The divine comedy

Many, many years ago, when community management was barely a thing and I was in the vibrating potential of my 20s, I went to New York to provide live social media coverage to a major advertising awards show. The bloggers were all put up in a fine hotel and given access to rare and special people to facilitate our coverage.

But things started going wrong almost immediately before the first day of work. I can't remember all the details. My wireless internet router didn't work, my Macbook Pro failed me and the Genius Bar took it away and said it would be out of commission for several days. I provisionally bought a new computer which they told me I could return after the week was over, minus the return fee, which I chocked off as a rental fee.

I didn't know New York that well, and barely had the funds for these emergencies. All this running-about, trying to get my shit together before the event started, was taxing. But finally it was done, and I got to my hotel and touched the key card to the door. It didn't open.

That is when I pressed my head to the wood and burst into tears.

It happened that, in the room next door, a housekeeper was just coming out. She dashed across to me with a look of alarm and buried my head in her copious bosoms.

"He hurt you," she said with conviction. "I'm so sorry, love, so sorry he hurt you."

I relaxed all my weight into her and kept on crying. It didn't seem important to correct her. In a way, a he did hurt me: Steve Jobs.

I blubbered about my door key and she sorted me out and ushered me into the room, tut-tutting the whole time, tucking me into my bed like a little rolly-polly.

The rest of the week went fine. But thereafter, I had the strong feeling that I was on the hotel's suicide watch. I came home every day to a pyramid of chocolates and handwritten notes from housekeeping. The staff kept calling to "check in." In the midst of all that stress—the week did not turn out so great in the end, though it had nothing to do with my work, nor anything I could have done—I felt loved and held by strangers.

This is how I feel at this moment. I'm standing at the very edge of a private endeavour I've poured months of myself into. It twisted my life around, made things chaotic, and at the same time I kept encountering people—improbable strangers and professionals—who seemed destined to help me succeed. Kisses from the universe.

Now we're nearly at the end, and success does not look like the most likely possibility. The grief sits heavy on my heart. There's one last salvo, then few remaining paths. It will be over, and the machine will simply stop.

Discovering what we truly desire, and why, is a transformative act. We spend so much of our lives being encouraged to measure and temper our desires against the societies and norms we grow up in; to deviate from this single-mindedly, in the pursuit of what we alone want, is a radical thing.

But desire is not equivalent to entitlement. You are owed nothing; the universe is not a meritocracy, and I'm not even convinced that a meritocracy is an ideal. Desire is merely a compass. You follow the direction where your heart beats loud and strong, and that's important; it vitalises you.

I have finally arrived at the place I've struggled with finding for the past three months. I cannot control this outcome. It has nothing to do with me "rising to the occasion" or "meeting the challenges." This is not a gauntlet for the gods. From my vantage point at this moment, life is playful, our time here a series of games. We learn things or don't, we feel things or don't; there are no wrong answers, only experiences and new possibilities, and all that enriches the cosmos. 

It's about us, sure, but we can't forget the macro sense of who we are. My life is about me insofar as that I'm living it, but I extend beyond my body. 

I am kapwa: I am me and you, me and the community, the community and the environment. I extend to my interactions, known or unknown, and cannot be divided from this fertile, murky mess in any meaningful way. So this story can only be about me in that sense. It's me as the cosmos, not me as a small slice of anxious ego wanting a happy ending from a very narrow spectrum of perspective.

I brought up the story of that woman and the hotel because it's on my mind. It feels related to this moment. Over the course of this project I've met with many forms of chaos, but also many people that, for a multitude of reasons, I believed were signs I was on the right track, and a "positive" outcome to this project was meant for me. They were strangers who became friends and they fought for my interests and still do, or spontaneously reassure my fears without me asking them to, or answer questions I didn't know I had, seemingly making the path clearer ahead.

All this time, I thought this was about me getting the right ending. But this isn't about the ending at all. It's specifically about those interactions. All those years ago at that hotel, everything went wrong but I felt held by strangers, cradled by the universe. I feel this now: As the project slowly unravels in front of me, as hope begins to rise softly from her chair and move toward the door, I realise I'm not alone in this room, have never been alone.

I am still held by strangers. I am still cradled by the universe. And this says more about my value to myself, my value to everything, than securing the fucking outcome. Though losing it, to be frank, breaks my heart. 

I can feel it: softening me, making me more malleable, relaxing my muscles with the grief. I bury my head in the copious bosoms of the universe. May I be worthy of the gift of the hands that go on holding me, and moulding me.

It is beautiful to be here. 

Brigid's creation song

St. Brigid's Cloak, the Shannon Academy.

It is Imbolc, that middle place between the winter solstice and spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. We're in that first salvo of the creation principle, awakening after a long sleep. Imbolc is the primary feast of Brigid, goddess of fire and water, with dominion over midwifery, poetry, crafts, brewing, iron-working, and technology, per Judika Illes in "Imbolc: Crafting the Creative Flame," in Taschen's Witchcraft tome.

