“letting go is the same as letting in”

Too much bread this time, with lots of help! A fancy homemade balm, Cleo’s tiny snores, and the reminder that meaninglessness is actual bliss. i accidentally found out i can rock a mullet, threw my egg, and said some goodbyes. Adventure awaits.

Maybe if i can collect pretty days i can string em together. This year’s would be spaced weirdly to remember the time of strange distances. i’ll hang them all over my memory. Combing through time worn photo books of all the lives i’ve bothered living. Retrieving every love’s sweet warmth.

i’ll decorate my interior with the times we laughed til we cried. That crowd in the elevator all sparkles and cheer; unforgettably ringing in 2008. We are now on several different continents. We are still so young and beloved to each other. Plenty more memories since. They’re all here, somewhere. Piled up haphazardly, waiting for me to stop by, sift through.

If i ever feel lonely i might meander these passages rediscovering well-spent moments. So few have physical photos. Too few. i can press back into the depths where i keep spent time, and forage for solid details. i’ll slog through the morass of nostalgia to mine gems compressed by years. i can restore the artwork to its original glory. Decorate my whole psyche.

This is also where i’ll come to have good cries. What is a better grief than one of lost joy? Perhaps all sorrow is really only that, anyway. Sometimes you just gotta listen to sad music for a while. Sometimes i visit these parts of my story to feel the absence of happinesses that once felt immortal. To laugh-cry at myself for expecting such. Sometimes i have to grieve.

And oh, how long and winding these hallways are! This palace where midwinter tucks me in. A collection of pretty days, all strung together, equal parts sorrow and joy for having happened at all.

being a “disciplined student”

wherein i take three baths, eat too much of Viv’s Solstice pork feast, lean into pigtails, and start feeling a lil cooped up.. just in time for my favorite holiday to usher in the energetic revolution.

Last year i went to the beach with my brother around new years day and whispered that i’d like to quit smoking. In August i successfully did so. (With the less-than notable exception of a puff of some hot guy’s hand-rolled ciggy one time,)

i have been without tobacco for nearly five months.

This year i think i’d like to take up smoking.

“Nothing is wrong”

In which i make (more) bread & a cargo net all from scratch, Max makes music, Viv makes cozy, and Ashley spots ducks.

A few days ago i visited my favorite pot shop for the first time in a couple months. The dude there was like, “Ayy you’re back!” This felt nice until i tried to say something about being memorable and he responded with, “No,you could be somebody I just met in the grocery store once and I would remember you. I’m an empath so that’s just me; I love people.”

Bruh.

Not that i am any sort of gatekeeper but i believe that a textbook empathetic moment would not have included discounting my hopeful “i like being memorable” by negating it. i teed up a nice little compliment there and this guy just barreled on through. Whoops!

How do you do empathy? Do we all do it? i have long wondered whether a lot of folks are actually projecting. Sympathizing?

Weed bro aside, here’s how i’ve witnessed the general role of “empathy” in the current zeitgeist: first, a person decides that they know what another is feeling. This is often followed by preempting the other’s response to that feeling. Generally this all comes from a place of genuine care and concern.

But wow, is it rude in practice! The “empath” here makes a lot of assumptions at once, the worst of which being that one can know better than another about the latter’s own needs. “I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d be sad.” But like, didn’t you want to know, despite whatever emotional response you’d have? This kind of empathy removes a human’s autonomy, disallows their freedom.

An empathetic response, if i’m reading the definition correctly, is one that corresponds with the needs of the person with whom one is empathizing. It is not for the empath to do what they’d prefer done in this situation, but to understand that subject of concern has their own needs.

Whenever i deliberately empathize with others, i try to feel it through. i reach gently, with understanding, to very lightly grasp at what it is that might serve them in this moment. That’s the hard part: i will never know better than they what they might need, and i have to trust them to ask for whatever that is. Maybe i go as far as to make my supportive presence known; i leave a door open. Empathy is theoretical, at best. We truly have no idea what anyone else is going through.

A theory: if we are to hope that we can be as caring as an empath might be, we must indulge in the truth of a human’s existence being solely her own. What i want to hear or feel at any given moment is different from the next person’s needs, as theirs are from the next, and so on. Therefore the most genuine act of empathy is to believe in someone’s ability to respond for herself. To allow a person access to truth and offer support as they handle it their own way.

Then there’s that guy, who just got the definition wrong and felt strongly the need to really lean in: “I treat everybody like an old friend! I’m just an empath that way.” And maybe he is! Who am i to say?

: the love of your life lasted a day

: your best sexual relationship was only that

: instead of quantity of days, we went for quality of minutes

: we burned bright, left embers

: longing never ceases, so

: we leaned in

: we loved each other’s freedom

: we let ourselves be free

“There is no attempt to run away from the suffering.”

Featuring an eagle’s aura, snowy days, successful bread, and WAP.

This time i have to leave because i bought and built out this adorable car and i wanna live in it. It’s actually that simple: i’m not into paying rent when i have such a great little home.

i wanna live in the space i built for myself out the depths of my own madness and the middle of an atrocious year; that space in my car as well as that space in my soul.

i am going on a trip i always hoped to do with a partner. Been waiting! Holding off and for what. Someone who loves me sent me a Billie Eilish song where she sings, “I’m supposed to be unhappy without someone, but aren’t I someone?” Yes, Billie. i too am in love with my future.

Isolation will teach you about yourself. Shit that you did not want to learn. Things that can make you reconsider nearly everything. If you haven’t been through this, i’d like to hear what you did this year. It got dark, and darker, and bright, and brilliant for me as i learned to take care of the fragile, courageous, multitudinous creature i am.

After a couple months of car life, i wrote to a pal: “i feel stronger than ever, yet deeply alone in a way that is at once isolating and bolstering.” i don’t feel this every day—that’d be boring—but i feel it. And i don’t quite understand it yet. And i want more.

So, far from my beloved airports and crowds of strangers speaking every language, and much more attached to the earth this time, i’ll go away again. i am scared. i am stoked. Adventure.

i have a recurring conversation with myself and others about how all art is already just garbage, because it’s expendable/excess/not “useful”. And isn’t art, by virtue of its creation outside of those constructs, a worthwhile endeavor?

i realized a while back that in order to create art i would have to remove the possibility of gaining from it. i made everything super low stakes, like at those uncomfortable but cozy cheap diner booths (hallowed be thy name) where i used to build sculptures of all sorts of actual garbage—sugar packets, straw wrappers, those little cream cups and butter packets. All the jellies! Always, just as my masterpiece was looking fantastic, somebody doing their job would sweep it away. i love diners. i did this at every one. It became a joyful thing: creating just to lose.

All of life anymore is creating and accepting that we could lose something from it. We must keep creating even our very own lives in order to continue in ways forward rather than stop. This isn’t just about art anymore. What would happen differently if instead of thinking “life is short, YOLO”, i started thinking: “Life is long! But each experience is brief af”? Everything is already garbage. This moment is already gone.

Anymore it feels like we must pursue only our own personal versions of being alive, both in body and spirit. We are finding out that we have to make subjective rules about safety. We’ve also found ourselves making time to talk to only those we really genuinely want to. It seems like every day is a new opportunity to take good care of each other and ourselves. And a lot of days we don’t get it right, but we are honing in.

Life is sad and beautiful and difficult and sometimes really mean to our hopeful hearts. Everything each of us cares about is so deeply impermanent. Because of this, i think we must care as much as we possibly can about all of it. From the smallest garbage art to the most cherished heartfelt dream. We must love it all relentlessly until its inevitable, always too soon, change.