Entropical Paradise

Thank you Cathy Shields, Karen Cadiero-Kaplan, and many others for tuning into my live video with Jennifer Pastiloff! Join me for my next live video in the app.I have so much to share with you all, and you’ll be hearing from me later this week! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aplaceforwriters.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aplaceforwriters.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aplaceforwriters.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aplaceforwriters.substack.com/subscribe

Hello! I am so excited for tomorrow! All paying members will have access to The Interior Gaze— here’s a video letting y’all know the format and everything that’s included. Something I love about this class is that you can choose your own adventure. If you only want to read the weekly essays, that’s totally okay. If you want to dive in and join in weekly discussions, bi-weekly meetings, and the weekly writing space, that is all available to you as well. Read about The Interior Gaze, but I encourage you to watch the video as well! THE INTERIOR GAZE is open to all paying members! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aplaceforwriters.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the Entropical Paradise podcast. For this first episode, I reflected on a scarf that I inherited from my mother, who died by suicide in 2010. I’m not going to say much more about the episode except that it delves into the subjects of inheritances, possessions, and what we carry. What’s passed down to us, whether physical or ephemeral. While this episode mentions suicide, I don’t go into details involving suicidality or suicide. Please let me know what you thought of the episode in the comments! Especially if you have something positive to say, or your own reflections and stories to share. Lastly, please, please share this post or podcast with anyone you think would resonate with it, or would benefit from hearing it. If you love Entropical Paradise, please share it with others. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aplaceforwriters.substack.com/subscribe

"Let this Darkness Be a Bell Tower" by Rainer Maria RilkeQuiet friend who has come so far,feel how your breathing makes more space around you.Let this darkness be a bell towerand you the bell. As you ring,what batters you becomes your strength.Move back and forth into the change.What is it like, such intensity of pain?If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.In this uncontainable night,be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,the meaning discovered there.And if the world has ceased to hear you,say to the silent earth: I flow.To the rushing water, speak: I am.Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aplaceforwriters.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode I talk about how we can be more gentle with ourselves when it comes to our writing practice and projects. Please comment and share!I mention the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. I am linking the incredible On Being episode. I personally listened to the audiobook and found it very helpful. This podcast is not behind a paywall, but all podcasts hereafter will be. Please consider subscribing and supporting this publication! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aplaceforwriters.substack.com/subscribe

In celebration of Spring, my favorite season (tied with Autumn, of course), I’m reading you the poem Swifts, by Anne Stevenson. Read along HERE.(apologies for any background noise; I live in a noisy place. Maybe you’ll even hear the birds outside…) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aplaceforwriters.substack.com/subscribe

This is the first missive of Hermitage. You can read or listen to this newsletter (or both). If you enjoy it, please (please) share it on social media, send it to a friend, or become a paying subscriber. Song of Myself, 51Walt Whitman - 1819-1892The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them.And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.)I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?Who wishes to walk with me?Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?My birth certificate reads Janet Anastasia Selby, but my mom called me Stacy when I was born. Maybe this was it. The beginning of me wanting to be someone else. Janet was my grandmother’s name, and I was her namesake. We were soul mates. If my mother had called me by my first name would I have kept it?The first dwelling I remember is the basement room I shared with my mom when I was in kindergarten. Our landlords were John and Yvonne, a kind older couple, and my mom and I lived on canned food and powdered milk. My clothes were hand-me-downs from my stingy rich uncle; our furniture was theirs, too. My mom brought a lot of men over. I often lay awake in her bed, where we both slept, staring at the popcorn ceiling and trying to force the scary images my imagination naturally created into unicorns or teddy bears. It never worked. Skulls, their edges red and glowing, formed above me. Grim reapers. Monsters.In the living-room