The Antidote Is Connection

A solution for our collective divide and for thriving as humans

Feb 25, 2024

Tender hearts,

I have been writing on the subject of simple pleasures for a few years now; identifying them within the cocoon of my own life; exploring and putting words to their significance. During the big slow down of 2020 I made short video compilations on Instagram of 5-second moments of simple beauty from my days. It was a way of slowing myself down enough to witness these moments of magical mundanity and to visually document them as a pleasure to pass on at a time when we could take all of the good news we could get.

Morning sunlight through a banana leaf illuminating its anatomy of ribs like a holy stained glass window.

The interior jewels of a halved citrus fruit.

A particularly interesting shadow on the wall.

Ordinary, beautiful things.

There is a myriad of tiny things to extract a high yield of joy from — fresh sheets, a prism of color caught in the dew of a spider’s web, the first sip of morning coffee. There is one, however, a single word encompassing endless personal interpretation, that to me remains the absolute greatest (and not so simple) pleasure one can experience: relief.

The first rain.

Receiving long awaited news.

Something lost now found.

Things working out.

A good save.

Hunger satiated.

Thirst quenched.

Making it through the night.

A ceasefire.

The simple pleasures that are woven throughout my days have felt more significant lately. I am more careful to notice them and feel into the momentary joy in my body. These little wonders feel like a privilege to experience at a time when fellow human beings in other places have had their access to pleasure and joy so violently stolen from them. Basic needs to survive deprived, let alone the joy and pleasure required to thrive. It’s wrenching to watch from afar. Efforts to interfere feel micro and not enough. The collective grief weighs heavy in the hearts of those who will never be able to relate to and justify such barbaric treatment of precious life and a disconnect from one’s humanity.

I wish every life on this great round earth abundant access to simple pleasures, daily connections with their source of joy, and profound moments of relief that provide them their birthright to safety, to liberation, to peace.

[I wrote the following back in October, the day after my birthday. I share it with you today because, nearly five months later, I still believe in them as a solution to our current collective issues and as a guiding light to our success at relating and thriving as humans.]

Yesterday was my birthday. Over dinner last night my husband asked me for my reflection on my thirty-third year. It was a big one when I think back: freshly back from an ancestral coming-home to Italy, newly engaged to my love of nearly a decade, I opened a shop, I closed a shop, I re-learned a lesson on holding my boundaries, I organized and produced (with the help of many invaluable hands) the most significant gathering of my life (wedding!), I got married. It was a transformative year in many ways.

And to welcome in my personal new year, on Saturday — the day of the solar eclipse in Libra, a marking of time for alchemizing old, ill-serving ways of relating — I chose to usher in a new era that shines a sparkly spotlight on building stronger friendships at an age when keeping friends, let alone making new ones, isn’t always easy: I hosted Girl Dinner.

With a very small gathering of women — some old friends, some newer, some family — we together leaned into an evening for the feminine sharing laughter, stories, and personal fears over glasses of bubbles and plates of finger foods sufficient enough to call a meal. They brought flowers from their gardens, more bubbles, homemade chocolates, farmer’s market orchids in an exquisite vintage green glass jug dug up from the yard, and in return, when the candles burned low and it was time to go, I sent each of them on their way with a hug and a good old fashioned pastel pink goodie bag (but for grown-ass women).

Just before composing this, I read a post on Instagram from author and group dialogue facilitator Priya Parker. In reflection on the tragic genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, she shared a social project by Wendy Macnaughton where she lugged a table and chairs down to the SF Bart station and invited strangers to sit and draw each other for one minute. They were to draw a portrait of the stranger sitting across from them using the blind contour method which allows the artist to draw using only one continuous line and without looking down at their paper. I used to bring this activity as an introductory exercise when I taught art to elementary aged students because, as Wendy Macnaughton also knows, it is about so much more than learning how to draw what you see. It’s about process, it’s about slowing down, and ultimately it’s about connection.

In Priya’s Instagram post she wrote one sentence that weaved everything together — the summary of my last year reflections, the significance of sharing an evening of frivolity with friends, the solution to enduring collective grief and abolishing colonization and mending the tears of political, spiritual and social divide — She said, “an antidote to horror is connection”, to which I would strip down further to say, “the antidote is connection”.

I have spent the past several months while the shop has been on pause reflecting on what Hina Luna is and what it will become. Ultimately, what I’ve come to is that the intention of Hina Luna is to inspire connection — connection to our Self, to our place, to our ancestors, to our community, to the objects we choose to surround ourselves with, to connect with our sources of personal belonging and inspire a lifestyle that both pays homage to those sources and intentionally weaves them into our everyday. There are many ways to weave those connections and the avenues of beauty and creativity that I seek I also share with you as an offering of momentary relief and slowed sense of time.