This isn’t closure it’s ignition. Season one closer from a lake in L.A. with the sun on my back and Teddy by my side. I look back at where this experiment started (Texas → Arizona → here) and what it’s been all about: living inside paradox and letting that space make us more alive. Presence, uncertainty, contradiction, and the messy, gorgeous practice of staying here now even when it’s hard as fuck.

This episode is a reflection, a love note, and a challenge: how alive do you want to feel? How free? I talk meditation, story-breaking, self-soothing, conflict as intimacy—and why we don’t have to wait for the world to get its shit together, or for our grief and struggles to disappear, before claiming joy and aliveness right now.

And because life loves a plot twist there’s even a lost keys saga at the very end that turned into a real-time parable about slowing down, trust, and providence.

Take what resonates, leave the rest. Season two lands October 9th.

Until then: stay present, stay ungovernable, and hold the paradox—because that shit is magic.

xSylvia

PS: In case you need a reminder of what holding the paradox means :)

• Not collapsing into either/or. Most of us want clean binaries—good/bad, right/wrong, here/there. Holding paradox means resisting that collapse and being able to sit with both at once.

  • Example: “I feel grief and joy at the same time.” Instead of erasing one, you hold them together.

    
    

• Staying present with contradiction without forcing resolution. It’s a refusal to rush into false closure just to ease discomfort.

  • Example: Being heartbroken about the world and alive with gratitude for a morning walk or whatever you fancy. You don’t have to pick one reality.

    
    

• Trusting that the tension itself is generative. The paradox is not a problem to be solved but a space where life, insight, and freedom happen.

  • Example: The season’s thesis—fuck the finish line—you don’t need to “get there” because the paradox of being both lost and found is where vitality lives.

    
    

So when I say “hold the paradox,” I’m suggesting it as a kind of compass: don’t fix it, don’t escape it, don’t smooth it over. Stay with it. Carry it. Let it pierce you. Let it open you. Over and over and over again…

Season one teaser.

Our entire unedited conversation in Zoomland, for better or for worse. You're welcome.

This week, I finally deliver on my promise to bring you a guest—and not just any guest. Amy Landecker is a force: actor, writer, director, and fierce advocate for the queer community and more. You’ve seen her in Transparent, Your Honor, and now as the writer/director/star of her feature debut For Worse (premiering Valentine’s Day Weekend 2026).

In our unedited, no-filter conversation, we go everywhere: life, death, intuition, sobriety, the binary, politics, why art matters, apologizing when we fuck up, how being down to not know is good for our love lives and art, the play she’s starring in this fall (⁠Caroline at the MMC Theater in NYC⁠), and how friends and lovers “don’t meet somewhere—they are in each other all along” (thanks, Rumi).

We also quickly shout out ⁠Brave Trails⁠, an incredible queer non-profit creating safe, empowering spaces for LGBTQ+ youth. Look them up, send your kids, or donate if you can.

Watch this week’s episode on ⁠Youtube⁠ or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Most importantly, stay ungovernable and incorruptible—because fuck fascism. Am I right? Right.

xSylv

If you listen to only one episode, let it be this one. This conversation is the spine of the podcast—the one that retroactively reframes the entire season.

Episode 10 is all about how we can unf*ck ourselves by uniting the personal and the political, the internal and the external, the somatic and the systemic.

If you’ve been swimming in questions, navigating burnout, or feeling the ache of trying to make yourself fit inside a collapsing system—this one’s for you.

I finally explore in the podcast the two distinct ways of knowing I’ve been exploring and writing about on Substack— Grid and Ocean Logic. As mentioned, I’m just building on the work of many others which are referenced below and in the episode.

Grid Logic is the hidden internalized operating system of empire. Also, algorithm daddy. Binary, rigid, control-based. It says: define, decide, dominate—or disappear.
It demands legibility, performance, and certainty—because its survival depends on keeping things fixed, ranked, profitable and extractable.
It’s the voice that says “be clear or be discarded.”
It’s the nervous system stuck in hypervigilance.
It’s the checklist of what counts as success.
It’s the fear that if you can’t explain it, it’s not real.
It’s survival, but at the cost of aliveness.

Ocean Logic is the deeper, older way of knowing. It’s quantum physics.
Nonlinear, somatic, relational.
It says: feel, notice, allow, listen—then choose.
It doesn’t need to collapse paradox or erase ambiguity to be at peace.
It’s the body’s quiet knowing before the mind catches up.
It’s the space between words where truth lives.
It’s what allows contradiction to become compost.
It’s not about rejecting structure—it’s about finding rhythm.
It’s not about bypassing discomfort—it’s about staying close to what’s real.
It’s presence. It’s multiplicity. It’s the inner logic of liberation.

