The end of the summer always feels like going back to the start of a new cycle in a different way. The return to driving with the windows down, reading in parks, and revisting albums. As soon as I start feeling a cool breeze in September, I remember that November night in 2011 standing outside of my moms’s car, ready to go to my first show and what would essentially change the trajectory of my life. But this isn’t about then, it’s about now.
A Return to Love
Last year, on my way to completing my goal of reading 60 books in a year, I started reading Bell Hooks, starting with All About Love: New Visions. Through a feminist lens, it breaks down various subjects within love such as how love is both shown and witnessed in childhood (and the trauma that can be created because or in lack of it), how love persists, and ultimately, how love can heal.
This chapter on healing titled “Healing: Rdepemtive Love” contains two of my favorite quotes on the same page:
“Mindful remembering lets us put the broken bits and pieces of our hearts together again. This is the way healing begins.”
“What we allow the mark of suffering to become is in our own hands.”
It’s only fitting that I started reading a book of a similar vein, A Return To Love: Reflection of the Principles on a Course on Miracles. Both to help me with this year’s reading goal and to try to find a solution for how disconnected I’ve felt to myself lately.
Rooted in the New Age perspective and using God as the framework for and around love, it’s a harder read as someone who isn’t religious but still stirs the introspection I was looking for. So far, I’ve only gotten through Part 1 which breaks down the principles such as surrender, forgiveness, miracles (defined as “a return to love”), and living in the present. Reading all of this has allowed me to reconsider my own hand in creating stress through things like self-sabotage and allowing myself to be mentally stuck in the past.
While listening to Hozier’s new album, Unreal Unreath, at work, the song “Abstract (Psychopomp)” reminded me of the book. Before the melancholic piano intro swells into its chorus of “see how it shines, see how it shines”, it opens with:
Sometimes it returns, like rain that you slept through
That washed off the world, the streets looking brand new
I will not be great, but I'm grateful to get through
The feeling came late, I'm still glad I met you
The memory hurts but does me no harm
Your hand in my pocket, to keep us both warm
The poor thing in the road, its eye still glistening
The cold wet of your nose, the earth from a distant
Rooted in the theme of forgiveness, it uses a combination of recalled experiences, detailing how allowing yourself to be separate from what was allows you to see the light around an experience that exists only in the present.
Out of pure coincidence, this moment in the arc of my life also comes at the same as I’m planning to move for the first time in four years. Same city, different area. Over the past month, I’ve been filling donation bag after donation bag with chapters of my life like books I used to love, clothing that defined my style, and decor that added color to my boring grey walls.
I don’t hold much sentiment to physical objects but rather spaces. The kitchen where I learned to cook vegan meals for both myself and countless friends, the living room where I spent countless days working from home and later binge-watching shows, and countless accidental naps. The parking lot where a stranger jumped my car battery or the road leading home where I once got a flat tire and a different stranger wordlessly replaced it with my spare.
The place where I started this newsletter and inspired me to get a tattoo based on that “newsletter summer” chapter of my life. It’s the space where I moved to Nashville completely alone and get to move feeling the opposite.
While it’s exciting to move, it does feel weird to leave the space that grew into a comfortable home from ages 21 to 25. But if there’s anything that I’ve learned recently in my return to self, it’s that one of the best ways to return to your core self is to move forward.