Learning to live the questions
Autumn diaries: on witnessing transitions, reorienting, and a published essay elsewhere 🍂
On my way home on a Saturday in early October, while waiting at the bus stop I noticed how the trees were already transitioning and slowly shedding their leaves. As the new season was arriving, I was also reflecting on the cycles in my life that felt similar to autumn.
“Leaves fall as omens of things to come, can you bear witness to what is happening?” I strung these words together at some point between the bus stop and getting home, as I tried to make sense of all I’ve been feeling, accepting, and releasing this year. Autumn is a welcome reminder of how life revolves in cycles and how releasing can allow us to make space for more resonant things.
Cinnamon, a song by Tinad popped up on a lofi playlist I had on at work recently.
Tinad means unfrozen in Swedish. Why I picked my name is because I like to see my beats unfreeze people’s emotions and let loose.— Tinad.
to thaw; to unfreeze; to soften as ice melts away1
Seeing these words in the artist’s bio made me smile because I had been feeling freshly unfrozen by a recent trip to Nigeria, and more prepared for the long winter ahead.
There has also been much heartbreak and unfreezing while witnessing the inhumane acts of genocide being brought to more light and accountability in recent times. There have been many calls to bear witness as many truths are unfolding. Through these times of collective grief, I’m observing the ways I process and move through grief. I don’t always know what to do with mine and how to find the words for it. But I’ve been choosing to pay attention, learn, and turn toward these truths.
I recently attended a poetry workshop with
, where we collectively reflected on grief, nature, the earth, the truth, and the erotic nature of poetry2. Fariha shared how writing is part of her spiritual practice of excavating layers to get to her truth. She guided us to locate the grief inside, to allow ourselves to go a little deeper than we usually do, to feel the feelings in our body, and to feel safe to feel them.WRITE: Locate the grief inside of you, where does it sit within you? Write what it’s saying to you, pay attention, and listen carefully.
WRITE: What is your relation to the universe? How does that overlap with your feelings about a loved one? Is there an overlap in the way you love the Earth and the way you love your beloved? Write to me about it, whether a poem or a short essay.
I’m grateful for containers like words, art, and good community, that allow us to build capacity to move towards hope and action. I found my way to poetry this year and it’s been a potent way for me to reach some truths, through reading it and attempting to form my own.
This spring, I saw an open call online from a Finnish-Swedish publication on the theme “Shame” (“Skam” in Swedish). I remember feeling the urge to write while not quite knowing what I had to say. I drafted most of my submission shortly after seeing the prompts in a way that felt like I was pulling it down from somewhere—like a loving conversation I was waiting to have with myself.
This was at a time when I was also trying to be more present with the things that felt creatively fulfilling, like writing and pottery while being out of my job. After much deliberation and doubt, I eventually found the courage to submit my draft. Even without being published, the process had been a way to come closer to examining and naming my experiences with this tricky emotion. So I was surprised and excited to learn that my essay was selected for publication.
As I worked with an editor and got feedback, some familiar fears about publishing personal writing resurfaced. There is the fear of being misunderstood, misread, saying the wrong thing, or perhaps offending someone else through this vulnerable act.
While my public writing has been interspersed since I joined Substack 3 years ago, it’s grown along with me and my creative practice—and it’s felt more alive this year. I realize that these fears don’t bother me as much when I write here now.
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Later in August, I found Elissa Altman’s Writing and the Permission to Succeed: The Intersection of Art and Shame. I resonated with her reflections on finding permission to write and the many hurdles we face while trying to tell our stories:
quotes Janna Malamud Smith in that piece: “Shame’s first goal is to have you confirm to group expectations. Art-making is a profound way people deal with shame. One way art transforms [it] is by replacing helplessness with agency.”“Who are you to not tell them?” a writer friend said to me. This writer friend — author of novels, memoirs, a short story collection — tells me that it is ownership, the acceptance of the fact that our stories make us who we are, that is the most complicated and treacherous part of what we do.
Shame and fear tend to create stuckness rather than move me towards expansive choices. Art, making, and action allow us to transmute these experiences into something else, the process serves its purpose regardless of the results and what is done with the results. Every work of our art is an act of courage towards freedom and agency.
I’ve recently been returning to these words from Audre Lorde:
I have to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.
—Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.