I lit a candle yesterday, on Brigid Eve. This morning—sun bright, frost still clinging to its edges—I dug through Sean Kane's Wisdom of the Mythtellers and found one of my favourite passages. This is Brigid's song of creation, written by Ella Young as told by Alice Kane: 

Now comes the hour foretold, a god gift-bringing,
A wonder sight.
Is it a star, newborn, and splendid up springing
Out of the night?
Is it a wave from the Fountain of Youth, that is upflinging
A foam of delight?
Is it a great immortal bird that is winging
Hither its flight?

It is a wave, high-crested, melodious, triumphant,
Breaking in light.
It is a star, rose-hearted and joyous,
Risen from night.
it is a flame from the world of the gods, and love runs before it,
A quenchless delight.

Let the wave break, let the star rise,
Let the flame leap.
Ours, if our hearts are wise,
To take and keep.

Brigid sings this song and moves the hearts of the other gods, who quickly recognise it doesn't come from her alone. She describes it as the song of the earth, who dreamt of beauty and longs for it now. Thus inspired, the gods descend to earth—a dark, formless abyss, chaotic and frightening—then begin paving it with beauty, each gifting it with their own pulsating wildfire touch.

When they have finished, the earth is rampant green and blue, clothed in flowers. They commit not to duplicate, there, the things that exist in other places. They decide to stay and collaborate with the earth, helping cultivate a beauty that is hers alone.

Only Brigid opts to leave. Her work done here, she turns her mind to other matters. The gods lace a ribbon of remembrance to her mantle, and off she goes, needfully separating herself from the creation she contributed to.

Every fire

Each morning I wake, put on my rubbery boots, and gather wood and kindling from the shelter in the garden.

At the stove, I clean the ashes out from the previous day.

I make a sandwich of paper, kindling, cardboard, more paper. I light it bottom to top.

In some configurations I know this will go well, but it doesn't always; the fire can be colicky, slow to take.

Every fire is a different fire. Each has its own temperament, its own way of being coaxed into autonomy. I start it off with soft foods, then move on to progressively bigger, harder comestibles. 

It will spend its first hour toddling, needing careful attention—a spare ear or eye forever monitoring its condition, even as I prepare breakfast, stretch, start my computer. By afternoon it will seem more confident, but experience knows this is not the case; left to its own for an hour, it could be dead-cold, not an ember left to revive it.

Every fire is a different fire. My job is to forget the nature of the one that accompanied me yesterday. I spend the day weaving my attention to it, hoping that by nightfall it will be fully its own, raging hot and radiating, dangerous in its certainty.

On making my new phone mine

There's a lot of change happening—shifts backed by years of marinating. In the midst of two big shifts I'm engaged in at the moment, I had my phone stolen a month ago and decided to break it off with Apple. I'd been considering it awhile, the cost of it had started outweighing the value, and a chaotic, stressful situation was the perfect last straw.

So I got a Google Pixel and lost half the data I've accumulated over 13 years—phone numbers, apps, messaging data (iMessage!), any number of things that seemed really important at the time. I spent a weekend in a foetal position and another week trying to understand my new normal, then came out the other side and decided it was time to start adapting the phone to my needs.

I'm very much an Otterbox fan because I drop my phone a lot and have often enjoyed the exercise of throwing it across the room to demonstrate the value of "military-grade" protection. But I'm over that now. Protection for ordinary drops is fine, which means I don't need a case the size of a commando's walkie-talkie. In keeping with that, I also decided against getting a phone clip, which in any case has proven too bulky for the type of gear I carry lately, and utterly impractical for attaching to a bicycle.

I still want to be practical. But it's a time of change, and I'm interested in who I'm changing into and how she manifests herself, especially in terms of styles and textures. These are the things I got:

First, this most delicious leather phone case from Bellroy with a secret orange interior that I have already forgotten about and which has consequently delighted me all over again. It is delicious to touch and yields perfect grip.

Second, this fully-rotatable ring and stand from Burga which is pleasingly smooth and niftily associates with my tropical leopard water bottle—an acquisition that followed the loss of my black Zojirushi bottle, which vanished as I was sliding off a cliff face last year.

I like this—these leaping-out greens and oranges that mark such delectable contrast to the monochrome accessories I have favoured most of my adult and adolescent life. It's a new language, muted but playful. It leaves room for other kinds of exclamations, new ways of being.

None of this is very important but I wanted to put it somewhere because it makes me happy. I also like how these colours interact with others in my life: The orange metal pen sitting beside my phone at this moment, the black Merci wristwatch with the subtle red details. Why have I spent so much of my life refusing my eyes this lush indulgence?

On heroes

There's a convention in the very old oral stories where a prophecy is given, but its completion relies entirely on the central person not knowing about it.

This is a crucial distinction, completely at odds with the convention that you, the Hero, are aware of and thus driven by your destiny. Knowing or believing you're the Hero is a burden for you and others.

