The Golden Line

I’m excited to share three pieces of news:

1. An update on Sunlight Papers
2. New original music for Circles of Care
3. A new Sunlight Paper called The Golden Line

Since I last wrote nine months ago, I’ve been working to refine the Sunlight Papers project — redesigning its website based on the geometry of the physical papers; creating a new interactive audio/image player for experiencing the papers with vocal narration, original music, subtitles, and explorable images; and putting together a simple About page describing the philosophy of the project. You can explore the redesigned website at sunlightpapers.com.

Here is the new theme music for Sunlight Papers, composed by Julio Monterrey:

I love how simple, playful, friendly, timeless, and iconic it feels. It reminds me of the wonderful theme music from Reading Rainbow, a TV show that I loved to watch when I was a little boy. Thank you, Julio!

Nine months ago, I shared Circles of Care: On scaling attention. It was presented basically as a blog post — words and images displayed in a scrolling linear format like any other news article or online essay. That format never really felt right to me. Circles of Care (like all Sunlight Papers) really wants to receive each viewer's undivided attention, opening up a sense of meditative immersion and grounded self-reflection — but a scrolling blog post format just couldn’t seem to offer that.

So I asked Julio to compose a musical score for Circles of Care — one that could sit alongside the vocal narration, without feeling overpowering. The music he created is really quite beautiful.

You can explore the resulting Circles of Care here (press the Play button).

Back in 2021, I spent four days camping in the wilderness of New Mexico on a Nature Solo. When I returned to camp with the rest of the group, a heavy snowstorm suddenly descended, and I started to hear a voice speaking the above-pictured words, which I quickly wrote down in my notebook.

Over the next few years, I shared this brief text from time to time with friends and family members, and it always seemed to resonate — a playful reminder about responding to life in each moment, without becoming too attached to plans.

The title “The Golden Line” is a phrase I heard from my teacher, Jose Stevens. He uses that phrase to describe the process of learning to surrender to the flow of life. Another favorite teacher, Christopher Alexander, used a similar phrase — “the unfolding process” — to describe the practice of always doing “the next clear thing” and trusting in the path that emerges, without needing to know exactly where it is going. It’s a philosophy of life that you find in many different places, even the famous graduation speech given by Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2005, in which he talks about his intuition to take a calligraphy class in college as ultimately shaping the way in which typography would be handled on all modern computers.

This past winter, using Japanese black ink and acrylic colored inks on Arches watercolor paper, I made a series of illustrations to accompany The Golden Line — introducing a fun and slightly goofy egg-headed character who I call “Peter Plan.” Once again, I worked with Julio Monterrey to create original music, and assembled the various pieces using the newly redesigned Sunlight Papers interface.

You can explore The Golden Line here (press the Play button).

Wishing you a wonderful summer!

— Jonathan