Natalie Audelo

Write little phrases that will “open a door to a scene”: Often, we can’t see our entire project in its full form, but we can see little pieces of it. A curtain moving in the morning light, for example. A man sneaking around a house. Jotting down these little hints “open a door” for your future writer-self.

Now, the GoFundMe and DonorsChoose thing is closely related, but it gets its own throughline. These platforms emerge to seemingly supplement gaps in the public safety net for things like education and health care. But instead, they’re in a kind of enabling feedback loop: instead of your taxes ensuring that kids have desks and cancer patients can ge... See more

I wrote the album in a time when I was feeling incredibly numb. I would have these huge waves of emotion, whether they were anger or joy. And to me, those are two emotions that sort of take over. It's terrifying to let go in that way, but it can be one of the fullest [experiences] of just living, in general. So letting go is really what Surrender i... See more

"You won't always get what you strive for, but you will definitely get what you settle for. You won't magically outperform your standards."

We don’t build community .

We build containers where community has a chance to emerge.

It is rare that anyone gets through an Earth School journey without collecting some pretty gnarly wounds. So rare, in fact, that it seems to me that trauma is an inescapable part of the Earth School curriculum. Not a bug, as they say, but a feature.

Measuring from zero helps us keep perspective. I’ve often recommended a similar exercise, but in this version you make your friends disappear instead. You might know it already: when you’re with a loved one, imagine that they’re gone from your life and you’re not actually seeing them in the room with you, you’re just remembering what it was like wh... See more