Hello, hello.
Many narratives have started and ended since the last instalment of this newsletter. Honestly it is hard to know where to start… The only constant is that I’ve been meeting the unknown at every turn I make. As we leave dreamy and airy libra season, and enter into the depths of scorpio’s orbit, I’ve been curious about this thin mist over the future that is so intimately a part of the conditions of living and dying on Earth.
Although it is still #whimsygirlfall the weather is warm in Andalusia, and I haven’t been feeling the deep and satisfying melancholy that comes with decay and the changing of the seasons. Don’t get me wrong I am very VERY happy to not be doing Canadian winter this year, but there is a part of me that yearns for that time when everything dies, and something must die in myself. There is always something mystical and mysterious in the air. Maybe it is the steadily dwindling daylight, but the thrilling and scary feeling of the unknown always grows for me during this season.
Lately, I haven’t been seeking so much to embrace the unknown (I don’t know if the unknown desires such an embrace), but more to get close to it, to understand the conditions of its existence and me in relation to it. I’ve spent so much of my childhood (and teenhood?) worrying about the future, and desperately desiring my safety to be guaranteed. Safety not just in the physical sense, but in the emotional sense as well, I wanted to know that my feelings wouldn’t be hurt and that things would be okay. I wanted a guarantee. But that is just it, the unknown never claims to offer a guarantee.
I worry all the time if I’m good enough to achieve what I want, if I’ll fail miserably and feel ashamed, but the thing is I continue to keep taking steps in to the unknown, embracing the unknown as the conditions for my lust for life, the thing that scares me deeply is also what makes life so exciting thrilling and whimsical. What is a good story without stakes?
As I write this a thick milky fog has descended over the south coast of Spain. I spent the day yesterday traversing through a cavernous valley thinking about the unknown and finding many portals along the way. I was explaining to someone I met that this whole trip feels like one big trust fall. Trust fall with myself and trust fall with reality (which might be one and the same??). Free falling and believing that you will be caught is deeply liberating (most times) and deeply scary (the rest of the time).
Safety is not guaranteed, but that doesn’t stop me. The more I make peace with that fact, the more free I feel in the world. Don’t get me wrong allowing yourself to feel safe in you body is a deeply important practice, however, desperately trying to figure out if you will be caught every time you fall is futile. The funny thing is, when I have the intention to trust, reality gives me many people and situations to trust in. When you are able to accept that you might not be caught, reality almost always is there to catch you.
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After leaving the sanctuary that was the artist residency, I have been traveling around feeling the excitement and weight of the unknown. There have been many beautiful moments, but also many moments crying and panic calling my mom. A moment when I lost my phone, and many moments when I’ve felt deeply lonely. Yet, even then, above all I clung to the solace that I would be okay.
Me: Will I be okay????? Will my safety be guaranteed…
Also Me: You can’t guarantee the complete protection of ~self~ and perhaps a lot of life is moments that break open the self. There too might be beauty in that. But, yes, yes above all you will be okay.
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Over the Garden Wall…
Just know that when I speak of the feeling of the unknown in fall, this song is exactly what I’m talking about.
Watching Over the Garden Wall is a cheat code to finding deep, whimsical, mysterious pleasure in the unknown…
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Poetry Moodboard
…somethings from my moodboard for the poems I have been writing lately.
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Oops forgot that nothing is real…
A little existential dread is good for the soul. Recently, I remembered that nothing is real, and that this is all in fact an illusion. That (like Alejandra Smits says) everything is sort of a scam, we are all performing what we think we are (performing gender, performing human-ness, performing adulthood, performing as someone who has this specific type of job etc). I was caught up in all the personal drama of existence, the fears, the doubts and anxieties of the unknown, and totally forgot that I am a tiny little thing on a rock traveling around a sun inside of a galaxy where there are many other rocks and suns, inside of space where there are also more galaxies that have an infinite amount of rocks and suns also within them. LMAO. It all feels so ridiculous when you really think about it.
All of life feels like forgetting, remembering and forgetting again. Remembering that life and the ~human experience~ is really quite ridiculous (possibly meaningless) and then forgetting again. Here we are living this ephemeral experience of sensory pleasure, suffering, joy, and love, and yes we will all just die afterwards.
I was a strange child, often I would become overwhelmed by the deep hopelessness of existential dread. I have many memories of being seven years old spinning around on a carpet of baby blue and white watching the colours swirl all around me and consider the weirdness of existence. Why is this happening????? One summer of my childhood, melancholy took hold of me in a way I had never experienced before. It felt suffocating and strange and scary, I couldn’t shake the feeling that nothing really meant anything and it was all futile. That I could do anything and that none of it would matter. I tried to explain this to my parents, who got semi-alarmed and quickly put me into therapy. Though my dad did offer some comfort on one late afternoon in our backyard, “many people, maybe all of us, have been wondering why we are here since the beginning of time, trust me you’re not the only one.” Though my first thought was “you’re telling me I will never figure it out!!!!!!!” Unfortunately, some things can’t be known.
This realization isn’t the terror that it once was, in many ways it is quite freeing. We are all buying into certain bits and making it real or not real, by our commitment to them. If everything is partially an illusion we can choose the reality we want to inhabit. One time writing the newsletter at a cafe, I had this overwhelming anxiety and self-consciousness that what I was doing ‘wasn’t real.’ I thought, look at all these people who are all here for serious jobs working for an income and I’m just sitting here writing a newsletter about portals on a weekday. Then slowly it dawned on me, that what they were doing wasn’t real either, and that we were all collectively LARPing as people that had really serious stuff to do. They were just buying into a different bit. Maybe all of life is one big live-action-role-play. All of us just buying into the bit.
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POV you discuss your fears and doubts with a 200 year old tree
you leave an an alter to thank it for its time.
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Life is forever bowing down to the unknown
Bowing down to the way, every moment slips through your finger, before you even feel it to be real. In the unknown we place our dreams and our sorrows.
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& A quick poem I wrote
I’m a poet because I love to indulge myself, It’s not enough for us to just experience a moment, We need soak in it, Absorb it into our pores and ooze it out onto the page. Everything is a story we can tell about the world, or about ourselves, Which might be, for the sake of the argument, one and the same. No, unfortunately, we can’t get over it, That one time, when You made us feel that way, Heartbreak will always be a friend, a muse, a lover that will poison us and then nurse us back to health again. Every ex thinks the You is them, Jokes on them, I don’t even know who You is, No, unfortunately, we can’t get over it, That one time when the snow made the world so silent there was a ringing in our ears, or when the light shifted through the trees just so that it made us feel we could happily die right then and there, Beauty only feels right when it’s layered on thick, when I can eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner, something I can save and keep in my pocket on the days that grey is the only colour I know.
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That is all for now. I can’t think of journal prompts but I suppose consider your relationship with the unknown! Is it scary, mysterious, pleasurable, cruel?
Sending my love.
-ThaiHJ x