(if you would prefer to listen to this instead of reading it, click the audio version above)
Sweet friends of TC,
How are you all doing out there? It feels like such a heavy time in the world once again with so many crises colliding at once. I am thinking of you all and sending you a lot of love.
In my last letter, I loosely mentioned that I was in the process of moving but what I didn’t actually say was that I was leaving London, the city that has been my home for longer than I’ve lived anywhere in my entire life and the process just took every ounce of energy from me.
For the last few years, I’ve been sitting in that feeling of yearning to be transformed by something unknown to me still. I could feel it out there, like a personal whisper, only intelligible by me, calling me back into the wild, inviting me to find myself by losing myself. Thus ensued a somewhat vigorous process of trial and elimination to try to understand what about my life needed to change. Was it related to my work life? Love or a relationship? Was it spiritual? Geographical? And could any of these things even be separated for me or were they all somehow deeply embedded and intertwined?
Then the pandemic came and like so many of us, that urge to change everything about my life only felt stronger. That it was time to do something different, be something different and the time was now, but what, how and where? Without a clear answer, I asked the universe to show me the way. Then early last summer, unexpectedly, while on a road trip from the south of France to the south of Italy with my brother, after 3 years of being very much on my own (a lot of that time was super nourishing, some of it incredibly lonely), I met someone so sweet and wonderful, who made me laugh, who made me feel very loved and cared for. We’ve been seeing each other ever since albeit long-distance with them being in Milan and me in London and at the start of the year, we decided to try and make a go at experimenting with what a life together could maybe look like. We went back and forth on our viable options but since I was the one yearning to get up and move, even though Milan is a city I’ve never had a connection to, where I know almost no one, I saw this as the crumb along the path that I’d been looking for and decided to take the leap to move to Italy to see what else this path could have in store for me.
Despite the move being something I’ve been and am still very excited about, the physical act of preparing for it brought up this familiar sense of dread and loneliness. I’ve had my fair share of lonely difficult moves, here are some that come to mind: a charming ex who already had a new girlfriend before we broke up, who left me to move out of our apartment alone in a blizzard, roommates who made my life unbearable, painful departures I didn’t want because I had run out of money and options. But when I stop to think about why moving always brings up so much, it's probably a lot to do with what felt at times like an unstable childhood. Having to leave Japan and everything/everyone we knew to go somewhere where we knew no one, where we were constantly carted in and out of our family home which my newly-widowed single mom rented out as her only source of income. Other families ate around our kitchen table and slept in our beds so we could keep living. The constant moving was hard for us, but we were kids, we learned to adapt, but seeing how difficult and lonely it was for my mother is a wound I seem to have inherited. After months of living in this repetitive cycle of culling, selling, donating and sorting, when it came to the actual packing part I somehow pulled my lower back out and from one moment to the next I could barely sit, stand or lie down let alone lift or carry anything, the body does keep the score after all. My yoga teacher Salimah reminded me that lower back pain is a lot to do with not feeling supported. She told me to call in my reinforcements. Learning to ask for help when I need it is a skill that I’m still learning, but I did it and it was beautiful to see my people come through for me. A note and a reminder to myself that giving and receiving should feel equal.
I moved to London at 19, clueless and lusty for life. It’s the city that shaped my very being, the place that made me, that I made myself in. That kind of home, that kind of comfort, in a city that has held you in all your forms, is really hard to leave. I am now in this surreal in-between, where my body is here in this new place, my mind knows what's up but my heart hasn’t quite caught up yet. I guess moving, especially for those of us that are immensely fortunate enough to even be able to travel and move freely through the world, is one of those things that becomes more ‘real’ with time, like when you have a bad day and your best friend isn’t around the corner to make you feel better. I know I will never lose the things I’ve played a part in making, the community in the truest sense of the word that I’ve cultivated, and those relationships and places will stay with me forever. Still, I can’t deny that I already miss them terribly. That somewhat bittersweet taste of change, to leave the things you love behind, to try something new, to risk it all, to open yourself up to the unknown and thus to all the ways in which life can surprise us.
This experiment of moving, this experiment of love, who knows what will happen? As mere mortals, nothing is forever. Absolutely nothing is promised to me, nor any of us, but there is everything to be gained in the process of experimentation. In this time of so much division, hate and pain, in this crisis of imagination, I am choosing to lean into the unknown, to try to imagine a new way of living in the name of love. Not merely in just a romantic sense but a truest deepest love for life itself.
It only feels right to end with this piece from Octavia E. Butler’s `The Book of the Living’ a fictional scripture created by Lauren Olamina, her protagonist in her brilliant, almost scarily profound and timely book ‘Parable of the Sower’. When I first read these words, they swirled around my mind all day, all night and really started to restructure how I saw the world. I got the title tattooed so that I can look at it whenever I feel unsure, scared and lost. They remind me of the beautiful impermanence of everything and that if one wants to truly live, one must learn to lean into the unknown because therein lies life itself.
—
God is Change
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
—
Love,
Naomi
15. God is Change