I could hear my mom and her men, the records they played, their laughing and the dulling of their voices until they slipped into murmurs. I imagined myself into the lives of my classmates, who smelled of laundry detergent and seemed taken care of. My clothes were often unwashed. I couldn’t sit still at my desk and was held back a year. I remember, the following autumn, passing the row of graduated kindergartners, now first-graders, and the way they looked at me. Some of them made fun of me, and soon all my fellow kindergartners knew I’d been held back, that I was a foreigner amongst them. I don’t remember the name of that school. As long as memory serves me, I have been imagining myself into other people’s bodies, imagining myself into their lives. I recall my schools through the popular girls, whose lives I wanted to inhabit so badly. Through the popular boys, who I hoped would save me. The world told me I needed to be saved by a boy. Maybe it was that we moved so much, and after moving enough I learned that I didn’t have to bring myself with me. I could be anyone. I’d pretend to be someone else until my mask slipped and I needed to hide again, but it was okay because we would move again and I could start over. Somewhere along the way my name stopped feeling like my own name, and I asked my mom and my new stepdad to call me Janet. I was thirteen. I thought Janet sounded nice because I loved Janet Jackson and I wanted to be Black. Black people were nicer than white people, from my personal experience. But Janet didn’t change how much I didn’t feel at home in my body, or at home with my mother and my stepdad. Running away didn’t change it either. I left first when I was twelve, then thirteen, then regularly until I hitch-hiked to California at sixteen. On the road I tried out all kinds of different names. Simone. Wildflower. Chynna. It didn’t matter what name I used— I lived in a different country, on a different planet. I wasn’t like the people who picked me up, people who sometimes hurt me but mostly helped me. I lived in a body, but didn’t know how to be in a body. I was untethered, floating in space.That sensation of being untethered has never fully dissipated. I could examine and reexamine the possible causes for my feelings of unbelonging, but I know its causes are too myriad to be grasped. I’ve changed my name three times since Janet. Ana. Anastasia. And now, back to Stacy, which feels like a name should feel. Not perfect. Not completely fitting. But mine. My name. Am I untethered? Or is this sense of untetherdness a product of my culture? When I am able to sidestep my American cultural training I can see clearly that our culture is absolutely unhinged, ungrounded, and, in essence, toxic. It’s constructed of binaries that pit us against each other and ourselves. It deprioritizes nuance. When I scroll too long through the infinite ribbon of the internet, I lose myself. My thoughts are reworked and transformed into communal thoughts, programmed thoughts. I didn’t notice this as much until I left social media. But in the quiet outside of the scrolling and screeching, I could hear myself again. I found solitude and silence, and turned the pages of books, wherein existed so many ideas to be contemplated, rather than inundated with and buried in. When I read, I often look up. I pause. I ponder. When I am on my phone, scrolling on social media, it takes so much of my willpower to put my phone down when I know I should. I reach for it constantly, as if it were a binky, as if I were a baby needing soothing. When I read, images blossom in my mind. Connection are consciously made. When I scroll, I lose myself. I begin to look at myself differently depending on what I am looking at. I begin to think I may be doing something wrong. There may be something wrong with me. Why aren’t people liking my posts? Why doesn’t my life look like (blank)’s life? Why can’t I afford to buy every type of candle that’s marketed to me. Online, I am lost in the ludic loop. A kind of insanity. I am a dopamine seeking missile. The more time I spend on social media in particular, the more I notice my opinions flattening and becoming dulled. To say something impactful on social media requires a kind of binary approach. It’s less about meaning and more about how to get and keep attention. Want to bring attention to a cause? Find the enemy of that cause. Make an enemy, and people will take action. One of my favorite witches, Amanda Yates Garcia, sent out an email about a month and a half ago saying she was taking a social media hiatus. She said that on Instagram, her more thoughtful posts were often overlooked and underliked in favor of any posts that were more superficial. For me, this manifests in my most “liked” posts always being selfies. Annoying. So what does this have to do with my sense of self or selves? It’s this: having grown up with no grounding, no real home base, and no unconditional and steady love from anyone, my sense of self is, simply put, sometimes fragile. I do a lot of inner work to keep myself grounded, but there are times that I find myself looking at myself from the outside, judging and criticizing. Policing