Dear Friends,

I started reading Eastern Body, Western Mind, a book my yoga teacher recommended that blends the chakra system from ancient India with modern Western psychology. I’m still only ten percent in, but in true Adrienne fashion, I’ve already started recommending it to others. I can tell it’s going to be one of those books that changes how I see things, especially as someone interested in the relationship between mind, body, and soul and wanting to develop a healthy nervous system.

One line from the book has stuck with me all week:

So many of life’s problems stem from too much or too little of something. We spend our lives searching for balance. — Anodea Judith

Finding balance is an impossible goal. Every action you take to restore balance knocks something else off, and you have to try again. Think of balance as a north star; it can guide you, but you can never reach it.

I felt this recently. Regular readers know I used to write twice a month, but this is my first post in two months. I stepped away from writing to make room for other activities. I’ve been coding more. Both are creative acts, and for these past few months, coding has fulfilled me in the same way writing had. But eventually, I felt out of balance and needed to come back to my words.

The idea of balance came up recently during a Jeweled Horse Foundation board meeting.

Jeweled Horse is a nonprofit newly formed in 2024 to support wellbeing and cultural preservation in Mongolia. I serve on the board, and the foundation is the vision of Janis Chilton, a fellow Kalmyk Mongolian. From the start, the plan was to balance large grants and major donors with smaller, community contributions.

Unfortunately, that balance hasn’t materialized the way we expected. Recent changes in the political landscape eliminated several nonprofit funding sources, with ripple effects across the broader grant ecosystem that have made funding harder to secure. So far, the foundation has been funded almost entirely by small donations, mostly from family and friends.

And yet, even to my pleasant surprise, we’ve been able to make tangible impact with small donations alone.

Because we partner with existing organizations like the Diluv Hutugthu Foundation which are already doing meaningful work on the ground in Mongolia, even our modest funding has translated into real impact. Small donations have supported initiatives like a Zero TB for Kids program, launched in partnership with Johns Hopkins and local health authorities, alongside compassion training for educators and public service workers, social and emotional learning programs, and winter emergency preparedness.

Preserving Mongolian culture matters to me personally, but it matters even more broadly to the world. Mongolia is unlike anywhere else. As technology accelerates, and as AI threatens to flatten the world into a single monoculture, we risk losing ancient wisdom that doesn’t easily digitize.

I’m deeply pro-technology and pro-humanity, and I don’t believe in choosing one over the other.

I believe we need balance between seemingly opposing forces: compassion alongside innovation, communities that cross borders alongside preservation and pride in where we come from. Balance is not a fixed state; it’s a practice we return to so we don’t stray too far in any one direction.

So, I have two simple asks.

1. First, if you’re able, consider making a donation. We currently have a generous donor matching up to $3,000, and contributions as small as $20 genuinely help. Donations are tax deductible and all donations will be matched and go twice as far through Jan 6. Donate here. (If you do, please let me know so I can shout you out in my next post!)

2. Second, we’re looking for help securing a stable funding source of roughly $50k per year to help the foundation get off the ground. If you’re able to help, that could look like:
   – introductions to aligned donors or high-net-worth individuals interested in supporting compassion-focused work, Buddhist-inspired initiatives, or cultural preservation in Mongolia
   – information about relevant grants or foundations we should be paying attention to
   – or guidance navigating the nonprofit grant-writing world, including help with writing or strategy (simply reply to this email if you can offer any help)

Thanks for reading, and for supporting the Jeweled Horse Foundation in whatever way feels right to you. I’m grateful to everyone who’s supported Jeweled Horse in these earliest days, and to those who take the time to learn about the work we’re doing. Please consider following JHF on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

As always, a quick roundup of some of the other things I’ve been getting into:

• Attended DevConnect, the first Ethereum World’s Fair in Buenos Aires, where I volunteered at the Farcaster booth, recorded a podcast with Will from Splits, Debbie from Privy, and Limone from Builders Garden and FarCon Rome, attended the base BUILDher brunch, ate lots of steak, and made time for an afternoon of sightseeing.

• Read the book Culpability by Bruce Holsinger which explores AI ethics and morality. As we give more control to technology, are we losing our sense of personal accountability? Who is responsible when a self-driving car crashes and kills someone? When a defense drone kills a civilian? When pre-teens get negatively influenced by chat bots?

• Hosted Thanksgiving this year and we added a few new items to our traditional menu: baked mac and cheese as requested (and made) by my 14 year old son, chimichurri (because our summer vegetable garden happened to have a ton of green parsley so why not? turns out it goes great with turkey), and a cranberry pico de gallo (a huge crowd favorite - simple recipe with raw cranberry, onion, celery, sugar, lime, jalapeno, cilantro, salt). We also got our turkey from a Catskills, NY farm, and it was delicious after a 30-hour brine.

• “It’s cheaper to cover a hole in the wall with a flat screen TV than fill it. Stuff is cheap, services are expensive. AI is about to fix that.” I got a kick out of the subtitle in this recent Fintech Brainfood newsletter.

• After thanksgiving I decided I would no longer work on any new projects for the remainder of the year and only allow myself to do refactoring and maintenance. I surprised myself how much I’ve gotten done already - so many things on my list that just weren’t a priority but I’m glad to have knocked them all out! I moved from local disk storage to S3 /redis/shared cache for the lore project; added natural language search to the gmfarcaster website (was easy to do using existing components already created); integrated full transcript files and featured casts into our website, ran some security updates, and changed S3 buckets to be versioned.

Top row: Saw Foreigner at the Capital Theater; Cranberry Salsa, a street in Buenos Aires where trees, cars and buildings are in balance (there’s that word again)

Bottom row: devconnect main entrance; dog walk in the autum; and playing in the snow

Note: if you’re reading this newsletter on Paragraph or another RSS syndicate, you might only be seeing 1 image instead of a gallery of 6. Substack publication will have all the photos if you are interested in seeing them

I started this substack in December 2022 as an experiment to see if developing a writing habit would help clarify my thinking and/or provide other benefits. You can read about my original intentions in my first post or my more recent reflections after sticking with it for a year.

I write about twice a month and share musings, meditations, and links to things I’m finding interesting as I build out a farcaster-native media company, a modern technology consulting company, raise my kids, and have fun creating and learning in the worlds of crypto, tech, finance, science and wellness.

Thank you for supporting my writing and journey. If you’d like to get in touch you can reply to me here or find me on X and farcaster.

Until next time, keep putting good into the world. —adrienne🌏❤️