As I was moving from my final apartment in Vancouver in 2022, I found a diary I kept when I was eight years old. At that age, I was musing over less complex issues, though I still maintained a very strict routine.

My eight-year-old self had scheduled a time to read, do homework, babysit, and vent big emotions.

At thirty-six, I set aside time to meditate, recite mantras, and practice reiki. I was setting up the conditions for these processes at eight when I scheduled time to sit and cry and be with myself.

When I initially read this excerpt from my journal, I wondered about the little girl who needed to organize when she would relax and feel her feelings.

I have the same disposition now: I tend to move through events and hold my emotions and opinions at arm's length. I need time to process before fully engaging and committing to the task or conversation.

I am at my best when I write about my experiences. Writing has always been a safe, controlled, grounding, and intimate space for me to reflect and review past events and expressions.

In one of my close current relationships, we do not speak the same native language. Much of our dialogue goes through Google Translate, so there is a big pause before the response.

I’ve grown to enjoy it this way because it gives me more time to digest what is being said and what is being translated through the felt sense.

There is an energetic impression behind every word. I can feel it, and it’s taken me many years to understand the discordant elements imbued in conversations.

Because sometimes, what is said is not felt and vice versa.

Transcribing your thoughts and feelings to a page is a reflective process that requires revision and review. Selecting the exact word that describes my experience is reassuring and exciting. It is fascinating to be stumped by the limitations of language!

Dating someone with a different cultural and linguistic background has opened my mind to how we express ourselves and how different our interpretations are depending on where and how we grew up.

Writing is as elemental as breathing - it’s like yoga in that it helps me align and connect to the flow of the universe within and all around me.

Thank you for reading,
Sera

Sheila Heti -

Grad school has no allure for me, never has. I waited a while before going to university—I didn’t go till I was twenty-one, and I wasn’t even sure I would go—but it was a fantastic experience. I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn’t worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn’t have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing. But I feel like one can have all of that as a writer; you’re writing, you’re reading, you’re talking to interesting and intelligent people. Your life is structured around whatever book you’re writing, and so is your reading and so are many of your conversations. So for me, grad school has never had much meaning or allure. As well, I have known a lot of people in grad school and no one seems very happy about it.

- Read the full interview here.

The Exchange

Lawrence wrote her name in cursive
on the inside of the small diary with a
pen. No one sent her love letters, so
she took to sweeping syllables into the
corner where the cats reclined. She paid
for her sweets at the bodega with tulips.
The old woman received the yellow and
orange bundles in her wrinkled hands.
Lawrence waved the wand and asked for
a palmful of cinnamon hearts. Burning hot! 

Centripetal force: the encouragement of
one spiral following a curved path. The
Old Lady witnessed the woman becoming
between factions, her adolescent passions
alchemized into the Five Great Virtues. Who
knew that the little girl sucking on hard candy 
could be so feminine? A white horse running 
across a wide river. An arbutus branch bends
with the wind. Archetypal forces at play in the
cold stones. 

Lawrence! The kingfishers cackled on the
beam, your mother’s calling! And the little
girl with a long name ran home very fast
with sticky fingers and sweaty shoes. Free
of pride and swollen glands, rushing onward
with the will of that white horse galloping into
the gale. Fully present for the old woman who
required help to lace her boots and bless the
bouquets their daily drink. Ah, said the Mother,
as the little girl appeared, the exchange continues.

composed by seraphina dawn

Quote of the Week:

If passion was a substance I would say it is dark brown, and then blood red. It's like wet grass, tons of it soaked in mud. It's warm and it stinks like shit and it's unaccountably and endlessly good. It's thick and it goes on for miles and it isn't so much deep as bottomless and it holds you in its grip, you never drown. And then it goes. That's all you know.

Eileen Myles

3 questions to brew on:

• Do you reflect on your day-to-day events?

• What do you do? What are your go-to practices?

• What habits have you sustained since you were small?