Notes from Me and The Weave

On Freeing Waterfalls + Updates on The Weave's New Website

It’s been some time since I last wrote.

Since my last Substack, I’ve left the US with my partner—and our dogs, Baz and Laila—to return to Montreal. I’m coming back from what turned out to be a decade-long pilgrimage around the world, nearly half of which I did solo with the dogs—whom I rescued in China midway through the journey. I lived in six countries across four continents over these ten years, having moved a total of ten times in just the last two.

Coming back to Montreal after so much movement, after so many beautiful, life-changing, heartbreaking, heart-opening, traumatising, healing and expansive experiences has been like revisiting all these years and a new now here, all at once. I’ve needed time not only to recreate a home from scratch—bringing together all the different parts of myself and the stories I’ve collected along the way—but also to sit with the very recognition of what it means to be returning from such a journey in physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual terms.

I’ve been witnessing a new version of myself poke through the surface and seek nourishment in the composting of the old ones. I’ve been unpacking memories in the form of journals, photographs, objects, and souvenirs from all the lives I’ve lived along this decade-long vision quest. I’ve been offering them meaningful places in my new space—so they can converse with one another, ground into their relationships, and together tell a story of wholeness. A story woven through severance and return, through their paradoxical dance, and through the multicultural diversity they embody. I’ve been getting acquainted with my recently unraveled neurospiciness while readapting to city life after living in isolation in the wild—and navigating waves of social anxiety in the process. I’ve been returning to community, to the simplicity of what feels familiar, rebuilding a grounding routine (a routine!), and giving gratitude for an emerging stability and an abundant harvest of creative, personal, and spiritual growth.

I share this as part of my commitment to embodying authenticity, vulnerability and truth in my writing—some of the foundations of the regenerative storytelling culture I want to see flourish in the world. I share this as I continue to untangle myself from the systemic structures that reduce us to ‘human resources’ and demand we present a manicured persona for public consumption. Even when we may be silently coming undone inside. I share this as I heal from burnout and complex trauma—as I reclaim the safety in speaking freely again after four years of living under mass surveillance and a social credit system. After fleeing the making of a totalitarian world that once seemed like a playground. As I return from an experience that started as a grand adventure and became a profound initiation through severance, transformation, and rebirth.