Autumn Equinox Update
22 Septmeber 2025
I realized that my blog is a place where I can talk about my life. The blog occupies a weird space, somewhere between a social media "post" and a diary. It's public, but at the same time, it's entirely my domain and I can decide everything. But it's also lowkey, conversational, it doesn't need to be too serious. It's literally just a post on a blog so there's no reason to overthink it, I can just make it have whatever structure flows from my typing fingers naturally and organically.
Well, part of what I want to use this blog for is a place to post little periodic updates, that I can go back to, that I can send out there, that my friends and friends-to-be can look at, that step by step add up to a collection. And it's also a good way for me to practice the act of writing without having any pressure at all. When I was young, I used to spend a lot of time writing writing writing, but nowadays I find that I have some kinds of nebulous obstacle. It feels more like trying to perform feats of manual dexterity while wearing oven mitts, instead of channeling playfully my words into an open space. But I believe that many obstacles can be overcome with practice.
Because of these "obstacles" sometimes it takes me a while to finish a project once I start working on it. Starting a bunch of projects but not finishing them has kind of been my motif lately. I've been diving into many different ideas ambitiously, wholeheadedly, but halfheartedly. It's been a pattern for me that I generally get more satisfaction out of starting a project than ending it. As I write this, right to my left side I have a half-finished weaving project where I still need to finish the ends, and under that is a dress I've been working on with the sleeves pinned and ready to be sewn, but I haven't touched it in a few days. Instead of either of those things, or any of the other things I got floating around, we work on my website, another great and unfinished project lmao. At least a website, especially a personal website such as this one, has the wonderful tendency to never be finished and to always be a work in progress as I myself progress and grow and change and get new ideas and make new art.
I began workshopping the ideas for what I wanted to write here right at the tail end of summer, and I finish it up right at the first tastes of autumn. Where I'm living now, in the state of California, early fall has a very summerish character. At night, there has been a refreshing chill in the night air, but the daytime is only barely cooler than the height of summer, if it's cooler at all. Some of the earlier trees are starting to change a bit, the pods on the sweet gum trees are looking heavier but haven't begun to fall off yet. More of the changes are faunal. At this time of year, in the park near my home, in the early evening, white-tailed kites begin to start congregating in the high trees, and they fly around calling to each other. Their assembly grows to more and more birds throughout the fall, and it usually peaks around Samhain. I think last year at the highest peak, I counted at least 30 birds all soaring in circles together. Really brought out the local birding community too!
Fall is definitely welcomed, but I usually prefer the lighter half of the year. It can be difficult for me to make friends with the cold and dark. I hope that the change to the more contemplative and darker fall days can be fruitful for me to find more balance and peace and keep up my inner work. The Korean pear harvest should come to my local grocery store any day now and I am really looking forward to that. They have such a light and delicate flavour and the most wonderful crunchy texture.
What have I been rotating in my mind lately... The most obvious thing is that I've experienced a lot of loss lately. Summer going into fall mirrors that feeling for me. I feel like what I really need is some time and space and stillness to feel that stuff out and come to a kind of balance, but instead I've been trying to keep busy busy, which hasn't exactly been fruitful to what I really want to achieve, but it has been fruitful for keeping me from being overwhelmed or depressed. So loss? On the one hand, it's natural and necessary for all phenomena to end eventually, just like the high and hot days of summer slowly give way to eventual cold and silent winter nights. And then it comes back again. The cyclicality of these things brings a lot of comfort and stability to me. I lost my job a while ago, a job I really enjoyed, and I can tell that I still got some mourning to do about that inside of me.
More importantly than that, I lost my last two grandparents within weeks of each other. Luckily, being unemployed it was easy for me to go down and spend time with them at the end of their lives without having the friction of dealing with "requesting time off" from "an employer". I think I still have mourning to do with that as well. The Zen Priest Joan Halifax, in her book Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death, she talks about how in the weeks right after someone's death you actually have a rare opportunity to feel everything fully and sit with your mourning, and she encourages you to give your mourning openness and space. Well, I'm trying and I know that's gotta go at my own pace and however it looks like for me. At least I wasn't in denial about anything and I knew it was going to happen in both cases, though both cases were still quite sudden. Something about having all of my grandparents be dead makes me really feel like the last ties connecting me to my childhood are gone now, like I'm in a new stage. Hard to put into words. A lot to reflect on. I wish to give myself more time and more stillness to feel these things with compassion and openness.
