vol 9. monthly recs & rabbit holes
wind phones, coming home, [un] doing philosophy
a snippet from issue no. 52 of Rabbit Holes:
every week, Patricia Mou hand-picks the most psychoactive internet rabbit holes that explore this question: What does it mean to live a life of meaning and beauty?
good morning 🍂🍃
i write to you from a crisp fall morning in sf. today’s issue features the usual eclectic bazaar of introspective portals, whimsy spaces, creative crests, and infinite vibescapes. i honestly have no idea how after 4 years, something within still compels me to compile each monthly issue. i believe it has something to do with freedom. and the act of manic rabbit hole-ing which compels that ethos. or the ability to meet myself more deeply and honestly in that hall of mirrors. heaven and hell transforming and scintillating in that corpus of consciousness expressing itself to itself. the internet. or the promise that some seed will be planted, some mask flung off, a quickening of the pulse, a shiver of the heart. will lead a soul to rest into itself more deeply. in a system that compels, contorts, and constricts. music will be created.
thank you for staying the course with me 🫶
without further ado.
Here are the visuals, words, poetry, and art so far that stirred my soul for the month of October:
1. 💻 open this issue in your web browser (not phone) at a time where you have at least 30 mins to read.
2. ☕ grab hot tea or coffee
3. 👚 change into something comfortable and ideally sit against some fluffy pillows, with your computer on your lap at a 45 degree angle
4. light a candle 🕯️
5. 💨 take 5 breaths and listen to this meditation
6. meditate on a question you have and run it by this iching reader
7. 🎵 press play for music. Listen while you read this issue.
select your vibes.
Ambient Reflective Beats
Soft snowfall in a dream
poetics & art.
words.
[wholesome] For the Grieving, the Global ‘Wind Phone’ Movement Is a Lifeline
Sasaki told Tessa Fontaine writing for The Believer in 2018:
Life is only, at most, 100 years. But death is something that goes on much longer, both for the person who has died and also for the survivors, who must find a way to feel connected to the dead. Death does not end the life. All the people who are left afterward are still figuring out what to do about it. They need a way to feel connected.
In other words, the “Phone of the Wind” is a physical acknowledgment that grief endures, that life never really returns to “normal” after loss.
check-out this documentary as well: The Wind Phone
A phone booth on an ocean cliffside brings together seven strangers whose seemingly different conversations are connected by one harrowing reality.
[essay] The One Essential Quality
This way of being, this “presence and continuous alertness” where we can be “always aware of the whole without excluding anything” is a hallmark not just of one seafaring tradition, but of most of the crafts that kept our ancestors alive and flourishing.
Peter Kingsley, a Classics scholar and modern mystic, uses the Greek word metis to describe this way of being, this
particular quality of intense alertness that can be effortlessly aware of everything at once. …Metis feels, listens, watches; can even be aware at the same time… of every thought drifting into and out of our consciousness. It misses nothing.
…
Artists need to engage a sense of life and death, of fate in the balance, of dynamic threat and urgent response, because without it, metis is harder to come by. You have to feel in your marrow that something is at stake. Artists understand this intuitively – as do athletes.
…
The ingredients for metis – intense open attention, sensory breadth, playfulness, intuition, a sense of possibility woven deeply with generative danger – they get rarer and rarer, each and every one, each and every year. They’re rarer not because we lack fortitude, or because we’re failures or fallen creatures not up to the task – but because generation after generation, we’ve built a world with little room for anything like playful failure, awareness of death, wide-open senses, and everything else metis needs to arise. We’ve degraded the soil, and there’s nowhere for metis to put down roots.
[interview] Kyohei Sakaguchi
Kyohei was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when he was 31 years old. He is very open about his depression; he recognises it as essential for his creativity. It is precisely because there are times when Kyohei is depressed and unproductive that he is able to feel and notice sceneries, sounds, and details that most people overlook. Kyohei’s sensibility allows him to honestly perceive everyday things as beautiful. His apartment reflects that unique warmth, the kind of place where you want to stay a little longer.
In my case, depression isn’t a bad thing—it’s what gives birth to my work. It’s like a sanatorium where I can shut myself in, or rather it’s more like a cave. And because I write books on being open about depression, this awareness has spread around the neighbourhood and the city. I think it is a really interesting way of forming a community. My partner suggested that I should do an open studio, but it’s difficult. This is the only place where I can protect myself when I’m depressed. It seems like this is a place of healing not only for me, but for others as well. People in this same building who are suffering from depression also have the keys to my house. Just listening to my music and spacing out for about five hours makes them feel better. In a way, this place is an actual shelter. It’s a place for self-care.
