The Golden Line

A principle for finding the flow

Happy Summer Solstice!

I’m excited to share three fun bits of news:

1. An update on the Sunlight project

2. New original music for Circles of Care

3. A new Sunlight paper called The Golden Line

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1) Sunlight update

Sunlight — Illuminations

Since I last wrote nine months ago, I’ve done some newsletter housekeeping — adding the old subscribers from my no longer active “Farmer & Farmer” essay project to this Substack (welcome!), while also creating a dedicated Sunlight newsletter for those who wish to receive future publications, images and all, directly to their inboxes (if you’re interested in that, you can sign up here).

I’ve been working to refine and evolve the project in general — redesigning its website based around the geometry of the illustrated papers; creating a new interactive audio/image player for experiencing the papers with vocal narration, original music, subtitles, and immersive explorable images; and putting together a simple “About” page describing the intentions of the project.

Here is the new theme music for Sunlight, composed by Julio Monterrey:

To me, it feels reminiscent of the theme music from the 1980s television show, Reading Rainbow, which I loved to watch as a kid.

You can explore the redesigned website at sunlight.us.

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2) New music for Circles of Care

Circles of Care

Nine months ago, I published Circles of Care: A principle for scaling attention. It was presented basically as a traditional blog post — words and images displayed in a linear fashion like any other news article or essay. That format never really felt right to me, given the distracted mindset with which so many of us end up interacting with web pages nowadays. Circles of Care (like all Sunlight papers) really wanted to be receiving each viewer’s undivided attention, opening up a sense of meditative immersion and grounded self-reflection — but a scrolling blog post format just couldn’t seem to offer that.

So I worked with Julio to compose a musical treatment for Circles of Care — a beautiful score that could sit alongside the vocal narration, enhancing and accentuating it, without feeling overpowering.

You can explore the resulting paper at sunlight.us/circles-of-care.

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3) New paper: The Golden Line

May 3, 2021

Back in 2021, I did a four-day nature solo in the wilderness of New Mexico. When I returned to camp with the rest of the group, a heavy snowstorm suddenly descended upon us, and I started to hear a voice in my head speaking the above-pictured words, which I quickly jotted down in my journal.

Over the next few years, I shared this brief text from time to time with friends and family, and it always seemed to resonate with people — offering a playful reminder about responding to the reality of each moment, without becoming too attached to plans.

The title “The Golden Line” is something I heard from one of my teachers, Jose Stevens, who sometimes uses that phrase to describe the process of surrendering to the flow of life. Another favorite teacher, Christopher Alexander, called the same phenomenon “the unfolding process” — the practice of always doing “the next clear thing” and trusting the path that emerges, without needing to know exactly where it is going. It’s a philosophy of life that you end up finding in many places, including the famous graduation speech that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005, in which he talks about his seemingly random intuitive impulse to take a calligraphy class in college as ultimately shaping the way in which typography would be handled on every modern computer.

The Golden Line

This past winter, using Japanese cartooning ink and acrylic colored inks on Arches watercolor paper, I made original artwork to illustrate The Golden Line — introducing a fun and slightly goofy egg-headed character called “Peter Plan.” Once again, I worked with Julio to create gorgeous original music, and put the various pieces together using the new Sunlight interface.

You can explore The Golden Line at sunlight.us/the-golden-line.

Wishing you a wonderful summer!

— Jonathan

P.S. I’m exploring the possibility of making and offering hardcover book versions of these Sunlight papers — if that would be of interest to you, please leave a comment or send an email saying so.

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