i am at london heathrow at the end of my time here, currently sitting next to an older gentleman who is using the empty seat next to him as a mousepad. it feels so, so good to be traveling again. i can always spot other americans in our pursuit of water fountains, refilling our personal water bottles again and again. i've missed hearing languages, exercising the muscle that is transit and map navigation. i saw punchdrunk's the burned city and cried about how much i missed theatre and the arts, which is the reason i booked this trip in the first place. in museums, i noticed parents with children and babies and thought of how my stay-at-home mom took us to the mall multiple times every week: not to shop, but to go somewhere outside of the house that didn't cost money.   

while i was here i visited with a friend (we met online, on LJ, ~2003?), who reminded me of a conversation we had when i came back in 2005: how i was lit up with shame about the re-election of w (baby bush) and the implications therein. how i was telling anyone, if they asked then, that i was canadian. i laughed a little, because that conversation isn't even a memory of mine. somehow here we are, nearly two decades later. i told him how i'm still traumatized by the heartbreaks of 2016 (and beyond), a kind of hardship of the soul (?) that, if i'm honest, i'm not sure baby bush ever put me through. he described to me how brexit is impacting the artists and musicians he knows who used to regularly tour mainland europe with ease. i was struck with a kind of despair about not knowing whether it's a pendulum swing to darkness, or longer term Dark Times, the proverbial boiling-a-frog analogy (sorry, frog). how it's hard to tell without distance. how you just keep on keeping on. 

i have been thinking about the systems in place, particularly capitalism, particularly during this pandemic (which we are still in! news flash to literally all of heathrow airport except the 2% of us who are masked, wow). personally, since 2020, i've had to really reckon with some workaholism and controlling tendencies. like many of us, i have been thinking a lot about effort and work. i don't have all the answers, of course, just gentle analysis, inquiry. there are a lot of folks who are writing incredible pieces on these topics (pretty much everything anne helen petersen puts out, tbh). i read this gem in alice sparkly kat's september newsletter just recently:

"There are problems that hard work will not solve. There are things that have nothing to do with working harder that we cannot cultivate through simple effort. There are things that we cannot buy with our labor. There are problems that we cannot fix through working harder that we also cannot accept. I’m thinking of working shitty jobs and about being in shitty relationships but also about the often too large to comprehend technologies of assumption and pollution that impact all of us but are not controlled by most of us. And then I wonder—is it possible to know that there are issues that cannot be fixed by pushing harder but to, still, retain hope?" 

this kind of vibe is where i am trying to redirect my energy. in coincides with a personal effort to work less, to not say yes to every work opportunity simply because it is an offer-in-hand. i recognize that is a tremendous privilege. i'm asking myself what it look like to put the work into: creative outputs? my mental health? where i can truly make an impact? i'm also thinking about what things i previously did or put work into, that no longer serve me, or no longer deserve of that time expenditure. it's a doozy; i'm often surprised at my answers.

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also, what a time to have been plopped in england for the first time in seven years. this is my favorite example of one of the hundreds of digital kiosks i saw the day after the queen's death. (that day i also spotted fabricated banners, signs, even a flag? like, do they print these things every year just in case?) 

hope you are all well and looking out for one another and have something out there that gives you a little sparkle of hope.

xo
rhienna