Through stories, reflection, and frameworks—not as prescriptions but as invitations—we explore how these two logics shape everything: time, self-worth, productivity, capitalism, care, and love.

I’m trying to give language to what you may have felt but not totally been able to name— or maybe you have and this deepens or expands that. It’s for anyone ready to soften out of over-functioning, trust their body’s knowing, loosen the grip of performance, and find their own rhythm in this holy shit show we find ourselves wading through.

And we don’t stop at the binary. We explore what becomes possible when Grid and Ocean Logic are held in relationship—when structure and fluidity, intellect and intuition, resistance and receptivity get to dance.

Let me clear—this is not self-fucking-help. This is self-remembrance.

xSylvia

PS: If you’d like to fiscally support this space/project, that would be greatly appreciated, and you can do so via:

Zelle —> soltoppenproductions@gmail.com

Venmo —> @soltoppenproductions

The essay’s I wrote and reference in the episode:

https://wedontknowwithsylvia.substack.com/p/grid-logic-vs-ocean-logic-fck-the

https://wedontknowwithsylvia.substack.com/p/ocean-logic-language-and-lineage

• bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (South End Press, 1990), especially the essay “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.”

• Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books, 1987).

• Ermanno Bencivenga, “Oceanic Logic” in Theories of the Logos (Springer, 2017).

• Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (Pantheon, 1957); also from various lectures and writings including Still the Mind and Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life.

• Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, translated by Stephen Mitchell (Vintage, 1986).

• Michel Foucault, works on power/knowledge including Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality.

• Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011).

Also deeply influenced by:

Queer theory

Somatic and trauma-informed healing

Mysticism, recovery frameworks, and decolonial embodiment practices

The vibe is: We’re not okay. But we’re not alone. And we’re not powerless.

This week’s unfiltered dispatch comes to you from the horizontal position in my bed, right before I passed out for a much-needed nap.

We go from despair to devotion—without ever bypassing reality. I get into the state of the world—climate collapse, creeping fascism, corporate rot—and why staying tender, politicized, and present is more essential than ever.

From L.A.’s scorched edges to back-alley conversations in Texas, this is a meditation on rage, resilience, and the refusal to go numb. We shoot the shit about the myth of the “cost of living,” explore how healthcare might be the thread that unites the 99%, and make the case that your nervous system is a political resource.

This isn’t a checklist. It’s a call back to aliveness. I remind you: everybody matters. Everyone has a part to play in this cosmic clusterfuck of a dance.

Patti Smith knew what was up when she said the people have the power to redeem the work of fools—don’t let them convince you otherwise.

Also: echo chambers, righteous anger, and the quiet, world-shifting power of smiling at strangers. It starts macro, ends micro. And somewhere in the middle, there are seeds of hope—and the reminder that you’re not alone.

As always—keep what works. Leave the rest.

Until next week:
Stay loving. Stay kind. Stay ungovernable and incorruptible.

xSylvia

In this episode, I read and discuss with reverence the introduction from adrienne maree brown’s (she/they) book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. All credit for the words I read goes to adrienne maree brown. I’m sharing these excerpts for commentary and educational purposes, as a way of unpacking and engaging with her ideas.

Side note: Dear adrienne (and/or her publishers), if for some reason you’re not down with this, let me know and I’ll take this episode down in a heartbeat. A literal heartbeat.

In Episode 08 of this unhinged gospel to the unknown, we explore why adrienne maree brown says that feeling good is a political act. I planned to read just a few pieces of her introduction, but it was so good I couldn’t stop. Think feral riffing, with adrienne’s opening chapter as the bones and flesh of it. Thanks to her writing, we unpack how capitalism and scarcity mindsets drain our aliveness, and why reclaiming pleasure—real, embodied, non-performative pleasure—is an act of resistance.

As adrienne reminds us, “When you’re happy, it’s good for the world.” I hope you never forget that—and that you take time to wade in the gray area of it, because she also talks about “excess” and how that’s not what this is about.

Listeners, if you resonate with what you hear, I hope you’ll buy her book and support her work because it’s fucking amazing. Here’s a direct link for purchase and description of the book from her website:

“Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good — adrienne’s first NY Times Bestseller, adrienne wrote and gathered these essays and interviews as a way to continue studying Audre Lorde’s luminous text The Uses of the Erotic as Power, and includes a lot of very practical texts on navigating sex and connection in the #MeToo era.”

