Vellichor // One

Downpour // Radimsky // Yoga Nidra

It will rain tonight. Through my window, which overlooks Puget Sound, city lights reflect murky and dull on the undersides of the newly arrived clouds.

Somehow I have become someone who loves rain, and I used to only love the sun. Maybe it was that boyfriend a long time ago who stood on the inside of my parent’s sliding glass door and proclaimed that he hated the rain that made me hate the rain. He was from Southern California, the desert. I pretended to love what he loved and hate what he hated, shrouding my true self in his personality. When I moved down to Southern California to work on a hotshot crew I pretended I loved the endless sun, or maybe I convinced myself so I wouldn’t have to pretend, or maybe I did love the constant light and warmth, the blandness and predictability of it, like the rain, but drier, brighter. The rain and darkness sent me into myself, an impossible place to be for me back then. Back then I was not sure what I loved, but I was sure of what I was supposed to love.

It’s not that I don’t love the sun. I love the sun. It’s just that, this year, something inside me says, enough already. I get it. Just a little rain now?

It will rain, and there will be that (petrichor) smell, and I will breathe it in my sleep tonight, all my windows open, the train horns in the distance constantly singing.

I’ve been looking for beautiful things this week. There are two rose bushes outside my small apartment building. They bloom intermittently, half-clobbered by the overgrown bushes my landlord never trims. One’s flowers are bright coral— they bloom too high for me to reach. When I came home tonight there was a gathering of several perfect roses high above the camellia bush. Somehow they made their way through the maze of branches and leaves, and now they are triumphant. The other bush is blooming too but its flowers are fuchsia and they flop out towards the sidewalk. I impulsively tried to pick one before opening the front door tonight and pricked myself with a thorn. Roses are not for picking. I ran upstairs for my scissors.

a pink rose leaning out over the sidewalk.

Bright coral roses rising (triumphantly?) above a giant bush.

The roses were a lovely surprise upon my arrival home after returning from picking up my now repaired computer, which crashed two days before my book was due, and returning the one I “borrowed” from Best Buy. Turns out a MacBook Pro is much nicer that a MacBook Air but I can’t justify (or afford) the purchase.

Yesterday I stood in front of my mirror and cut off all my hair. It’s short now, short like it used to be years and years ago, its lengths mismatched, its curl returned. I’ve been thinking of shaving my head.

I shaved my head for the first time after my soul mate Brett died. I was working as a stripper in Eugene, Or, and borrowed my roommate Jonathan’s clippers, shaved my head, then dyed the remaining hair black. I didn’t call it ritual but it was a ritual, a type of mourning. “I loved your floppy curly hair,” Jonathan’s girlfriend told me upon seeing it.

I shaved my head again in my mid-twenties. I did it to reject my own vanity, which I felt was useless and ridiculous, but really I was scared of my beauty. The attention it drew. I wanted less of it, but I didn’t want it to disappear completely. I wanted just enough.

My short hair now feels different. It’s not about liberation. It was an impulsive act, but I also thought it out. As I cut my hair, there were two sides of myself. One was holding the scissors— this is my true self, my full self. The other part of myself was scared. Terrified. It said, you’re crazy. I am assuming that anyone who lives with a legacy of parental suicide has a scared, sad part of themselves that is always keeping an eye out for crazy. The part of myself that whispers about my craziness, that tries to convince me I can’t care for myself, or that I’m not safe, is the part trained by our cultural narrative, which insists that there is a particular way to be human.

I insist otherwise. I seek to move into my humanity outside of our rigid cultural and capitalist narratives.

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Václav Radimsky / The Old Mill in Giverny / Praha National Gallery

Less than two years ago I was arriving in the Czech Republic for my Fulbright. This painting by Václav Radimsky is on display in the Prague National Gallery. While I was at the gallery, by myself, I became distracted by a man in a blue suit jacket who kept standing directly in front of the paintings I wanted to look at. He kept standing in front of them and he stood in front of them for a long time, until finally, impatient, I took a picture of him standing in front of one of the paintings. I can no longer remember which painting it was, but I remember the curve of his shoulders in the suit jacket, how unusually bright its blue color was, how textured its fabric (almost like wool), and how the track lighting above him shone on it like it shone on the art.

Václav Radimsky grew up in Kolin, Czech Republic, a town I rode through on a train en route to Kutna Hora. He was an impressionist painter who, in his early twenties, moved to Paris and became friends with Cézanne and Monet, and eventually bought the land depicted in the above painting. He won awards and was deeply admired within the French art scene. When he returned to the Czech Republic he wasn’t received well. Artists in his home country (some of whom had moved to Paris and themselves been much less successful there) said that he ripped off Monet’s style, that he was merely a copycat. It’s only recently that his paintings have garnered admiration in Czechia.