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In my essay, I write about shame and context, how shame relates to self-acceptance and releasing shame:
Shame is a form of orienting the acceptance of self in relation to others. To understand the relationship with shame is to understand self-acceptance.
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Releasing shame is about finding freedom, and defining how and when I feel free. Sometimes finding people who are free in ways I am not, and sometimes offering that same freedom to others.
—Funmi Adewodu
The full essay is published in the fall issue of Astra in print and digital format.
As I write and connect more with the words of others, I’m noticing how certain words stay with me in a way that requests contemplating—what they mean, what they point to, and how they are perceived by others.
Towards is one of those recent words.
Towards implies an orientation, a direction, or a position, to move from. To turn towards as a way of paying attention and being with what is in front of me—An act of trusting in how a path could unfold. It does not necessarily imply speed or attachment to outcomes. Thinking towards can allow for momentum in a direction that feels right. It reminds me of these words that have now been with me for most of this year:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.
I like that it brings me back to a way of living the questions—living into acceptance, being with time, and being with the process. Perhaps, it can be enough to know what to do next and to allow for the rest of the map to flow there.
Towards: connection, truth, devotion, discernment, momentum.
I’m thinking of how autumn into winter, can be a time to deepen, to be with the silence, and slowly chip away at what might typically feel like an impossible task. When writing feels slow, as it’s been lately, or when I need other ways to express and process, I turn to my sketchbook as a playground. I play with the words, symbols, and colours present in my mind. I’m also feeling pulled to image making lately, although I’m still figuring out what that means in practice, I’ve been turning to my existing collection of images made by other people—the ones that have resonated and moved me. I love how making a mood board and visualizing my inner experience can gently shift my energy—like making a spring mood board on a gloomy day in late winter is so delightful. This is another playful way of expressing and processing that I easily forget is available.
Thank you for reading, and thanks for being here! 💌
✼ Inputs ✼
Things I’m turning towards, learning from, and resonating with:
📖 The medicine of turning towards by
.🌐 Palestine university—resources and ways to take action in solidarity.
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📖 The Internet Determines What is Remembered and Who is Forgotten —“In Sudan, the internet access was cut off. In Tigray, the internet access was cut off. In Gaza, the internet access is being cut off. Have you noticed the stories dwindle?” by
.🎧 Invitations from Inside Collective Grief and Study, a moving podcast by
.📖 Running Towards Radical Love—“Suddenly love wasn’t just a word, it was a principle of possibility, a mandate for living that I could sustain amidst the collective grief. Living by the primacy of a love ethic, allowing myself to be seen by others, feels like baptism and accountability is welcomed like rain after the drought. Instead of running away from accountability, we run to its shore to bathe in it. While wading in these healing waters, we enter spaces of collaboration, collective imagination and generative conflict with gratitude.”
📖
’s first post here is so resonant and timely—What do you mean a poetic revolutionary, a spiritual gunrunner?🎶 André 3000’s New Blue Sun for some soothing frequencies ✨
🌐 I love everything Ace makes—post-colonial astrology and some of the most poetic analyses.
📖 Solidarity with Palestine—A Radical Black Feminist Mandate: A Reading List.
🎧 I enjoyed this conversation with Craig Mod on attention, vipassana meditation, and writing.
✼ Prompts for Self Inquiry ✼
What/Who/Where am I turning towards through my words, dreams, imagination, questions, and actions?
What do I feel called to be devoted to? Where am I being called into more discernment?
What feels superfluous? What feels necessary? What does enough feel like?
How, and when do I allow for moments of rest, pause, and integration?
What are my sources of truth?
✼ Looking forward to ✼
A writing class on the personal essay form, this class is being taught by 3 of my favourite writers here on Substack—
.Let me know if you’ll be there! 👋🏾
Thank you, Amara! I’m glad to be in this space with you 😊
There’s so much wisdom in Lorde’s writings, definitely a cozy winter read ✨
There is so much fullness in this letter, Funmi! Grateful for it all and I'm especially thinking about the aliveness of making the vulnerable work public. I share so many of the thoughts that you do about the process. The journey here on Suubstack has truly helped me unfreeze some of that. Thank you for sharing and I cannot wait to read your essay! Also thank you, love, for sharing Lorde's writings. I'm returning to her essays and poetry this winter and it felt so good inside to have that quote from 'The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action' in this generous compilation.