Vellichor // Three // Letters
We used to write letters
My grandmother used to write me letters. She and my grandfather both had their perches— his was a big La-Z-Boy chair and hers was the left side of their mustard yellow couch, close to the front door and the picture window that overlooked their front yard. I’m not sure if the couch’s mustard color was its actual color or the residue of my grandmother’s chain-smoking. The ash of her cigarettes was a monument. Me and my cousins would watch it and try to guess when it would topple; never into the ashtray, always onto the carpet, which was dotted with cigarette burns.
I lived with my grandparents for two years, but outside of that span I collected my grandmother’s letters, often written on card stock she’d decorated with magazine cutouts. Next to her perch was where she kept all of her supplies in a plastic basket. Magazines, catalogs, scissors, glue sticks, and cards. She sent letters to everyone, not just me. But I was her favorite, she confessed. Her handwriting was sometimes illegible because of her shaky hand, loosened by years of heroin and alcohol abuse. Often my letters would be decorated with zebras, unicorns, and dolphins, my favorite animals.
I wish I’d kept those letters. Letters detailing a childhood in Texas with her strict, racist parents, the return address label from organizations like Amnesty International. Letters about her meeting and marrying to my grandfather (they met during WWII. She was a nurse, he was a Marine). Letters encouraging me to believe in myself, telling me I was smart and deserved good things. Letters encouraging me to write. The opposite of what my mother told me. Her letters, throughout my unstable and transitory childhood, were a through-line, like a chain staked to a narrow precipice.
I wrote her back consistently until I left home at sixteen. She taught me to be a letter writer too, always seeking out pen-pals from around the world, collecting stickers and stationery. I loved receiving the little missives from across the world. Stamps of different colors. All kinds of handwriting. At summer camp I kept in touch by writing letters. We didn’t have cell phones yet, and although we could have talked on the phone I liked the excitement of sending and receiving something tangible and collectible.
It has been a year since I have written a letter. I keep envelopes from friends I used to exchange letters with; envelopes from Brooklyn, Honolulu, Denver. I aspire to write to them again. I aspire to find my letter writing self again— the one who didn’t escape for any period of time into any medium involving fast-moving pictures and sound.
If you could write a letter to anyone, who would it be? What would it say?
I know I’m not the only one with this aspiration. With the hope that somehow, someday, things will slow down. But I’m a realistic person and I know we live under the structure of capitalism, which to me resembles the Nothing in the Neverending Story. The Nothing is always expanding, overtaking everything in its path and changing it irrevocably. Not even Indigenous people living deep in the wilderness can escape The Nothing. It will take their trees, their resources, because to the Nothing resources are more valuable than human life. Liquid assets are of the highest value, more than anything, though liquid assets are, when we really think about it, invented. Made up. We can survive on so little, and yet many of us insist on having it all.
My birthday was last week, and I was also diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis. I’ve been in pain for the past few years but have told myself I’m not really in pain, as I personally am wont to do. I dissolve my experience for myself so I can convince myself that I need nothing, that I am a machine. And in a way, I have been a machine, sacrificing my letter writing for Netflix and Instagram and desperately seeking work so I can make sure I am never homeless again. The shuddering of scarcity dictates so much of what I do. The fear of having nothing. The knowledge that my safety net is wrought with holes large enough to fall through.
Capitalism has convinced me that I am worthless without money.
