There’s an inhale-exhale pattern to the shape of this past year, maybe to all of time, space, stars, and every universe: a contraction-expansion, focus-dissipation, condensation-evaporation, a coming together and a dispersal, a concentration of effort and intention and a release into the medium of daily life, as we hold the new year in an open palm before time stretching out in front of us. Containers form to collect our joy and sadness and memories and love, carving channels before melting back into the groundwater. Points of stillness in a swirl of action. The breaking of dawn.

Cycles and circles, rotation, revolution, inhale, hold.

Exhale.

There are times and days when whatever membrane separates surface reality from the numinous becomes thin, when every action is tinged with meaning and ritual. It’s an impulse I’ll occasionally indulge on New Year’s Day: favorite socks, special breakfast, crisp intention. The pesky demons of the last world-cycle – doubt, uncertainty, pressure, agitation – swooped in to harry me with their pointy teeth one last time at the year-end, before being washed away by candlelight and the unseasonable pre-dawn rain. Then, a razor wind, keen and bracing, and the clear light of January.

It’s easy for the day-to-day to slip from ritual to routine. You lose sight of the bigger picture, forget to zoom in and out, gross to subtle. At the core, yoga, and service work, are a practice of love. It takes hard work to surrender to the vulnerability of this truth. Practice, teaching, devotion to hospitality – they all work the energy body. The Gita says, śraddhā – faith – “is where one places one’s heart.”

An Occasion, amidst the late summer swirl, like a warm passing current –

It’s been two years of Mari x Moonday!

Community is not an ingredient or a data point, but an emergent property that coalesces around a thing done with love and intention. To our beautiful regulars, who keep showing up for what we’re putting out there: cheers to you, Happy Marimoondayversary, and thank you for supporting this wild seedling of a scheme. I feel no immodesty in claiming we have the best customers. May we continue to nourish each other mutually.

Moonday is a human business; on the coffee front, one human, to be precise (hi). As we slip-slide into summer, the thrumming background project of puzzling together an energetically sustainable business presses ever to the forefront, and at the gentle but persistent urging of those close to me who care about my wellbeing – I’m cracking open a lunch break for myself. Call it European, if you like; or a tiny pushback, on behalf of Team Human, against rampant capitalism; or an attempt to tend to my creature-body in a very basic way. I very much hope you’re able to do the same.

Before.

Tearing your space apart – it’s a weird, deep-rumbling feeling. Jabs you in the solar plexus, where the fire comes from. Entropic unraveling as time travel, peeling back layers, new puzzles uncovering old puzzles uncovering new ones. Touches something old in you, like the smell of your grandma’s house. Lunar new year new moon transition, welcoming the dragon – dust and flame and another trip to the hardware store.

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the coffee scene in Seoul. The explosion of coffee shops in the last couple of years, and the level of quality and service at which they operate, is pretty staggering. Modern Korean coffee culture emerged out of the grand tradition of super sweet instant coffee, then the inevitable arrival of S-bucks in 1999, which led to a handful of folks planting the seed for the specialty movement, in the late aughts. There are currently on the order of 19,000 (!) coffee shops in Seoul, and the world barista championship will be held in Busan next year. When Korean people get into something, we really get into it.