Summer Notes, Installment 1 - Taking the Long Way Round

It took me 6 full days after the end of finals to really wake up.

I walked out of my last exam and felt stress peeling away from me in sheets the whole way home, feathering off in the breeze and disintegrating under the sunlight as I thought about the brainspace, the creative energy, the time (oh my god the TIME) that had just materialized into my life. The list I’d been compiling for a month of all the things I would do the moment I had a spare afternoon was a shining vision, lighting my future with purpose and play.

And then I spent 6 days alternating between staring catatonic at my phone and ranting to my journal about WHY can’t I stop staring catatonic at my PHONE I thought I was so excited to MAKE THINGS.

Yesterday, though. Yesterday I read James Baldwin for hours while the speaker on my mantle filled my surroundings with folk songs. I sat on the floor of the living room and copied down a Rilke poem. I glanced at myself in the mirror of my mind’s eye and thought “there she is”.

I would like it if, in the future, doing hard things didn’t take me so far away from myself, to the point that it takes almost a week to wind my way back. I’m not sure why studying for tests is so incompatible with lightness of being or tender thoughtfulness.

But now, on day 8, I’m choosing to focus on the knowledge that, 6 days or not, I made it here. There is deep safety in that. In this proof, that I might lose my way but I’ll always return.

And as much as I may wish to spend all my days firmly rooted to this one spot, folk flowing down from the mantle, spacious warm glow in my chest, I may instead spend all my days on the slow spiral. Away from and back again. Losing contact and re-establishing intimacy. Low tide and high.

If I…when I…lose touch again, with you, with me, with hope, with color, know I miss it, and know I’m spiraling back again, even if I take the long way round.

6 days is worth it 100 times over for a lifetime’s worth of curiosity, isn’t it?

P.S.

My hope and dream is to use this summer to bring back the weekly newsletter format! Consistency is truly not my strong suit these days, but I’m thinking a lot about cultivating a creative practice I can trust in, and expanding the easy, playful energy I have found in my journals (where there’s no forcing or “getting myself” to do anything, and yet somehow I still find myself journaling every single day) to other avenues of expression! At this moment it feels very possible, but as previously stated, I might spiral in and out of this clarity as I find my way. Either way, it’ll be rich summer, whole summer, human summer, trying summer, and I don’t have to ask anything more than that <3

Would love to hear your hopes and dreams for the summer. Might be throwing a virtual summer solstice party that you’ll get an invite to soon ;) some of y’all might remember it from last year.

P.P.S.

I like this song a lot, maybe you will too.

See you on my next loop around the spiral, friends!