Sunday Brunch

The Season of Sweltering Sadness

Jun 22, 2025

The row of linden trees lining the road, perfuming the air

Oh my mother said, I wish there was a way to take a photo of a scent, to share it with others.

“flowering Linden trees with its fresh, warm, floral aroma, delicate, sweet, honey-fruity top notes and fine, green, hay-like undertone reminiscent of the scent of sweetened herbal tea. There is a balanced and delicate complexity of aroma throughout the drydown when smelling it directly from a scent strip, but after leaving the area for a time, upon returning, one finds “the entire atmosphere is charged with its radiation.”

NOTES OF THE WEEK

As I don’t think anyone here pays attention to notes on Substack I am going to turn this week’s brunch into a batch of notes.

When you come back from a dog walk and lie down because it’s too hot to do anything else because your battered lymphatic system says f…off and while browsing for a guided meditation you notice you are stil wearing poop bags. It’s scatter brain Saturday…

Every car I look at I check two things; is the boot big enough for all my pets to lay comfortably. Is the airco strong enough to keep them cool on long trips, mid summer (have you noticed how every highway in Europe runs through fields without trees and every traffic jam feels like you’re being slow roasted).

While I only have their comfort in mind, my dad keeps an eye on everything else. He keeps asking, what kind of car do you like and every time I say: whatever is most comfortable for the pets.

A friend always says a car is about the smiles per miles ratio that matters.

Happy pets make me smile to that’s it. I want the car my Dogs need.

(i have just realized I had dragged dad down the rabbit hole of van conversions…. when he gets back from food shop he wants to show me slide in foldable bed boxes or something…

As a journalism student you are taught to be “objective”.

As a cultural studies student you learn such a thing doesn’t exist.

Thanks for reading The Way I Spend The End Of The World! This post is public so feel free to share it

MY SPACE TIME CONTINUUM

For years, I let people drift. They needed space. They were busy. Out of sorts. I understood. I always do. I made no demands. I waited. I left the door ajar. Always.

But now, I am the one to go quiet. Because I need my space.

When I withdraw, when I simply stop being the warm, attentive mirror, the inexhaustible cheerleader, security blanket, side kick or back up battery, that’s when it all shifts. Then suddenly, messages come in: “I’m worried about you.”

I don’t think it’s really about care. It’s not genuine concern. It’s withdrawal. And it feels patronising and manipulative. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe it is my turn to opt out and take care of myself first?”

I doubt it is even about me. It’s more about the expectation of others of my endless presence. This is about them unexpectedly being denied access to the part of me they’ve somehow come to feel entitled to.

I created that, I know. Through my enthusiasm, generosity, availability. I taught people how to treat me. I taught them that availability was a constant. Loyalty, care. I taught them that I adjust, absorb, listen, witness. I don’t flinch, falter or flake out.

The “mistake” that was made here: People wrongfully assumed I did this without ever needing the same in return.

How foolish. Reciprocation, not checks and balances, but honest and respectful reciprocation.

I am not a dumping ground for toxic emotional waste, I am not a resource either.

I still will let people go quiet. But I also claim the same for myself. Cherish stillness. Self soothe instead of seeking solace somewhere, where I will still end up doing the brunt work of all the emotional labouring.

I used to dedicate thoughtful discussions to this. These days I just quietly leave the room.

I am 48 years old and I feel like I have been naive for all of it. I once thought that treaties and alliances were meant to keep more people safe.

They were not. There seems to be only one alliance that counts in this world: US - Israel and whatever they say goes.

No matter how many murders it takes to get what they want.

The systems of impunity are seen for what they are. False narratives unravel. Framing no longer works.

Rise and stay loud. Let there never be a mistake about what side you’re on.

Because I believe our humanity, justice, safety, freedom, sovereignty, and equality, are not some abstract concepts to be sold to the highest bidder.

They’re paid for with blood and souls.

painting by Etel Adnan

MARROW & BONE

I cannot separate myself from suffering. I cannot celebrate fear, death and destruction. I just don’t have it in me. I don’t have a capacity for hatred. I may feel repulsed, but I will always pray for redemption. I can only celebrate life.

My friends call me weird quite often. Not exactly an insult when you look at the original meaning of the word.

What they mean to say, and have said literally, is that I am “off with the fairies half of the time”.

