me to the Norton Simon and Moon Juice Silverlake (RIP), and told me I had until the end of that day to be sad, and then I had to be done. Sometimes toxic positivity and a latte with a heavy sediment of adaptogenic dust are just what the doctor ordered! Give yourself one more day to be sad. Then, it’s a new day.

Let’s stop at seven, because it’s both my and her lucky number.

If you clicked on one of the links earlier there’s a mini playlist. My friends Leo and Anna made this and I love it so much, maybe you will too. If you know me at all you know how much I adore Sam Wilkes; I went to a beautiful show of his a few weeks ago and remembered how much I love this track. If you’re in LA, catch the Alice Coltrane exhibit once (or four times if you’re competitive and would like to beat my record) before it’s gone this weekend.

Love you all, talk soon after my spiritual reset wherein I’ll hot spring (verb) in the nude and sit by my favorite small streams along the Central Coast and listen,

Zoë