🌕 Feeling My Way — Salt Water & Smiles

it's a full moon in gemini 🌕

Image ID: Collage on black background with various images, including l to r, top to bottom: color drawings of multiple birds, b/w photo of a neon VACANCY sign, part of one column of Amharic Fidel, illustration of a yellow skull, b/w photo of a young smiling black girl, cutout of the Magician from Mother Peace tarot deck

---

Listen to me read this essay:

---

Hi friends

How are you doing? I hope you’re able to get grounded, find connection, and be gentle with yourself.

I am talking to myself.

I was going to write a whole other newsletter. It was about information overload, and I had been making notes about it since last time. But I’ve been way inside my feels for the past day, and it doesn’t make sense to talk about that any longer (and it’s not completely unrelated). So this is what’s up right now...

I spent last week with my sister, Finot. I decided to center awareness and kindness during this visit by noticing when I was acting from old patterns. It seemed to work. I was the least reactive with her that I’ve ever been. We watched many movies. We worked on a difficult puzzle (which we then dropped – we will try again!). We ate delicious food. We watched episodes from the first season of Friends (Chandler is her favorite 😢). We went to a taco party. We walked to the Brooklyn Museum. We had a beautiful time. And, still. I noticed moments when controlling tendencies emerged. A lot of that originates in our childhood relationship where I expressed both fierce protection and social shame because of her disability. [Listen. Stay in my heart.]

I also noticed my tendency to judge myself about those controlling tendencies (an unhelpful pile on). When I pay attention to the visceral experience of those patterns, I sense that underneath my desire to control her is fear. As though, if she could be as I preferred her to be, then all would be better. Whether it’s with Finot or others, my space or the state of the world, my mood or my resources — or any experience (internal or external), some part of me believes that if everyone and everything would just adhere to my preferences, I would be ensured comfort or certainty. That I would be safe.

This is especially true with my body. Of course, all of us have fears for our health (even if we don’t consciously surface them). I am intimate with mortal fear. For almost two decades, I’ve experienced extremely sharp vicissitudes in my life that have forced me to continuously confront my fear of death. I bring this up because I have scans tomorrow (I’m writing this on Sunday, so actually, they’re today). They’re routine. And, still. Scanxiety.

Yes, all emotions are temporary (including “good ones”). Of course, I understand this on many levels — not only intellectually. And, still. I have distinct preferences when it comes to how I want to feel. Preferences mean I want things to be different than they are. But because I have no real control over almost everything that I prefer were different, my preferences are actually not. at. all. helpful. What’s helpful is to simply feel and allow what’s happening.

Simply is simple. Simply is not easy. Not for me. Becuase feeling is not easy for me. Between fight, flight, freeze, fawn, I definitely tend toward the latter two. In my experience, freeze especially makes it difficult to sense. Not that any of them are great as habituated patterns (and I may be playing “the trauma is greener”), but fight seems like it would afford more agency or movement or possibility. Flight too. I know all too well how very long it can take to thaw from what’s frozen over. It’s required years of presence and patience and persistence.

When I was beating myself up about the ways I was not “perfect” with Finot this week, I let myself feel the regret and sadness in my chest. Some tears came. I let myself feel that. No story, just melting salt water. So simple. I also reminded myself how much more grounded and connected and gentle I was with her this week. I recalled the many times we genuinely laughed together. A smile surfaced. It’s then, I recognized that my regrets about her were intertwined with and even muddled by the worry I feel about these medical tests. I let myself feel that too. That’s when I realized I did not want to write about news and social media. I’m writing this not because I think you don’t realize that salt water and smiles are a way to thaw. I’m the one who needed the reminder today. It helps me to share.

Another thing that helped was talking to my best friend. This morning (Sunday), I called Peter and told him how I was feeling about Finot. I mentioned my scans. I cried a bit. He listened. He reflected kindness back. He made me laugh (at me). Again, salt water & smiles. Peter also helped me process fears about my upcoming solo trip to New Zealand (where he traveled solo some years ago). He helped me decide on a few details (including leaving a chunk of the trip open for spontaineity). He reminded me that solo travel is both exciting and scary. Even more so because I haven’t done it since backpacking through S.E. Asia in 2000 (practically the nineteen hundreds LOL).

