NAKEDJEN

on my mind…

  • Catching My Breath in Bali: Embracing True Hospitality

    The Professor said something to me yesterday that I still haven’t been able to shake, we were texting back and forth after I spent the whole day with Ring and his family, and I’d sent him a photo from the backseat of Ring’s car where Ring’s two kids had climbed over the seats to inspect me up close, which honestly felt entirely appropriate — imagine being two or three years old and your dad just casually announces that today you’re bringing home this strange gray-haired American woman with questionable tattoos and an alarming enthusiasm for coffee, and they were completely unfazed by the whole arrangement, didn’t even blink.

    The Professor looked at that photo for about three seconds before he wrote back, “you look different.” Now this is a man who has spent the better part of fifteen years watching my face, he knows every version of me, Festival Jen, Burning Man Jen, Migraine Jen, Grief Jen, the “I’ve had four hours of sleep and somehow we’re still driving with the dogs to Santa Cruz!” Jen — so when he tells me I look different I tend to pay attention. At first I figured he meant happier, or more rested, maybe Bali had finally succeeded where every overpriced moisturizer on earth has failed. Nope. It took me almost a full day to understand what he was actually seeing, which is that I’m breathing. Not metaphorically, not in the inspirational-Instagram-quote way where somebody writes just breathe over a photo of a mountain they’ve never once climbed.  I mean my body has quietly started doing something it stopped doing years ago. I am breathing all the way down into my diaphragm, which is a sentence so absurd I barely believe it myself except my therapist has been trying to convince me of this for years, my friends have been telling me for years, and if I’m being completely honest with you, I don’t really breathe in Utah. 

    That’s maybe the truest sentence I’ve written in a while. I don’t breathe in Utah, I hold my breath there. I hold my breath at the Coffee Garden, which is probably the safest place I’ve ever known — think about how wild that is, Alan and Dieter built this beautiful little sanctuary full of artists and misfits and queer kids and old professors and everybody who’s ever felt like they don’t quite fit anywhere else, and even there, some ancient part of my nervous system remained unconvinced we were safe enough to fully exhale.

    Trauma is such an exacting little bitch. It doesn’t just build memories, it builds posture, it rearranges your shoulders, it decides where you’re going to carry your jaw, it teaches your lungs to negotiate with oxygen like there’s a shortage. It whispers don’t get too comfortable, don’t relax completely, stay ready, something is coming — and the infuriating part is that after enough years you stop even noticing you’re doing it, holding your breath just starts to feel like breathing, you adapt, because human beings are spectacular adapters, we can normalize almost anything if you give us enough time. Apparently we can normalize living on tiny little sips of oxygen. Who knew?!  Not me. Not until Bali.

    Every morning here I wake up before the sun, and I genuinely could not tell you where the sun comes up from on this particular corner of the island because islands are wonderfully confusing that way, ocean over there, jungle over there, temples everywhere, my internal compass has basically shrugged and said good luck. I pull on my Converse and my yoga pants and head out before most of Ubud has even opened its eyes, though the birds have not only opened theirs, they’ve apparently called for a full choir practice, there is so much birdsong here it you wonder if you should start learning the tunes. As daylight begins to break through, the women carrying canang sari, those tiny woven offerings made out of palm leaves and flowers and gratitude and intention appear like apparitions and then the sweeping begins — god, the sweeping, I have become completely enchanted by the sweeping. Every single morning somebody is quietly taking care of something, a doorstep, a temple, a sidewalk, a family shrine, and nobody is doing it for applause, nobody’s particularly interested in documenting it, it’s just what you do before the day starts, you prepare your little corner of the world for whoever might pass through it. I keep wondering what America would feel like if we spent less time yelling at each other online and more time sweeping.

    Yesterday Ring picked me up. Actually — that’s not even true. Yesterday Ring and his family made room for me. Those are two completely different sentences. His wife was there, his two beautiful kids were there, and we drove from Ubud to Sanur for the kite festival and an afternoon at the beach, which is only twenty-seven kilometers away and somehow took three glorious, ridiculous, completely unhurried hours, and if you’ve never been to Bali that probably sounds impossible and if you have been here you’re already laughing. The traffic is legendary, scooters flowing around cars like schools of fish, entire families balanced on one bike in a way that, honestly, makes you HOLD YOUR BREATH, temple ceremonies just appearing out of nowhere, trucks stopping, dogs wandering across the road like they own the place, which, honestly, they absolutely do. Nobody seemed particularly bothered by any of it, least of all Ring, he just drove, and we talked, and the kids climbed over the seats to tell me very important things I only understood about half of, though I’m fairly sure I agreed to several imaginary adventures and possibly promised to play the important role of a superhero at some point.

    The thing that really got me wasn’t even the kite festival, though the kite festival was magnificent, giant creatures sailing across an impossibly blue sky while whole families gathered on the beach cheering them on, joyful in that deeply communal way that feels rarer and rarer these days. But that wasn’t the point. The point happened in the car, somewhere between the villages and the rice paddies and the scooters and the little roadside temples draped in black and white cloth, when it hit me that Ring wasn’t giving me a tour, he was giving me his entire Thursday, his family, his kids, six hours of a life that already belonged to people he loves. He wasn’t spending time on me, he was sharing it with me, and there is a difference so enormous I still don’t quite have the language for it. I’ve spent so much of my life being the one who takes care of everybody else that I almost didn’t recognize what was happening — I’ve been the Fluffer, the doula, the organizer, the woman carrying snacks in her backpack because somebody’s inevitably going to need almonds, the one who remembers birthdays and medications and spare phone chargers and where everybody parked the damn car. I know how to be that person, it’s one of my love languages. What I apparently don’t know how to do is be cared for without feeling like I owe somebody an apology for the inconvenience of it.

    This is exactly what Bali keeps insisting on. Sit down. We’ve got you for a while. Drink your espresso. Walk your ridge. Ride with our family. Breathe. We’ll sweep, we’ll make the offerings, we’ll show you where the ocean is, you just be here. Maybe that’s why I look different in that photo, not because Bali changed me but because for the first time in a very long time my nervous system believes someone else is standing watch, and it doesn’t have to, not today, not for these few precious weeks.

