Welcome to this issue of Stumped by Nature, where we notice nature lurking just beyond our screens, curate a list of outside-y events in Austin, and build community with other folks in the thick of the startup ecosystem.
In this week’s issue:
✨ Misogi 101
🌤️ Upcoming outdoors events
🥬 Local Farmers Markets
Let’s dig in!
-Nicole
PS Close the Loop is my monthly Admin Night: a protected calendar block and just enough ambient peer pressure to finally clear lingering to-dos that are quietly draining your bandwidth.
It’s productive. It’s social. It’s surprisingly satisfying.
Our agenda:
6:00-6:15 Arrive, say hi
6:15-7:45 Do the things you’ve been avoiding
7:45-8:00 Celebrate completion and move on with your life
Next one: January 20.
NATURE SPOTLIGHT
Why live a normal life of low-grade suffering when you can make it harder for yourself with applied suffering?
Today we’re talking misogi, a concept of chosen difficulty as a psyche reset, in service to a more sure-footed future.
Spoiler: there’s nature involved
So what is misogi?
Depends who you ask. But ancient people and modern people agree on one thing: it’s the antithesis of TLC’s “don’t go chasing waterfalls” advice.
A brief history
With Japanese roots, misogi refers to a spiritual practice of ritual purification. Not self-improvement. Not grit for grit’s sake. Purification.
The idea is that, as a byproduct of living, humans naturally accumulate kegare, translated as the withering of vital energy. The source of kegare include: illness, grief, death, bureaucracy, group chats.
Misogi functioned as a waste-disposal system, cleansing away the pollution of daily toil so life could move again.
Historically, this often meant cold water: standing in rivers or under waterfalls, paired with breath, prayer, and repetition. These practices were seasonal, guided, and communal. And they probably didn’t feel great to in the moment.
Samurai practiced misogi before battle. Mountain ascetics folded it into long spiritual disciplines.
The keyword here is rhythm.
The intent was clarity—removing enough residue to return to ordinary life with a sturdier foundation. This wasn’t about becoming exceptional.
Misogi: the modern remix
Untethered from its religious roots, misogi has been repackaged as a one-off, intentionally hard thing. Often annual. Often extreme.
In its best light, it can be motivating: realizing you’re capable of more than you thought, letting the little annoyances roll off now that you have Broadened Your Perspective, taking a more expansive view of the world and its potential.
Where it can fall short is when difficulty becomes performative avoidance—when misogi turns into an attempt to outrun shame, prove worth, or bypass the slower work of meaning-making. When the soul-seeking gets replaced by spectacle. When it starts smelling like a funnel into expensive 1:1 coaching and a bonus set of supplements.
So what makes something a misogi?
If we’ve learned anything from buffalo and cedar, it’s that you can call things whatever you want to call them because rules are made up, and naming conventions are especially fickle.
But if we’re being sticklers, intention matters.
There’s a blurry line between adventure sports and misogi, but intention is usually the differentiator.
There seems to be another force creeping into modernity, where misogi looks less like endurance and more like Lent or Ramadan: the intentional giving up of comforts, a symbolic sacrifice meant to reorder attention and values.
My working theory: a misogi is an act of confronting and releasing grief, resentment, or mindset that no longer serves.
It’s a shift from being passively buffeted by life to taking ownership of the narrative, paired with surrender, acceptance, and endurance. Nature tends to be the container that makes this possible.
A misogi usually:
is voluntarily chosen
sits at the edge of psychological or physical capacity
resists optimization
marks a transition
returns you to daily life changed, not exalted
Almost always, nature is involved. Water. Wind. Sun. Cold. Long roads. Changing landscapes. There’s something deeply human about seeking nature, not to escape society, but to reintegrate into it. To build community and a day-to-day life that’s actually sustainable.
If it ends in a book deal or Netflix special, we can gently raise an eyebrow.
If it’s involuntarily chosen water purification, it’s called waterboarding, and that’s a hard no.
Cold water? Yes. Intention? Unknown.
Re: cold plunges—is it a misogi or is it just cold?
If your intention is to optimize health, hit time stamps, and track streaks, congratulations—you’re probably just cold.
If your intention is to release something burdening your capacity to access the world, could be misogi.
Cold water can be a medium, but it isn’t the meaning.