From the book Sacred Economics:
“Perhaps the deepest indication of our slavery is the monetization of time. It is a phenomenon with roots deeper than our money system, for it depends on the prior quantification of time. An animal or a child has “all the time in the world.” The same was apparently true for Stone Age peoples, who usually had very loose concepts of time and rarely were in a hurry. Primitive languages often lacked tenses, and sometimes lacked even words for “yesterday” or “tomorrow.” The comparative nonchalance primitive people had toward time is still apparent today in rural, more traditional parts of the world. Life moves faster in the big city, where we are always in a hurry because time is scarce. But in the past, we experienced time as abundant. The more monetized society is, the more anxious and hurried its citizens. In parts of the world that are still somewhat outside the money economy, where subsistence farming still exists and where neighbors help each other, the pace of life is slower, less hurried. In rural Mexico, everything is done mañana. A Ladakhi peasant woman interviewed in Helena Norberg-Hodge’s film Ancient Futures sums it all up in describing her city-dwelling sister: “She has a rice cooker, a car, a telephone—all kinds of time-saving devices. Yet when I visit her, she is always so busy we barely have time to talk.” For the animal, child, or hunter-gatherer, time is essentially infinite. Today its monetization has subjected it, like the rest, to scarcity. Time is life.”1
A couple years ago I stayed with a Gurung family in the jungle of Nepal. They had no internet, unreliable water sources, no traversable road leading to their tiny village, and intermittent electricity. I went their straight from Kathmandu, taking a tourist bus first to Pokhara, staying there for a few days, and then taking a city bus from Pokhara to Gattichena, the small village below the even smaller village. I went there to write, to exist, to find something unavailable to me in the United States. What I found was that my brain was contorted by capitalism, by our culture. Even when there was nothing to do, something inside me screamed: do something. I berated myself, while laying on the plank bed in my tiny room, for not going on long hikes or helping at the local school. But my body and my soul longed to lay in bed, to take short strolls through the village, which was no more than ten huts, to sit on the stoop of the mud hut and watch the plants sway in the wind.
Slowly, I slowed down. I found myself relishing Virginia Woolf on my Kindle. I began writing because I wanted to. I tagged along with Amma, the matriarch, for a visit to town where she argued with other villagers about which village deserved to have their dirt road rebuilt after the last destructive monsoon. I slept.
Amma’s days were spent mostly puttering around. She tended to her bees, slowly harvested vegetables for Dal Bhat, swept, and fed the village children and dogs. She was never rushed. The only time I saw her upset was when she was scaring off the monkeys who liked to steal guavas from her tree.
I learned how to make yogurt from water buffalo milk and helped care for Arun, her grandson. I’m not saying Amma’s life was idyllic, but I am saying that the dangers that are creeping in for Amma and her fellow villagers are created by capitalism, not by nature. The damage nature can do is always smaller than the damage wrought by capitalism. Capitalism convinces us that we shouldn’t care for each other. That giving things away will leave us with nothing. That we are alone, completely, and that our blood family is something we should protect— not the larger families of community.
If I close my eyes, I can stretch into that feeling I had at Amma’s house. The sense that everything was okay. That death was okay and pain was okay and I was okay. One of my favorite things to do was sit outside at night, when it was raining. The jungle was so loud with animals and insects. If the electricity was on the lights shone yellow on the banana leaves and the giant raindrops landed and sparkled and found their pathways down the crevices. Amma and I set out buckets to catch the rain. Amma’s son sometimes offered me Raksi, a distilled liquor with the ABV of beer. I sipped it and sat and watched and had absolutely nowhere to go.
This week, I hope to explore more of that sensation of going nowhere. Maybe I will block out “nowhere time” in my calendar. That sounds contradictory, but maybe that’s okay. Nowhere time. Nothing to do. Only being.
Assignment:
This week’s assignment is to write an actual letter. It could be meant for sending or keeping or burning. Doesn’t matter. Write it all in one sitting. Put your phone in the other room. See how it goes and please report back in the comments!
What I’m Loving:
I am currently reading White Magic by Elissa Washuta. It’s complex and difficult and confrontational and also beautiful. I like it for many reasons but especially because it examines Seattle’s history and the history of Indigenous exploitation by white people. The writing is lovely.
I rewatched some of Six Feet Under this week. Turns out I have different opinions about many of the characters than I thought I did, and I feel that I appreciate the complexity of the characters so much more now that I am older.
I’ve had to quit coffee because of my RA diagnosis. I’ve been drinking loads of Pu’erh tea, a fermented tea from the Yunnan Province of Southwestern China. It’s so, so good and apparently good for you too? I went to the Rishi Tea website and am now contemplating starting a TikTok channel only about different teas. Can you tell I have ADHD??
I’ve been doing lots of yoga and trying not to be on my phone so much and also considering quitting social media again.
I’m doing an asynchronous workshop called Inner Oracle starting in September. I’d love to have you! Respond to this email if you’d like to register.
What are you doing? How are you feeling?
Note- Charles Eisenstein is now what could be called an anti-vaxxer and I do not endorse him by any means.