    Maybe that’s what hospitality actually is. It’s not luxury, it’s not five-star hotels or infinity pools or welcome drinks with orchids floating on top, it’s someone quietly convincing your body that it’s finally allowed to exhale. This is what we’ve always done for each other at our very best, long before social media, long before airplanes, long before passports and guidebooks and algorithms and all this noise we’ve built around ourselves — we made room. Around a fire. Around a table. In the backseat of a little car driving across Bali with two curious kids and a man named Ring who probably has no idea he just handed a tired American woman something she couldn’t have found in any guidebook on earth.

    He gave her back her breath.  He let her exhale. 

    Now that… that feels like a story worth carrying home.

  • A Day of Hope: 118 Laughs, Tears, and New Citizens

    Today, 118 people put on the word AMERICAN for the first time, on purpose, in a room with vaulted wood beams and white fabric draped across the ceiling like something built for a wedding, not a government ceremony. Light came in sideways through all those big windows. Little American flags in every hand. When it was finally official, the whole room stood up and waved them at once — flags going up in every direction, people crying, people laughing, phones out trying to catch it. I don’t think a single person in that room will forget what that looked like. I know that I certainly will not. It was such a gift.

    From 38 countries:

    Argentina. Bangladesh. Bolivia. Brazil. Canada. Chile. China. Colombia. Dominican Republic. Ecuador. Egypt. El Salvador. France. Guatemala. Honduras. India. Indonesia. Ireland. Italy. South Korea. Marshall Islands. Mexico. Nepal. Netherlands. New Zealand. Nicaragua. Panama. Peru. Philippines. Portugal. Samoa. South Africa. Taiwan. Thailand. Trinidad. Ukraine. Uruguay. Vietnam.


    Thirty-eight countries. One room. One oath.


    In the afterglow, many of them stood up and just talked — about coming as a child and seeing the Wasatch and how important those mountains still feel, about being a Nanny first and then a mother and wanting, knowing, there was a better life here, the international students who praised the higher education they received and then knowing that opportunity resides in America, the years it took to get to this exact folding chair. Then they promised, out loud, to show up now. Vote. Volunteer. Pay attention. Some of them registered to vote before they even left the building.


    I used to teach citizenship classes in a tiny room in Santa Cruz, mostly to farmworkers who picked strawberries and artichokes and brussel sprouts all day and still showed up at night to memorize the preamble. I have never seen determination like that. Today I saw it again, times 118.


    As I walked Clyde this morning, before the ceremony, the New York Times reported that ICE is quietly deporting people right here in Utah, and that immigrants and refugees in this state are too scared to go grocery shopping. Both of these things are real, in the same country, on the same Tuesday. Nobody should be afraid of the cereal aisle.


    America was never one face, one accent, one flag on one lawn. Almost none of us can point at a map and say right here, forever. We’re all from somewhere. Today 118 people made it official, in public, on purpose, and I got to stand in the room and love every single one of them.


    Thank you, Deborah Fiona Eyer, for the invite. As always, you know how to make the shape of my heart change.


    Out in the parking lot after, I passed a woman still holding her certificate. She looked overwhelmed, in the good way. I stopped and said, “I’m so proud of you. Thank you for choosing America.” And she came apart, right there. So I hugged her. Hard. The kind that doesn’t let go first.


    Love is a verb. Today it looked like a parking lot hug and a hundred and eighteen little flags going up at once. I’m so glad I could participate. 💜

  • The Maps Are Written Across Our Hearts

    Every year when June rolls into July, some part of my nervous system starts looking for Interstate exits, and I do not mean this metaphorically, although perhaps I do because the older I become the more difficult it is to separate the actual road from the one that has been unspooling inside me since 1986, that long ribbon of asphalt and possibility and bad coffee and improbable miracles and the certainty that somewhere beyond the next exit ramp there would be music, or friends, or a circus, or a field, or a dog, or a broken transmission, or Jerry Garcia himself sitting quietly at the center of the whole strange wheel asking us all, quite gently, just how much freedom remained in America and whether we intended to use it.

    July has always felt less like a month and more like a tuning fork struck somewhere deep inside the rib cage, because the body remembers before the brain does, and somewhere around the end of June my internal compass begins spinning wildly, looking for truck stops and ticket stubs and glove compartments full of maps that no longer exist, wondering where the circus is setting up this year, where the bands will bandaloop, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, whether there is coffee at the next exit, whether there is pie, whether there is a field nearby where tired travellers can throw down sleeping bags and look up at the stars and ask one another the really important questions, such as where did the dog go and who has jumper cables and is there an extra ticket and when exactly did we all decide that strangers were dangerous.

    The Grateful Dead taught me one version of America.

    The parking lot was an experiment, a temporary city appearing overnight on asphalt and empty grassy fields and grilled cheese and optimism, a place where money occasionally mattered and occasionally disappeared altogether, where miracle tickets materialized from thin air and somebody always seemed to have an extra sandwich or an extra blanket or room in the van, where your transmission could fall out in Indiana and a garage owner would stay awake all night teaching you how to repair your own car while his wife fed you dinner and you slept in a cornfield beside the garage listening to the stalks whisper like the Pacific Ocean, and where eventually you discovered that gifts do not come with strings attached, that miracles are often folded inside free tickets, that somebody stops when you are broken down, that somebody shares what little they have, that somebody teaches you how to repair the engine instead of repairing it for you, and that no matter where you go, there you are.

    The Oregon Country Fair taught me another version. Same song, perhaps, but a very different verse.

    You entered through the gates and somebody hugged you and stamped a peach on your arm and said, in one way or another, welcome home, and eventually I tattooed that peach onto my own skin because some religions require baptism and some require communion and some simply place a peach upon your arm and send you wandering through the trees with music and art and children and ice cream and impossible ideas about how human beings might live together if they chose kindness over commerce and curiosity over fear, and somewhere beneath those magnificent fir trees you begin to understand that home is not a place at all but a practice, something we make for one another, something we carry, something we offer.

    In the between times, I found another temporary city in the desert, and what it taught me was not terribly different from the parking lot or the Fair. Build the city yourselves. Bring what you need. Share what you have. Somebody always runs out of water. Somebody always loses their camp. Somebody always breaks down. Somebody always sits beside somebody else beneath impossible stars on what feels like a truly impossible precarious piece of art and says, “I’ve got coffee. Tell me what happened.”