myself. I lose touch with what I want, and what I need, instead focusing on the reactions or perceived reactions of the people surrounding me. In real life, this is easier to manage. When people are in front of me, I can feel them. Feel their energy, and along with it, my intuition. But online, my feelings are dulled, and I inevitably begin to exist as a sort of object to myself. I objectify myself as seen through the eyes of social media. This habit of self-objectification isn’t only brought about by the internet, as the internet didn’t exist when I was younger, and when I began looking at myself in this way. TV started it. My mother, who was ultra-critical and sometimes abusive, started it. I policed myself to make sure nothing I did made her upset (though it was impossible to conform to her standards, which were milky and oblique). But social media magnifies everything. I say everything, but I think it magnifies the negative, and not so much the positive. It becomes, a lot of the time, a hollow performance. Even things on the internet that encourage inclusivity and self-acceptance inherently discourage the kind of deep self work that’s necessary for real growth. My curiosity has been piqued by my month’s long absence from social media I took last winter. I am curious: what would it feel like to spend a year without any exposure to social media?One of my mentors, Dana Spiotta, told me that leaving social media is the highest form of self care. Is it? I won’t know unless I try. So, beginning on September 1st 2021, I am taking a year off of social media. Truth be told, I’m excited. I really am. I need the respite. I need the quiet. I am ready for it. We’ll see how it goes. Stuff I’ve enjoyed this week:* I loved this piece about the history of Emily Dickinson’s black cake. * Tiny things have always been adorable to me. You too? Read this piece on the ceramicists who are making tiny lil menageries. * Look at these amazing masks handmade by various Mexican artists, which depict covid in a myriad of ways. * This week I got kind of into videos of feral cats becoming friendly. What’s not to like about that? There’s this one in which a feral cat makes friends with a kitten, and this one with blind Apollo who regains his sight and learns to love his humans, and this last one where a feral kitten gets the love she deserves. * Sometimes I happen upon artists I really love, and this week I have been obsessed with Gabrielle Brown, whose paintings are chaotic and beautiful and full of emotion and history. You can find the painting below for sale on her Facebook page. * I’m almost done with White Magic by Elissa Washuta. It took me a minute to get into it, but it’s stunning. I especially like the Indigenous and historical perspective on Seattle. Here’s a video of her being interviewed while she was writer-in-residence at Fremont bridge. That’s all for this week. Please share if you enjoyed this and let me know what resonates for you by leaving a comment. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aplaceforwriters.substack.com/subscribe

Here’s a twelve minute meditation for adaptation, guided by me. These meditations are for paid subscribers, but I thought I’d send one out to all of you as well. We all need some space for adaptability in these times. Research has proven that twelve to fifteen minutes of meditation daily can improve our experience as humans. I hope you love this; it’s made with affection and hope. With love,Stacy This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aplaceforwriters.substack.com/subscribe

Readers: please don’t hesitate to comment and respond to this newsletter. I love to connect with you!I am offering you this embarrassingly candid recording (it would be exaggerating to call it a podcast) as an example of how addicted I’ve been to social media, recorded last week. It’s not edited, so listen at your own risk. When I say addicted to social media, it’s not tongue-in-cheek. I have navigated substance addictions, and my social media addiction has been just as destructive, albeit in different ways. I foresee a lot of learning on my part as I continue to abstain. I have now been off social media for a little over a week- my Instagram and Facebook are deactivated, and my Twitter is active only to post links to this newsletter. It’s blocked everywhere— on my phone and computer. For the first four or five days I felt a surprisingly visceral longing to be on social media. Mostly, it was the worry of being out of touch with people I care about, as well as not being able to promote my writing or projects.It’s telling that quitting drinking has been easier for me than quitting social media. I transferred my sense of striving to my newsletter. Last week I watched a bunch of videos about how to grow and promote my newsletter, and realized I was doing exactly what I’d set out not to do: make something that is geared towards the “market",” rather than writing simply about my experiences and things I am loving and/or struggling with. Do I want to grow my newsletter? Of course! Would I love for you to share this and encourage others to subscribe? Yes! (I am inwardly laughing