August break to metabolize
Welcome to Wandering Grace. I share essays exploring the themes of place and (be)longing 1-2 times a month that follow the stops of my 2023 Migration Tour, and sometimes bonus snapshots from the road. Read more about the project here. See an archived list of essays in-order here.
Welcome, especially, to new subscribers. Thanks for helping me surpass the mark of 100 readers on this here Substack! <3
Hello!
I have decided to take a break from posting essays here for the month of August. There are some logistical reasons (heat-addled brain, a big work retreat coming up at the end of the month, the pragmatics of homemaking). More importantly, there are a few transitions that need space+time to sift and settle,1 so that I can show up in more integrity here.
Where I am in the Migration-Tour-to-essay-timeline (one essay per stop) is that I am currently writing a loooong essay (or maybe a few different essays) about relationships in Los Angeles (with land, with people, with self) from June 2023 which were speculative and yearning and uncertain back then, and which are more concrete and sorted and actualized now. The relationships of now need some breathing space to be what they are today — without my hamstringing them with the burdens of what they were or could have been in the past. These relationships are at risk of becoming confusing or stuck unnecessarily if I spend more time writing about them than in living them out.2
The other, subtler shift happening internally for me is around my relationship to this project. When I started this project, I was still living in Oregon. Some of my motivations for putting my experiences to paper were to justify my need to leave and to legitimize my desire to move amidst an internal landscape of guilt, shame, and fear around making moves towards a wholeness that I (for a spell) was not sure was possible without sacrifice.
In What It Takes to Heal, Prentis Hemphill says, “We tend to long for what our bodies need in order to heal and feel whole.”
Often, that requires change, which is scary.3
In a generative somatics framework of transformation, there are stages of disintegration and transition before your body can take on new shapes, before your habits can take on new patterns.
I am in a different place — literally and metaphorically — than I was a year ago, and it is largely thanks to all that has transpired over the last 18 months.
I still want to capture this journey, I still want to continue writing these essays, I still want to honor the transformations by shining light on their subtle magical maneuverings…but I no longer need to justify these decisions or actions to myself — or to anyone else. I want to let my motivations for writing sift and settle into the mud, to see where I stand with this project after the water around me is clearer.
Here is the interesting transition point of integration that I find myself in: I am still writing with the old patterns of justifying and legitimizing as part of my Wandering Grace voice, and I am not sure whether they are old writing tics that no longer serve and/or whether they capture something true about the me of a year ago whose lens on the world required her to explain herself in those particular ways, always hedging and capitulating to an external oppressor-styled audience4 all the while also trying to navigate by a surer internal compass.
The freedom of no longer needing to expend energy on that extra layer of explaining your decisions is wildly resourcing. Part of writing these essays is to explore how I got from one way of being to the other, which means I need to still spend some time in both (multiple) mindsets.
But…for now and for August, I’m going to revel in the newly-re-embodied freedoms of not having to explain myself before returning to the page to continue exploring Place and (Be)Longing in the lifelong essayic attempt to explain myself to myself. lol
Kaira Jewel Lingo quoting Lao Tzu: “Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?”
At the Asian Diaspora Jam, the facilitants reminded us constantly not to ‘freeze’ anyone — others or ourselves — because we are always changing, and we have to allow ourselves to meet each other in each present moment beyond the stories and interactions we may have perceived in the past.
Dear Daughter reminds us:
Past pieces on ‘writing to whiteness’ and ‘talking straight to [ourselves]’ instead
Loved this!