    The band plays its final song. The parking lot empties. The Fair does a final sweep. Jerry dies. The dust doesn’t stay. The map disintegrates in the glove compartment.

    This is what I have been talking about all along.

    The maps.

    Not the maps on our phones. Not the blue dot telling us exactly where we are every moment of every day. I mean the old maps. The Rand McNallys folded into impossible shapes and stuffed into glove compartments until the creases finally split. The state lines and county lines and interstates and back roads and roads that simply ended in gravel and dust and faith.

    My maps.

    The weathered notebook that always traveled beside me, filled with health food stores and diners willing to make grilled cheese after ten o’clock and pay phones that still worked and the woman in Eugene with the extra couch and the basement in Ohio that somehow held all of us and the garage in Indiana and the kitchens where we could always make more sandwiches and fill our coolers with ice and beverages before heading back out onto the road.

    The attic in Pittsburgh where a gaggle of filthy hippies once landed and laughed until morning and where years later, after the roads had bent and folded and delivered me back there carrying an entirely different version of myself, somebody I loved quietly helped put me back together again.

    Those were my maps. Not red states. Not blue states. Not electoral maps. My maps are made of people. The people who stopped. The people who stayed. The people who answered the phone. The people who wrote their numbers on the back of a ticket stub. The people who said, “Call me if you need anything.” The people who said, “If you’re ever passing through.”

    I know this is why our Americas all look different.

    Mine looks like parking lots and Oregon forests and dusty roads and kitchens full of soup and coffee and dogs and people making sandwiches.

    Yours may look like a fishing dock off the coast of Maine. A church basement hosting an NA meeting somewhere in the Carolinas. Your grandmother’s porch with a view. A diner serving pie all night at Exit 141. A station wagon headed west. Or East. Or to catch a baseball game in an endless summer of baseball games. Pick-up trucks to pick up a stray dogs because they need a place to call home.

    The shape of our America is the shape of our own hearts.

    The maps are written there.

    The lines still run from mine to yours and from yours to somebody else and from theirs to a frightened stranger standing beside a highway wondering if anybody will stop.

    I really believe that is what the country has always been.

    Not the lines we draw between ourselves.

    The names we write beside them.

    So, here we are. All of us together inside the largest and strangest experiment of them all.

    America.

    Somewhere, probably even right now, somebody is sitting beside a dark highway with their hazard lights flashing. Somebody is lost. Somebody is afraid. Somebody is wondering if anyone will stop. And somewhere else, perhaps only a mile away, perhaps at the next Interstate exit, perhaps sitting at a kitchen table drinking coffee, perhaps reading this very thing by the light from a cellphone at 2:13 in the morning somewhere outside Winnemucca somebody is already reaching for their keys.

    We all have our roads. We all have our lines. We all have our maps.
    And we all have our exits.

    This is another thing the road taught me. You never really know which exit is yours. You pass hundreds of them. Thousands. Rest areas and truck stops and little towns with one blinking light and pie shops and motels and places you promise yourself you’ll visit someday, and then one day you find yourself taking an exit you never expected because your transmission gave out or your heart broke or somebody got sick or somebody died or somebody called and said, “Can you come?”

    We ride with our hands on the wheel and our hearts beating in our chests and we simply do not know. We do not know if the next exit is ours, or the one after that, or the one two thousand miles down the road. That uncertainty is not the frightening thing. It is the reason for everything.

    I do not know where my exit is, and you do not know where yours is, and America herself does not know where hers is, the whole point is simply how we choose to travel. Choose to show up.

    We do stop. We share our sandwiches. We find the lost dog. We answer the phone. We write our numbers in the margins and on the backs of ticket stubs. We make coffee. We put our hands over our own hearts. More importantly, we put our hands on the hearts of others and ask, “Still beating?”

    Babump.

    Babump.

    Still there.

    This? This is what America needs from us right now. Not spectators. Not passengers. Not people standing beside the road arguing over the map while the engine overheats.

    AMERICA is sitting there herself with her hazard lights flashing and one hand pressed against her chest, and perhaps what she is asking is exactly what every frightened traveler has always asked somewhere beside a dark highway in the middle of the night.

    Is anybody coming?

    Yes. We are. Because this is our country. This is our map. This is our heart.

    The lines still run from my heart to yours and from yours to someone else’s and from theirs to a stranger sitting beside a road somewhere wondering whether anybody will stop.

    And someday, though none of us knows when, we will each take our own exit. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe thirty years from now. Maybe somewhere we never expected. Maybe somewhere we’ve been driving toward all along.

    So while we’re here — while the engine is still running and the coffee is still warm and the maps are still folded in the glove box and the names are still written in the margins and the kitchen lights are still burning and the hearts are still beating — we might as well show up.

    We might as well keep each other breathing.

    That’s it. That’s the whole assignment.

    America needs all of us right now. Every last one. And if you call yourself an American — if you put your hand on your heart and mean it — then that means you.

    So pull over. 💜

  • Utah Is on Fire and the Fireworks Are in Aisle Nine

    I have just come home to Salt Lake City and Utah is on fire, and I do not mean this poetically, although honestly, Utah does enjoy making everything biblical and dramatic and vaguely Old Testament in July, so here we are, once again, surrounded by dry grass, hot wind, evacuation alerts, smoke maps, firefighters working themselves into ash-covered saints, dogs hiding under beds, veterans and refugees and babies and every person with a nervous system bracing for the nightly neighbourhood reenactment of “freedom,” while fireworks are stacked for sale in the aisles of the grocery store as if this is perfectly normal, as if this is not the sort of cognitive dissonance that should make all of us stop next to the ice machine and the rotisserie chickens and the family-size tortilla chips and say, wait, hold on, are we really doing this right now?

