Meet Me in the Middle of Nowhere
Dreaming of a Lorde Summer x Lightning Field Summer
After a brief-ish hiatus from being “online”, I’m logging back on to talk about thresholds. Lately, I’ve been consumed by my own personal threshold—the one that seems to be defining my 2025. That invisible edge between what’s been and what’s next. And what’s been? Honestly, kind of bleak. But it’s not just me. Maybe you’ve been feeling it too: the restlessness, the exhaustion, the weird grief, the rage, the fear, the ache that something desperately needs to shift. It feels like the whole world is standing at the edge of something. A national threshold. A collective one. We’re all squinting toward what’s coming.
I hate my job…but there’s a recession coming, right? I consider, for the 500th time, what my “working identity” even is... then remember fascism is trending again and resist the urge to doomscroll. Thresholds, everywhere. Some existential, some economic, some algorithmic. And still, something in me stirs. Even if everything else says not now, something deeper says go.
Threshold (n):
The point of entering or beginning.
A boundary—both physical and symbolic.
For me, thresholds don’t always look like choices. They show up as flights I book before I’ve fully said yes. They arrive in songs that later act like time machines. Sometimes the threshold is invisible until long after, like Santal 33 that hits me sideways on the L train at rush hour all these years later. Sense memory. Body flashes.
The possibility of a Lorde summer (a threshold I am welcoming, tbqh) is looming in the air. To celebrate, I’ve found myself back inside Melodrama—the album etched into the long drives I took through Silicon Valley in the summer of 2017. I was working a temp tech job that was resume-cute but somehow managed to both terrify and bore me. I brought my car from Brooklyn to California. No aux cord, no bluetooth. Just Melodrama on CD.
Spotify Wrapped started in 2016, which means all those loops never made it to the cloud to mark my Lorde-entrenched summer. My employer didn’t allow Spotify on the machines either, so it became a Spotify-free season in my life—one where I was really only listening to Melodrama on CD, twice a day, in the car. That summer was a Bay Area fever dream of overpriced acai bowls, hella Keynotes, my first dance with autoimmune remission, and bracing for a future I could feel forming but couldn’t yet name. It was the first time in my life I ever drove myself to work, and the album—about 40 minutes—matched the commute. Most mornings, I’d pull into the Beamer-filled lot right as Perfect Places played. The office had zero windows, for security purposes. What the fuck are perfect places anyway? At day’s end, I’d return to my suburban sublet and feel it all wash over me again, like the song had followed me home. At the end of my contract, I got married. That particular threshold became a marriage, and eventually, an ending.
Some thresholds come for you: no warning, no way out. Others, you carve yourself. You feel the edge before you see it, and you step over anyway, because staying still starts to feel impossible.
That’s the energy behind Skypunch—a design experiment shaped by thresholds. I created it because, for me, travel and art have always been catalysts. Travel pulls me out of default settings. Art, when it lands, rearranges me. Skypunch brings those two forces together.
It’s an interdisciplinary project for creatives, artists, and curious minds. I’m dreaming up offbeat retreats that help people step outside the grind, away from the algorithm, and into places where wonder still lives. It’s a quiet rebellion. A hand extended toward the part of you that’s ready for something else.
The first Skypunch retreat is a pilgrimage to Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field—a work that perfectly embodies a threshold. Designed to be experienced over 24 hours, it asks you to slow down, to witness subtle shifts, to attune to scale, sky, and stillness. Visitors are asked to arrive with no expectations and no cameras.
De Maria’s land works explore the tension between the relative and the absolute. Through repetition, geometry, and scale, he created experiences that stretch time and demand presence. His art sits in space and asks something of you.
His interest in what can’t be captured, but must be felt, lives at the edge—between minimalism and mysticism, body and landscape, the physical world and something harder to name. The Lightning Field isn’t about what you see. It’s about what you feel.
Themes we’ll explore at the retreat:
Presence & Duration
What does it mean to truly be somewhere? What shifts in perception happen when you stay long enough to notice?
Perception & Perspective
How does an artwork change when you move within it? What does scale do to your sense of self?
Energy & Charge
How do we sense what's beyond the visible? Even when lightning doesn’t strike, what feels alive?
Trace & Transformation
What marks an experience you can’t document? What remains when nothing is recorded?
If you’ve been feeling like you’re standing at a threshold of your own this retreat might be your invitation to step through. At the time I’m writing this, there’s just one spot left (!) but you can join the waitlist for next year if it’s already full. <3
Whether or not you join us, I hope you find your own threshold moment this summer—one that stays tucked in your memory palace for years to come. The quiet kind that changes how you see, what you feel, what you know. The kind marked by a color or a Lorde track.