In Some Other Life | 4.4.21
The Sunday Edition
How can seventeen months feel like an entirely different life? How can time, something we invent in our own desperate attempt to make sense of the way all things pass us by, race and rush so swiftly we don’t even notice the gap between then and now? We were two with arms around one another, we were two on the shore of some far off loch, only days into hand fasting and vows spoken into rain and Autumn fog. Now we’re here, now we’re ages from that riverbank, that shoreline, those people still lost in the soft haze of elation and a heart content. We lost a year, all of us, and I wonder if I’m alone in feeling this way, this strange confusion when I look back at those days before the world fell apart and wonder if it was all imagined. We lost a year, and we’ll have to figure out how to get it back, or at the very least, we’ll have to figure out what it means that we never will. In some other life, we continued on, and I wonder who we’d be right now.
I ask you now, you who read this a year from when all this madness began, I ask you and I wonder aloud: Who are you now that you were not before? What have you lost? What have you gained? What have you learned of yourself in the strife and uncertainty that spilled like paint on the white page of a year? Are you happier now, are you more free? Are you broken in ways you don’t know how to fix, are you lonely?
How can time do this to us, how can it shift and steal? A year gone, four seasons risen and fallen and we’re back to where we began but nothing is the same, and I wish to know if it ever will be, again? Will we ever be, again?
Speak to me of you, of the ways this trip around this glowing ball of heat has transformed what matters to that heart in that chest of yours? Let’s connect on this, let’s reach out to one another and see that while different, we are probably so very much the same. Different boats, same sea, the lot of us. We all feel the waves, but how they toss our ships is so very different. Tell us of your storms.
Arm around shoulders
on some distant riverbank,
in some other life.
Haiku on Life by Tyler Knott Gregson
Song of the Day
MY NEW BOOK IS HERE!!! ILLUMINATION is available to snuggle up with in your loving arms. I will love you forever and ever if you’d give it an order. Click the button below and wham bam, you can choose where to order it from! (For International orderers, check your local Amazon!)
This is how I’m feeding my family, how I’m able to keep creating art and reaching out to all of you beautiful souls, so please, if you’re not yet part of our extremely rad exclusive community of Light Chasers, you can sign up for less than a sugary latte a month. Let’s hang out, it’s time. If not, I love you all the same.
Just a quick thank you for everyone who is subscribing. If you dig what I’m doing, please, share it with anyone and everyone you can think of by clicking the button below.
I am not at all the same person I was a year ago. My world was changed by a traumatic injury just weeks before the pandemic took hold of our lives, and turned our little snow globes upside down.
I'm not one who collects a lot of close friends - I'm guarded and prefer to keep that number small to limit those who know my deepest thoughts, fears, joys, pain. In the last year, political trash has shown me true colors of people, some of which have a hateful streak laid bare for the world to see. Ive lost friends as a result, as I can't abide hate. As I worked through my personal trauma, I had someone who ghosted me and never offered an explanation, yet we move in similar circles so we continue to cross paths regularly. Someone who i was a very close friend I confided in withdrew, and when questioned, claimed I ignored her when her life was difficult - I had no idea because she had shut the world out.
So no, I am not the same person I was, and I'm still processing what that means looking ahead. I'll keep putting one foot in front of the other, and I'll find my way.
I had been in Germany a full one week of my year long contract as an Au pair when everything completely shutdown. Suddenly the new normal I was trying desperately to acclimate to was snatched away. It put new stresses on relationships that had barely even begun. So many wonderful, beautiful things were canceled - Oktoberfest, Carnival, the Christmas markets. And oddly enough, I felt a strange sort of detachment from what was happening back home in the US. But I found that tether again in the righteous anger of the Black Lives Matter movement. Moved by anger and frustration of my own, I took part in my very first protest.
Now that I’m back home and have time to reflect, I realize that, even though I thought of myself as compassionate, I’ve gained a heightened sense of empathy for others. I genuinely care about keeping others safe and healthy, and treated with dignity and respect. And I don’t see that as such a bad thing at all.
Tyler, I’ve loved your poetry for years, and this community you’ve gathered has been so uplifting during this time of uncertainty and frustration. Thank you for having the courage to bring us all together and give us this space to share, create, and heal.