First round of lockdown notes: So, given all the ‘free time’, I’ve found myself thinking about my desires. There are some assumptions I’ve made about how my future looks that I now stop to question.

There is a secret place I have designed which is not a dream, but a daydream. Feels strange to write it down. I always wake up in a large bed, and I stand up to look in a mirror in front of it. I look into my glowing face. I adjust this place slightly every time I am there. There’s a large library and a painting studio in the house, and deep woods just outside. Temples have been built within those woods, scattered along winding trails and streams. A sprawling garden, with curious choice of plants and sculptures, closer to the house. It’s a dewy morning, and I go downstairs into a minimal, sunny kitchen. Stocked fridge. I make coffee and cook a dedicated breakfast for two. That’s the ritual.

Some hours I spend alone there. Others, not. Someone else, someone close and with a mutual pace and shade, lives with me there. Sometimes it’s raining. I sit by a ceiling-to-floor window, in an armchair, with a book. I play with paintbrushes. I arrange a party, or I wait for the doorbell to ring. My visitors are always of interest. Or, I go hiking and arrange sacred circles. Or I tend the goats and quails I keep there.

What’s unsettling to me is that’s not so terribly different from my life now. I have some books. I have an armchair. I have coffee and kitchenware. I have (had..before isolation…) a painting studio. I have countryside to walk in. I guess I’m missing goats and quails and woods. But Is that really all I want? Is that the end-goal? In other moments I imagine myself as an eternal nomad. With several close companions traveling along with and living with me. Deeply bonded. 

Imagination very often becomes reality. At least, that has held unnervingly true in my life. So trying to understand what I imagine and daydream about is really very serious business to me. Therefore, it’s no idle hobby to make notes of these desires, like I am doing now. When thoughts come to me, I treat them as of consequence.

When a thought gets stuck in my head, I am highly wary of it. I pace carefully around it and size it up, and decide whether or not I’ll let it play and dance on repeat in my mind, unbound and untethered. I ask questions of it: where did you come from? Who will you most benefit? Do you have my best interest planned? But some of these thoughts are so deeply set and instinctual it’s frustratingly hard, impossible to call them off. Some of them I don’t want to call off. And maybe some of them are not desires, but premonitions. Just the future stopping by my mind to make itself known. What’s the difference anyways, between desire and premonition?

Maybe I should take more salt showers. (Glancing over, now, to the Florida water poised-and-at-the-ready on my counter.)

Besides using this sudden, government-imposed, monastic lifestyle to reflect on my daydream-desires, I am also livid at this circumstance. Well, my emotions cycle through lividity, helplessness and total apathy. I am not convinced by the current acquiescence into isolation. I cannot make it make sense to me. My heart doesn’t understand it, even if I try to explain. It’s like trying to explain to an animal why it has to go to the vet. The animal doesn’t understand, it’s only unnerved and in pain.

I have enjoyed my own isolation in the past, from time to time. I don’t mind being alone with myself. It’s a skill I have: sitting with the company of my mind. But, I have also slowly, over years, cultivated a deep respect and true love for all moments of social interaction. I genuinely enjoy (enjoyed…) hugging my friends, going to cafes, to bars, making small talk with acquaintances, meeting with teachers or peers and having long dialogues about painting, observing and analysing strangers, or sitting and listening attentively to a partner. These interactions fulfil me. Long ago, I used to tense up when anyone touched me, but now pats on the shoulder mostly feel in-flow and in accordance with me. So what an awful time for that all to mostly disappear. 

But, I know. Fretting doesn’t help. When you want something, you have to become it, invite it to you. Then it becomes yours. So I have to embody the healing and connection that I want. (What is inside of you is what is outside of you, tend your garden, etc.)

My current hope, is that we can all spread into tight-knit tribes. Like my daydream of nomadism. But my internal drive runs on physical impressions. Physical manifestations hold the most intense interest for me. The tics of facial expression, body language. Sly smiles. Information you can gather only by searching someone’s eyes. Those sorts of moments are what play in my mind on loop. They are holy to me. Truly, truly holy. I enjoy a good, deep text conversation, too, but I need more. Or I’m going to get very bored, and very hungry.

Here’s my currently employed strategy: When caught in a riptide, you don’t fight against it directly. You do not try and swim against the current, or it will overtake you. Instead you slyly swim diagonally. This is the only way to survive it. Being mutable is a blessing of power. So I quietly put my livid rage aside, because it is unhelpful to me, and let the world do whatever it’s going to do for now. I keep only one eye on it. This is simply what the current patch of time we are in looks like.

Some arguments are not worth arguing or having at all. In fact, most of them are not. There’s always a better method to reach your aim. And no one will be convinced of anything they don’t want to be. We make our decisions subconsciously, based on emotions, before we even become consciously aware that we’ve made a decision at all. At least, that is my experience.