I’m going to New Zealand! For a month! Wow! I’m aiming for light and simple (old school: a backpack and mostly hostels). My central intention: To be present to the best of my ability for the entire month — untethered and unhurried. Another intention: To lessen my inputs by incorporating skills I’ve integrated from decades of silent meditation retreat — I will limit communication, news, media, and even books (that are not connected to NZ).* It’s definitely not a silent retreat — I’ve been thinking of it as retreat 2.0. Peter called it an immersion. It’s an immersion into presence — and maybe possibility. My third intention: To listen for creative muses — I am not pressuring myself to write, but I am open and curious to what emerges.

*[If anyone has recommendations for local literature I should load on my iPad, I’m open to those. And any other suggestions!].

Recently, someone I read on this platform expressed guilt for their ability to travel as we watch genocides on our phones. Besides looking forward to not writing OR reading any Substacks while I’m gone, I am hopeful that this immersion will nourish my intention for more clarity and beauty in all my offerings next year. I am privileged to do this and deeply grateful for the opportunity (including to myself for allocating the time and resources).

---

Image ID: A New Yorker cartoon titled “THE ADVENTURES OF LADY NO-KIDS depicting a bleary-eyed man and woman with a baby carriage and a toddler standing looking at a woman wearing a top hat, sweater, scarf and underpants looking at a goose and saying: “Anyway, I’m gonna follow this goose for a while and see where I end up.”

---

All this means that after next week’s last quarter moon, I will be offline until mid January. While I’m gone, I’ll be sending out pre-planned posts from my archives, including my very first “official” newsletter from long ago, which you probably have not seen unless you were one of the few dozen people originally subscribed. Comments will be off on those posts and I will not be sending a January Quarter Connection. I look forward to sharing about my immersion when I get back. Until next week…

May we all feel our way towards freeedom.

With love,

Sebene

P.S. My dear friend Sara Shapouri (one of my favorite people on this planet!) is co-leading Pleasure as Practice: A 4-week series focusing on pleasure as a pathway to personal and collective transformation. It starts this Wednesday and I WISH I COULD TAKE IT! Here’s what she says about it: Our engagement in movements towards justice and in the everyday effort to connect and take care in our lives cannot be maintained without pleasure. Pleasure of the body and spirit are essential to our humanity and help gladden the heart so we do not become overcome by confusion and despair. Tapping into pleasure can help sustain the energy and capacity we need to show up fully for ourselves, our communities, and all of life with responsiveness and creativity. More info and registration here.

---

Here are a couple of related posts for your pleasure…

🌑 Trust Life – Let Joy Be

🌑 I Did It! & No Fear

---

Shahnaz Habib launches Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel, with Sebene Selassie

Lofty Pigeon Books

Tuesday, December 5, 7–8:30pm

More Info & Registration

Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals of Excellence

The conditions of travel have long been dictated by the color of passports and the color of skin.

For Shahnaz Habib, travel and travel writing have always been complicated pleasures. Habib threads the history of travel with her personal story as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom roundtrips are an annual fact of life. Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, this insightful debut parses who gets to travel, and who gets to write about the experience.

Threaded through the book are inviting and playful analyses of obvious and not-so-obvious travel artifacts: passports, carousels, bougainvilleas, guidebooks, trains, the idea of wanderlust itself. Together, they tell a subversive history of travel as a Euro-American mode of consumerism—but as any traveler knows, travel is more than that. As an immigrant whose loved ones live across continents, Habib takes a deeply curious and joyful look at a troubled and beloved activity.

--

About the author

Shahnaz Habib is a writer and translator based in Brooklyn. She translates from her mother tongue, the south Indian language of Malayalam, and has translated two novels, Jasmine Days and Al-Arabian Novel Factory, the first of which won the 2018 JCB Prize. She also consults for the United Nations. Airplane Mode is her first book.