Shades of Blue (and Something New)

Returning to the fatherland, beauty hunting, and a new side project

There are certain shades of blue that make me ache. The vibrant cobalt of the doors in Sidi Bou Said—the town near Tunis where I lived as a young child, where my parents live part-time—is chief among them. I chose that blue for the entryway of our home in Brooklyn, then got a wild hair and saturated the entire back wall of the house with it too. It found its way into our kitchen, in a backsplash of blue-and-white tiles made by a retired high school science teacher I met in the seaside town of Nabeul, who hand-cuts, paints, and fires them in his garage. It’s the blue of the bluest ocean—perfect for diving into.

There are scents that do this too. The slightest whiff of jasmine transports me to Tunisia: a winding alley lined with flowering trees, where I’m seated at a café drinking mint tea as a man appears with a basket of machmoums—tiny jasmine bouquets cut while still budding, bound with red thread into the sweetest-smelling nosegays. Then there’s jasmine’s earthier cousin: oud, a dark wood whose essence is used in perfume and incense. I keep tiny bottles of oud essence all over the house—on my desk, beside the coffee maker, by the sink. I daub it on my wrists every morning and breathe in deeply. It’s my own little Proustian madeleine moment—instant nostalgia, scent stirring memory with startling precision.

I haven’t been back to the fatherland since before the pandemic. When the world opened up again, the leukemia had returned. I lost all my childhood vaccinations during my second bone marrow transplant in the winter of 2022, and had to wait to be re-vaccinated slowly, over many months, until my immune system was strong enough. Then came another relapse. In the meantime, I’ve carried the ache of distance—that particular kind of homesickness the Welsh call hiraeth. The photographer Sally Mann described it as “a near-umbilical attachment,” and that feels right to me. It’s not just nostalgia—it’s something deeper. The longing is in the bone. Marrow-deep. Like the pull of a whole lineage. When my brother moved back to Tunisia for a teaching job, and with my parents spending half of each year there, the longing only deepened. It’s as if the geography of my heart is split across continents.

But last week, I finally made it back to the Maghreb—Morocco, to be exact—on a birthday boondoggle with Jon and my college best friends. Morocco and Tunisia are like siblings who look alike but have wildly different personalities. Once, during a college summer study abroad in Morocco, I confidently asked for tabouna—the Tunisian word for bread—at a restaurant in Fez. The waiter froze, eyes wide like I’d just insulted his mother. Turns out, in Moroccan dialect, tabouna isn’t bread at all—it’s an extremely vulgar word for female anatomy. (Moral of the story: When words get weird, just point to the bread basket.)

I was 21 then. This trip, nostalgia came in two flavors: the wildness of my younger self, and a quieter, deeper contentment with who I am now and where I’ve landed. We stayed in a beautiful old hotel in Marrakesh I’d only glimpsed on that long-ago summer, when due to an unfortunate series of circumstances, I showed up at midnight, lost, without a cent in my wallet, and ended up sleeping in the maid’s quarters before my flight home—a story for another time. Then we took the train to Tangier, my favorite city in North Africa, maybe even the world. It’s the same train I used to ride every weekend as a college student—except back then, instead of puzzling over the crossword, I was sneaking smoke breaks between the cars.

It wasn’t a restful, lounge-on-the-beach kind of trip. It was far more electric than that. We wandered the lush gardens of Yves Saint Laurent in Marrakech, climbed the steep, sun-drenched streets of Tangier, haggled over treasures in the souk like it was an Olympic event, and played competitive rounds of Scrab-Grab in cafés along the corniche. Jon and our friends dubbed it a TOAL—Trip of a Lifetime—and honestly, it lived up to the name. I came home physically tired (and, yes, with a bout of covid to boot), but creatively reawakened and brimming with inspiration. I’ve been journaling nonstop, dreaming up paintings, stories, and new ideas.

And after so much beauty—those impossible blues, the towering spice turrets, the handwoven rugs, the arresting geometry of ceramic tiles—I came home with a new kind of hunger. I’m giving myself permission to indulge my visual curiosities, to follow aesthetic rabbit holes wherever they lead. On a whim, I started a side project: a separate newsletter called

Tunisiana

, the name Jon and I gave our shared design sensibility. It’s an homage to our fatherlands—Tunisia and Louisiana—and the deep braid of our Francophone and African roots. I’m imagining

Tunisiana

as a kind of digital commonplace book for beauty hunting and design intrigue. I can’t promise consistency—only that it will look and feel different from anything I’ve written before. But if that sounds even a little bit interesting, I’d love for you to subscribe and to come along for the ride.

In the meantime, I have something really special for you today—an essay and prompt called “Your Aesthetic Life” by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross. It’s excerpted from their bestselling book, Your Brain on Art, which is a science-backed exploration of the healing power of art. May it help you find new ways to enrich and amplify your days—to realize a technicolor life.

Some Items of Note—

It’s been a very exciting week over here, so I have a few things to note in case you missed them:

• If you missed last Sunday’s meeting of the Hatch, our virtual creative hour, you can find the replay here! We reflected on how art can transform despair to laughter, how we create ourselves through words, and how we learn to follow our intuition.

• I did a very special virtual event using Substack’s newest feature, GoLive, this week (well, my first successful one) with the brilliant humans over at The Ink. Among other things, we talked about how journaling and 100-day project transformed my writing and saved my life. Watch it here!

