small beauties (004)
saying a big voluptuous unmixed yes to life
gm frens, this newsletter is listening to MMS (Mr Money Sound) by Asake and Wizkid, produced by P.Prime.
Assalam alaikum. Wabillah taofeeq gan. Ma dupẹ lọwọ ọlọun for my city (and everything I have come from) gan. You no fit run from who you are. Wetin go be is cast in stone. If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
Let’s get into it, shall we?
I locked myself in the past many months after returning from a pesky life lesson experience. And before that, I lived many months in relative solitude in my Abuja flat. (Ecclesiastes- there is a time for every matter under heaven.) Looking back, I miss the quiet, the quiet… how so much else came alive, the walls, the bead curtain, the lights, the colours, the electricity or lack thereof, my privilege and my blindness to it, the Love inside me. It was an incredibly difficult time in all aspects of my life and I’m glad I experienced it as both participant and observer. The observer of the anguish made it possible for me to get up every morning even though all I looked forward to was 4 pm, time to start winding down to sleep. The participant in the anguish made it easy to experience my life like it was the one job I had, to taste things, to feel so much of the things and the process, to cry very often, to write essays like this one on living in the dark in Nigeria, to feel my anxiety and name its spikes, to experience the silent terror of the unknown I found at the edge of myself/my career as I knew it. I discovered and christened different parts and characters in myself. The light came on in my internal world and it was quiet.
But now after four months of waking up to face a corner in my bedroom in my parents’ house in Enugu, the girl is outside! for long or for short, who knows? Last week, my birthday week, was full of delicious, sometimes ill-advised, irresponsible delights! I have [been] pleased and displeased and life continues, wonderfully—where the wonder is the simple miracle of everything in life.
Here are the things that spun me around last week:
Dear Sugars: Heartward-bound asks, “How do I follow my heart, trust myself and be my own guide?”
(Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ZBAQxzWg2GckkJQJ3jUNH?si=FKqrUlSYQ-qc7n3PFXqmdQ )
The way I remember it, it’s April or May 2021. I’m walking around that E14 neighbourhood I stayed in between January and June 2021. It’s night. I decide not to walk the park/garden trail that serves as a quadrangle in the midst of the housing complexes in the area. I get out into the roads, walk towards Canary Wharf but do not cross that 6 (or 8?) lane highway and instead walk back down the street. It starts drizzling. I’m listening to this episode of Dear Sugars (summary web page linked).
Steve: Consciousness is, by nature, obsessive. Children come into the world obsessed — they care about things too much, and that obsession gets socialized out of us. We beat down the voices that care about things too much and that feel too much, and part of the artist's journey is to say, "Screw that. I do care about it too much. I am too invested in it. I'm obsessed with it, and I'm going to be honest about that obsession rather than try to lead a safer, more conventional, 'approved' life.”
But it's an emotionally and psychologically inconvenient arrangement because you feel more and you face certain things about yourself that bring you away from arrangements that are there to keep you insulated from deep feeling.
Cheryl: I agree with you that that can be a very hard life when you first step off the path but I think the harder life is never stepping off the path while always aching to do so.
Steve: Heartward-Bound may be thinking of courage as the absence of fear, and that's just all wrong. Courage is action in the face of fear.
As I listen today in 2024, I feel like I’m back in E14 right now. I’m feeling the cold and wetness. They called India Arie at some point and as I hear phrases like ‘taking the step even being afraid’ ‘feel like you don’t have an option’ ‘having health issues’ ‘a breakdown’ ‘take a chance on the truth’ again, my nose stings and my eyes are watering. I remember being there in 2021. Maybe I even stopped walking and went under one of the corner shop umbrellas to focus on what she was saying. Maybe I took a picture of the streetlight-illuminated leaves in front of me. I was so stressed and tired and in deep missing of being in Nigeria. Home was the great love that I lived with only through a screen. I had never yet felt at home in it but it is where I came from, it was the part of the river that birthed me, and I knew, I just knew, I just knew, I could have a life I enjoyed in it. Why could I not?
