moving in
on time, ageing(and isms), maps + itineraries, invisible stories, and asking "more beautiful questions."
Welcome to T H E | L I M I N A L on Substack! We'll move-in softly and slowly. This transition mirrors others I'm making simultaneously, and with each, I'm trying to resist rushing to give form to something that needs time to grow into itself.
Before we begin: a whole-hearted thank you for being here, for the gift of your time and your presence amidst everything. This move to Substack is motivated by intention to nurture community. If you would, drop a comment below introducing yourself — your name, where you're joining from, why you're here, and/or anything else.
Another reason we're here is the archiving capabilities. You'll see I've migrated a few of the most-loved past issues here—feel free to take a wander. If there's anything you'd like to read or hear or see more of in 2022, just reply to this email or comment below.
The monthly newsletter will remain free, but if you'd like to support this labor of love and the time & energy that goes in to writing + researching each issue, there's an option to do so below.
I hesitated to write you a longer note this month. By this point many of us are just simply exhausted, myself very much included. I intend to move towards shorter-form writing in the months to come. And we'll get there. But then, a memory came circling back to me from the depths of last winter, and meshed with the present, and here we are. Musings on time, ageing, and the invisible stories we make of them:
first, a memory from the Swedish winter:
Late January this year, in the midst of that dark-in-many-ways first pandemic winter, Tobias and I took an early morning walk on a beach in Åhus, on the SE coast of Sweden. It was brutally cold, the kind that stings all uncovered surfaces of your skin. The sleepy sun hung close to the horizon behind a thick layer of fog, diffusing the scene in a blueish haze. The sea was predictably moody. We walked toward a dark cloud I assumed was rain, mostly in weighted silence.
One, two, a dozen, hundreds of flakes, and before I could call it snow, we were in the midst of it, swirling everywhere. Snow and ocean never crossed my Californian mind as capable of co-existing at once. But here, it did. The entire shoreline disappeared under a blanket of white until there was only water in two forms: snow / sea; frozen / liquid. We laughed in a deep way for the first time in a long time. We asked each other—when was the last time you saw something for the first time? Then, we turned around to head back, the landscape before us (and maybe within us) shifted.
In the distance, we could just faintly make out the outlines of four, five little humans, running toward the sea. They sprang with so much vigor and without hesitation, and didn't stop when they reached the water; they just kept running until running became swimming. I assumed they had to be kids, teenagers at most. The little humans lingered in the water awhile, long enough for us to draw closer. And when we did, we saw that they weren't children at all but instead older women, closer to their 60s or 70s. They threw their heads back in laughter and were so undoubtedly awake and alive and absorbed in the moment that it was contagious and arresting all at once. That is how you stay young, Tobias said to me.
age/ing/isms
I keep turning this memory over and over, wondering why this scene surprised me in the way it did, beyond the confluence of ocean and snow.
I'm turning 30 later this month. The soon-to-be 30 part of me tries to remind me that numbers and age are only the meaning we imbue them with and so on and so forth. And another, maybe younger, part has spent the past weeks in a kind of neurotic existentialism. There's a lot there, as there is for any of us when we pause long enough to look back and take in. So much gratitude and a sense of awe, but also some grief and exhaustion, shaken and stirred with so very many questions.
I have this embarrassing habit I'm trying not to attach judgment to of Googling people I admire and calculating how old they were when they achieved X [insert impressive thing or book here]. Maybe you do this too? (if so, hi human). My favorite stories are invariably of people who grow into themselves and iterations of their life's work or meaning "later" in life (tinged with the irony that inevitably this is what we are all doing in one way or another, if we are lucky enough to grow older). I see so many inspiring examples of this in my own family.
Still, these stories tend to center “success” or “fame” or “making it,” almost as if these redeem the fact of one’s age. I’m curious why these stories relieve me. I've admittedly interpreted my own age with externalized notions of achievement or legibility as if the two went hand in hand: what we have to show for a life lived. And, at the same time, there's this aching sense of just how much remains invisible, immeasurable, unaccounted for, and how much more interesting those stories are to me, increasingly so (especially in this strange and disorienting aftermath of post-PhD).
We are enmeshed in a mainstream culture that fetishizes youth and tends to assess enoughness by way of what the world can see, a sort of ageist surveillance capitalism in which certain forms of lifestory are made publicly visible and consume-able by the concealment of so very much else. It is too easy to forget this in today’s market of narrative projections. Let alone acknowledge how irrelevant templates are when we stop to ask who scripted dominating narratives, many of which are blind to (or profit from) structural inequities, a mercurial economy, climate peril, a pandemic, etc…..
Age is the way a human body moves through time. As human beings we attach layers of meaning to this relationship—us + time—through story.
Yesterday, I had the fortune of taking an online workshop with Nevine Michaan, the founder of Katonah Yoga (which I’m currently studying). Nevine is a force, a wizard of placing metaphor into the body, and I’m still metabolizing all the brilliant things she said. One of which resonated with our conversation here: “People say age doesn’t count. Of course it counts, everything counts. It’s not a judgment; it’s information, meaning form. The calendar is a map, a body. How you weave your life through it is your spirit, your itinerary. A map is not an itinerary. Have enough life to move your spirit through the structure.”