Pictured: my Definitely-Not-a-Life-Crisis Backpacking Attempt, 2024
Chop wood, carry water
While I do have a personal misogi to share in a future chunk of writing, the post-misogi, reacclimated-to-society version of me is more interested in the smaller, repeatable ways life can off-gas kegare. My sightline is now on integration and maintenance.
Enter: Minimum Viable Product Misogi
When there’s an inevitable, especially tedious stretch of venture capital work layered on top of solo parenting, my version of misogi looks a lot less like chasing waterfalls and a lot more like a shower set to the temperature of the sun. It feels explicitly spiritual— a brief portal back into my body, and then back into the elementary school drop-off line.
If a daily scald is Misogi Lite Maintenance, the signal isn’t Do Harder Things. It’s a call to push back on self-imposed artificial urgency, block off my social calendar, and spend more time in the hammock.
And those feel like reasonable systems corrections.
Also 2024, and I can feel in my bones he was dropping a crucial afternoon nap. IYKYK
Your turn for storytelling
All this to say: I want to hear your misogis, great and small. I’m envisioning a Misogi Series in this newsletter, featuring readers’ experiences.
Let me know the intention things you did:
after exiting a company
to mark the end of an incompatible relationship
to metabolize the strange weight of good fortune
to move through grief, relief, fear, or hope
I’m on standby for tales of the portals from one version of life into another.
A related experiment
I’m currently building an outside-leaning community for people in the investor/founder/tech orbit who want to integrate nature into their weekly cadence as a stabilizing input.
Alongside this newsletter, we’ll gather in virtual community to encourage follow-through and share what’s actually working.
If that sounds like your people, come join us.
St. Edward’s Trail in winter
VOTING SEASON
With elections coming up, the last day to be registered in Travis County is February 2. Make sure you’re on the list!
UPCOMING EVENTS
🗓️ January 16: Pitch and Run ATX: Run with founders, funders, and folks in tech
🗓️ January 16: Trail Talks ‘26 Kickoff: Hill Climbers and Lonestartup combine founders, investors, and creators. I’ll be there!
🗓️ January 17: Mushroom Cultivation with Recycled Reads: (!!) Likely to reach capacity!
🗓️ January 17: The Board Walks
🗓️ January 18: Birding with a Ranger: at Inks Lake, just over an hour out of Austin
🗓️ January 18: Bird of Prey Demonstration +Texas Stars Hockey + Renaissance Faire Night: I have a lot of feelings about this, and they’re almost entirely positive. The negative: how did the hockey-lovers in my life let me miss years 1-3?
🗓️ January 19: Art + Gardening Talk: at Zilker Botanical Garden. Bonus: it’s Free Day! Please share your notes.
🗓️ January 20: Close the Loop: I’m hosting this! It’s an admin night. Come to socialize AND knock out the To Do list
🗓️ January 21: MoonLAUF: at UMLAUF for art after dark
🗓️ January 21: Stargazing at Reimers: Saturn and star clusters on the menu
🗓️ January 23: Not nature, Investors only: private event with curated Series A founders. If you’re an interested investor, email me, and I’ll connect you to the organizer.
🗓️ Through February 1: Fortlandia
LOCAL FARMERS’ MARKETS
👩🌾 Arboretum Food & Artisan Market Saturdays 11am-3pm
👩🌾 Barton Creek Farmers Market Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 Lakeline Farmers Market Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 SFC Farmers’ Market Downtown Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 SFC Farmers’ Market Sunset Valley Saturdays 9am-1pm. *Mushroom block giveaway from 11-1!
👩🌾 Texas Farmers’ Market at Bell Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 Texas Farmers’ Market at Mueller Sundays 10am-2pm
LAST WEEK’S HOMEWORK
Last week, we looked into squirrels. What did you notice?
How many squirrels did you see in a 24 hour period?
That’s all for this week!
In the meantime, I hope you find yourself integrated into the version of society that fits you.
-Nicole
OPTIONAL SIDE QUESTS
🪵 What’s this like for you? Email with your perspective.
🪵 Who should I collaborate with? Email with your recs!
🪵 Do you need to commission a writer? I’m happy to discuss projects that might make me cry in public/funnel my experiential/existential dread into essays like this one.
🪵 Is this newsletter not your vibe? Forward it to your enemies to make them suffer too.
💰It’s safe to assume there are affiliate links, and I’ll monetarily benefit from any purchases you make. Hooray, capitalism! So far, this newsletter has generated $3.46 of cold hard cash. 💸