First, some housekeeping. To those getting this newsletter in their email inbox drag it from promotion to main (if it keeps showing up in promotion *sigh*). & if you wanna get notes on here and elsewhere in your inbox, subscribe, you won’t regret it! Secondly, I’ve been considering posting consistently on a specific day. It’s felt great having things come out when they come out, but I think the ritual might be nice (me having a writing ritual & you knowing when you will receive it). So I’m deciding that day will be today Thursday (additionally the Leo new moon). That is all!>
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I spent the weekend in Saskatchewan for my great grandmother’s celebration of life. The prairies offer wide open space. The type of space that I’ve been asking for, when things felt too crowded around me. Yet, now having quit my job, I’m experiencing the other side of space, the thinly veiled, at times dreamy and rhythmic malaise, of wide-open plains. It’s the type of malaise that inexplicably makes me feel like ~nothing is happening~ even when life is still life-ing. This trip became the culmination of what I was terming my cowgirl era: vaguely inspired by @sighswoon’s discussions of the cowgirl archetype, and my desire for the ultimate experience of a roguish independence and the freedom of space. In witnessing the expansiveness of the plains I thought to myself “oh well I guess I’ve arrived.” This timeline has reached its most literal conclusion. The cowgirl embodiment of leaving-in-the-night and choosing yourself above all else will forever be a part of who I am, but, but I feel it is time to retire her and move on to other expressions of myself.
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Loss in Two Acts (it must be love).
Let me set the scenes of loss, and grief, that remind us that it must be love, and here, here there are many>>>
Gymnasium of the united church where the basketball hoop is hung on the back wall (and the other hoop is folded into the ceiling to give way to the projector screen), a glass punchbowl with a matching ladle, little platters of treats (some homemade, others store bought), a framed photo of the beloved by a three wick candle, small plastic water bottles lining the table runners, little single wrapped treats: flecked gold punctuating deep purple, heads bowed or else nodding, words caught in throat, laughter, of course, and the understanding that Christmas might never be the same (though it hasn’t been the same for many years now).
And another one…
Two wind chimes (because this loss is not a singular one), birds that aren’t quite yellow but have yellow bellies, wild sage, loss collecting around itself by way of rocks, small plastic blue dolphins (because she loved dolphins) fallen in between stones because of the wind or just the wearing down of time, a beaver’s damn and a man-made hole in-between, chirping of crickets, Costco potato salad (soiled with radish and bacon to the dismay of some), the old fire pit spot that we can’t use anymore because the land gave herself over to the creek, a spiral notebook almost as old as me where I’ve been talking to the dead for as long as I can remember, “I’m older than you now” I would want to write than think better of it.
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Interlude: Inspiration is a practice (from a place of feeling uninspired)
I’m feeling uninspired, but that’s okay because I remind myself that inspiration is a practice. As a writer, I am reminded again and again that inspiration is a small fraction of the puzzle (as it goes it is only 1%), and consistent routined effort is where the real writer emerges (or any creative for that matter). Yet, here’s the thing, I need inspiration to write. I can’t collect things from the void if there isn’t direction, or some type of momentum moving me forward. I need to feel that there is something greater than myself that I am communing with. Without this, I’m just dragging my body along, then getting angry at myself when the work is subpar, then (naturally) spiralling into despair because I made things denser than they needed to be (“I’m a bad writer” “I can’t create consistently” “What does this say about me?” “Well, I’m just not smart enough, not creative enough, not unique enough” <etcetcetc>, “Why can’t I just…”).
What about inspirations origins?
Being filled with the breath of the divine, being breathed into and/or the breath as a portal to an elsewhere beyond yourself. This feels closer to how I understand inspiration, not as a singular moment, or a great idea that strikes you seemingly out of nowhere, but something that you are in relationship with, something that is a practice. The breath is always happening but to use the portal that the breath can be, you need to tune yourself into it, that’s why the basics of all meditation is to witness the breath. Inspiration, to me, follows the same logic, it is always taking place perhaps just in the background, but to open the portal you need to practice tuning into it.
<to write like a poet, you have to live like a poet> (or something like that…sometimes it just takes lighting a candle)
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I never considered this small town in Saskatchewan, not so much until now. It just always felt like a give in, in the same way my great grandmother’s house always felt like give in. Now not so much. I tell my sister that nothing gets me like the passage of time, as I cry to a photo slideshow my uncle made of almost a century of life accompanied by a Maroon 5 song. I always cry during the bridge of Castle on the Hill by Ed Sheeran when it comes on the radio, not because its particularly moving but because ~things changing~ makes me so sad. But, of course, thing are doing what things do and that is change. If anything, it reminded me that I am this small life living in relation to this matrix of all these other lives that have loved, created, and lost.
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POV you are going through your great grandmothers teenage scrap book…
Again, it reminded me that unfortunately, there are very little things that are new in the realm of human existence…there have always been crushes, and men!!!!, and the tender realization that it must be love.
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Prompts & Painting
How does your body experience doubt?
It makes me want find a corner to crawl into and hideaway forever, so I do that, for a little while, and then, and then, I start painting my doubt. I was doing a creation camp workshop by @peathefeary and they asked what would fear or doubt look like if it was just a painting or a piece in a gallery. If it was just a piece of art, something that can be observed from outside of one’s self, something that is perhaps just there, something just hanging on a wall.
What does your doubt look like?
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okay that is all for now…till next time.
-Thai xoxo
The part that particularly struck me was the section on inspiration and writing. I've had the same thoughts to the T. It felt relieving in a sense to know someone experiences the same struggle I do. So I commend you strongly, for still being able to create this insightful and heartfelt piece despite the tempest of doubts.
special😍🙏