I get it. I understand why I am perceived that way. I mix decades of academia with this ancient wizardry woo woo walking on the edge of time vibe.

I have lived everything. From child abuse to house burnt to the ground to terminal cancer and all of it in between. Yet, I remain grateful for life. For being a life. A life that contains billions, light years, universes.

No I am not high. I am me. No magic mushrooms involved in the creation of this moment.

This is not about identity. it’s about inter being. It’s not about empathy as performance. Look at me giving a shit, shouldn’t you give a shit too.

I have learned it’s about embodiment. Not in the let’s reset your vagus nerve to fix your IBS.

I mean something else.

My soul doesn’t live inside this body, this body lives in souls. Many many souls.

We carry other souls. You can feel them through you. We don’t imagine suffering, we contain it. We are it. All of it. All of us. Anywhere, all of the time.

I believe in incarnation beyond time, or space, this porousness of self. I did not invent this. I felt it, couldn’t explain it away, and then found it in others too.

It is ancient. It’s mystical. It’s Sufi. It’s kabbalistic. It’s early Christian desert mystic. It’s Buddhist. It’s quantum physics. It’s what mystics and martyrs and poets and prophets have all tried to pour into language before the world shut them out and shut them up with flags and borders and binaries. From Rumi to the Sutras, from the Bible to the Quran. I believe.

Oneness.

And our bodies know it.

That’s why when a Palestinian child dies, something dies in us too. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Because there is no separation.

This is not a pity preach. I don’t believe in pity. It lacks dignity. Feeling sorry for someone is patronising and undignified. Especially when their ending has been premature, brutal and incomprehensible.

And if there is one thing we owe the dead it’s their dignity. The honour they did not receive in life.

When a Palestinian child is martyred, something in me dies too.

Not sentimental. But actual, spiritual, cellular loss.

I keep saying names out loud whenever I see a face posted here. Beautiful, human faces, all these bright soul sparks. Gone.

And I kept wondering, this is not my grief, so why do I feel it in my bones?

I bring it back to the well. The one that is endlessly replenished. I believe in incarnation the way Wayne Dyer described it: outside of space and time.

It’s not lineair.

Which means other souls are already in me. Right now. Souls of the disappeared. Souls of the drowned. Souls of the murdered. Souls of those still clinging to life.

I do not care about nationality. Or race. Or gender. Or religion. Or sexuality.

Not because I’m “above” those things, but because they are all in me. They are not the division, they’re not the border between you and me. They’re not where my love begins or ends.

I am all of it, so projecting, expecting, judging, rejecting and separating from any of it, any of you, is annihilation of self.

I encompass everything.

We all do.

Not all of us are awake to it.

Separation is the greatest illusion ever sold.

And the most violent.

Kill a Palestinian, man, woman or child, and you kill something eternal.

Kill a Palestinian,

drop a

Bomb on Tehran,

and you kill all

Of us

Because we are all of us.

I just heard a song on the radio. It’s by a Dutch artist called Typhoon. He sings:

“When heaven falls,

we carry it together.

So she, and Allah,

can finally have a rest.”

Because no soul was ever meant to hold it all alone.

NOTHING NEW

They say you learn something new every day. For a few years now I keep learning things I wish I hadn’t.

Not because I want to be gullible, ignorant or naive.

No, because I wish I didn’t have to know because it never happened, nobody did it, no one even conceived of it.

The only thing that flows more freely than my love these days are my tears.

I STILL AND ALWAYS WILL

I have been wanting to write something about the absurd nature of hearting photos of the most horrific images.

Human suffering at its most profound. Bombs, blood, tiny feet sticking out from underneath the rubble. Parents in absolute despair. Sons carrying the lifeless bodies of their fathers on bicycles.

It’s human horror. Humanity eroding with every bullet and every bomb. Every lifeless or wounded body.

At first I did not. I left comments instead: I see you. I won’t look away.

Now I do heart. Because my heart breaks with every photo. These cracks, ridges, fault lines are how I grow. It’s how my heart expands. To make room for it all. The grief, the rage, the loss, the terror. But also the tenderness, the loyalty, the care.

My heart will keep breaking. That’s how it can absorb everything that overflows. Until my heart takes on the shape of the universe. And love has become infinite.