T-minus two weeks till I’m back in my nation state of birth. By the time this newsletter is out, it might even be just a mere week. It is to no surprise to me that I simultaneously have approximately 2 weeks of writing in my journal left. This is the end of something, and, of course, it is also the beginning.
As it turned out, I didn’t make it all the way through the Canadian winter till I decided to come back, and I will be entering a world that is biting at my cheeks and my hands when I forget to wear gloves. That made me feel initially ashamed. Coming back earlier than I initially thought felt, for a moment, like some failure. However, once I let that feeling pass I began to get excited at the idea that I would have some stake in the coming of spring. I would be there at that critical time when the first warm day would mean something. When the days growing longer felt like possibility. A chance for encounter.
I feel very different than I did when I left in September. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what shifted, but somehow it all makes a bit more sense than it did before. Or rather, I have let go of that desire for it to make sense entirely. This season my journal has really read like field notes on letting go. All I know is that I used to wake up every morning with my heart fluttering and later sinking into my stomach, and now, I don’t. This is the small miracle of early twenties, a time when everything whips past me before I can grab hold of it. My identity feels as malleable as it did when I was 18 or 14 or 7. Maybe this happens as well when you can safely call yourself an adult (I couldn’t tell you) but it feels exciting to know that everything can change in a moment, anything could be a chance to start over again.
A poem
It is rare that I start with a poem, but I wanted it here at the beginning. Before I can explain anything coherently, I have this poem that is reaching for all that is beyond words.
I’m still figuring out how much of my writing I want to share and how much I want to keep for myself for later. Recently, it really dawned on me that there was a part of me that was scared of so quickly giving up my writing, in case it would take away from longer form projects I hoped to pursue. However, I think I’m done with buying into the scarcity of my creativity. For me, exercising my creativity, only ever increases it. There is always more writing, always more that I can create.
Butt dialling all versions of yourself from the void (the party at the end)
I left the window open, I left the candle burning, On another night, in some other reality where sad things happen, and all the magic had been already used up, I might have not woken up at all. Fortunately, it was a full moon, and blood was pouring out of my uterus, and I had talked to a very old tree just the day before, and it was early in the morning, and all the words still tasted fresh and clean. It was the perfect storm for an accidental spell. You know the one where you call forth all versions of yourself from the void, and talk like sisters (at times bickering, often gossiping, leaving enough room for the chance that together you might heal some ancestral-trauma™ if the time is right and neither of you wants to shove the others head against a wall). She came in through the open window, maybe I had left it open for her all along, She entered like a secret, like some song I couldn’t quite place, like a memory that might have been a dream, or a film I had forgotten, or yes, another version of myself in another life. She pressed an open palmed hand to my head, as if she was checking my temperature, I woke to something like a breeze on my face, and there she was, translucent and orange in the candlelight catching on the edges of my bed sheet. Hello? Hello. You called? Oh sorry, did I? It must have been an accident. Oh… (She might have been older, or younger, or the same age but born at a different time, I wanted to keep her here. It wasn’t often one got such an opportunity). Well since you're here, tell me a story. A story about what? A story about how this all Ends. She nodded knowingly and began. We all throw a party. Not one that is just for one night, where we countdown the clock as the ball drops. Not one where we sit around a table clutching hands, or one where we slam our bodies against the cruelty of the way each moment dissolves before we can feel it to be real. All we knew is that it could have always been the End or never the End or maybe sometimes the End it’s hard to tell, but we all throw a party. We celebrate all the secret pockets of freedom woven into time. We celebrate all those that were denied a life and who still found the whisper of possibility shape-shifting under pink plastered lights, or in the porous boundaries between their body and another, in hands jittering, in love skittering soundlessly across the dance floor. All of it phantom threads that you can pull out and hold glittering against the light if the time of day is right, and the light is shining just so. We laugh and laugh at the sheer horror of careening towards the unknown, We cry and cry because it is all so devastating and a song came on that reminded us that our parents will someday die, and that we might never speak the language of our grandparents, and nothing could ever fasten us to the silence protruding in-between whispered stories in the kitchen. We dance and dance because we can’t help but feel how freeing it is to know that our bodies will all someday be compost to the Earth, and how that makes us feel very small and very big. We celebrate because we’ve all tried being scared, We all throw a party, because we chose this, to be dancing at the End. And even if we didn’t choose this, we are here, and we are alive, so we might as well stay with it and push towards the center of all that hurts, get close to something that feels like the truth but isn’t. That’s how it all Ends, she finishes. Really? Maybe, it depends. I nod. She left before the first streaks of daylight cracked open the sky, I don’t remember her leaving, But I felt her absence when she was gone.
The end of the world has been an amorphous blob that I have been floating around for a while. I’ve learned more and more that it is always helpful to have a center to throw yourself in the orbit of. For me, this gravitational pull becomes something close to obsession, so I try to be mindful about what I’m tethering myself to. Or rather, I think it is closer to Einstein’s version of gravity. What I give the most weight to curves time and space in such a way that I sink into the compression it has made.