India Arie: Heartward Bound knows what she doesn't want, but she's not exactly sure what she does want. When you take the time to get clear about what you want, the thing you want pulls you forward.
Everyone doesn’t have a mum that can say [know you can always come back home] to them, I know that. But I think everyone has something in their life that matters enough in their life that they wanna be alive for it.
For me, it was my own enjoyment, how food tastes, how colours look in different lights, what secure romance feels like.
*
Uses of the Erotic
During a guided meditation early last week where I explored my intentions for this new season of being outside (which in many ways is really just going a level deeper inside!), the erotic came up as a crucial touchstone and I remembered Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic (read the 5-paged essay here) and a review summary in The Marginalian here!
Observing that “we have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings,” Lorde writes:
The erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.
Simone Weil, one of my patron saints, matriarch spirit of my kinspeople, the channel through which the universe gave us The Power of Words argued that “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer” and I agree.
(Shout out to the theory + writing workshop class in uni that introduced her to me, it was for this class I wrote that my 2018 personal essay: Me, My Body and I!)
(Also, as I write this, Asake, fellow kinsman, is singing I wan dey precise, I wan dey precise.)
(Oh, you know who else I see at the village square every time I go there? Beyoncé don’t-talk-about-it-be-about-it Knowles. For the transcript of the linked speech, go here.)
*
A new friend, Segun, and I were talking about our relationship with our parents and he shared these two songs with me which I’ve had on meditative repeat a lot :
Joy Oladokun’s ‘Let It Be Me’ and Adele’s ‘I Drink Wine’
The 10 minutes of these two songs puts me in a loop of making peace with the thought of growing out of more than my skin -> I want you so bad but I can’t fight fire with fire -> making peace with the thought of growing out of more than my skin -> I want you so bad but I can’t fight fire with fire -> …
As I write this, Wizkid is singing Mo dupẹ lọwọ ọlọun ta wa sanle o, mo ware ware titi mo dẹ sa'amin o.
*
One thing I’m a sucker for these days???
A good i’ve been tried in the fire, now i’m walking out as gold story.
Here is one! https://onaweekly.substack.com/p/recovering-writer?utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
*
I woke up on my birthday morning to this quote from Etty Hillesum (1914–1943) in the Centre for Contemplation and Action’s newsletter ‘Saying Yes to Life’:
“Reposing in oneself” … probably best expresses my own love of life: I repose in myself. And that part of myself, that deepest and richest part in which I repose, is what I call “God.” In Tide’s [Hillesum’s friend] diary I often read, “Take him gently into Your arms, Father.” And that is how I feel, always and without cease: “as if I were lying in Your arms, oh God, so protected and sheltered and so steeped in eternity.” As if every breath I take were filled with it and as if my smallest acts and words had a deeper source and a deeper meaning.…
*
The Immaculata HQ biannual report newsletter
I have a biannual work update newsletter that I treat as a report to my stakeholders. If it’s easy for you to think of yourself as a stakeholder in Immaculata’s work—a person for whom Immaculata does what she does, a person whose need/enjoyment/support makes Immaculata’s work needful—you can check it out here. makingaliving.substack.com :)
*
Other Internet Gems:
We must transform ourselves to transform the world.
Any swimmers here? You may find this mini-doc on the evolution of Olympics-approved swimming technique interesting: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMr4NEUTL/
Here’s to the power of the erotic in our lives! Flirt with the flower that is also you. Sing 3:15 - 5:41 of II HANDS II HEAVEN or any other worship song out loud to yourself in the mirror or to whoever. 💐
Good news:
I’ve set up a payment subscription link (15,000 Naira monthly) for these posts from the editor’s desk. Ideally, this column would be paywalled, but Nigeria is not on the Stripe list to set up the Substack payment process. As I can’t figure out a way to disaggregate recipients of this newsletter without using Substack’s paid subscription tool, the newsletter remains open to everyone till further notice.