My name is Jesse Paris Smith. Hello to you :) We might be meeting now for the first time, we might be old friends, or you might know me a little bit already through music or climate action, travel or family, or perhaps another venue altogether. You might have read the guest post I wrote for my mom’s Substack in September, an obituary story of love for our dear cat, Cairo. Maybe you met me through my Instagram profile, MichiganManhattan, and if so, thank you for your support and encouragement, through reading and engaging with my shares and captions throughout the years. That name, ‘MichiganManhattan,’ is significant and personal to me, as I was born in Michigan in 1987 and we moved to Manhattan in 1996. It’s a seemingly simple and straightforward bit of data, though it represents and incorporates nearly everything to me. Both of those places are home, have been guides in my journey through life, and have formed and shaped who I am today, through sorrow and grief, imagination and discovery, nature and culture, input and output, memory and desire, hope and longing - my inner world and the external forces. I am looking forward to sharing more on this all, to delving into and expanding more widely on topics and ideas than I’ve been able to on Instagram, and with the added ability to incorporate other mediums, too - and I of course look forward to learning from you also, to discovering new things together with each new day. I’m thankful to my mom for her suggestion that I start a Substack of my own, and I have a good feeling that I’ll really like being in this new space with you all.
I’ll start now by introducing myself a bit more - who I’ve become so far in this life, and what I’m most interested in focusing on for the months and years ahead.
Read along below, and if anything resonates with you, I hope that you will join me.
Learning and Writing
I’ve found as an adult that I really do love to learn, to listen closely and ask questions, to study and take classes, read books and articles, and to acquire knowledge from others. My most proficient skill is probably writing, to process and share what I’ve learned through typing on the computer or writing in notebooks with my messy handwriting that I have trouble deciphering later. I love when a project requires some research, and I also find that writing can unearth remembrances from the past and help bring to light new realizations. I like how different styles and moods can serve a purpose or need - straight forward essays about inspiring topics or stories of personal memories that are sacred to me. I also write poems, a personal practice that’s helped me since I was a teenager, to express and process emotions in strange and secret ways, and to capture and contain the energy of my nightmares and dreams.
Piano and Music
In addition to writing, it’s been a fundamental gift throughout my life to play piano and to write my own music and songs. This is a cherished practice (not a ‘perfect’) that is deep and special and for which I am truly grateful. Though I am not the most technically advanced musician, playing music is profoundly healing to my heart and has helped me immensely from the first notes I ever sounded long ago. The world of playing and performing music has probably taught me the most of any other area. It has brought the most diverse and unique travels and adventures, collaborations, connections, and powerful life lessons than any other medium or practice I’ve engaged with. Over the years, I’ve written both instrumental pieces and songs with words, and I enjoy the unique challenge and structure of writing lyrics. I sing songs and play piano at home as a regular practice, to process and navigate through sorrow and joy, to reconnect with my body, and to dissipate and empty out those distracting spiderwebs of my brain. I’ve played with musicians on stages locally and all over the world, been a member of many different bands, toured on the road and recorded in the studio, I’ve worked both for a company and as a freelancer doing sound production and film composing, and I’ve learned the ins and outs of both onstage performance and offstage production. There is so much to share about all these different entry points of music. It all started when I was a young teenager, and I couldn't have imagined the many layers of what I would learn and discover, the wild and winding path that lay ahead and continues to unfold today.
Healing Power of Music and Sound
In 2008, when I was 21 years old, everything began shifting when I found myself deeply drawn to the healing power of sound. Following this intuitive curiosity, in 2013 I enrolled in a 9 month professional training in psychoacoustics and therapeutic sound and music, a deeply transformational experience that forever changed my life, completely shifting the course of the musician I was shaping into and the individual person I was becoming. I graduated from the program in June 2014, and I realized more than ever that I wanted to more intentionally use my skills, abilities, and platforms to communicate with and help others somehow, and I learned that this in fact was the true meaning of ‘purpose.’ So much of who I am today is because of that training and the things I broke open in myself during those unbelievably humbling and emotional months of learning and unlearning.
Grief and Loss
My personal ‘track’ or ‘focus’ during the 9 month training was ‘Music and Sound for Grief and Loss,’ and following graduation, I immersed myself in the study of grief, a highly personal life-topic for me, as the losses I experienced in childhood were the major turning points of my own timeline, when my Daddy died and we moved from Michigan to Manhattan. As a lifelong processor of this identity shaping loss and subsequent losses into adulthood, I consider myself somewhat of an ‘expert griever,’ and I feel a sense of home and purpose when I am sharing words and a listening ear with someone experiencing a personal grief story of their own. It’s a language and space that makes sense to me, and feels perhaps I can do the most good.