What I took Nevine to mean is that if the map (time) is the template, the circumstance, the itinerary (you) is the personal. It is in this way that the universal (ageing, growing older, the passing of time) becomes personal, particular: the story only you could write.
The narratives we spin about age and time are not innocuous. We need new narratives (currently I am thoroughly enjoying writer and former Longreads editor Sari Botton’s Oldster Magazine for alternative narratives of age/ing) and we also need new questions.
more beautiful questions
The poet David Whyte writes about the art of asking the "keener and more beautiful questions":
"…questions that ask us to reimagine ourselves, our world and our part in it, with the potential to reshape our identities and help us to be equal to the fierce invitations extended to us as we grow and mature…"
Here are some questions I would like to ask anyone at any age:
What moments brought you to the doorstep of yourself? When did you pick yourself up from the floor of despair to make it through a day, and then the next? When did you have to rewrite most everything you thought you knew? What about the times you strayed so far away that one day you didn't recognize your own reflection? How did you come to learn to walk together again, you and you I mean, step by step, hand in your own trembling hand? How and in what ways have you learned to care, and what does care really mean, look like, feel like to you? What dreams or desires within you are yearning to be recognized just enough to exist at the periphery of the possible, even especially the ones that scare you? What matters most to you in this very moment?
And, to the women in the water: Why about the ocean called you into it on that snowy day? Which is to say, what about you called you into it? What were you running from? Toward? I imagine it was cold, but what else was there to feel, beyond the stinging skin?
My wish for 30+: I want to give more of myself to the invisible questions and stories—of myself and of others. I want to be like the women running into the sea with reckless abandon in the middle of a snowstorm. I want to see the snow next to the sea and be daring enough to feel all of it—the piercing cold and the way that our own breath makes the harshness and softness of the world able to be felt, in all its devastating and surprising beauty.
Writing Prompt: I remember…
“All water has a perfect memory and is like that: remembering where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.” — Toni Morrison
With so much emphasis on the new and on change and on transformation circulating this time of year especially, sometimes we forget that returning or remembering can be just as radically supportive of living closer to the kind of life we want to live, that sometimes transitions are not about quantum leaps but about recirculating to core, a culling of values, an invitation back to what already is.
What are you remembering, in this season?
Come to a blank page and start with I remember… I remember…, over and over, keep the pen moving, allowing yourself to be surprised by what memories prompt others as the free-flow of association takes over. What is asking for you to return?
If you feel so called, you are always welcome to share your writing here:
A number of people have asked about future WITHIN courses. The full 12-week Season (course) will return in Fall 2022 (sign up for the waitlist here). In the meantime, I am offering WITHIN in two formats:
For alumni of past WITHIN Seasons: In early 2022 we’ll be gathering monthly for WITHIN Labs (2 hour yoga + embodied writing workshops), open to all members of the WITHIN community in a drop-in format, offered live and via recording. WITHIN Labs will begin late January and will be held on select Sundays.
Stay tuned for date announcements here and @within.practice.
For those NEW to WITHIN: I am also making a recorded version of the WITHIN course, WITHIN: your time, available for practicing on your own time, at your own pace. Several have done the entire course via recording, and a few have done so with a partner (which is a supportive way to link personal practice with joint contemplation and accountability). While this format will not feature the community circle, those who practice with the recordings will also have the option to join the monthly WITHIN Labs (above).
WITHIN: your time will be available in January 2022—stay tuned here and @within.practice.
You can learn a lot about a year, its arcs and curves and edges, by looking back at what you chose to read, when. 2021 in Books, my annual reading list, is on the blog.
RESOURCES
Reading:
Torrey Peterson, author of Detransition, Baby, on looking for meaning in your mid-thirties and making meaning as a trans woman.
I’ve had a few conversations recently with loved ones going through significant health challenges and personal losses that, among so much else, stir up what they describe as a feeling of lost time. Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms speaks directly to the sense of life interrupted and is one of the most riveting books of 2021 I’ve read.
Listening:
If you, like me, are struggling to separate the dark winter season from a dark inner season of affect and emotion (or to accept either/both!), this On Being interview with Katherine May on “Wintering” is a warm hug for the shivering soul.
Doing:
Human Is What We Are: Conflict Resolution for Holy Hearts with Bryonie Wise | a 21-day writing adventure with prompts in your inbox, through winter solstice and the new year
That is all for 2021, dear friends. I wish you a holiday season of rest, remembering, and renewal, spent in the company of those you love. See you back here in January.
With love,
Allie
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Allie! It's wonderful to receive periodic doses of your thoughtful writing. It's always a small pleasure to read what you have to say. Checking in from a familiar place as I settle (back) into life in Durham, NC!
Congratulations on the new positioning and format of your newsletter. It feels very accessible. I am writing from Northampton, Massachusetts, a new home for us after 15 years in Bend where we were lucky enough to make friends with your parents and be introduced to your life adventures. I am fascinated by the space you are carving out (not at all assuming that I have a full picture of its contours) and find your explorations and writing very intriguing and comforting at the same time. Thank you for sharing and opening the door to so many new thoughts.