as I embed this “share” button below)—— But, nothing I write in this newsletter will be anything but what I’m feeling, what I’m loving, what I am struggling with, what I am doing. Beyond that, I can’t control anything. I’m honored that anyone spends any of their time reading my words at all. Many moons ago (like, lots and lots of moons) I ran away from home after being gang-raped and subsequently ostracized at my high-school in Olympia, only a few months after I’d moved there with my mom and stepdad, from Renton, WA. As a perpetual new kid, I’d always been a tryhard, diehard striver, wanting to be accepted and loved instead of ignored or made fun of. I also lived with the deep knowledge that I was, at my core, a terrible person, and didn’t deserve good things. When I returned to Olympia, after living on a farm in Northern California, an alternative school was opening and asked me to attend. It was there that I began to learn how capitalism poisoned everything. Capitalism is a for-profit system, where growth must be infinite. Capitalism ran the beauty industry, which had taught my mother, and then me, to hate our bodies. Capitalism eradicated the wolves in the western United States, a keystone species integral to ecological balance. Capitalism marketed the vodka I poured into my Jack-in-the-Box soda cup and brought into the classroom with me. At Avanti (the name of the school), I learned to look beyond the horizon of capitalism, towards a world where art for art’s sake was valued, where people were treated equally instead of exploited, where we saw each animal and insect and human being as valuable— not because of a net worth, but because every living thing, including our earth, was inevitably permeated with inherent value.Throughout my life I’ve felt at odds with the culture I live in and what we’re taught to sacrifice as humans in order to conform to what’s expected of us, or even simply buy essentials such as toilet paper and clothing. Buying clothing is a political act, because our globalized culture oppresses the powerless in order to provide inexpensive clothing to the powerless. Does one powerless have more power than the other? In some ways, yes. Are we all pawns here? In some ways, yes. Especially if you were born without resources that link you to the ones who own the means of production, i.e., us. These are things I think about all the time, and I think about them in relation to social media, and how I engage with social media and the wider world. It all breeds a specific kind of narcissism, doesn’t it? We can’t necessarily fault ourselves. No need to feel ashamed about it, is what I tell myself. But also: wake up. My alternative school taught me that we can build systems outside of the already established systems. In our classrooms we watched film noir, read A People’s History of the United States, learned the meaning of anarchy, spoke openly about queerness and our eating disorders and sat at round tables with our teachers. In a public school. I taught a yoga class, which other students could take, for credit. We can build systems outside of the already established systems. I, an individual, am a system. It is okay to acknowledge our individual power.It is okay to acknowledge our powerlessness. On New Year’s Day I pulled a past, present, future spread from a hand-me-down tarot deck I was gifted. This is from the Iris Oracle deck. The three cards felt spot on. The “something that is never truly yours” is money. Money, the thing I stress about the most, and the things that doesn’t belong to anybody. Pieces of cotton and nickel and copper. When traveling, I love holding unfamiliar money. Often I think of ripping money apart. tearing bills in two. We could rip up all the money. What would our lives look like without money?As far as my dreams? What are those? I have an apartment. A steady job. I once dreamed of being a well-known author, but now I only want to be able to write, which I’m doing right now. You’re reading my words. My dreams are very close.What are your dreams?If a light shines on us, what is exposed?On Thursday I went to Carkeek Park by myself. I’d been there earlier in the day with the boys, but we left their bubble machine on the beach and after work I went back to retrieve it. I got the little machine, whose button sometimes gets stuck in “on” mode, and put it in my Prius, then took a walk up into the park. It was raining a little bit. I found a fort with a garland hung inside its curved entrance. Lichen hung from branches like overgrown mint-green beards. Winter is moss season in the Pacific Northwest. Did you know that the air hovering above moss is its own kind of ecosystem? And when moss wants its spores to fly along on the breeze it must grow a head higher than all the other little strands of moss in its community? I learned this from Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Gathering Moss. I’ve written about the book before. Now whenever I touch moss I think of what it takes for more moss to be made. Isn’t it incredible, how alive everything is?The boys, at the park a few days ago, asked me: is everything alive? I said yes.Walking through the park I