- the feeling of coming home -
dear stranger friends:
today feels like autumn in berlin - my favorite season - and i'm trying not to get too excited about baking rhubarb cakes and fermenting kimchi, one day soon, in my imaginary house by the sea, where i'll live with my lover-cat and maybe lover-man, if we are lucky.
i discovered a new joy: working late at night, on the balcony, with candles -- post-shower, post-skincare, between 10pm and 1am, as darkness falls slowly. it's the inverse of what hemingway described about writing early in the morning, in the cold and dark.
summer is not great for focus, let's say.
here are the contents of this letter: a reflection on the feeling of coming home, the joy of simple summer sweetness, a map of contents for my travelogue book, a list of sanity exercises (written after-the-fact of my having completed them), notes from a train ride to warsaw, an item from my soothing room: to make a medicine song playlist for bad moment-days.
i am sending you brilliant wildflowers from tempelhofer feld,
kening
1 | a simple summer sweetness
what i want is to live inside this simple summer sweetness - where the days are slow and supple, and the air not too hot, the fruit always ripe, the water just cool enough. summer is definitely not my favorite season. but what a perfect joy — when summer can be simple and easy.
2 | travelogue: map of contents
today i drew the rough design for the “map of contents” for the first experimental book collection of my travel writings. it was only when i returned to new york city this spring that i realized i could finally complete a full circle — on the page, or in my head.
3 | sanity exercises for the obsessive mind
1. take a 6 hour train ride away from your foreign country to an even more foreign country. feel acutely the discomfort; the further disorientation and confusion.
2. buy yourself frivolous flavors of ice cream and eat it while walking an unfamiliar street in aforementioned foreign city.
3. choose a cafe with a smiley owner with whom you can only exchange three words. sit outside. accept his offer of cacao and cinnamon for your coffee.
4. return to the original foreign country — only for it to feel like a gentle, familiar place (familiarity is relative, afterall).
4 | make a medicine song playlist
here is a good thing to have in your emotional medicinal closet — a personalized playlist of medicine songs. by that i mean: a short curation of songs to listen to when you're feeling especially terrible, and need to self-soothe, ground, or remind yourself that the apocalyptic world in your head — is not the end-all-be-all version of reality. sound — and music — is so healing, and requires no effort to absorb. you just press play.
5 | train from berlin to warsaw
i took a train from berlin to warsaw this past weekend — and sat twelve hours on the train, looking outside the window, where there were fields strewn with bright orange wildflowers (poppies?) and strips of purple. the trees were a foggy dark green. i sat in a compartment with four other people — all of us masked — and felt so hot and sweaty i could barely stand the feeling of my own hair. germans are not a fan of AC. okay, well, fine, then.
6 | berlin wildflowers
here are some pieces of the berlin wild i collected yesterday, on a late afternoon walk along the canal - during which, lost in my own whimsical fantasy, i almost lost my keys (thank you, dog-walking stranger, for chasing after me). and they remind me of the flower poems i made in rural japan, when i hardly saw a single other person except the friend who i stayed with, and occupied myself by talking to myself, soaking in long hours of tatami mat solitude — and passing the days by the rice paddies and sakura trees — and how i was so very, very happy. am i meant to live a life like that - as a countryside recluse? sometimes i get confused.
7 | tango appetite, almost post-pandemic
like most of the world, I barely danced in the last year and a half. I spent months where i didn’t think about tango, didn’t miss it, felt relief that my addiction to the embrace was not all-consuming as I thought. this meant new possibilities: I could live in a remote seaside village and not suffer from a lack of tango. (which is, more or less, what I did) what a relief.
8 | the feeling of coming home
here is a flyer i saw on the street sometime last winter — on one of my daily zombie walks during that berlin winter which never seemed to end... but what is: "the feeling of coming home?" I try to recall the last time I had that feeling, and I can't really remember. if the feeling of coming home is a magic potion, then what are its ingredients? safety? nourishment? peace? comfort?
thank you from all the cabbage waiting to be made into kimchi for reading my weekly digest. write me back anytime.