This dispatch finds itself in a new form.
Through this video, I offer to read to you and invite you to scroll with me.
I reprise the text below here in Substack, but encourage you, if you want to read, to read the full piece here, in its stylized version:
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"The caterpillar is not so much transformed as it is hydrolyzed…The linkage between caterpillar and butterfly is not fluid. Form is not transformed. Form is abandoned, melted down to imaginal cells. The butterfly, then, is an afterthought. The form that comes after form is abandoned. The life after death…It’s hard to assert that memories are stored in the brain if that brain has been melted down to caterpillar juice and then reconstituted. Are we our brains? Is that where a self is stored? Or are we something else? Something that bridges brain-death and flies beyond (meta) form (morphe)? Is the self of the butterfly the same self as the caterpillar?”
I read two newsletters on butterflies [1] [2] and consider myself emerging.
This summer I felt out side of myself.
I’m trying to piece together if thats because I’ve been outside my room, sleeping in borrowed beds, or because I’ve been outside the country, speaking in borrowed language.
I’m normally not so bothered to be away from home—I have adjusted in this year plus of a suitcase closet. In the absence of a door to close, house slippers, or the guarantee of mine, this body has become first home, the source of truth. For it to be rendered foreign –– for me to feel away from this home –– was a deep violence, a shaking displacement.
Then to find new ways to understand it –– to chart it and recognize it's footprints and still feel almost trapped within it. This cycle will repeat. I will be both familiar and foreign to myself. I will expand and contract. I will indulge in flavors that make my stomach ache. I will excuse the dairy in a Toll House cookie.
I hear sea shells shatter and wonder about the vulnerability of public art. My body is public but my relationship with it has always been mediated in the privacy of my digital worlds. I am trying to invite you in. I like it in here, in this body, and I want to share it with you. But it has always been mine. How to be honest and anonymous? How to be honest in an archive and not be self centered?
Lately I’ve been emerging. From the southern hemisphere to the north, most recently from Mexico to the US. This is as north as I’ll go for a while. Fall in New York is lovely, but so is autumn in Georgia — this one is my first here in nearly 8 years.
On my flight I notice my anxiety rise, and regret taking the entire edible. Is it feeling like I’m not going anywhere that makes me feel unattached? For the first time in a while I'm not rushing towards an arrival with someone. For once, I'm not departing onto some tagline: “Brazil for two months” “a co-created co-living residency in the desert” “a diasporic fem retreat in Bahia” “a surf trip in a small coastal Mexican town” “returning to visit friends from last year and practice my Spanish” “visiting my friend in Bogota cause its on the way...”
I'm flying to Atlanta. Technically, I’m going back to base.
Theres an emptiness waiting for me there that mirrors an emptiness I'm projecting on the past: I feel like I've done nothing this year.
And yet I reprise: I co-organized a co-living residency in the desert in Joshua Tree for musicians and visual artists. I did a writing residency in the forest of Indiana and a studio residency in the hills of Pasadena. I went to a music festival in Detroit with my childhood best friend, finally visited Chicago, and was in a wedding in Philly. I had a client retreat in LA and two commissions flew me to New York. I co-organized a two-month all-fem diasporic research retreat in Salvador, Brazil and then spent a month in Mexico, surfing, recovering my Spanish post Portuguese immersion, and visiting dear ones in the city.
Where in all this saturation do I find the space to cast so much emptiness?
Of course in all of this I am writing in cycles, about cycles. Feeling through the flux of an up and down and around continuous motion. Because really this year has been about my cycle, feeling so deeply into it after six years of numbing.*
And there is the real depth of it, the earth underneath the projection. The dark mud. It's been messy and I have been covered in it. I feel so creature sitting here with my knees in the dirt. It's under my nails and I’m wearing three tans on top of each other. I have been in the sun and laid my body out on the earth to bear my spirit. Every inch has been warmed, but then too, my stomach shivers at the cold touch of shade.
What a cycle to be trapped in.
The cycle I still chose. I still learn from and of in awe and wonder.
What a body to be held in.
And I know I've been avoiding the depth of it. It hurt so bad last winter and I don't know that I feel I can stomach it. I know I want to, but my stomachs been so sensitive lately from all the travel. Right now, I’m not sure I could stomach the ache.
And so then I come to these sounding sad. Do I sound hurt?
Really it feels like my dreams have come true and now I'm standing in them. And so I consider: this longing is really just a desire for a world that doesn’t hurt so bad. Here I am, still with the yearning, and feeling no agency to satiate its burn.
I don't want to feel desperate for my friends, but they really are my favorite part of this living. I wonder if they know this? I've been so focused on surviving, shaping—supporting this living, that I haven't been able to text them back. I pray they give me grace. Trust I will be there soon.
Don’t forget I love you when I’m away.
How many people have I ever been just a flight away from?
Whiplashed.
I look at my legs in old photos and remember how much I was running.
I judge Moses for being in his model era but so am I, so I buy tickets to his show. He tells us: listen to your body. I close my eyes and touch mine. Feel it roll and deepen. I feel where it all connects, all the flesh in skin that is mine, is this movement. I feel the chill of adorning silver.
What is a flight across the country but a few skipped meals out and not paying rent this month?
It’s September and I’m checking in on Lease 2025. Scouting locations. Trying to also check in on who’s still in without seeming desperate. Like anything else I've spent the last year overthinking it, so I have back up options. It's scary to ask someone to do this living with you. But its no fun to do it alone.
More poetic though.
Two essays on imaginal cells and then a caterpillar with feet the color of the hex code on my clipboard. Now I have a tomato half eaten and the memory of a dead spider in Brazil and LA.
She’s the only one I got a gift for. The scent of the ocean would have been too subtle, so I bring her flowers, awkwardly interrupt a meeting and offer a truce in gift wrap.
A dozen addresses in Shopify and no where do I have written down the address of my best friend. I still list him as my emergency contact but don't know where to direct a package....
It hurts to love you so much you know?
To long for you but know I should keep my distance.
I feel like I'm flirting, trying to pull everyone I love close to me, without them knowing that I want so badly to care for them, that it’s what I feel best able to do.
What more could I do in this time but grieve and tell you over and over again I love you? That it's you and this relation to you that keeps me going.
more, soon
raya
*Context for those who don't know me: I am a bleeding fem born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. I had a Mirena IUD for six years and finally chose to remove it at the beginning of this year.
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"As they experience their caterpillar body failing, the caterpillar’s imaginal cells are seen as a foreign body, at first attacked by their immune system. But the imaginal cells keep finding one another as the rest of the caterpillar cells become goo, and eventually allow themselves to be pulled by the imaginal cells’ future memory into new shapes.”
~~ Mara June citing Xenia Marie Ross Viray
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what more could i do?