passed only two people. Birds, hiding from the rain, chirped, and I pictured little lasers beaming through the treetops. In colder places the ferns die, but here they grow gigantic, and I thought of the forests as they must have been when Indigenous people were the only ones foraging in these parts. I thought of what the forests must have looked like before any human contact. My footsteps leave footprints that will soon disappear. We are here for such a short time. I touched the rough leaves of the ferns and felt the tiny circles of spores on their undersides. On my way out of the forest I stopped and leaned against a cedar. I let my whole body rest inside the curve of its body, and felt its immense solidity and peace. I breathed in, visualizing the xylem and phloem like little highways inside the tree, carrying water and nutrients. My fingerpads gently tapped its smooth bark. I could have stayed there a long time, but was conscious of someone coming up the trail, so I peeled myself off and away. Next weekend I start my 200 hour yoga teacher training through Sangha Yoga here in Seattle. The training is positioned towards diversity and inclusion, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it and excited to see how what I learn informs and transforms my life. I’ve been given a scholarship. A blessing. For over two decades I wanted to do a YTT, and now is the time, mid-pandemic. Of course, it’s all via Zoom. I miss seeing people in person, don’t you? A room full of people sharing air is something we really took for granted. What I loved this week:* This interview (there’s audio and transcription) with Jaron Lanier was helpful for me to listen to. He’s a silicon valley veteran who now writes and speaks about mass addiction to social media. * Here in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, Richard Knowles made a tiny Rosebud Motel. I hope to visit it before it’s taken down!* I’ve been OBSESSED with Julien Baker lately. Here’s her live set at KEXP, and a little bit about her from Jia Tolentino at The New Yorker. * I may have watched the entire first season of Bridgerton this week. The holiday gave me time? I thoroughly enjoyed the series, which is lighthearted, full of lots of great characters and beautiful costumes, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. I did wish for better camera work and lighting, and more queerness, but one can’t have everything.* Have you heard of LIVt? Read about and listen to her here, and make sure to read this Medium post . Her music is multilayered, and her newest album Flowers in the Void has been on repeat for me. * As someone who’s number one Spotify song of 2020 was forest sounds, I adored this piece about people who binged on white noise in our pandemic year.* I’ve been meditating for an hour every morning, listening to a recording of S.N. Goenka from my Vipassana days. It’s not easy, but it feels good to do it. Books:* This week I read The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas, a Norwegian author. The story is set in the cold late autumn, the darkness of winter, and the ice-breaking early spring, and follows two girls, Siss and Unn. I devoured it. Sparse and impactful, the prose resembled poetry in the way some sentences were given an entire line to themselves. The story was enigmatic, yet forward moving— a tale of friendship, but also a fable with a moral lesson. The book was sent out via Phinney by Post (or, rather, I picked it up).* For months I’ve been wanting to read The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh. I’m near the end of it, and am enthralled with its poetic sentences and open examination of familial relationships, abandonment, regret, and eating disorders. It’s surprised me. I’m not sure what I expected, but I am especially taken with the voice of the story— arresting and melancholic, yet hopeful.* I just finished James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. I clutched it to my chest when I (digitally) turned the last page. Its richness of emotion, depth of exploration, and autobiographical quality was wholly unique. Its characters, of course, were loosely based on people Baldwin knew, and much of what he struggled with personally was present in the book. I am currently reading his novels in chronological order, so I’ll be reading Giovanni’s Room next (for the second time). I am interested in how Baldwin examined similar subjects from many angles. As writers in the “market” we’re told we must write certain things at certain times, but the truth of it is, we must write what we must write, or we aren’t writing what’s true to ourselves at all. * Tonight I’ll tuck in with Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness. Please, if you feel so inclined, comment and/or share Gathering. I am exploring what this newsletter can be, and will be adding a Thursday installation in the next couple months. Maybe yoga videos and guided meditations? Thoughts on writing? I’m interested in what you’d find helpful. I’d love to hear your ideas, feedback, and thoughts. With love,Stacy This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aplaceforwriters.substack.com/subscribe