    Before anyone starts clutching their sparklers and typing with their thumbs full of liberty, I know what month it is, I know where I live, I know Utah in July is not so much a month as a prolonged ignition ceremony with snack breaks, I know we begin with the 4th of July and then we just keep right on going until the 24th when the pioneers allegedly rolled into this valley, wiped the dust out of their eyes, looked around at all this dry, flammable majesty and said, “This is the place,” which apparently, generations later, has come to mean this is the place where we spend most of July scaring the bejezzus out of every dog, every sweet person with PTSD, every baby trying to sleep, every elder trying to remember what quiet feels like, and every canyon full of sweetgrass waiting for one yahoo with a lighter and a pocketful of constitutional fireworks to become the plot twist nobody needed.

    I am not anti-fire.

    Please.

    Let us not be ridiculous.

    I am a Burner, for fuck’s sake, a woman who has spent a good portion of her adult life hauling water and snacks and weird forms of devotion across a dry lake bed where people build impossible things out of dust and scaffolding and crazy grit and love, then set them on fire under the supervision of people who understand wind, perimeter, safety, ritual, consequence, and the very important difference between sacred flame and Chad from down the street launching aerials into a neighborhood full of juniper while declaring himself a patriot.

    I love fire.

    I love the bloom of fireworks in a night sky when they are handled by professionals who know what they are doing and have permits and water trucks and actual plans that do not begin with “hold my beer” and end with the county sheriff asking everyone to evacuate.

    I love spectacle.

    I love celebration.

    I love light.

    I love the crack and shimmer and gasp of it, the moment when a whole crowd looks up together and forgets for three seconds how divided and tired and mean we have all become.

    What I do not love is carelessness dressed up as tradition.

    What I do not love is selling explosives in grocery store aisles while Utah is literally burning in every direction, while we are watching acres disappear, while animals are running, while people are packing medication and photographs and dog food into cars just in case, while firefighters are out there trying to convince the flames not to become weather, while smoke sits in the valley like an unwanted relative who refuses to leave and makes everyone’s lungs feel personally insulted.

    I do not love the part where we ask for help with one hand and sell the problem with the other.

    FEMA has authorized federal funds to help fight the Iron Fire, which is a sentence I find almost darkly comic in this particular American moment, since depending on which political carnival ride you happen to be strapped into, FEMA is either a vital public agency or a government bogeyman hiding under the bed with your tax dollars, but apparently when the hills are on fire we all remember very quickly that mutual aid is not communism, it is what keeps the flames from eating the next ridge.

    And still, here we are, Utah, with the fires burning and the air turning into a throat lozenge from hell, selling fireworks next to the groceries, smiling brightly through the smoke, acting as if we can call something a national emergency and then we spin around and hand out spark boxes with patriotic branding and a coupon for more for the arrival of all those pioneers.

    I do not think we get to have it both ways.

    I really don’t.

    I do not think we get to say we love this place, we love these mountains, we love these canyons, we love this big dry weird holy bowl of a valley, we love our families, we love our neighbors, we love our firefighters, we love our dogs, we love our veterans, we love our freedom, we love our pioneers, we love our heritage, we love our God, we love our country, and then spend the hottest, driest, most flammable weeks of the year treating the entire state as if it is a disposable party favour wrapped in red, white, and boom.

    I know fireworks are legal.

    So are many dumb things.

    Legal is not the same as wise.

    Legal is not the same as kind.

    Legal is not the same as neighbourly.

    Legal is not the same as, perhaps we should not tempt the desert into becoming a funeral pyre just so Kyle can light the “Mega Patriot Screaming Eagle Thunder Dragon 5000” in the cul-de-sac while everyone’s Labrador trembles behind the washing machine.

    This is the part where someone will tell me I am trying to ruin everyone’s fun, which is hilarious, truly, since I am a woman who believes very deeply in fun, possibly too deeply, a woman who has built entire temporary civilizations around coffee, glitter, grilled cheese, electrolytes, radical hospitality, art, dust, nakedness, body joy, and the spiritual necessity of occasionally doing something weird under the stars, but I also believe fun has to survive contact with the actual world, and the actual world right now is hot and dry and on fire and full of living creatures who did not volunteer to become collateral damage in Utah’s annual month-long pyrotechnic identity crisis.

    I am asking for restraint.

    Not forever.

    Not joylessness.

    Not a statewide ban on wonder.

    Just the tiniest little teaspoon of common sense stirred into the Pioneer Day punch bowl.

    Maybe this year, while the fire crews are out there doing the kind of work most of us cannot even imagine, while families are refreshing containment maps, while the air smells wrong, while the mountains stand there looking dry and tired and entirely too ready to go up if we breathe on them funny, maybe we could decide that freedom also includes the freedom not to light shit on fire.

    Maybe we could decide that being a good neighbour matters more than making the sky explode from your driveway.

    Maybe we could decide that dogs and babies and veterans and refugees and exhausted people and traumatized people and firefighters and wildlife and lungs and canyons and whole communities deserve one July where we do not confuse noise with patriotism and sparks with devotion.

    Maybe we could put the fireworks back on the shelf and go eat pie.

    Maybe we could stand outside and look at the mountains, while we still have mountains to look at, and remember that they are already dramatic enough.

    Maybe we could wave a flag without setting the hillside on fire.

    Maybe we could let July be July without turning every night into a tiny war.

    Maybe we could be brave enough, just this once, to celebrate by not making anything worse.

    I know.

    Radical.

    Possibly un-Utahn.

    Someone alert the Governor.

    But here I am, home again, looking at fireworks for sale in the grocery store while the state burns around us, and all I can think is that irony has finally put on boots, walked into the aisle, picked up a box of TNT Pop-Its, and asked all of us whether we have completely lost the plot.

    And honestly?

    I think the answer might be yes.

    But we could still choose differently.

    We could still choose the mountains.

    We could still choose the dogs.

    We could still choose the firefighters.

    We could still choose the air.

    We could still choose not to be the spark.

    Wouldn’t that be something?

  • PING. Be Early to the Right Thing

    Friday is the new moon, which has always felt to me like the sky turning out its pockets and turning off the lights so we can finally tell the truth.

    So here is mine, loud and clear.

    I have done the polite part. I have done the boots-on-the-ground, rustling-the-bushes, digging-under-the-dirt, logical-rock-turning part. I’ve made the calls. I’ve sent the “just checking in” notes. I have played the game by the usual rules with a bright mouth and a hopeful heart.

    And still, what I am looking for hasn’t fully stepped out of the shadows. So now, I’m doing this the Nakedjen way.