• We shared the third installment of a new summer series, Journaler’s Routine, where the beloved illustrator and author Liana Finck shared how she uses pen and paper to puzzle through. Read it here!

Henry Golden Dearth, Flecks of Foam (1911-12)

Prompt 347. Your Aesthetic Life by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross

So what does it really mean to live with an aesthetic mindset? Imagine just one day in your life where arts and aesthetics are seamlessly integrated. Your morning routine might include simple sensory choices to begin your day. Smell informs as much as 75 percent of our emotions, and you’ve selected favorite scents to wake you up.

In the shower, you sing a tune that you can’t get out of your head, and this activates multiple brain areas, all of which are connected by complex neural networks. Even just humming becomes an act of pleasure, activating the vagus nerve and engaging the parasympathetic system to help you feel good. Your brain is humming, too, now, and you begin to feel good as endorphins are released. And as the warm water quenches your trillions of skin cells, a sense of calm washes over you, activating your nervous system, improving balance, and putting you in an alert, cognitively ready state of mind for your day.

You have a daily art practice that is as vital to you as exercise and meditation routines. Art, you now understand, isn’t only a hobby, it’s a conversation with yourself, a way to connect your mind, body, and spirit and to support your health and wellness. Some days, it’s just twenty minutes of sketching or doodling to reduce cortisol after a challenging or stressful experience. Other times, it’s something tactile, like sculpting with clay, knitting, or gardening, where your mind wanders and you are in a flow state. The sensation of working the clay, the yarn, the soil, in your hands stimulates skin and nerve endings and ignites the body’s internal sensory receptors. Through sensorimotor pathways, you feel instantly attentive, awake, and receptive. Art-making here is not about the end product. It is a process, an active way of being and knowing.

As your day progresses, should a headache hit, a dose of dance and movement helps; when anxiety rises, tuning forks in C and G create a sound wave that soothes the fight-flight-freeze response and elicits relaxation.

On this day, you make time to be in nature. The sunrise, a red cardinal alighting on a branch, wind in your hair, the yellow freshness of daffodils, all inspire a brief pause to appreciate the awe of the natural world. Being reconnected to nature’s rhythms supports and sustains us, and you are now more aware that these simple everyday aesthetic moments activate neurochemicals already in your brain, like dopamine and serotonin. The beauty of the natural world is motivating and mending you in small ways.

In the evening, you make plans to see live music, catch a dance or theatre performance, or visit a local arts venue with friends. It’s great to be together, experiencing and enjoying a range of art forms, but that’s not all. You are gaining empathy and perspective, being immersed in new feelings and ideas, enhancing the conditions for flourishing.

At the end of the day, there is the intentional art of making a meal. There is more music that soothes the mind, whether you are creating it or listening to it. You might watch a sunset or a moonrise. When you are ready for bed you dress yourself in fabrics that feel good on your skin, while the sounds of nature lull you to sleep.

The arts have the ability to transform you like nothing else. They can help move you from sickness to health, stress to calm, or sadness to joy, and they enable you to flourish and thrive. They can lead you to profound altered states, changing your very physiology.

The arts have always offered the highest form of hope, and science is now providing new knowledge that each of us can immediately use.

Just as your brain waves oscillate with the electric energy of rhythms, just as sound and color vibrate through you, the personal choices of your aesthetic life feed and support your unique self.

Are you ready? The world, and its beauty, are there waiting for you.

Your prompt for the week:

Reflect on how arts and aesthetics are seamlessly integrated in your life. What do you wake up to—colors, sounds, scents? Where do you go? What do you do, see, hear, or make? What do you cook and eat? What is the capstone of your day? What would you like to cultivate more of?

Today’s Contributors—

Susan Magsamen is the founder and director of the International Arts + Mind Lab, Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she is a faculty member. She is also the co-director of the NeuroArts Blueprint. Susan works with both the public and private sectors using arts and culture evidence-based approaches in areas including health, child development, education, workforce innovation, rehabilitation, and social equity.

Ivy Ross is the Chief Design Office for consumer devices at Google, where she leads a team that has won over 225 design awards. She is a National Endowment for Arts grant recipient and was ninth on Fast Company’s list of the one hundred Most Creative People in Business in 2019. Ross believes that the intersection of arts and sciences is where the most engaging and creative ideas are found. Get a copy of Your Brain on Art here.

For more paid subscriber benefits, see—

• Mothers, Daughters, & the Artist’s Life, a video replay of the artist talk from “The Alchemy of Blood,” my joint art exhibit with my mom, Anne Francey, where we discussed how the works came into being, the meaning we make of them, the joy of aging, and the high-wire act of balancing motherhood and creative work

• On Hiraeth, or Distance Pain, a recap of our virtual creative hour where we read a passage from Sally Mann’s Hold Still and wrote about places we long for—for their beauty, for the sense of belonging, for the “memory of a memory past”

• Goodbye to All That, an installment of my advice column Dear Susu where I answered a reader’s question about leaving the city, real estate, and big dreams

• On Writing Yourself Home, a video replay of my Studio Visit with the generous and brilliant Nadia Owusu, where we talked about journaling as creative source material, writing your way through trauma, and how memoir can be a radical act of reclaiming the self

My new side project: Tunisiana

I’ve started a newsletter called Tunisiana where I’ll be sharing visual and design intrigue. I can’t promise consistency, but if you’re up for surprise moments of beauty, join me!