Not Being #1: The Wisdom of Aloneness

Not Being

Excerpt: The Wisdom of Aloneness

Hello hello ,
Thanks so much for signing up for update of the book Not Being.

I hope you are truly truly all well. This is a strange strange time. For people living in the West, what is known of as "normal" will probably not be normal for at least 2020 and likely much longer.

As strangeness will become all the more common, I see part of writing this book is to point out and explore those strange truths about our life and work.
Which is why this first newsletter will be an excerpt from the book about Aloneness, that strange nagging sense that we may be deeply alone in this world. The excerpt came from one experience I had recently, being struck by how alone I am in this world while often feeling so grateful for all the wonderful people in my life. It's quite a paradoxical state - we can be alone even in the most intimate connected moment. Yet paradoxicality has become the heart of our time now.

I hesitate to call such loneliness a problem to be solved but an invitation to a surprising larger mystery that is always with us.

In this crisis time, please come together and offer solidarity. Please also take this time to come home to yourself and visit the often ignored parts of it.

On the Writing Process #1

Some of you have asked "How's the writing life going?", to which I'd gladly reply "STRANGE!"

Book writing has been both slower and much more rewarding than I've expected. It's consuming me at the moment, a thrilling and frightening prospect. I've conservatively estimated to write about 500 words/day, which takes about 3 hours, but truly it's a new gravitational field throughout the rest of the time.

The writing is weird too: it is as if the book has a life on its own and resists whenever I try to conform it into our predetermined outline.

The writing process is closest to a long form improvisation. It's slow with occasional burst of smoothness, a very spooky process. We had an outline. I tried with various degree of success to be disciplined, setting goals & tracking word count (somewhat on track) mapping out sections to write every week etc.. BUT
I'm also understanding more of my creative temperament that it's actually not following my own plan and digging the rabbit hole maybe a better approach.
The metaphor: imagine you plan to make mexican food and you went to buy a bunch of ingredients and put it all on the table and then you end up improvising making strange interesting new food vaguely resembling Mexican..

More magically, having the book as a larger inquiry really doing strange magic to my life. My co-author Steven and I talked about how the only way for the book to work at all is that we really have to live the book. We have to hold these messy and difficult inquiries in our own lives.
I'll share with you more in the next issue.

For now, stay open to everything,
Khuyen