05/02/2026
My Indian friends taught me something deeply poetic about birthdays. Where most of us simply say 'Happy birthday,' they wish you 'Many returns'âimplying that coming back again and again in a physical life is a blessing that leads you, eventually, to the moment of Self-realization.
This 'Many returns' speaks to me directly. Because this year, I returned.
I dreamed of creating R***e RĂ©volution when I was sixteen years old. I was in high school, and something awakened in meâan awe, a desire to live an intense creative life like Baudelaire, like Edgar Allan Poe. That dream never left me.
I didn't know then where it would lead. At nineteen, in Congo, I had time to think. I was building my project of returning to France, thinking about literature, about my love of foreign languages. The dream was there, simmering beneath everything.
During the pandemic, I launched R***e RĂ©volution in New York. I built it with collaborators I thought were aligned. Some were. Some werenât. I got exhausted. I stepped away and worked in a world that wasn't mineâcorporate fundraising that drained me completely.
But I kept coming back to what mattered, and loving a particular museum nestled in the Upper West Side.
How I came to know about its very existence is a story for another post but here's the thing: I'd been visiting the Nicholas Roerich Museum for years, taking my family there, dreaming in those rooms about art and philosophy and what culture could be. I was a silent lover of that place long before I knew I'd collaborate with them.
When the partnership finally happened, it was a beautiful surprise, but it felt like coming home.
I just had to become ready.
***eRevolution