It feels like esoteric is an important word this season. So is reticence. I think I'm returning to journaling in semipublic quietude... this person I go to for erudite bits of text mentioned how women journal so that their lives can be witnessed. Something about performance. I remember nodding gravely and saving the link to the post, but I've sent myself too many bookmarks to keep track at this point. A lot of the frenetic energy I'm sensing that lingers still I now attribute to absorbing too much information all at once, without a filter or strategic way to go about processing it. I want to dedicate some moments of the morning to myself, to the world, and myself and the world before surrendering to capital.
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Writing this as soft flurries fall to the ground out the window and my lamp offers its soft glow on this sky-so-blank-it-seems-flat morning. Reminded of The Book Thief, that book that changed the way I write and appreciate writing. Eyes a bit sore from a night of staying up (slept too randomly yesterday). Got that familiar, now-five-years-old playlist on as I type this up. I watched a few Tiktoks about time, the fourth (and n^th more) dimension(s), as well as sea creature and microbial organism drawings. It was a little existentially unsettling and morbid, but also reminded me of that Bojack Horseman episode about the view from halfway down. The unknowability of the end of it all at the same time is such a reassurance. @peeinthecorner on TikTok says, “to erode with others into a greater static is a luxury.” Willa Cather writes,

I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

and this feels like what someone (who I will not reveal for my peace of mind) said of being snow falling softly and quietly onto other snow... how much of our pursuits are to escape the endless wondering of what, if anything, listens on the other side of the door?

It's curious how aspirational we get in this first and only life, at least one where you recognize (to some degree) your consciousness... it's freeing that we get to define for ourselves what it means to live well. It's astounding how some people dedicate their entire lives to achieving that for a community (Fred Hampton and bell hooks come to mind), people who these systems have so callously left to the forgotten strata of society. There's that book that I want to read (it's a PDF so not as present as a physical book for me) about how, like Audre Lorde wrote, one might find eros and the erotic in service and in camaraderie. I was watching this show (free on YouTube until halfway through, alas) where the main character said of her friend who'd passed away, "she was my one true love in this life". I really liked how it celebrated their friendship. And there are so many more moments like this in the series: the courage and innocence of childhood, the inexplicable spirit of a mentor-apprentice dynamic, the warmth of grandparents and their grandchildren. What joy.
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Feels like yesterday: composing paragraphs of personal text as gusts of wind blew through the tunnels. Already almost a month past. Wow.
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