august ellipsis::
on almost & compost & losing the plot
Hello Dear Ones,
It’s been a minute, maybe a season or two, since my last dispatch.
How many worlds have been divulged to you this morning? It’s a wonder any body stays on track…
I have been questioning the track, anyway. As I tend to do every several years or more. Who laid this one, and do I really want my body to be on it forever, going round & around & around?
Is there not a forest or a meadow somewhere close, with a stream fit for drinking from; for dipping toes into…
It is August. Here I am. Again; relying on the ellipses. On the semicolon & the ampersand to grant me more pause than I deserve.
I can feel the almost surrounding some return.
I haven’t hiked nearly enough this summer, thanks to unfathomable temperatures & the ways days seem to slip through chubby toddler fingers with such inconsistent persistence.
Internally, however, I’ve been in the wilderness. A lot. Not lost, just wandering; again; almost returning to something; yet what that thing is still just right out of gnosis.
In July I spent a week saying goodbye to my childhood home. Questioning how to archive so much debris from old decisions, old dreams, old desires; most of which still feel very present.
Thumbing my way through forgotten love letters/ tender first poems/ construction paper evidence of trauma/ college acceptance folders/ burned cds. What to keep (of myself (of my sequence (of selves) and what to throw back into the void? What will fill the land and how will the land receive it, and what will compost towards a future I can fuck with.
I’ve been thinking about the future. Haven’t you? Mind often running up against a hard wall. Of what to want. Of what is even possible.
Some days, people say anything is possible.
Other days, other people say a future is inextricably linked to a past. In the past, I’ve been both a pack rat & a junkie for wanting to begin again: anew.
There is something here about keeping; about leaving & weaving; certain strands of past & certain glimmers of future through the bottleneck of our eternal axis of the present. And about how to me, this is the highest form of art. In other words: alchemy. In another word: magic. But I am too tired to parse it out.
Ocean says the future is in our mouths.* We’ve got to speak it, to see it. But I am still too hazy to language it. Right now, inside the wild forest of myself: I am instead simply listening for its hum…
“Do I not have a plot to my life? for I am unexpectedly fragmentary. I am piecemeal. My story is living. And I have no fear of failure. Let failure annihilate me, I want the glory of falling.” —Clarice Lispector, Água Viva
There is no plot to this newsletter. Rather, a rambling reflection of some of the things I am musing on these days.
And I wanted to tell you, I am going to be away until September— so bookings are temporarily closed.
And that I have a second book of poetry coming out in November— and if you’d like to write an official review, do reach out—I will gladly send you an advance of [a go] !!
And all of that is to say, I love you.
Until September,
Gabby
*this quote is from the On Being podcast, the one with Ocean Vuong/ here’s the episode. I am v inspired by this one with adrienne maree brown, too.