    Pssst.

    If you have ever said to me, “I wish I could do something with you, Nakedjen,” this is me looking you dead in the eye and saying: The gate is open. Walk through it.

    Not “someday.” Not “let’s grab coffee.”
    This.

    The film is PING.

    It’s a story about ambition, identity, and the high-voltage cost of being “exceptional” in a world that wants to eat you for breakfast. It’s smart, it’s dangerous, and it’s painfully relevant. We have an extraordinary team, a killer script, and a direct line to Sundance. This isn’t a “maybe.” This is a machine that is already humming.

    What we need now is the investment to bring it home.

    I am passing the hat. I know it’s unconventional. But when have I ever been the patron saint of conventional?

    I am the woman who gets naked and rides escalators because she can. I am the woman who will stand on the back of a moving horse and jump through fire to make a point. I am the woman in custom Doc Martens, stomping a path toward the things that matter while everyone else is looking for a paved road.

    I know how to make magic out of dust. I’ve done it a thousand times. I know how to turn a bare patch of ground into a republic of joy. I know how to turn strangers into a family and a good idea into the kind of night you remember for twenty years.

    PING is alive. It has a pulse. And it needs extraordinary hearts to match it.

    If you have ever wanted to play with me, build with me, get gloriously dirty with me, or bet on something that actually has a soul—Come on then.

    Be early to the right thing.

    Do not watch this from the sidewalk. Do not wait to hear about it later and wish you’d stepped inside the tent while the lights were still warming up.

    Come to Utah in June. Come be part of the strange and beautiful machinery. Help make the kind of art that tells the truth with its lipstick smeared and its boots still dusty.

    Invest. Introduce me. Raise your hand. Tell your friend with the secret appetite for art. Tell the person who is tired of the boring and the safe.

    Do something wild.

    This is the whisper before the drums. The match struck in the dark. The stomp of the boot that says we are here.

    Come make some movie magic with me.

    I’ll bring the snacks.
    There may be beets.
    You do not have to eat them.

    Let’s make some magic together while we still can. xo

    #PINGfilm #newmoonmanifesting #indiefilm #utahfilm #nakedjen #sundancebound #customdocs #makemagic

  • POOF!

    I am known, in some circles, as a fairy.
    The Beet Fairy.

    For years, Vive supplied the cold-pressed beet juice that quite literally helped keep me on this planet. Not as a luxury. Not as a lifestyle accessory. As medicine. As ritual. As one of those stitched-in things your body comes to trust before your mind has even caught up.

    This morning I was waiting for my juice delivery.

    Then it didn’t come.

    So I did what so many of us do now when something beloved suddenly slips sideways. I went looking for the answer myself. No text. No email. No little human tap on the shoulder. Just absence. A missing delivery. Then the quiet discovery that after nearly thirteen years, Vive Juicery had closed.

    That was how I found out.

    No goodbye. No handoff. No soft landing. Just poof.

    Black Lab sitting on a stool in a messy kitchen covered with beet juice bottles and vegetable scraps.
    A black lab sits calmly amidst the delightful chaos of a kitchen covered in beet juice and vegetable scraps.

    Maybe that is why it hit the bruise so directly. I am apparently still one giant exposed nerve ending over being let go from the acupuncture clinic in much the same fashion. Another Irish Goodbye. Another community I was inside of until suddenly I wasn’t. Another place where I did not get to say goodbye. Another thread cut so cleanly it somehow bled more.

    I have not recovered from that.
    Not really.
    Maybe not at all.

    I miss helping.

    I miss it with a force that startles me. I miss it in the marrow. I miss it like phantom limb pain. I miss the direct, human, ordinary holiness of being useful to another person in real time.

    Yes, I still help. I help all over the damn place. I help in line at Coffee Garden. Let me sort out the pastry case with you. Tell me what kinds of sweets you usually love. Let’s find what’s just right.

    I help at the Apple counter at Costco, explaining to a stranger that the employee doing spreadsheets, shipping, data sheets, all of that, probably does not need the spaceship. The graphics or web person absolutely does. Get the more robust machine. Get the memory. Get the AppleCare. It is a business expense anyway, right?

    I help at Warby Parker like it is my god damned job, choosing frames for a woman I have never met as though her future face is somehow my responsibility.

    I keep doing this. Everywhere. Like some feral customer service department roaming the earth in search of purpose.

    I miss people.
    I miss service.
    I miss usefulness.
    I miss the tiny spark that passes between two people when one says, “Can I help?” and the other one exhales, relieved, because the answer is yes.

    I miss the community of helping.
    I miss the rhythm of it.
    I miss the feeling that my care had somewhere to go.

    Yes, I gather signatures. Yes, I show up. Yes, I speak up for affordable housing, for democracy, for the vulnerable, against cruelty, against ICE, for all the jagged broken-hearted things that matter. I do all of that.

    This is different.

    This is the grief of not getting to be of use in the ordinary, intimate, daily ways that once shaped my life. The grief of no longer being inside the circle of care. The grief of being built to help, only to find yourself standing there with your hands still full of help, nowhere to set it down.

    So when eight little bottles of juice did not appear on my porch this morning, it was not just a delivery glitch. It was one more vanishing. One more touchstone gone quiet. One more place where continuity dissolved without a goodbye.

    That sounds dramatic, maybe. Grieving a juice company. Fine. Call me dramatic. I am not really grieving juice. I am grieving what happens when the small, reliable rituals that hold a person together simply stop speaking. I am grieving the shock of finding out that something woven into the fabric of your life has quietly slipped out of the loom. I am grieving the way endings arrive now with no witness, no handoff, no human warmth.

    This is what I keep thinking about:

    We are living in an Irish Goodbye economy.

    Businesses vanish.
    Communities vanish.
    Jobs vanish.
    People vanish.

    You are in relationship, however imperfectly, until suddenly you are not. You are of use until suddenly you are outside the door. You are waiting for the thing that has reliably arrived, until it doesn’t. Then you are left to piece together the ending by yourself like some emotional raccoon rooting around in the dark for context.

    I understand all the arguments. Protect your peace. Preserve your energy. No one owes everyone every explanation. I know. I really do. I understand that people are tired, burned out, underwater, overextended, one hard conversation away from becoming a puddle in public.