I have theorized the end of the world with books, peers, and myself, from different points always finding myself at the same middle. At that space, in that portal, where endings and beginning are something of the same. The end of the world is a foreclosure of possibilities in this timeline, yet is opening up other possibilities for new timelines. The end of the world thus is sort of the void space. See my earlier newsletter on portals, portals, portals.
For many years, I have worshiped at the altar of a new world asking in various reading groups what possibilities they imagine and how we can use this portal space of the end to create transformation. How can we change and reshape the current world forming structures of capitalism, colonization and slavery. A lot of buzz words, re: transformation, change, reshape.
There is a line in a poem I wrote that to me is the closest I have gotten to some “truth”:
This is as close to it as I can get. I think we have always been here or never been here in some way. Always at the brink of everything falling apart, with some centre that can’t hold.
{Oooh I am going to be a bit controversial, but please, stick with me. This newsletter is a vehicle and I am taking us somewhere grand I promise. Do you trust me? I trust you.}
It is easy to proclaim that now is the worst it has ever been. That this present is something that it shouldn’t be. That we cannot accept this. More than that, our very refusal of the present is seen as the pathway out of here. Or for those more nihilistic about the condition-of-our-times a way to lament the impossibility. The entrapment of it all. It seems capitalism has cornered us, there is no way out!
A while ago, maybe even a year ago, I did a podcast episode on radical acceptance at the end of the world. It is definitely not one of my favourites. It was rambly and truly I didn’t feel like I said anything profound. In fact, it felt as if I was dancing around what I really wanted to say, which is that our acceptance is the quickest and easiest path between here and elsewhere. This is something that I meet time and time again, in many ways it has been the thesis of my traveling.
This thought at the time felt more radical than I could make room for. How could I believe that the world wasn’t wrong, and, to be more bold, that it didn’t need to be changed? The central focus of almost all my studying and theorization in the past 5 years hinged on the central notion that the world was deeply fucked up and that we all needed to be a part of some coming revolution. It felt impossible to hold these contradictory notions together. How could I contend with all the suffering, the injustice and still believe that under radical acceptance nothing needed to become something else? It was all exactly as it is. Exactly as it was “supposed” to be, in that, it was happening here and now. What if this was it?
It made my brain hurt, and yet, that thought felt like a deep exhale, like a breeze making its way through the open window, indeed like the first warm day of spring. I had that feeling. A clue that I’m getting closer.
I think many of us are reaching that same point, pushing towards the same centre. More and more it seems that people are finding that the present is the only path home. While writing this I looked at adrienne maree brown’s blog wondering if she would have any words that would inspire me. In one of her latest posts, in her poem, “the secret cure,” I found a few lines, the few lines I was looking for.
i will never fix life not as a whole arc nor a system of parts that is the secret
That is the secret. That is the secret.
Life, reality the world is not mine to fix. More and more I find that sorrow and joy are intermingling in this infinite spiral, and there at the centre of it all was something that has been there all along. That this was it. This was it. This was it!! There was no new world to escape to, no one to save us from ourselves, no revolution to wait for, no imagined future to put our hopes and dreams into, that this was all we had. More, I have a secret feeling that holding the present moment in our hands knowing there is nothing to fix, is the portal. The point where stories dissolve, and reality transforms. The new world is right here. Right where it always was.
I want to note that, this is not to say that decades of social justice work and movements have gotten it all wrong, and this is the real and everlasting truth. To claim such a thing would be condescending at best and flat out racist at worst. Rather, I think that claiming that this is it, can only come after this is not it. To engage in refusal, to assert that there is more to life and reality than what systems of oppression claim, is not only important, it is necessary.
To refuse to buy into these systems is to believe that there is an elsewhere out there and that our desires for more mean something. To accept is to know that an elsewhere is right here and that we have the power to access it. It is ours if we want it.
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” -Arundhati Roy
The manifesto
I write this newsletter because first and foremost my life is my art form. I find all these lovely and horrible objects in reality and I come to discover every time that I’m a part of them and they are a part of me. I don’t know how many times and in how many ways I can write about this space in between me and the other, here and elsewhere, the infinite and the finite, but more and more I have this sneaky feeling that it is all endless poetry. No matter where I go I have always been right here reaching for that invisible thing. Suddenly, like many times before, it dawns on me. This is it. This is it. This is it!!! It is all here.
Gross!! No…it’s a blood offering duh
Affirmation I’ve been loving
Okay truly I used to think affirmations were a little lame, but especially these past few months I’ve watched as affirmations have really shifted things in my life. Other than going on a walk they are the fastest way for me to shift stagnant and circling thoughts that can’t seem to find a place to land. The affirmations become the landing point, the direction for thoughts to enter and dissolve.
(For jealousy, an icky friend, at its best a tool to learn about what you desire)
There is enough room for me.
(For situations where the path out seems confusing and muddled)
Everything works for me.
(In any moment, at any time)
Love is here
(For nurturing self-trust)
No matter what happens, I am always on my own side.
(For fun)
Life is filled with magic
Me: *talking about how much I love the song Landslide and how it perfectly articulates how much sorrow and beauty exists within the passage of time*
My friend: Ya, landslide, because not even the mountains stay the same.
Me: Yes. Yes.
As always, sending my love. Talk soon.
-Thai xx