I keep telling my students I never thought I’d have to practice yoga this hard. I never thought I’d be walking, this often what I preach, fighting to stay inspired daily. I don’t know how you’re keeping it together—but I do know music saves, performance heals, and anytime you can catch a sunset or sunrise you are reborn. Beyond that, hard to know what’s coming next.

Lost in remembering my first episode of GIRLS, reading Lena Dunham’s new tell-all I was transported back to my own nineties New York. That particular collaborative moment of all of us together. That particular brand, and mix of people—who defined me. It was the moments before 9/11, after Y2K when we all had stars in our eyes… A sense that we could beat this, we could rise above the politics and divisions, married to making work that mattered regardless of commercialism or the next fortuitous alignment.

I remember shooting in the subway at 2AM, no permit, no set, just actors who changed in the Starbucks bathroom captured by hand-held cameras and a director with vision. This was before I knew what anyone else was doing on social. Before I started to feel I was somehow less. I just lived and created and never stopped. I didn’t know it was a time of innocence. I didn’t know I’d need to savor every moment, although I did, thank God—

I did.

Odessa, and The Library, and Nuyorican Poets Cafe were not lost on me. My walks past the psychic on 3rd Street, East Village, not looking down at a cell phone… My time interning for Blue Man Group, witnessing brilliance, but never predicting how long it would actually run. Vegas—and my ‘Adam,’ and all the time we thought we had… it all just feels like a different lifetime by now. Days gone by, indeed.

What has always remained true in historic times of public despair is the human will, to rise above. The innate connection to greater love, greater vision, and a way in that saves the out.

You have to fight. You have to pick yourself up, and sing… Plant your gardens, water your flowers, write your memoirs because this is it.

We are a global consciousness of ever expanding love. Can you deal?

Or are you losing yourself to dark. Look, I love horror, I understand it, and can get down and dirty too, but now are the times to hug toward light. I see you. I see many of you walking the streets with your neck and shoulders tight. Your faces behind the wheel sad and scattered….

You have to Rise Up.

You and me both, everyday—and fight the good fight. Fight for love. For expansion and living life as a creative act. This is our time. Gone are the nineties, oh well… That pocket of music and artists and movies—freedom we didn’t even know we had. It is in the absence of love you realize what you lost. And in that moment—just like that—it’s back. You’re back. Keep rising, family. Find the ways to pick each other up and just, keep…