Home is a Yellow Notebook | Wherelse 004

Wherelse is the Living Guide to Living Good

In This Issue:

📝 Editor’s Note: “Maktub to it all”
✈️ What is a Threshold City?
📍 Next Week in Wherelse

Maktub to it all.

From the First Page of My New Notebook

I never quite know how to answer when people ask where I live. I’ve started saying that “I travel around, but when I feel homesick, I come back to Paris.” It’s partially true, and a little more graceful than just admitting I’m homeless.

This week, I started a new notebook. It’s hardbound, leather, and dyed yellow. I bought it two months ago on June 4th in Cairo, at a little bookbindery off the Sharia al-Khayamiya, the Tentmakers Street. I had the cover embossed in gold foil with a rising sun and the Arabic word مكتوب: Maktub. “It is written.”

I’ve been saving it for the right moment. August 4th in Paris just felt right.

I wrote some words on the first few pages as a commitment to a career shift, and as a Redeclaration of Purpose to my way of inhabiting the world. I want to live a life where I wake each day closer to the person I know I’m here to be: as a writer, creator, a founder — as a traveler and storyteller.

Today, I received a text from a friend in Poland. She’s just been accepted to acting school — a major life-pivot. She asked how Paris was and what’s next for me. I told her, “I think I may hit the road again as soon as next month.” I would’ve never seen that as a possibility if I hadn’t taken the leap and left Paris back in April. I told her, “Now it feels like the whole world could be home.”
Funny how fast your perspective can shift like that.

Wherelse started as a way to make sense of all the places I’ve been and all the places I’ve yet to go. At some point, I stopped trying to explain how when someone asks if I’ve moved somewhere, I just say “yes.” It’s simpler. Maybe that’s the real answer: wherever I am, I can belong.

So this issue of Wherelse begins, as I did, with a yellow book. A little rising sun I can carry with me. A reminder that even as everything changes, the path has already been written.

Maktub to it all. And to it all, I say yes.

---

What is a Threshold City?

There are cities you move to, and there are cities that move you. For all intents and purposes, Wherelse is about cities. We love cities because they’re the fullest expression of human creative capacity. Looking around and realizing that everything you can see and touch was made by, or put there by someone just like you. It puts us all on the same scale and makes you realize that you are capable of that same creativity that literally builds the world around us.
This is what I mean when I talk about a threshold city. It might not be a capital or a final destination, but it’s a place on the edge of something. I’ve been traveling through threshold cities for the better part of a year now, and I intend to keep doing so.

Tangier is the entry point to Africa, so close to Spain it could kiss the rock of Gibraltar. Istanbul sits between continents, split by the Bosphorus, always looking both East and West. Forward and backwards in time. Oklahoma City, in its own way, is a threshold city. You can feel the potential energy seeping up through the sidewalks.

These are cities that hold people mid-shift, where no one’s asking you to be any version of yourself you’ve already outgrown.

So about a year ago, I started asking people a really simple question:
“Do you feel like you’re in a season of arrival, or transition?”

Easily over a hundred people, not that I’ve been keeping count. Not one person has ever said arrival. Every single person says transition.

That tells me something about us — collectively, generationally, whatever.
About what we need, and about what Wherelse is really trying to map.

I started Wherelse to make sense of how place changes people —
and how certain cities seem to give you just enough distance to re-meet yourself. My goal with this has always been to write more than a diary and certainly more than a newsletter.

I named it Wherelse because that’s the paradox of how I move.
If I don’t like where I am, I ask where else. If I do like where I am, I’m still asking where else. I believe that’s not to escape, but to expand. I believe that’s core to who we are as human beings— we seek expansion through the unknown.

So here’s where it’s going:

• More stories from other voices — artists, travelers, locals, and people in motion

• Cross-channel content — not just essays, but lots more video and design.

• A permanent digital home — a site that feels like a threshold of its own!

• Collaborations with brands and people I admire — limited drops, joint projects, etc.

• Workshops, dinners, and pop-ups. Starting in Paris, expanding outward.

  
  And always, the central question:
  Where else could we go?

So, why Paris?

Paris isn’t a threshold city, by any of my above definitions. It’s something else entirely though. I’m making Paris the unofficial “headquarters” of Wherelse because of one simple truth- Everyone passes through this city eventually. Some come to stay a while and reinvent themselves. Some come to be look back in time. But most, I think, come to fall in love.

That’s why Wherelse is headquartered here: to create from what I see as the center of culture while chasing the fringes of What’s Next.

Because… if everyone’s in transition,
maybe it matters where we pause to tell our stories.

Next Week in Wherelse,
we’re dressing the part.

Have suggestions or stories you'd like to see?
Send me an email — I love love letters.

A Note to New Readers:

Welcome! I’m Jackson Greathouse Fall, an American based in Paris, living on the road. I write stories about the places I go, the people I meet, and how it all fits together.

Wherelse is my handmade weekly dispatch: part travelogue, part love letter, and a guidebook for the emotionally adventurous.

I’m also on Instagram and TikTok, where I share reels and engage in more visual storytelling. If you like this, you’ll love that.

Avec Grand Plaisir,