when i was a lot younger, i wanted to write pocket-size books that are so portable that you can carry anywhere with you. you can have it while you have your coffee in the morning, in your commute, in between meetings, and late at night when you can’t seem to fall asleep.
you can have it when you feel a slight discomfort from today’s misfortunes, when you’re lonely and feeling alone, when you’re filled with sadness but also when you’re ebullient with joy and gratitude, when you see the sun rises in the first morning in april. my words with you there, and everywhere.
we will never have to feel alone again. we will always have each other to listen and care. we will have that april sun shining down on us, the wonder of things, the heart of it all.
when something rips out of the ground —dandelion, garlic, an entire life, there should be a minute when things are allowed to be raw.
let the earth still clip the roots. let the root be pulp and wet and indeterminate. uncertain.
the rushing, always, to replant, to make meaning, to say aloud: this has made me, as if movement away from pain is the only moral posture.
what we need most, really, is inertia: to lie within the bruise to see its colours changing overtime without putting any word on it. to be permitted a dull, unproductive grief that does not serve a future lesson.
i have been in rooms with people who wanted an arc sooner than i could give it. who are you now? what did you learn?
honestly? i am not ready for the new sobriquet. i refuse to be within the tyranny of usefulness.
i want to sleep and then start awaking, without the internal wobble that follows. let it be uncertain, for once. let’s not name it anything other than nothing.
there is tenderness in not naming everything immediately. there is relief in being allowed to be messy, to carry weight for a while without being judged for not having done enough with it.
i would make it mandatory that after anything that breaks you, there is at least one stretched week—one small, sacred river-of-minutes—where you cannot be called anything other than the person who is still, quietly mending. without expectations. only the simple, radical work of not needing to mean anything yet.
Sontag once said that interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art, that to interpret is to impoverish.
the same can be said of pain: to over-interpret it, to rush it into symbols, is to impoverish the real. to let go, in this Sontagian sense, is to resist the pressure of metaphor and instead inhabit the raw, unclassified minute. without neither sobriquet, nor emblem. just the difficult, ordinary fact of being here.
and perhaps that is the only kind of survival worth naming. it resists the language that would make them exemplary. it lingers, holding open the right not to be defined.
with that in mind, you are everything you need to be.
the universe inside, this wholeness, this warmth, is meant to be shared.
the act of reaching out, overcoming shame, loneliness, resisting the system that alienates us all, are the very essence of survival. it’s peak humanity.
there’s an epidemic of loneliness that starves us in rapid proportions, and we might be able to do something about it.
i’d like to take part, however small, in fighting it, surviving it. i deeply believed we need to keep grounding ourselves in nature and in each other. we have to try. we have to create space to grieve, to nurture joy, to have each other.
when was the last time you had a conversation that felt loving, that was pouring into your cup, that gave you a breath of fresh air? let’s have one today.
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