1 Comment

Hey Devin Kelly, your newsletter brings me such joy. I love to sit with a warm cup of coffee, some snacks, and just dive into your letters. They help me a lot to process feelings and think, and are a brief meditation time in my week. Some things you wrote I even printed and hung on my wall, to remind me that yeah, I can also see things this way. I am really grateful.

I'm not the type who likes to interact on the internet, but boy there's so much care in your letters and sometimes I wish I could comment, so aah, I'm going to ramble a bit (and btw sorry if anything sounds awkward, english is not my first language so there's a struggle:)

I thought about what you said about adulthood and you know, I feel it a little different. My childhood was very confusing and messy. I am kind of enjoying being an adult right now, I mean there are many things that suck, but the agency and calmness I feel in choosing my experiences and being able to figure things out, and just over all being able to name and identify complexities, to taste a whole arrays of things and knowing that I can handle them, it's quite a high.

Like, when I remember being a child, there's wonder but I also had this feeling of not noticing and I feel noticing is a thing that comes with time and practice.

My childhood was like eating a food, enjoying the taste but having no idea what I am eating /adulthood is like: eating a food, enjoying the taste and noticing which spices and textures are in play. Maybe even knowing some of the ingredients.

Anyway, I've been reading this book called "Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art" by Lewis Hyde where the author thinks about the trickster archetype in different cultures and religions and it's very interesting. There's this whole thing about how the trickster embodies diplicity, how it's about walking in the liminar, or as Lewis put it having "the context of no context", to have the wit to work with happenstance and chaos.

And I feel it kinda relates with what you wrote, about "wow" and "!". about not knowing and at the same time witnessing. Like, soaking in the ambiguity of living and being okay with it.

You know, I've been thinking a lot about love, trying to understand what the word means to me, trying to describe it in simple or complex terms. I've had a lover who knew really clearly what love meant to them. When they asked me what it meant to me the only thing I could answer was I do not know. I do feel it, I do ache. It's both a feeling and a verb. It's so so many things, or it is in so so many things, and idk, it just feel impossible to grasp. Like, describing it would reduce it, and I need to have it fill every corner, be as big as it can. It feels good and it feels right to not draw a line, to let in wander.

And reading your letter I was like, "I think this is it. It's indescribable. I don't need to grasp it.” and I felt peace.

Anyway, I loved your last reflection about the ephemeral. There's this poet, Taisia Kitaiskaia who had this project of answering real magazine reader's questions as Baba Yaga, a witch of Slavic folklore. There was this one question about climate change anxiety and Baba Yaga's answer stuck with me and I feel it kinda of relates with your reflection about loving what is present. I'll link it here so you can read it if you want to:

https://www.readpoetry.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/How-Do-I-Deal-with-Climate-Change_-e1597673335431.jpg

thank you again for your newsletter, looking forward to reading your next meditation,

Sincerely yours, a Brazilian fan :)

Expand full comment