rabbit holes to explore this month - #1

the most inspiring books, magazines, podcast episodes & ideas

Hi lovely people! There’s now nearly 11,000 of you here, and for that I’m beyond grateful - welcome to the Crystal Clear community. I’ve been looking for ways to treat my paid subscribers here more regularly, and decided I’ll start doing this monthly inspiration digest, sharing all the best things I’ve been exploring each month.

You’ll find notes on the best books I’m reading, life-changing podcast episodes I stumbled upon, ideas I’ve been collecting, lessons I’m learning, and everything in between. I hope you enjoy it and that something here will prompt you to go down your own exciting rabbit hole.

This week I’m writing to you from Slovenia. I’m sitting at my Airbnb in Ljubljana, the capital city, that reminds me of a mix of Rome, Athens, and Budapest. It’s beautiful and underrated. My boyfriend and I took the bus to Lake Bled yesterday and spent the day exploring the landscape and the castle. Also, Ljubljana is really all about dragons - everything here is dragon-themed. Never been to a dragon-themed city before. And look at the unfiltered photos I took in Lake Bled yesterday - obsessed with how blue the lake is!!!

So, let’s get into it. Here’s everything that has been inspiring me this month - starting from my favorite one that I’m super excited to share with you guys!

🎧 Craig Mod Returns — Epic walks, the art of slowness, and more

Guilty… I’ve been listening to the Tim Ferriss Show podcast since I was 17. That’s 8 years. A lot of years to be listening to a podcast. And the reason why I always keep coming back for more is because Tim Ferriss always interviews the most interesting people I’ve never heard of, and then their conversation ends up changing my life in some way. He’s the best interviewer out there in my opinion, and I just absolutely love everything I learn from his podcast guests.

Recently (as always, tbh) I’ve really been missing Japan. It’s been 2 years since I was there and I’ve had the most constant urge to go back, I can’t stop thinking about it, and I feel like I can’t rest until I go again. So when I saw the description of this podcast episode, it was an instant click:

Craig Mod is a writer, photographer, and walker living in Tokyo and Kamakura, Japan. He is the author of Things Become Other Things and Kissa by Kissa. He also writes the newsletters Roden and Ridgeline and has contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and more.

Writer, photographer, Japan lover, author — say less. That’s literally me. And I can’t begin to tell you how much I loved this episode… Craig Mod lives in Japan and basically does these very long walks (often over 30 days long) across the country, documenting them in writing and photography. The stories he shared of walking across the Japanese countryside, meeting people, exploring and being completely present were incredible, and often made me laugh out loud. He’s got some super interesting stories, including accidentally making the smallest, most ‘random’ little Japanese town globally famous through the New York Times, and becoming a celebrity in Japan because of it.

Craig describes how intentionally he goes about these long walks - no social media, no access to the news, allowing himself to become as bored as possible and in turn to experience each day in the fullest possible way he could have experienced it. How he talks to the locals, writes 2,000-3,000 words a day documenting his walks in the evenings, how he produced a photobook that immediately sold over 1000 copies in 36 hours, even though he priced it at $100 per copy. I learned so much from him and it gave me that spark of a feeling where you know that there’s something there that really resonated with you. It reminded me of how much I’ve been wanting to do my own photo-story in Japan since I first went to the small town of Kanazawa and fell in love with the way some of the locals lived. I highly recommend giving this episode a listen.