    Still.

    At what cost?

    At what cost do we keep disappearing from one another like this?

    Trust is not built in grand gestures. Trust is built in continuity. In small acknowledgments. In the dignity of a heads-up. In the simple human instinct to say: hey, this is ending. Thank you. You mattered here.

    When that does not happen, something erodes.

    Not just loyalty.
    Not just goodwill.
    Something softer. More essential.

    The belief that we are actually in this together.

    That may be why so many of us feel so untethered right now. Yes, the world is on fire. Yes, democracy feels like a folding table in a windstorm. Yes, we are out here gathering signatures, speaking up, protesting, trying to keep one another fed, sheltered, seen.

    Underneath all of that, another grief hums.

    The grief of disappearing from one another.
    The grief of institutions, workplaces, businesses, communities, all using the language of care or family or service or belonging right up until the moment they evaporate.
    The grief of no goodbye.
    The grief of no witness.
    The grief of being left holding love with nowhere to place it.

    Maybe that is why I keep helping strangers in random retail environments like a woman possessed. Maybe I am trying to stitch myself back into the human fabric one tiny interaction at a time. Maybe I am trying to prove that service still exists. That tenderness still exists. That someone can still look another person in the eye, say, “I’ve got you,” and mean it.

    I wanted my juice this morning.
    Yes.
    More than that, I wanted continuity.
    I wanted the medicine to keep medicining.
    I wanted one small beloved thing to arrive exactly as expected.
    I wanted not to lose one more thing.

    Instead, I got another lesson in impermanence. Another reminder that the world can change shape while you are standing in your Uggs on the porch.

    Thank you, Vive, for the years you nourished me.
    Thank you for the medicine when it was medicine.
    I mean that.

    This hurt.

    Deeply. Weirdly. More than I would like to admit.
    Yet not weird at all, really.

    Sometimes eight missing juice bottles are not eight missing juice bottles.

    Sometimes they are every goodbye you did not get.
    Every room that went dark without warning.
    Every place you poured your care that disappeared before you could say:

    I was here.
    I loved this.
    This mattered to me.

  • A Warehouse Is For Freight, Not Families

    Yesterday I stood on the far west side of Salt Lake City, staring at a gigantic empty warehouse the Department of Homeland Security bought for $145 million, with plans to turn it into an ICE detention center. A warehouse. Near our airport. In our city. As though human beings are inventory. As though the right word is “facility” and not what it really is: a place built to disappear people behind walls and fluorescent lights.

    Let’s start there. Warehouses are for packages. Not for people.

    Salt Lake City’s mayor has already said what should be obvious to anyone with a pulse: mass detention inside a warehouse is inhumane, outside the city’s zoning allowances, and contrary to the values of Salt Lakers. She is right. Full stop.

    And the obscenity of the timing should make every Utahn furious. Homeland Security has somehow found $145 million to buy an empty building for detention expansion while the department’s own budget fight has left TSA officers working without pay. Tens of thousands of airport security officers have been showing up unpaid, absences have surged, and some airports have faced serious disruptions. So let me get this straight: there is money for cages, money for contracts, money for detention infrastructure, but not enough political courage to pay the people keeping airports running? That is not governance. That is moral failure with a spreadsheet.

    Utah should know better.

    This is a state with a living memory of Topaz, where Japanese Americans were incarcerated behind barbed wire in one of the worst civil-rights violations in this country’s history. They were never charged. Never convicted. Just removed, confined, and treated as a problem to be managed. If you think history repeats itself with the exact same haircut, you have not been paying attention. History comes back wearing a lanyard, holding a procurement document, calling the camp a warehouse conversion.

    And this land was not ours to begin with. The Salt Lake Valley has long been a gathering place for Indigenous peoples. This is the traditional and ancestral homeland of the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute Tribes. We are on borrowed land, whether or not that phrase makes people squirm in their expensive boots. The least we can do is refuse to add one more chapter of sanctioned cruelty to soil that has already held too much.

    Standing there yesterday, I realized something uncomfortable: outrage alone is no longer enough. We know how to chant. We know how to hold signs. We know how to post the photo and go home. But the image that stayed with me was not the rally as it was. It was what it could have been: a living human chain around that building. Bodies linked arm in arm. A fence made of conscience. A line that said, in the oldest language there is, No. Not here. Not in our name.

    I have done this before in other fights. I have put my body where my values were. I have stood in the road for old-growth forests. I have blocked entrances where animals were being tortured in the name of research. I have been arrested for refusing to move while weapons were being built. None of that came from some romance about confrontation. It came from understanding that sometimes the body is the last honest instrument left. Sometimes you do not merely raise your voice. Sometimes you physically interrupt the machinery.

    That does not mean performative menace. It does not mean trying to out-tough the state by dressing like a junior militia and smashing windows. A very small group at the protest seemed to think covered faces, body armor, graffiti, and property damage were the message. They were wrong. Utah will not be moved by cosplay intimidation. Broken glass does not build a broader coalition. It hands the story to the people who would much rather talk about vandalism than detention. I understand the rage. I do. But if your politics make you look like a mirror image of the force you claim to oppose, then you have already wandered off the path.

    What wins here is not theater. It is moral clarity.

    What wins here is grandmothers, veterans, students, clergy, tribal voices, teachers, artists, airport workers, neighbors, and yes, the loudmouth dog mamas too, showing up again and again with enough discipline to make the truth impossible to ignore. What wins here is refusing the lie that this is normal, or necessary, or inevitable. What wins here is making Utah look directly at what is being built and asking: Is this who we are now?

    I do not believe it is.

    I believe Utah can still choose decency over fear. I believe Salt Lake City can reject the idea that people should be warehoused three miles from an airport like delayed freight. I believe we can remember Topaz not as a museum field trip, but as a warning. I believe we can honor this land by refusing to make it host one more machine for disappearing human beings.

    Enough is enough.

    You can build a warehouse. You can hire guards. You can print forms and call it policy. But you cannot make a cage moral by giving it a budget line and a neutral-sounding name.

    Utah has seen this kind of shame before. We do not need a sequel.