[essay] On having a 1-of-1 purpose
A unique purpose is something people will advise having in a theoretical way (I did it in this post last year), but the emotional reality of a singular vision is harder than it looks.
When you’re focused on something few others are thinking about, you find yourself constantly making the case to yourself and others that your vision is worth pursuing and worthy of other people’s attention. This ongoing need to justify your work creates a significant emotional overhead.
I speak to this emotional overhead from experience. Every project I’ve done — Kickstarter, The Creative Independent, Micd, Bentoism, This Could Be Our Future, Metalabel — was initially a 1-of-1. Not something a bunch of people thought was obvious and were looking to do, but something I and the others who were part of them were convinced would matter even as the how and why were unclear.
[reflections] 31 Reflections at 31
Burn and protect your Clearing6 by any means necessary and I mean by any means necessary. Otherwise, what are we fighting for if not our joy, if not our play, if not our life? Your Clearing may be 3pm every Sunday or the 12pm lunch hour in the green space across the street from your job. Maybe it’s your 9pm bath time after you put the babies to bed. Mine is 5am every morning. What’s yours?
Prioritize intergenerational worldbuilding. I’m convinced most of the unnecessary suffering in my 20’s was a direct result of not being in an intentional relationship with my elders.
Gender dysphoria will not protect you. I regret not showing up fully for myself and my students in an attempt to assimilate into white, tech bro culture. It might have protected me in the short term, but the long term damage took years to heal from.
Consider reading for every page you write. If you’re doing morning pages, for every 3 pages you write, read 3 pages of political text. Call this daily devotional practice, Daily Seed.
Once you have a vision for your life, you can’t unsee it. Once you imagine the most authentic expression of your practice, you can’t unknow it. I will die. You will die. We will die. The best possible outcome before that happens is allowing ourselves to step into an irresistible10 vision beyond survival11 and iterate toward it daily.
Almost all animals and plants use their sensorium to facilitate their survival and, in many cases, the survival of their entire ecosystem. Passing along survival data and information via root networks and pheromones is a somatic technology we all have access to. Grounding in our sensorium is also a reliable way to quickly and consistently drop us into the reality of abundance and beauty that is already-always surrounding us if we pause to take it in. We don’t need to wait on the artist grant or our sibling to come back with the car to make a trip to the art store if we remember the pantry of herbs, the textile documents in the linen closet, our bodies, the soil, the book stack beside our bed, the paper scattered on the floor, the breeze wafting in from the window is plenty (if not too much) material to work with.
[essay] What I Learned in Hell
Buddhist teacher Justin von Budjoss was a chaplain to staff at America’s most notorious jail—Rikers Island in New York. There he learned two important lessons: Buddhism really helps people, and prisons should be abolished:
My colleague then said something that struck me with a truth I was unprepared for. She said, “You and I make this place worse. We make it worse because we try to make it work. Maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe these systems should just be left to collapse so that a better alternative can come into existence.”
While this wasn’t necessarily the type of thing one wants to hear while trying to make sense of years of hard service, I think she was right. Her comment gave me permission to let go of working in a way that keeps a broken system going. At the end of 2021, I left my position.
Trying to bring an ethos of compassionate response to the complex intersectionality of suffering at Rikers Island made me a prison abolitionist. I cannot in good conscience support the existence of prisons and jails. No one should be caged, and the magnitude of harm from centuries of penal enforcement has created unfathomable damage to communities of black and brown people, immigrants, the underresourced and underrepresented, and those suffering from the complexities of substance abuse, mental illness, and homelessness.
[essay] Know your creative cycle
Eisenman’s drawing made me think about how useful it can be to know our own creative cycle—or to know something about it, to have some idea of how our individual cycle operates. Granted, to some extent the creative process is a universal mystery—that’s what keeps me writing about it week after week; I’m fascinated by how people try to arrange their lives to get the most out of themselves, creatively, while also recognizing that we have limited control over any of it.
examples
At some point, she knows it’s time to start writing:
It’s kind of cheesy, but I’ll just start writing sentences in my head. And then it seems like I’ve hit some kind of tipping point where the research should be over and the writing part should happen.
Or here’s Zora Neale Hurston describing a frequent dynamic in her work, in a 1938 letter:
Every now and then I get a sort of phobia for paper and all its works. I cannot bring myself to touch it. I cannot write, read, or do anything at all for a period. . . . Just something grabs hold of me and holds me mute, miserable and helpless until it lets me go. I feel as if I have been marooned on a planet by myself. But I find that it is the prelude to creative effort.
