learning how to be here
if your temple lives within you, you need not travel to find it
Dear friend,
I have a new pen pal. Yes, I mean a literal pen pal: pen and paper, stamp and envelope — the real deal. It’s the sweetest treat to open my mailbox nearly a month after sending a letter into the precarious realm of the US Postal Service to find a tender response awaiting me.
In the early days of the pandemic, craved for connection, myself and friends (some who lived only a short car ride away) would write letters back and forth to each other. We taped our envelopes closed instead of licking them and prayed some intimacy might be transferred simply by touching something someone we cared about had touched. We were consoled by the curve of the other person’s unpracticed handwriting.
With time, the letter writing lapsed and in the last year, I’ve missed it dearly but struggled to think of who would want to pick up such a time consuming analog practice and was equally unsure if I could commit to consistently carve out the time.
One morning in October of last year, a week after ending a work contact that had been causing me overwhelming anxiety for months, I deleted my Instagram account unceremoniously. Around this time, I also found myself vocationally recommitting to my first love (writing) and falling into an unexpected romance with someone from my past. These personal moments of disengagement and re-engagement were taking place alongside the horrors of the unfolding genocides in Palestine, Sudan and Congo. I immediately felt afraid of the implications of deleting social media — missing real time updates about resistance efforts, losing access to reliable first-person news sources and lacking insight into the well-being of my friends.
While all of these this did happen to some degree, I’ve ultimately found that my choice to disengage from social media platforms has renewed feelings of intimacy and accountability to myself, my community and the values we share. Somehow my world has become smaller but also more real, more alive — teeming with tangible interdependence and care.
Indeed, it was my pen pal friend who reached out to me directly over text about a petition to protest the closure of our alma mater’s multicultural engagement center. Through that short text exchange, an idea was thrown out that we explore a more analogue may of communicating with each other. We both quickly realized these letters would become a sacred archive of our little lives in the context of this daunting and often disturbing time in history.
In a writing workshop I was in last fall, we read and discussed Audre Lorde’s always timely essay, “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action.” Although I’d read the essay multiple times and discussed it in group settings previously, I experienced it with renewed clarity. Lorde speaks to the transformation of silence into language and action as an act of self-revelation: “visibility without which we cannot truly live.” It’s this, she argues, that we are most afraid of. I always believed she was speaking about the experience of being externally perceived or judged, but as I read it this time around I realized the more daunting task was looking at and listening deeply to ones self.
As someone who wears ear plugs often (thanks to the thin walls of my apartment) I’ve spent many nights navigating the strange experience of having one of my core senses dulled. I find that blocking out the external noise amplifies the sounds of my body: the liquid expansion and compression of my heart beat; the hollow, soft fluttering of my lungs; the oceanic sound of one swallow after another. Suddenly, with the absence of the external world, these masked sounds become a symphony.
The last seven months have been a process of learning the intonations of my unique symphony; trying to parse my own fears and desires from what I’d been incessantly told to fear and desire by others. My perception of my relationships have shifted from fun house shapes to a truer mirror of their size and form. Many of the people I thought I was close with were actually people I was simply observing online. These were not the active members of my life who make time for an evening phone call, extend an invitation to share a homemade meal or invest in a plane ticket to come spend precious days with me. Indeed, hundreds of people from all spheres and eras of my life shouldn’t all be showing up in my life in such intimate ways. I’m finally starting to hear more clearly the melodic, harmonious song that arises in me when folks feel compelled to actively clear a space in their lives, invite me fill it with my presence and visa versa.
I felt that tune ring out last week as I spent time in the Pacific Northwest, reconnecting with friends, mountain gazing and communing with trees. As I walked the streets of Seattle, I randomly ran into a friend who I wasn’t supposed to see until later in the week and felt a spark of magic as we embraced each other. Later, she would share this passage from a book she’s been reading:
“All cities burn. All cities crumble. We build them up again and again. And again someone comes and turns them to rubble. If your temple is the ocean, it cannot wash away. If your temple is the mountain, it cannot burn. If your temple lives within you, you need not travel to find it.”
I keep re-reading these words thinking about the urgency of tending to my own internal temple and asking with great reverence to step into the inner sanctuaries of my (human, plant and animal) beloveds.
As I continue to journey further into this place of slowness and rebuild my own internal and external infrastructure around connection and desire, I’ve found the writing and facilitation of Ayana Zaire Cotton very compelling. She recently shared a tool that helps identify what she calls “Zones of Validation” and “Zones of Desire.” She describes the Zones of Validation as actions where we receive the most praise, often for work and efforts that we’re good at but are rooted in performance for the approval of others. The Zones of Desire are the places where we feel devotion and flow; where the labor we do feels like a gift in and of itself.
For me, social media always felt like a Zone of Validation. It was its own part-time job, (mostly1) compensating me in generous sums of self-consciousness and an array of compulsive tendencies. I used to think there were things I desired there like connection, play, self-expression, information and inspiration. With distance, I realize what I felt wasn’t desire but a futile longing for those things to appear in a medium that wasn’t equipped to satisfy that longing.
As I continue on the journey of exploring what does ignite play, connection and creativity in my life, I’ve found an inexplicable amount of delight in taking in person art classes. A few weeks ago in my acrylic painting class, our assignment was to paint on apple. When I put the last brush strokes on the canvas paper, my heart SANG. I felt more pride and awe than I had in a long time.
When I arrived home after class, the apartment was empty. There was such a strong urge in me to share this treasure! I longed to text a friend, but realized I would have friends over in just a few hours for dinner. Sending a message felt unnecessary — I would show off the little painting as we prepped veggies for our meal. I felt a twinge of disappointment as I thought of a past lover I wanted to share my childlike excitement with but knew reaching out would be inappropriate. A small part of me wished I could blast this photo out to the world like I would have on social media, awaiting the waves of reactions that would feed into my energy.
Instead, as the sun set through the back windows of my home, I gazed at this thing I’d created, drenched in light, and let the feeling of joy root further into myself. For a few hours, the only person celebrating me, was me. The only person delighting in me, was me. The solitary pause that I thought would feel sad, was instead an echo-chamber of self love reverberating beneath my rib cage; a precious feeling inviting me to cherish it before sharing with anyone else.
As my web of connections become more concentrated, I keep falling deeper in love with my very extraordinary ordinary life and the beings who choose to co-exist with me right here, right now.
With love,
Jas
I must admit that I miss publicly praising my friends on the internet, having one of those rare moments where someone’s words or art speak directly to your heart, ad all the memes. I really miss the memes.