I don’t have a lot of updates this week, just that one of the roleplaying games I’ve been writing for, Defenders of the Wild, is up on Kickstarter.
This week’s piece is an excerpt from a work in progress, which is why it’s only available in full for my paid subscribers. I’m working on a zine called A Black Triangle in a Green Forest, which will be a bit more esoteric than what I usually write, that is based on the experiences and epiphanies I had while living alone in an off-grid, 12x12’ cabin in the woods during 2020 and 2021. I sort of lost my mind for awhile, and it’s been interesting to piece together all the scraps of songs and essays I wrote during that time. I’m proud of this work though, and hope you enjoy it.
One of the worst people I’ve ever dated styled herself a guru. She wrote essay after essay on forgiveness. She even once forgave me for letting her abuse me.
Her essays were good. She was a good writer.
I don’t trust the people who offer simple solutions to complex mysteries of life.
You shouldn’t trust me either.
I’m just a girl who lives in a black triangle in a green forest, waiting out the rain and the thunder while the world dissolves into the primordial chaos. While everything dies, rots, and builds the soil from which new things may grow.
That pattern is beautiful. If the gods intend anything, they intend for that pattern.
I’m also a girl finishing her own essay three years later, in a red brick house built on a mountain of gray shale, fighting her own instinct to try to make her writing perfect and universal. Perfection is not possible. There are no simple solutions.
I want to find scraps of happiness; I want to live courageously and long. The world didn’t end when we thought it might, because it rarely does. Which is good. I don’t want to die, not anytime soon. I don’t want to rot, not anytime soon. I want to listen to this rain on the steel roof I put over my own head, or I want to listen to my dog chewing a toy on the couch while birds build their nests just outside the window.
I can’t answer the complex mysteries of life. I can tell you what I’m learning, though.
It starts with triangles and it starts with circles. Squares make better building blocks than either of those shapes, but lives are not legos and we had better understand ourselves as vines, as trees, as elk, as rats, than as bricks. You simply cannot perform the best kinds of magic with squares.
In the abstract, all things are best understood as circles. There are no sides to a circle, and importantly, there are no corners. There is no point when the right side becomes the bottom, when the bottom becomes the left, in a circle. There is no bottom side to a circle, only a bottom part. In comparison, the bottom side of a polygon is an objectively-existent thing. We know precisely where it begins and ends. This is to the polygon’s detriment.
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