  • Welcome Back, Clyde

    Today is Clyde’s gotcha day, and I want to tell the truth about rescue. The kind of truth that doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker or a tote bag. The kind that lands in your chest and stays there like a warm stone.

    People like to say we rescue dogs, and yes, we do. We pull them out of shelters and ditches and bad luck and someone else’s failure to keep a promise. We sign papers and pay fees and buy the good kibble and the ridiculous toys that end up under the couch like lost planets. We do all of that, and still the real rescue runs in both directions. Sometimes it runs harder the other way.

    Clyde found me again, and I know how that sounds to anyone who only believes in what can be proven under fluorescent lights. Those of us who know, just know. Some souls have a homing signal. Some love has a map. Some devotion takes the long way around the block and comes back wearing a different coat.

    The first Clyde, the original Clyde, was something else entirely: a four-legged myth, a shaggy guardian angel with dirt under his nails. A dog who carried my heart on his four paws. He lived with me in my car on the edges of the UCSC campus. He followed the Grateful Dead with me. He watched me build a life out of whatever I could carry. He witnessed the whole strange, gorgeous circus of my becoming. He inspired Clyde’s Cookies, my vegan, organic chocolate chip cookies: a survival spell baked into a name, a business born from love and necessity and a dog who never once asked me to be anything other than alive.

    He stayed. He stayed until he was seventeen, which feels like a small miracle when you remember what we were doing: miles, highways, parking lots, fields, weather, music, midnight. The kind of living that makes a person feral and holy. The kind of living that turns a dog into a legend.

    And then time did what time does. It took him, and it took something out of me right along with him. Life kept life-ing. The world kept spinning. There are days I have wanted to step off the carousel. There are days my nervous system has felt like a live wire. There are days the weight of everything has made gravity feel personal.

    And then this Clyde arrived.

    Here he is, coming in for the heavy leans, snoring beside me on my pillow every night like he pays rent, making certain I show up. Making certain I eat. Making certain I walk outside and see the sky. Making certain I keep my appointments with the living world. He has taken the job seriously, like he clocked in and said: I’m on it.

    He knows things, and I don’t mean in the cute “dogs are intuitive” way. I mean he knows. He knows when I’m going to have a seizure. He knows before I do. He shifts his whole body into readiness. He watches me with that steady, ancient focus. Guardian dogs just know. They read the weather inside us. They stand between us and the cliff. They become the tether, the anchor, the soft alarm system with fur and breath and unwavering devotion.

    So yes, this is a gotcha day post, and also it isn’t. It’s a gratitude post, and also it isn’t. It’s a love letter to rescue, and to everyone who has ever walked into a shelter and felt their heart split open. It’s a reminder that the animals waiting behind those gates are not “less than.” They are not damaged goods. They are not charity cases. They are beings with stories, with courage, with the kind of tenderness that survives impossible things.

    Rescue is holy work, and it isn’t only holy for the animal.

    Sometimes you walk in thinking you’re saving a dog, and you walk out with the one creature on earth who will keep you on the planet. The one who will press his weight into your legs when you start to float away. The one who will insist on morning. The one who will drag you into the present moment by the sleeve. The one who will love you through all your versions, even the ones you don’t know how to love yet.

    Clyde, my beautiful boy, my guardian, my snoring, heavy-leaning, heart-tethering miracle: thank you for finding me. Thank you for coming back around. Thank you for choosing me again. Thank you for making a home out of my body and my bed and my life. Thank you for the way you keep showing me what devotion looks like when it has four paws and no agenda.

    If you’ve ever rescued an animal, you already know. The rescue runs both ways. The love arrives like a rope thrown into dark water, and sometimes it’s the only thing that pulls you back to shore.

    Happy gotcha day, Clyde. We’re still here. We’re still singing. We’re still walking forward. And tonight you can have the whole pillow, like always. 🖤🐾

  • Still Here. Barely.

    I shaved my head last Monday.

    Not for fashion. Not for a dare. Not for reinvention as some shiny little brand strategy.

    I did it because my body needed a receipt.
    Because my heart kept whispering, we are letting go now, and I needed my scalp to sign the paperwork.

    Gizmo died.

    Sundance ended. Not just the festival, but the way of it here. The particular Utah snowglobe version where I knew the back hallways, the green rooms, the secret shortcuts, the faces that needed feeding, the ones that needed a tissue, the ones that needed a firm hand on the shoulder and a “drink some water, babe, I’ve got you.” Ten days of taking care of everyone… and then suddenly the lights go out and you’re standing in a quiet room full of empty chairs, holding a lanyard like it’s a relic.

    And Burning Man? I closed that chapter too. I am not going back this year. I can feel the hinge click. I can feel the door seal. I can feel the desert wind on the other side and I’m not stepping into it. I’m finished. I’m choosing something new even though I don’t yet know what “new” looks like.

    Also, because life has a sense of timing that is either comedic or cruel (or both), my credit card got compromised. So this morning I drove to the bank, bald as bald can be, and I started thinking about what it would be to make a documentary of my life.

    Not the highlight reel. Not the montage where the camera pans across costumes and concerts and glamorous chaos.

    More like… the witness list.

    Because if you really wanted to tell the story of me, you would have to find the people I have helped along the way. The ones who would say: she showed up. She filled the gap. She made it happen. She walked into the mess and started organizing the corners. She brought the water. She brought the snacks. She brought the extra phone charger, the spare hoodie, the peppermint oil, the hand on your back when you were about to fold.

    I’m the fill-in-the-blank fairy.

    Sundance Fairy.
    Fluffer Fairy.
    Share Your Sandwiches Fairy.
    Missing-person search Fairy.
    “Let me just handle it” Fairy.
    “Here, eat something” Fairy.
    “Breathe with me” Fairy.

    And I never, ever, ever accept payment. I have built an entire life on the belief that if I keep giving, the universe will keep providing, and maddeningly… it does. It really does. Doors open. Tables appear. Someone hands me exactly what I need right when my hands are empty.

    I’ve trusted that so hard that it became my religion.

    Even back on Grateful Dead tour, even in those long-ago days when everything was loud and wild and starry and half-improvised, I was still taking care of people. I made Clyde’s Cookies on tour, vegan, organic chocolate chip cookies, because I needed a way to support myself, yes, but also because it was a survival mechanism. A nervous system strategy. A way to stay steady in the swirl. A way to love people and the planet at the same time. Those cookies ended up in cafés all over Santa Cruz even when the Dead weren’t touring. Little brown-sugar love letters in a world that moves too fast.