Beyond that... The 20th mainline Touhou game came out fairly recently and I've been playing the hell out of it. It's definitely becoming "a fave" and I think ZUN is doing some of the best work he's ever done in it. I've been flirting with the idea of writing some kind of review for it for this blog (infact, I've already started workshopping it) but only time will tell whether or not I follow through with my mental ambitions. At the moment, I have managed to get that 1cc on Normal several times, clear the Extra Stage, and get the 1cc on Hard.. twice!
Another section of this site I want to eventually create and flesh out is a section for book reviews, because I enjoy books and read hungrily, though I'm a bit behind on my goal right now. Lately, I've been reading Joy Williams' The Changeling, which was first published in 1978. Whenever I read Joy Williams (who is quickly becoming possibly my favourite writer of fiction?) I have to really take my time, because every sentence and every paragraph is so deliciously crafted and so savory in its bleakness, humor and wit. I also recently finished Salman Rushdie's 2024 memoir Knife, which he wrote after that attempted assassination. More on that one later. I also began reading a translation of the Egyptian Book of Coming Forth by Day i.e. the Book of the Dead. I know that will take me a long time to finish because the passages are so beautiful and so moving that I can't read more than a couple of pages without crying.
I have been deepening my study of tarot (eventually posts about tarot will be found on this blog, probably, definitely, maybe, perhaps) and to that end I reread Rachel Pollack's (may she rest in peace) insightful and foundational 78 Degrees of Wisdom and I read for the first time Ruth Ann and Wald Amberstone's Unlocking the Secret Language of Tarot, which was a very interesting and grounded book despite the outlandish griftiness of the title. Basically, the "secret language" they're "unlocking" is symbolism. They analyze certain repeating symbols that appear in Pamela Colman Smith's art and draw comparisons between cards that way, plenty of morsels for me to chew on and use in my practice later.
The last thing I want to explore in this post, the last idea that I've been rotating in my mind a lot lately, is the idea of the sword, the knife, the dagger, scissors. It's an image I've felt very drawn to over the summer. In July I had a series of vivid and recurring dreams about swords, piles of swords, a sword shining in a void, being a knight wielding a sword. I painted a sword. I drew swords. My tarot readings were full of swords, swords, swords, and myself as the King and Knight of Swords. As a seamstress, I cut with scissors and rotary blades. A month ago I took psychedelics and had a vision of swords and daggers floating in the air. A powerful symbol. Macbeth has a vision of a dagger before murdering the king of Scotland. In Tarot, swords are ideas, the mind, words, air. So what's "the big idea"? Still figuring that out, but I got a clearer idea than I used to have. Reading Salman Rushdie's Knife made me think about this symbol even further. To quote from the book:
"When a knife makes the first cut in a wedding cake, it is a part of the ritual by which two people are joined together. A kitchen knife is an essential part of the creative act of cooking. A Swiss Army knife is a helper, able to perform small but necessary tasks, such as opening a bottle of beer. Occam's razor is a conceptual knife, a knife of theory, that cuts through a lot of bullshit by reminding us to prefer the simplest available explanations of things to more complex ones. In other words, a knife is a tool, and acquired meaning from the use we make of it. It is morally neutral. It is the misuse of knives that is immoral. [...] Language, too, was a knife. It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. It could call bullshit, open people's eyes, create beauty."
Drawing and painting more swords is likely in my future at any rate, along with writing more :)
Thank you for reading my post, if you read it all the way through. May you have a great fall if you're in a similar temporal situation as me, and may you have a great whatever it is if you're far in the future. In either case, may we experience a nice balance between the dark and the light.