The waitress looked at me with a kind of resigned kindness. “This is London,” she said after I realized my phone was gone. On my friend’s screen, its small green dot moved steadily across the map, tracing an indifferent escape through the city.

The theft happened quickly. I had stepped inside the restaurant to alert the police about a woman we'd seen on the street berating and striking her child. By the time I returned to the table, one of the young men who haunt London’s pavements pretending to be deaf had slipped a sign onto our table and, with it, taken my phone. Everyone else’s was safe. Mine had been left too close to the edge.

No one seemed surprised. The waitress had already lost two phones this year, and a woman at the next table said the same thing had happened to her, almost identically. The phrase “This is London” hung in the air like a proverb, half warning, half acceptance.

Later that night, I watched the green dot drift south across the city. I indulged, briefly, in a fantasy of marching toward it with a squad of oversized American football players to reclaim my stolen property. But the image made me laugh. I didn’t feel particularly angry, just a bit foggy about what to make of the experience, and the strange relief in losing something replaceable. It sharpens both what cannot be lost and what, if it were, would devastate.

I thought of a book I read in high school, Candide. Voltaire’s hapless hero begins by believing his tutor Pangloss, who insists that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” Voltaire meant it as mockery, but I remember liking the phrase too much. My teacher thought I had missed the point, which I did. What I admired wasn’t blind optimism, but the possibility that even in the world’s disorder, some quiet coherence persists by the meaning our minds make.

Now, experiencing through London without a phone, I see what that meant. The city feels more like an adventure to lose myself, more intimate, its pace suddenly unmediated.

At the end of Candide, after every absurd and violent misadventure, the hero concludes that “we must cultivate our garden.” It’s the line that lingers most. For me, that garden is the small, daily work of attention to what remains, to what insists on being witnessed and alchemized through feeling.

Maybe the loss of my phone was nothing more than carelessness. Or maybe it was, in some quiet way, permission to look up. From the outside, lesson and accident look the same; only in experience do they feel different.

Recap of the National Postal Museum

Yesterday’s event at the National Postal Museum took an unexpected turn. I was originally scheduled to give a talk and workshop for a group of donors, but when my co-host had to take sudden personal leave, we opened the session to all museum guests instead. The result was a lively, much younger audience, many children, including three who turn two today. 

Holly from Cambridge, one of our fellow quaintrelles, also joined, which made it even more special. There was such freshness in sharing wax seals with little ones, seeing their wonder at something so tactile and timeless.

I took many museum photos, now lost, but here are a couple from my friend, Liza's phone.

Whistlejacket - Back in Stock

This week, we visited The National Gallery and saw Whistlejacket (photo of me with my favorite horse unfortunately lost), but the real painting remains and this very special seal is back in stock!

Poinsettia, Poinsettia, everywhere

The poinsettia has quickly become the must-have seal of the season. I especially love having it in the two-tone method.

To cultivating our gardens,