Václav Radimsky / Stream in Giverny

In both of these paintings I am drawn to the water— its reflecting of light and simultaneous impression of depth. I have always loved water, so multilayered, its surface tension and movement. It’s hypnotic. I love the colors Radimsky uses on the surface to create a sensation of movement, reflection, containment.

I love the light on the trees, too. In the first painting it appears golden, radiant, and in the second subdued, wintering. Something is caught in the stream in the second picture. A discarded chair? In the first picture the white church in the background is a chiaroscuro. Because I know so little about painting, the longer I look at these ones, the more magical they appear to me. I know nothing about how these effects are made, and I love that. I don’t want to know. To be able to admire something for its beauty without knowing its inner workings is something I’m learning to enjoy.

A little over a week ago I was informally diagnosed with ADHD. I’ve been processing the idea that I have and have had a neurodivergency. I’ll be formally assessed in about a month. Honestly, the diagnosis exploded my world— I immediately went online and listened to podcasts and watched videos and kept saying this is me. All the traits about myself I had assumed were personal failings may actually be part of my human structure, and instead of disempowering me this information is allowing me to more fully accept my limitations and work with them rather than giving up, as I have felt like giving up. People live with ADHD. I can live with ADHD.

I wonder if you, like me, have been struggling over the past month or two, as this breath of relief we all breathed is a memory and not a constant. We, as in the world, are once again entering unknown territory as far as Covid is concerned. I think many of us are burned out. I know that I have not been at my best over the past couple months, and I feel like I have missed summer in a way, just getting through things. But yesterday I began a new yoga training led by Tracee Stanley and Chanti Tacoronte-Perez. Yoga Nidra is a powerful tool for rest and insight. I’ve wanted to study it for a long time. It feels like the exact thing for me right now.

Yesterday we did a short practice and I was reminded: not everything we have to learn is taught through the written word. Experiential learning is just as important. Learning by feeling, experiencing, and embodying one’s experience can be powerful. Life-changing. There is always the possibility for change, both incremental and transformative. In fact, change is guaranteed.

This week, for me, has been a practice of moving through discomfort and hopelessness and self-judgement without getting stuck there. Changing the aim and format of this newsletter is part of that— seeking goodness and beauty and kindness and hope within a machine that feeds us fear.

What beauty, growth and/or hope have you found this week? Please let me know in the comments.

Beautiful things via readers and the internet:

• Jen, a reader, commented this quote that’s given her comfort: "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing." It's from "East Coker" by T.S. Eliot.

  My friend Erin shared a quote from John Cheever’s The Death of Justina: “How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?”

  A Twitter friend (Matthew Murray) told me about a recent trip to The Art Institute of Chicago, where he saw Bisa Butler’s incredible portrait quilts. I would love to see these in person.

  

  Southside Sunday Morning // Bisa Butler // Courtesy Chicago Art Museum

  

  Negro Boys on Easter Morning // Russell Lee // More info on this photo HERE

• Hannah Hagemann (also a Twitter friend) said she loved Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Stravinsky. I agree, and love almost all of the “five minutes” series from the New York Times, which breaks down complex artistic universes and shows why they’re great.

• Have you ever seen a Diamondback Squid egg mass? I hadn’t either, until today.

• I have been reading Joseph Campbell since Jonathan (the same roommate referenced earlier, who sadly died of an opiate overdose fifteen years ago) showed me his book The Power of Myth. Campbell’s work is well known, and his concept of the hero’s journey has even been taught to writers as The Writer’s Journey. Personally I always found the concept of The Hero’s Journey brilliant but also too linear for my taste. It’s become a formula for everything from Star Wars to The Princess Bride and pretty much every mainstream story/book/film/television show out there. So, I really appreciated this piece in the Atlantic by James Parker, which is about Maria Tatar’s The Heroine with 1001 Faces but also references other must-read books by women, specifically Sinéad O’Connor’s Rememberings, which I haven’t read. Basically, I have an entire reading list now and can’t wait to dive in.

• I am a little obsessed with the concept of Apophenia and conspiracy theories and how the two are connected. Apophenia is the human tendency to see patterns where none exist, especially in those who have been traumatized.

• I am enjoying The White Lotus, and also wishing HBO had more shows that weren’t about rich people.

• This week I am vowing to watch less television. I must admit to myself that it’s been a crutch and an easy way to avoid my feelings. I’m also considering another social media hiatus.

Please tell me about the things that are inspiring you! Leave a comment with something you love. It will be in the next Vellichor newsletter. Have you gone to an art show, a reading, a park, a bar? Taken some flower pictures? Are you loving a certain musical artist or song or show? Tell me about it in the comments.