From the places in between
On transitions, here versus there, and the pursuit of transcendence.
In a perpetual limbo
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Go to the Limits of Your Longing
I started writing a long letter back in September, but procrastinated on putting the finishing touches to it. Writing piled up, I got back on the road, procrastinated on more commissions, worked through some niggling existential uncertainties, and never got to sending that letter off. It was a long digression on what I had read and watched and listened to, which felt like something I wanted to share and no longer feel the need to. So this is a rewritten letter: patchwork updates on what I’ve been thinking about, a few of those recommendations included. I should have sent it out sooner into the new year (which was when I wrote most of it), but I’ve never been good at coming up with sage round-ups to mark momentous occasions. Here it is now, filled with more questions than answers and hardly any resolutions.
After some time out from social media—not a case of detoxing, I’ve just been caught up in a little personal turbulence, and not all of it the bad kind—it’s nice to be back in touch. Thanks to everyone who reached out to my last letter, which seems to have moved quite a few of you. I hope you enjoy reading this one too, and that you’re off to an encouraging start this year.
Reading San Mao and writing postcards while nursing sweet breads and copious amounts of mint tea on a riad’s roof terrace in Marrakech.
I remember thinking that sunny, windy morning in December how content, how at peace, I felt alone with a notepad and a book in a beautiful place, but also that I didn’t feel absolutely wholehearted about traveling just then, and that I wanted to be back in the embrace of a place among people to whom I mean something.
The trip had been mainly a family holiday and was too short, even with the few extra days I gave myself to travel solo, to do a story. And I know, have learned time and time over, that without a story to guide me, I lose some of my clarity for moving, surefooted, through lands new and strange to me. A certain listlessness, a certain repetition, can start to creep in. And yet.