    I have been in service most of my life. I don’t say that with a halo. I say it with the honesty of someone who knows service can be both medicine and the perfect hiding place.

    Because here’s the part I’m trying to tell the truth about:

    Right now, I feel broken.

    Like… really broken.

    Not “I’m having a hard day” broken. Not “I just need a bath and a nap” broken.

    More like: I cry over silly things. A song lyric. A dog on a porch. A stranger’s hands. The way light hits a kitchen counter. I cry because my heart is full of endings and my body doesn’t know where to put them. I cry because I can’t fix any of the big things right now, and I am a person who has built a whole identity around fixing. I just can’t seem to find the Nakedjen superglue AND the duct tape.

    The world is hurting. It really and truly is. There is a real revolution happening and I am paying attention. I am not looking away. I can feel the instability in the air like static. I can feel the grief in the streets. I can feel the fear. I can feel the fire. Sometimes it feels like the whole planet is holding its breath, waiting to see who will choose cruelty and who will choose care.

    I want to be the person who chooses care.

    I am still that person.

    I’m just… shaky.

    I’m alive, but barely. Tender as an overcooked beet. Raw in a way that surprises me. Not numb, not detached, not checked out.

    Just open. Too open. All nerve endings.

    So this is me, leaving a little note on the community bulletin board of the internet:

    Hi. It’s Nakedjen.
    My head is bald. My heart is bruised. I’m still here.
    I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I know something is happening in me. Something is changing shape.

    If you’re reading this and you’re also crying in grocery store aisles, or feeling oddly fragile in the parking lot, or standing in the doorway of your own endings… come sit by me.

    No fixing required.

    Just the quiet promise that we are not alone in this, even when we feel like cracked glass.

    And if the universe has been kind enough to keep meeting me in the moments when I’m empty, then maybe it will meet me here too.

    Maybe it will meet all of us here.

    One breath at a time.

  • Badump. Badump.

    Tomorrow is my birthday.


    I’ll be 62.


    And yes, it is also my father’s birthday.


    Ironically.
    Not ironically.
    Kismet.
    Habit.


    A cosmic joke we’ve both been in on since the first day I opened my lungs and learned the sound of his name.


    It is all I’ve ever known, sharing a birthday with a man like him.
    And this year, as we all know, the birthday came with teeth.This year was very difficult for both of us.
    Me and my father.
    Two birthdays. One weather system. Climate change is absolutely real.


    He almost died while I was sitting in Bali, on the other side of the world. I was waking up to roosters and temple smoke and offerings arranged like tiny prayers in palm-leaf trays. He was intubated in a hospital outside Baltimore, tethered to machines, his breath being borrowed. I was on the phone with my sisters doing the sacred arithmetic of panic: the shoulds and coulds and woulds.


    Then I made a decision that still feels like the only one I could make.


    I decided to live my life way out loud.


    I decided to wake each morning and bow and pray to the Bali gods and goddesses in the best way I have been taught. I decided to place my hands on my own chest and hold my father’s heart in mine like it was an instrument I could keep tuned through devotion.


    Because his heart is my own.
    Let’s be honest.


    I am not being poetic. I am being literal in the only language my body trusts.
    Isn’t that what we do, ultimately?


    We keep each other’s hearts beating. No matter where we are.
    Isn’t that what love is?
    One beat here. One beat there.
    One beat in this chest answering a beat in that chest.
    Call and response.
    A long-distance holy communion. Take this beat. I’ll give you mine.

    I can feel it even now.


    His heart has a way of announcing itself.
    Sometimes it wakes me up in the middle of the night like a knock at the door. Sometimes I stop short in the middle of a busy intersection and forget the world has cars. Sometimes I stop dancing and just stare off into space because the beating gets so loud I have to listen.
    Sometimes I have to just stop.
    Because the beat is bigger than the moment I’m in.

    Badump. Badump. Badump. Wait for it….Badump.
    One beat here.
    One beat there.
    Way over there.
    Wherever he is.


    It isn’t easy sharing a birthday with a man who lives his life so loudly, so gregariously, so unapologetically. A man who has always taken up space as if space was created specifically to be taken up. A man who can turn a room into a story just by walking into it with that half-cocked grin.


    The encyclopedia could probably use his photograph, worn and tattered and sepia toned, under the definition of: life lived beyond the edges. Full of hell. Full of laughter. Full of trouble. Full of impossible charm.

    Close-up selfie of an older man in glasses smiling beside a woman smiling, both leaning into the frame.

    This little nut did not fall far from that tree.


    This is the part where I refuse to make myself small.
    Because tomorrow is not just my father’s birthday.
    It is mine, too.


    I made it to 62.


    I made it here with my own two feet and my off-key singing and my insistence on showing up again and again and again. I made it here with love in my fists. I made it here with my heart out where people can see it, which is a dangerous way to live, but it is the only way I know. I walk into the fire, never away from it.


    I have marched.
    I have fussed.
    I have fought for what’s right.
    I have loved people so hard it felt like my ribs were going to crack open and let the light out.
    I am still here.


    So, Albert. Happy birthday to you, you CRAZY (all caps) beautiful human.
    I mean it with all the love. With all the heartbeats. Every single one. Mine, too. Badump!

    Here we are again, for another spin around the sun.

    I can’t even believe it.
    I really am so grateful.

    Two birthdays.
    One world.
    Two wild hearts.
    One echo.

    Tomorrow, if you’re reading this, pause for a second.
    Put your hand on your chest.
    Feel your own drum.
    Notice the beat that has carried you through every single thing you thought might take you out.

    Then go live your life out loud.
    Keep someone’s heart beating, if you can.
    Let them keep yours.
    One beat here. One beat there.
    Badump.


    xo
    Nakedjen

    P.S. Why today? Because Sundance. It’s basically my birthday party, my church, and my annual emotional car wash. I’m volunteering (!!!) and will be in Park City for the duration starting today, so I’m kicking the celebration off early and holding the bittersweet right alongside the glitter.