what we see and what we know is never settled
adulthood was always looming ahead and now we’re suddenly here. mortality is naturally top of mind, as is revealing the truth.
1. “For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.” ― Cynthia Occelli
2. Destruction: (noun) the action or process of causing so much damage to something that it no longer exists or cannot be repaired.
3. In the depths of my hormonal mood swings, my catastrophizing makes death seem like a lovely option. I don’t mean to glorify anything, but I do ponder what it would be like for all of it to just stop for a moment. The bliss, the relief. It’s nothing serious because when I actually think of my last exhale I don’t feel ready for that experience at all. So I’ve grown to allow myself to feel and explore this aching for an end of sorts, out of what I would like to be curiosity but is often actually desperation. And that’s okay too, because in doing so I have become more intimate with the simple nature of death which is: (noun) the destruction or permanent end of something.
4. When we feel this urge for death, know that there is something inside of you that needs to die. “It no longer exists or cannot be repaired” and yet we are grasping to it because it is what we’ve known. Imagine the seed grasping for its coat when it is well on its way to becoming a sprout. It sheds the coat as soon as it can afford to do so and doesn’t look back. Sometimes the shriveled up coat sticks to the sprout as it punctures the surface of the soil, leaving a crunchy remnant that hangs off the edge, almost as if it was saying, look how far I have come.
5. So anyways, I am 27 and mortality has been on my mind. I felt its first real pangs in the form of grief when I lost someone dear to me when I was 23 and he was 24. Now it is in how I experience time. It is in me and my friends finding our first few silver strands, noticing the extra crinkles around our eyes when we laugh, adding in wedding dates to my phone calendar for two childhood best friends who I have known since I was 8, gearing up for our 10 year high school reunion, realizing there’s a possibility that I could be pregnant when I come back for the summer Olympics in LA. It is in seeing my parents getting older and me finishing their sentences when they can’t think of the word. It is in realizing they are just grown up kids, just like me, trying to figure it the fuck out. That this is their first time living with a 27-year-old daughter and how for some reason I forget that. It is seeing their youth in them, seeing the children still in them. It is in speaking to their inner children and saying wow, I’m so proud of you and meaning it and remembering that even when we’re 68, it means the world to hear that. We all want to hear that, anyways.
6. Adulthood was always looming ahead and now we’re suddenly here.
7. “It’s the first time in your life when you’re not young.” – Greta Gerwig on being 27
8. “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” (John Berger) It’s an ongoing flux and in the moments that they overlap, it’s magic. The moments of seeing and knowing converge and they only exist right here, right now.
9. I look in through our glass doors and they are cooking dinner for me as I write on the back patio because they are angels and I like when they baby me. (The back patio that is the beating heart of the Goldberg abode if you have ever been here.) It’s pitch black except for my computer so my dad set a fire for me because he is acts of service. They are doddling around, mom with her bright yellow kitchen sink gloves on because her hands get dry easily and dad handling the raw meat as the man of the household does. It was now when I understood why my dad always had his handheld video camera recording wherever we went. Why he still always wants to take photos of things which sometimes makes me want to yell BE PRESENT, Be Here Now, please! But I get it now: the desire to solidify these moments that are air, hoping that when it inevitably becomes a foggy memory, you’ll have something to bring you back.
10. My mom, talking about me living at home, says, “I can’t believe how well this is going! You’re so pleasant.” And I laugh at the back-handedness of the compliment and then tear up because it’s true, we are having a blast. I glance at her reading my smutty fantasy books that I turned her on to and chuckle as she reads the nastiest sex scene with a stone-cold face of focus. I don’t dare interrupt her.
11. They said to me during the pandemic, even amongst all of our fights, how many more times would we get to live with you as an adult? Not many, so we must cherish it. And I agreed before we proceeded into another cruel screaming match. Little did they realize it would happen two more times––once when I was 25 and now when I was 27. And the 27 one would be pretty darn sweet.
12. To attempt to see something is to try and reveal its truth.
13. Our eyes are our first tools to seeking truth, with intuition rumbling closely beneath. Your intuition is either strengthened or weakened then, depending on if you were raised to trust it or dismiss it. Most of us were taught the latter and that’s okay. You can always reconnect to it. I reconnected to mine. It takes some time to rebuild that trust as does any worthwhile relationship but it can of course be done.
14. Seeing becomes knowing, and back and forth.
15. “Contemplation is a long, loving look at what really is.” – Richard Rohr
16. How we see the world is how we experience it. When you see life differently, you do life differently.
17. With my lower lip uncontrollably pouted out to hold the tears back that are already welling in my eyes, I ask my dad something I don’t think I have ever asked him before as a woman, which was “can I have a hug? I could really use one today.”
18. (What do I see? What do I know?) The fleeting moment of this overlap, where the ethereal non-entity of true presence feels like it is hovering around you, is where embodiment occurs.
19. Embodiment: (noun) the representation or expression of something in a tangible or visible form.
20. What we know within has shown itself in our 3D reality for us to see. A jigsaw piece is clicked into place and for a split second we are simply cherishing what is––what lies right before us––as well as who we have become––a person who sees the world like this, through this lens of love.
21. We cannot see when our body is merely the means of carrying our big, large, loud minds. We cannot see when our enough-ness is at stake, put on the chopping block by ourselves, and the entire day is spent with tunnel vision, blinders also tacked on, courtesy of moi. Reality doesn’t feel real because we have made ourselves blind to what really is. And it is in these dreadful hours, sometimes days, that I have begun to see them for what they are and know, deep within my body, that it’s time. It’s time for a small death.
22. And so I welcome tiny deaths. Their size doesn’t make them any less powerful though, and they will always be accompanied by the tears of grief, the tears of letting go and trusting, the tears of knowing it will all escape us one day and that we can either realize that now and cry happy tears for having it or realize it later and regret not cherishing it when we had it. I welcome it all, because on the other side is that nectar-sweet worship of our mortality that makes you want to take a full body screenshot of this exact moment. And that one, and that one too. Of the hearty chuckles you hear when you get someone to laugh at something naughty you said, the smells, the breeze, the diddle daddling, the sound of their specific footsteps, their scrunched up frown that they don’t notice is on their resting face, the feel of their soft skin in your hand. All the sacred tidbits.
23. You start to see them again. Let’s start to see them again.
With love,
Kristen 🪶 🌱 🧺
PS – Maybe you noticed my new Substack rebranding?! Weeeee! I couldn’t be happier about it. The funny thing is ‘DEVOTED CONTEMPLATION’ came to me a few months back and it felt like it absolutely captured the essence of what I do here. It gave me chills, but it also didn’t feel like it was just time yet. It only became time over this past month when I decided that I was going to truly make my practice of writing AND sharing my work an act of utter devotion––one that I was fully committed to as if my life force depended on it (which it honestly does), one that would become the closest thing to my version of religion, one that I would follow with unrelenting faith remembering that I am my best version of self when I am showing up again and again. I finally stepped up into the Kristen that IS devoted to her writing practice and in doing so, I earned my new newsletter name. I almost didn’t finish this post, almost pushed it back another day or two, and then remembered what ‘devoted contemplation’ really means to me: It’s a promise to my craft. It’s a promise to the holy act of creation. It’s a promise to myself and what I know I am capable of. It’s a promise to my ancestors who weren’t able to express themselves so freely and that because I can, I will. What a privilege that we forget we have. Thank you for listening to the spillings of my heart as always. I love you dearly. 💚
PPS - I HAD to give a moment to my SWEET lil acorn logo! I am an acorn. If you know me, you know that my essence is a muffin acorn. So that felt right too. Sending ALL my love.
xoxo