If you are seeing this message, you belong to my virtual village. I think of you from time to time. I root for your projects and plans, and hope for your best successes and happinesses, your health and wealth. Perhaps I send you the occasional postcard, photo, or an indulgent voice note. Perhaps I saw you just the other day and we shared a walk. We co-worked for an afternoon. We caught up over dinner. Or sadly our paths do not cross often enough, and I fail to tell or show you that you cross my mind. Now and again, I miss your call or forget to reply to that last text. Maybe you do the same? But most of the time, I receive from you as much if not more than I can repay. It is also possible that I don’t really know you, yet I know that I care for you. I want your inner and outer peace as we are interconnected. On est ensemble.
I find it difficult to settle in or on one place. It is no wonder my work examines the question of “home” (how to leave it as much as how to (re)create it.) Many of us are ending the new year painfully aware of how fragile home can be, if not ours, than those of countless others. For some time now, I’ve tended toward the hermitic, toward itinerancy, and toward not resettlement so much as unsettlement. I do not wish to be an elusive or mysterious being, some tortured artist type, and I am aware that my wandering is both a problem and a privilege, a bittersweet solution, some pattern response to a number of anxieties. I am a perpetual migrant, fortunate at this stage to be seeking adventure and opportunity rather than physical safety. I have known happiness at home and abroad, and I often and anxiously compare and conflate the two. Where is home, truly? Beyond geography?
Søren Kierkegaard aptly defined anxiety as ‘the dizzying effect of looking into the boundlessness of one's own possibilities.’ Okay, so, that’s not all bad. Perhaps conversing with you, dear reader, will help me still my disequilibrium. At the very least, it will grant me more of the roots I am missing, the sort that affirm our shared humanity.
This newsletter idea is 2+ years old, with this entry first drafted earlier in 2023. I feared a newsletter would be a distraction, and God knows we have enough of those. I also feared no one would want to hear my roadside rambles, that they belonged in a private journal, that they might make me out to be solipsistic or opportunistic, another navel-gazer with good wifi adding junk to your inbox. I thought I would (hear: should) pick up this newsletter practice down the road, when I felt more grounded (when my first book was out of my hands maybe, or when I settled in one physical location, with less travel and turbulence in the forecast, when I felt sure of myself.) But I am rarely sure of myself. I am by nature and occupation a questioner.
Truth is, I can’t be sure what others see as junk or value. My arrogance often manifests as assumption. And I’m not sure what time or space life will afford me in the immediate future. But I am sure that I *think* my way into being, and that I think best out-loud with loved ones. I feel my feelings alone, but I process in community. I am also sure that a broader community is part of the security I seek. (What did Marx have to say on a related matter, again? We experience four types of alienation? Alienation from the self, from the process of labor, from the product of labor, and from others.) You are my others. You are, I hope, my community—my virtual village. An ongoing alienation from others, from you, is the equivalent of an alienation from nature, the external kind of nature and my best internal nature.
I am sure of this: I want to stay connected. I want to give and receive more freely, more regularly.
So if you are interested or feel the same call, do follow these written musings of mine. The goal is to make them a seasonal offering. Perhaps we can exchange, and talk about what helps us feel and stay alive, the stories worth “writing home about”. I will probably expand on the following and more, with, I hope, an open-mind:
Home, Travel, Margins and Migrations
Identity, Authenticity, Alignment
Storytelling, Writing, Reading
Psychology, Theology, Spirituality
Consciousness, Liberation, Philosophy
Love of all kinds
Pathways to peace
I hope to learn from and with you, my virtual village, how to broach what is on our collective minds. But whether you want to hear from me in this fashion or not, know that I will be wishing you well from afar. Sans besoin d’un retour. Sans fautes.
I’ll touch base from some place(s) where I find myself deeply rooted. I will reach out tenderly and gingerly, but I will reach out. And I will see you when I see you.
Have a happy and fruitful 2024.
Bisous, bye, baraka!