life notes: on amnesia & spring rituals
my rose blossoming
I haven’t written about my day to day life in a while - perhaps because, ever since I started traveling - (and even after I “stopped”) the days continue to float by like a dream, and I feel like an amnesiac half the time. despite experiences, emotions, and ideas feeling all-consumingly intense at the time of experiencing them, after they pass, I can’t remember much - of anything.
perhaps this is the number one reason why I keep so many journals, of all varieties (a handwritten digital journal on my iPad, a typed, multi-media notion journal, this public web journal, a very private paper journal). I write things down so that I don’t forget myself, in the midst of constant, infinite mutating selves. if truth lives in the accumulation of feelings, then keeping an archive is a way of trusting myself.
ortakoy, istanbul
living in istanbul already feels like a series of hangovers. these photos that I’m posting are outdated (a few weeks old), containing the very beginnings of spring. those were the days when I rode the bus in my winter jacket, sweating. when days of full sun made me happy for no reason, while the nights made me melancholic and sad. there is something about the changing of seasons that hold with it a violent kind of grief, when all of your old rituals feel no longer relevant, and you don’t know if you’re doing the right thing, and actually, you don’t know what to do with yourself at all.
if winter asked me to be very, very still, then I think spring wants me to grow, to move, to breathe with it. to find different ways of inhabiting space. different understandings of spaces — be it internal, physical, emotional, digital. how do you cultivate a space? open a space? close a space?
these days, I’m starting round two of settling into my home (more on this later). I’ve been hungry for plants, and books, and freshly squeezed orange-pomegranate juice, and taking long naps in the sun on my fluffy white rug. I discovered a bookstore ten minutes from my home, with a winding staircase that leads to a basement floor of english classics in turkish, and an upstairs floor with an entire table of plant & urban gardening books, which I stood for an hour reading. afterwards, I go to the neighborhood plant shop, and carry $20 worth of green things home. this ritual has felt so nourishing.
I’ve never “identified” much as a gardener - but gardens make me feel sane, connected, alive. I know what it takes to nurture a thing and to help it thrive. maybe this is what spring is mostly about: being tender enough to help tentative things grow.