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I've been processing the passing of our beloved dog, Monkey, who taught me deep trust and patience, curiosity, tenderness, confidence and persistence, to ask for what I need, to show love, and the gravity of what it means to be a part of a pack

We start with nothing. To be is to mean something to someone else. This existence we cannot directly create for ourselves: it can only be given to us by another. It is a blessing.


I've been thinking about acceptance as a fundamental step toward growth, giving up the need to understand in order to find peace

I've been thinking about Honour's album Alááfíà, which they dedicated to their late grandmother, where the title track began to take form after their last embrace, using their creative practice as a coping mechanism for loss

I've been seeking moments of connection, noticing light, spirit, love; portals beyond prosaic experience, perception, and comprehension

I've been thinking about our attempts to connect with spirits, and how in that act we are talking to the void, forever unknowing whether we can truly be in touch with them or not, but still connecting to some part of ourselves and the world on other levels

The body is a haunted terrain—a living record of personal, familial, social, and epigenetic memory. To look at my father’s body now—the way he shuffles when he walks, the atrophy in his once-nimble fingers, the nerve pain in his feet, the cloudiness in his eyes as he loses his sight—it too is a record of a forgotten life, and of the systems that failed it. I carry the memory of him in his splendor and his decline. And what I carry of him is also connected to the land, its seam connecting memory, legacy into the future. Memory itself is a kind of map, linked to textures, smells, songs, places, the act of remembering in and of itself a kind of haunting. Music is one of the few portals I have into my fragmented memory, and writing the only way I know to recover my people from the nothing of forgetting, to resist the erasure of the border and its constant overwriting of history, to salvage what is disappearing.


My encountering with landscape, my reaching out to it, gave clarity to concepts still difficult to put into/retain with languages. I became aware of my own longing, isolation, hysterical positioning, while at the same time uncovering a new relationship with (and very disanthropocentric companion in) landscape.


I've been studying erosion, material gestures, agency, undoing; how the land, materials, traces they carry, and our bodies carry our experiences; not only in us but beyond us through generations and extra-familial ties in language, traditions, natural and cultural artifacts

I've been thinking about how, using the internet, we store everything elsewhere, flying files across and beneath the earth and ocean, through light and air, networks of fiber optic cables and electromagnetic signals

I've been listening to Kelman Duran, on a flight home reflecting on how it feels like a slow procession, stretching moments and feelings; a ghostly whine up in my head, a somber celebration, an honor

Death reminds us of the limits of love, but it also sets love free


life is just made upot circles
and at our lowest point, we return to the circle.










    Dying as the last stage of growth
    2024