It is a new year, it feels different, but mostly the same. I have set new intentions though they don’t feel all that new. Just some ideas and ways of being I have been already circling around but want to give more intention and weight. This year is the year of committing to it, of choosing to not just create art or write poetry, but be a writer, be an artist, be a poet. The difference is subtle, but important. Committing to the identity, the process of creating as something intrinsically a part of who you’re being allows for a practice that is sustainable. It leaves room for imperfection. There is ample time to get things wrong or try something and have it not work out because creating is (for lack of a better word lmao) a lifestyle. Once I became okay with creating “bad” or “mediocre” work the more I fell in love with it, the more I was capable of creating prolifically. Sometimes I can’t help but laugh because life feels like the same truth in a constellation of different variations.
So, this newsletter is officially partially paid! The deal is as I mentioned before. 1 newsletter a month, at the beginning of the month, free, and the rest which is currently looking like (in total) 3-4 times a week depending will be paid, as in available to you if you had a paid subscription. This is of course free. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!
That is all, on to the newsletter…
If you want to cross the estuary to get to the much quieter beach on the other side you need to take a one minute boat ride for 1000 colones, or else swim across in murky crocodile waters. If you're lucky and it’s low tide you can wade close to the sea holding your valuables over your head. This time I was alone, so I took the boat, catching a ride with a mother and her two daughters. They were all very pretty in an uncomplicated way. I could have mistaken them all as sisters at first glance. The mother showed me her stick and poke that her daughter's roommates did on her forearm, three flowers for her three kids, all summer babies. She didn’t tell me where her other kid was. In the one minute boat ride I found out all of this, and that they all lived in the town I went to high school in. It all felt very serendipitous. There were two portals, one by way of edible and one by way of boat. By the time I was on the other side, it was like I was completely transported.
I spent the last parts of the day walking alone on the beach talking to future versions of myself on voice memo like I often do when I’m traveling alone. It felt like sort of a natural progression, as I would always end up talking to myself out loud anyways. At least now I could listen to them back.
My dad told me he saw this strip of beach on a Microsoft screensaver, it was a crazy thought to me that it was all so real, here and now. Maybe somewhere people were looking at this on their screen and here I was splashing around.My real fleshy body submerged in saltwater and my hair dusted with sand. It all felt too real to be real. It all felt so impossible. Like a dream or a childhood memory where an afternoon of playing stretched out forever. Like you might have been in this moment for your entire life.
If I traveled further I knew I would find rocks filled with tide pools, home to sea urchins and small shelled creatures and baby crabs, but I was alone and the sun was sinking further and further into the horizon, so it was my cue to go.
It was all so romantic. No, not romance like the performance of it, nor romance as a tool to woo the other, romance as an experience of the richness of life.
In googling a definition for romance, one particular line felt resonate, “a remoteness to everyday life.” Time seems to rule the everyday as we sort things out into before, after, if only, then. However, romance seems to exist outside of the realm of time, inside a deep presentness that can only exist within the here and now, approaching something that feels mysterious and alive.
These are moments that feel out of time. Moments that are so rich and layered on thick that being submerged in them makes you feel like you have finally learned what life is all about. All of these moments feel like the same moment, yet, every time, it feels brand new, like a revelation.
Engaging with the romance of life seems to be something close to breaking open a moment and expanding it into something greater than the sum of its parts, finding that ineffable thing again and again.
There are many pathways here, sometimes you find yourself walking home or riding a bike and wonder creeps up on you like an old friend. Sometimes it is intentional. It involves tools and rituals to deepen reality: lighting a candle, having a long morning or a late night, a playlist, a vice, a journal, a walk, telling a story about the experience you’re having and suddenly you are transported.
The online trend of romanticizing your life is worthy of note. There is a lot more discourse about this than I care to get into, so I won’t get too much in the weeds about it, but the desire to make our lives into a story and expand our experience of reality is a part of it. You could just be reading a book, or you could light a candle, dim the lights, set the mood, and all of a sudden it’s something different altogether.
Like I talked about in story-telling alchemy, I’ve been thinking lately about how our capacity to perceive is what co-creates the richness of life. It maybe isn’t so much that we are witnessing what is already there, but the witnessing itself does something more, the present aliveness of the moment is not independent of our capacity to perceive it, our capacity to break it open. Maybe this seems like an awfully narcissistic human impulse, to believe that we are critical to the magic of the world. Though I don’t think this is just the role of humans. It makes me think about many mornings at my parents house that I let my old dog out, and watch as she sits or stands on the deck to stare at the lake, taking in the morning. Her eyesight has deteriorated over time, so I’m not quite sure what she can see anymore, but she has continued this practice even if it’s for just a few moments, to turn her nose up to the wind and catch the breeze pushing off the lake. I can’t help but think the lake needs her in some ways. Something is taking place that is beyond what I can articulate in words.
I went through a stage when I was 17 where I was obsessed with quantum physics (I evidently go through a lot of random stages lmao). The double slit experiment was something I read up on the most. A sort of butchered explanation: particles were thrown at a board that had 2 tiny tiny slits. They found that when unobserved the particles would go through both slits simultaneously sort of behaving like a wave, but once observed by an ocular device the particles would “choose” a slit to go through and behave like particles. It seemed that the act of observation created a change in the experiment, the particles collapsed into a particular timeline in which one slit was “chosen” to travel through by the particles.
The world of the quantum is an unruly and chaotic one. More and more it seems to reveal that the “world” is not independent of our capacity to see, hear, touch, smell, or witness it. In many ways, it answers the age old question, if a tree collapses in a forest and no being that has the capacity to interpret sound is there, does it make a sound? No, no it doesn’t. (Though, the question of if trees have the capacity to interpret sound waves, might be a more apt).
We seem to be an intrinsic part of this experience here on earth. In many ways, choosing to perceive the romance of life is what makes romance readily available in reality.
Many stories on the beach
Some new and old good omens
Creature comforts (or lack thereof)
You can’t make this shit up. That is the only thing I could think of as the hostel I would be working at for the next three weeks or so, started completely flooding in muddy knee deep water. The flood felt biblical, flooding in January, a month or so into the dry season was near unheard of. The whiplash of migrating from the family vacation life to the hostel life was a sharp one, brought in by the proverbial and all too literal floodgates. I spent the evening drinking beer, watching people play chess in knee deep water, sloshing across the street to the bar to drink more, concluding in one big 20 person slumber party with people I met only hours before as everyone from the flooded rooms migrated upstairs spreading our mattresses on the floor. I woke up in the morning, and like magic, all the water was gone leaving muck and dirt in its wake.
Giving up regular comforts in such a dramatic way was nothing short of brutal. I take a lot of pleasure in the contrasts of life, in the variety of experiences that are possible, but even this was a little much for me. Hostel life is always a humbling experience, but I found pockets of little comforts, little moments for myself cooking alone in the kitchen listening to a familiar podcast, going to cafes to write, finding moments alone to watch Gilmore Girls. LMAO that has been a big one for me, whenever I’m feeling out of my comfort zone, I turn to Gilmore Girls the steady consistency, the reoccurring characters and settings provide me so much unexplainable safety. In moments that feel really out of my comfort zone, prioritizing normal-ness in small ways is always a cheat code.
That is all for this weeks edition of notes on here and elsewhere. (geez that name is a bit of a mouthful, maybe NH&E?)
Find a moment for romance this week, break a moment open, make it special, the candle needs you to light it, the sky needs you to notice its beauty, reality needs you to write it into being.
Talk soon.
Love always, Thai x
some instas
@hereandelsewhere
@hereiflow