the year that was... (2021)
As 2021 draws to a close, I find myself turning to this line from Bella Li's Theory of Colours:
Float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure.
My strongest, most scintillating work emerges from darkness, from writing for myself.
'Through the Looking Glass' emerged from a failed personal essay for Daily Life (RIP).
'From the Other Side' took almost a year to write.. So grateful to Meanjin for the extension.
Echoes emerged from a writing workshop with Ellena Savage. I deliberately didn't pitch the essays anywhere as I wanted to work on them at my own pace.
'Shades of Longing' emerged from a failed submission to the LIMINAL & Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize (so excited for the anthology!!!). I took the strongest sections and rewrote.
Credit: Zhi Yi Cham
Other quotes I've been mulling over:
The mirror of water is not a surface of reflection, but of absorption.
—Jean Baudrillard, Seduction
What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.
—Carl Jung (via artist Lindy Lee)
And this snippet from a conversation between Lee and Elizabeth Ann Macgregor:
...it's not rebellion for the sake of rebellion, but rebellion for the sake of 'being'. The important thing (and this is still so unfashionable to talk about) is to find one's true north. It's a cliché, but I love that phrase, because in each of us is this direction caused by longing, the longing for wholeness of some kind. The pathways towards it are individual. That's where true north lies, and only you can find that.
I hope to carry these sentiments into 2022 x
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I'm spending New Year's Eve reading the exhibition catalogue for Lee's Moon in a Dew Drop (I learnt of Lee via Liminal) and re-reading Joan Didion's 'On Keeping a Notebook'.