Grief Support and Education
Since 2017, I’ve served as a certified Grief Support Coach and Grief/Death Educator, developing my own personal practice, and working as a Moderator for the Creative Grief Studio (since 2021), assisting certification students training to become grief support practitioners. I’ve continued my studies also, taking courses, attending conferences, talking with professionals, and reading books and articles focused on subjects of trauma, childhood anxiety, attachment theory, thanatology, end of life planning, sleep and recovery, and more. There is so much I want to study, and I feel as though I could remain solely as a student forever, but as one of my teachers told me a few years ago, ‘your pencil is sharp enough!’ That’s a bit hard for me to believe sometimes, but I am trying! There will always be more to learn, and I can always continue to study and ask questions, but it’s so very important to share what we’ve gathered along the way, and connect with each other as much as we can during our process, in fact it’s our responsibility to do so and the purpose of it all. <3
Climate Action and Pathway to Paris
In addition to music, writing, and grief support, I also have been deeply concerned about the urgent climate crisis since I was in high school. In 2014, in response to the People’s Climate March in NYC, cellist Rebecca Foon and I co-founded a climate action non-profit called Pathway to Paris, which actually began as a way to bring musicians and artists into the climate movement in an effective and meaningful way. After a year of concerts and events that culminated with two nights in Paris during Cop21 in December 2015, the initiative evolved into a project focused on helping cities transition to zero emissions/100% renewable energy, designing and implementing strong and ambitious climate action plans to meet and go beyond the targets outlined in the Paris Agreement. We have an amazing technical team based in Canada (where Becky lives too), consisting of some of the most incredibly brilliant and hardworking climate experts in the world. I am the only American on our team, and though we are far apart, we communicate often and have plans and ideas for 2024, our 10 year anniversary! Event production and hosting is where I am most skilled and useful, and I loved organizing our concerts over the years, a regular offering that took a major halt during the pandemic, transitioning to virtual for a while, and on pause for now. Those events were such a great feat of partnership and teamwork, and the unique memories of collective community action and collaboration still bring on such a powerful and energizing feeling when I think back on them all. Our work might look different in the future as we focus more on education and cities, but we will still do our best to plan some community based efforts and gatherings for 2024.
Thank you for Reading
So these are some of the areas where I’ve given my energy and attention over the years, and where I’ve learned such valuable life lessons that I continue to draw from. Though these parts of life may (or might not) seem quite separate and different, they continue to flow in and out of each other, to elevate and inform, and to surprise me in meaningful and life-changing ways. Over the years I have tried often and creatively to merge these worlds together, and I have an exciting feeling that here with this new venture and platform, I’ll be able to share them all perhaps for the first time, as one cohesive offering. When I think about my Substack, I picture just that, these separate paths of life that converge all together as one, un-fragmented and whole. I am so thankful for this opportunity and look forward so much to sharing this new experience with you all.
Forthcoming Content To Be Shared with You
On Tuesdays and Thursdays I will send out a newsletter to my subscribers, and the writing and content will often draw from one or all of the areas introduced above. Sometimes I will write letters that are based on research and experience, like an article or essay, and sometimes I will share pieces that are more personal and imagination driven, like a prose or short story. Oftentimes I will write about grief and loss, offering words or creative exercises to engage in, and invitations for reflection and discussion. I will share stories and personal memories, poems and dreams, music and song lyrics, intentional sound compositions, audio and video, art projects and photographs. I will spotlight teachers and mentors, share stories and notes of wisdom from individuals I have learned from along the way, travel diaries with photos and links, articles and books that have brought inspiration, questions we can ponder together, history we can remember, and futures we can imagine. I used to think that all these things were quite separated, but the older I get, I realize more and more how truly interconnected everything is, and how much there is to learn with fresh eyes and ears when we share our findings and discoveries with each other. When we are open to feedback and new points of view, familiar ideas can become fresh new discoveries, the best sort of authentic collaboration. I hope you will join me on this modern adventure. Thank you so very much for trusting me with your eyes and ears, and with your sacred time. I am truly grateful and I will do my best with each new share.
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Thank you so very much for your time and for your support. :) Looking forward to sharing this adventure with you.
A Happy Moment looking forward <3, 2023