In the older tales, there aren't any side characters, not really; the whole universe conspires to bring the prophecy to fruition. Even your mistakes are critical. Sometimes you have to die. Sometimes you resurrect, unable to be the person you were before. But you need everybody. You are part of a larger story that isn't really about you at all.

A story where a central character is infused by their own heroism enables the hero to use (and treat) everyone around them as collateral. The hero is not only protected and supported but enabled, including by the audience. Their belief in their own story—that they act in the service of a Greater Good—ultimately corrodes the very qualities that made them heroic, because there is no place for a greater good—for others—to flourish.

Somewhere along the way, the story came to be about them alone.

What is your kiwi?

Credit.

A few years ago I had lunch with a former intern who was in town and wanted to catch up. He told me a story of a man who had never eaten a kiwi.

"It's not a very interesting story," he said. "His parents didn't like kiwis so he never had them as a child. Only when he was older, and people started saying, 'you've never had a kiwi?', did he realise it was a weird thing. But he decided to make it a choice. He still hasn't eaten a kiwi."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because he thought, one day when life gets too dull or repetitive, or he feels depressed, he will know there is still something new to look forward to. All he has to do is go downstairs to the nearest shop and buy a kiwi." He paused heavily on that ending and leaned over our empty plates. "Angela. Do you have a kiwi?"

I can't remember how I answered. I like the idea of having some small, easily-accessible thing that remains to be experienced, a hedge against the everyday travails that can make life feel Sisyphean. In moments I've considered the question since, I mostly think about big kiwis: Moving to Paris. Half-moving to Italy. Learning to forge and tend fires. Learning to cook. That one time when, lonely in my new Paris life, so long ago, I took a four-hour improv class.

But the point of the story is that a kiwi isn't a big thing. It's a tiny thing that reinfuses a tiny dose of magic into life, enough to keep going, to hope again. I went to the Italian bookshop in Paris and practiced Italian with the shopkeeper, which made me nervous. I let Demo talk me into buying butter cookie-scented candles. I ate dark chocolate with octopus on top. I conducted that Covid experiment where I stayed up as late as I wanted, and slept when I wanted, and ended up living on a reverse schedule to everyone else: Breakfast became dinner, sunrise my sunsets.

The general vibe on the social networks right now is that people are tired of hoping for a "better" 2023 than the 2022 we got. I think of something a client said, months ago: Nobody believes anymore that life will be better tomorrow than it is today. Nobody thinks anymore that their children will do better than they did. 

Hope is being crushed, at a growing pace, under the burden of capital.

What a mindset to find oneself in, though. Where does one go from there? I've already done the rage against the machine, shuttled through the abject desolation that follows. There's no solace there. There is no there there. As King Solomon once said: "Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!"

It occurred to me, the other day, what my kiwi actually is. I've been fooling around with it for the last few years, and it has never stopped restoring my sense of wonder. 

My kiwi is making weird choices. Big, small. Doesn't matter.

When you're finally ready to cede to chaos, it merits remembering that chaos yields new cosmos. This is the lesson of trickster gods, and, oddly enough, kiwis: The fruit is thus named because it resembles the furry egg of the kiwi bird. It is a something that looks like something else—deceptive, but not shatteringly so. (Unless you're a kiwi bird, I suppose.)

Social conventions are collapsing. All the things we didn't dare do, for fear of punishment or opprobrium? Fuck it. Make the weird choice you didn't think was allowed. Go on vacation alone. Do the wacky masters degree. Run away from all the war news and take a salsa class. Quit your job and live on unemployment awhile. Take up a weird hobby that has zero viable hope for becoming a "career." Fuck careers. Learn High Valerian—or better yet, a real language like Tagalog—and speak it to strangers.

Call reality's bluff. Test the elasticity of your possible, your normal.

We spend so much time chasing rewards and avoiding punishment. Half of the rewards and punishments don't come to fruition. I suspect the worst thing we can do in this time is dig our heels into the old, dying promises and threats our system has made to sustain itself, and find ourselves alone holding an empty bag in the end.

Norbert Wiener once observed that the more one learns about the universe, the more one realises that life was an improbable gift, utterly squandered when you measure it by the arbitrary benchmarks of civilisation. The sum of this gift cannot simply be spent desperately pursuing capital or some golden standard of success. We need more.

Make weird choices. My weird choices have done more for me, and borne more beautiful fruit, than my careful plans. Sometimes the outcomes have sucked, but that was less than 5% of the time, and 0% were devastating. It has all been a good exercise in staying open, curious and childlike; and learning the many nuanced lessons that love still has to teach me.

To return to the topic of kiwis, though, here's a weird choice I made about them specifically once, when I felt too lazy to peel one. I bit straight into the skin. It wasn't fibrous or unpleasant; improbably, the skin is totally edible. Practically melts in your mouth. Because of this weird and vaguely antisocial choice, I will now spend the rest of my life knowing that peeling a kiwi is a luxury I can indulge in or not. 

It doesn't take a massive weird choice to make your life richer.

Chaos makes new cosmos. If you don't happen to like the one you find yourself in, another awaits around the corner of your next decision.