Thanks for tuning in—and as always, take what works and leave the rest.

x Sylvia

Excavating The Porous Boundaries Between Art and Love. And How Aliveness is a Form of Resistance.

This week, I take a walk through Eagle Rock, California, and reflect on what’s been surfacing—grief, impermanence, desire, and the wild fucking ride of trying to stay present when everything’s changing.

I read a poem by the late queer poet and kindred Andrea Gibson, and share the ache of not just their loss, but the mourning of all the selves I’ve been… and the paradigms I’ve outgrown—romantic dynamics, old definitions of safety, professional identity, my life in LA. Maybe you relate?

At the core of this episode—maybe this whole podcast—is the idea that aliveness is resistance. Not spiritual bypassing. Not performance. Just the act of staying with the mess, the grief, the beauty, and the bullshit as it tries to open us.

I also start to unpack what love without possession might look like, and how I’ve shifted from trying to secure external scaffolding (a home base, marriage, etc) to cultivating internal rootedness.

Side note for anyone with abandonment trauma: I fully get that “uncontained love” can feel like chaos or reenactment and I’m not saying any one way is right or wrong. I don’t go deep into that here, but know I’m holding that complexity in the background and change my mind about shit on the daily.

I also scratch the surface on the topic of resentment, too— how it stifles love and creativity, but not what it might be trying to say underneath, which will be touched on more in a future episode. This one’s about opening, not closing.

I wrap up up with Mary Oliver, a few tears, and a reminder that pleasure and play are powerful. In a future episode, I’ll dive deeper into that and how play can be post-capitalist strategy, trauma alchemy—and basically ocean logic in action.

Thanks for being here. I appreciate you. Truly.

xSylvia

Referenced in this Episode:

• Andrea Gibson – “Slip Your Mind”

• Mary Oliver – “When Death Comes”

• “Man will choose the familiar hell over the unknown any day.”
  – Referenced quote (often attributed to Thomas Merton or Anaïs Nin, origin debated).

• “Coincidence is the universe’s way of remaining anonymous.”
  – Commonly attributed to Albert Einstein (mentioned near end of episode).

• Audre Lorde – Referenced re: The Erotic as Power and sensuality as resistance.

• Dr. Mindy Nettifee – Poet and thinker mentioned for insights on grief as transformation.

• The Nap Ministry / Tricia Hersey – Referenced for the idea of rest as resistance.

• FreePlay - Improvisation on Life and Art book mentioned by Stephen Nachmanovitch.

In this week’s episode, I sit down with my 83-year-old mom, Martha (who I bribed with a brownie) for a wide-ranging conversation that spans queerness, Catholicism, grid logic, Palestine, and Pac-Man.

Well… this turned out to be more intense than I anticipated... what starts as a cozy chat between mother and daughter unspools into a much deeper exploration on how we inherit beliefs about gender, faith, politics, and identity—and what it takes to unlearn them and why it’s helpful to us.

We discuss grid logic, how binaries and dominant narratives get reproduced (often without our consent), how we return to our intuitive selves, and how cultivating humility and presence can disrupt the systems that keep us divided.

You’ll hear us laugh (I cry a little) and get fired up about stuff (mostly me), ultimately arriving with more questions than answers.

This episode includes discussion of sensitive and complex topics such as queerness, intersex erasure, religion, and the ongoing genocide in Palestine. We do our best to hold multiple truths in this episode and we do it very imperfectly.

Let me be clear: I am in solidarity with both Palestinian and Jewish lives. I unequivocally oppose antisemitism and the occupation and genocide happening in Palestine.

There are threads here, especially around intersex identity, trans embodiment, and the deeper geopolitics of Palestine and Israel that deserve more time, care, and nuance than we could fully hold in this one conversation. We didn’t get to unpack as much as I would have liked.

When it comes to intersex identity, I want to name clearly that intersex people have historically been erased, pathologized, and subjected to non-consensual medical procedures in the name of “normalcy.” This is part of what we mean when we talk about binaries and discomfort with the spectrum of embodiment. It’s a vast topic that deserves more space than we had time to give here and I am no expert.

Please research yourself and remain open, curious, and willing to learn.

All of our reflections are rooted in lived experience, not expertise, and we’re both constantly learning and unlearning. My hope is that this episode sparks reflection, dialogue, and deeper listening—encouraging us all to keep unlearning and learning together, one day at time, even when it’s messy (and when we’ll probably need to make amends.)

I do hope you’ll stay curious, do your own research, and seek out voices and resources from those directly impacted—especially when it comes to issues of identity, colonization, and liberation.

As always, take what works and leave the rest.

xSylvia