what is your relationship with god?

july 2024

sunday evening. we're chilling in front of our house after a full-night celebration of my birthday. warm summer night, england just lost to spain as i heard through the doors of our local bar, i'm flushing down meaty sweet cherries with a bright red watermelon monster energy. incredibly high and tired, bored of any other topic of conversation, from my k-hole to another's i'm shooting a question: "what is your relationship with god?". i know my answer and mostly want to talk about it but it's easier to bring it up as a question. people stumble through fried neurons and disparate associations coming up with barely coherent poetics.

"what is yours?". a fabric of reality, a connective tissue between subjects and events that erases the boundary between them.

later that night i throw up red.

december 2024

sober for 3 months. depressed, isolated, no meaning, no purpose.

cj the x in their essay "6 shapes of god" reminds me that god is what people gather around, connection between them, a point of worship besides ourselves. a meaning. 

later that month i'm in highlands in a rented motorhome escaping new year parties and ex-friend's birthday in the darkness of the northern winter. among the books i brought with Christina Rossetti's poetry collection. i got it a couple years before, but felt too stupid to read poetry. now is the time. the book opens on "who shall deliver me?".

        God harden me against myself,

        This coward with pathetic voice

        Who craves for ease, and rest, and joys:

Romans 7:24-25:

O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.

i find myself reading about her, researching the requirements for joining a monastery, reading scripture. horses' video on exorcism and christian mysticism adds more fuel to a growing undefinable at the time feeling.

february 2025

in a campervan in france. writing on the topic of roots for a poetry contest leads me back to the imagery of fabric. i finally put it properly on paper solidifying this idea and shaping my interest in it.

        you will always forget. you have to forget.

        no being can survive the full view.

        the gardeners of the cloth
        cutting, mending, patching, stitching
        day in, day out
        you have to make a choice. then make another one.

        trace back what you can. pin it for others.
        behind every mark a movement.
        behind every movement a mark.

        the fabric shifts and folds and tears and seals.
        move, feel the tension,
        make a choice to unknowable consequences.

        the fabric persists,
        and so do its gardeners. 

june 2025

cj the x comes to the uk with lectures. easily juggling philosophy, theology and a deep understanding of modern culture while being apologetically queer and non-binary. they tell how often people would credit them with allowing themselves to join a church, following through on that yearning, that pull from inside the solar plexus into a lived religious tradition while staying true to their queerness. it is allowed, it makes sense. god loves as all and wants us to live an authentic flavourful delicious life. there's no contradiction.

        falling in all the lines, into all the places. following the thread, leaning towards, facing all the walls and all the corners.

        the treasure is in the eye of the beholder.

        unfolding formulated unexpressed. releasing. separating desire and pathology.
        i do care and it’s good actually.

        recognize impulses. let them play out. embrace the consequences.

september 2025

preparing to celebrate one year of sobriety. getting ready to come out as lesbian and non-binary. i still have never been to a church service. a two days before the sobriety dinner we go to a counter-protest against march for life. i see people holding "christ is king" banners shaking their rosaries at us for defending our right to reproductive healthcare. it scares me for a moment. i know that christianity is not that, but i'm scared to be seen as part of that. mortified.

next day. it's sunday. i wake up early. today is the day. i find a nearby church and go to a service. i am incredibly lucky. it was their patron saint day, St Mary's. the priest explicitly mentions palestine in prayers, pleading for peace and safety for all people.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

a communal lunch after. i am at the table with other young queer-looking people. too shy to speak, startled by their inviting kind attention. scared. but i keep coming back, sunday after sunday. the faces become familiar, become family. sundays become days of reflection, of coming back to what matters, to my truth. but i still mostly keep it to myself, talking around it when asked by friends and housemates, telling only the closest ones. 

march 2026

everybody knows now. even my parents and the most atheistic friends. sometimes i see surprise on their face, sometimes curiosity but never disappointment. 

i'm sitting in front of the house having the last cigarette of the day with my friend. he is honoured to be my sponsor at the baptism. 

i am home. 

home is where the heart is.

recently i started preparing for my trip to ireland. the plan is to visit a few churches and monasteries, collect inspiration and make some artworks, which then my best friend can produce into an exhibition. he is irish. i'm not.

in preparation i asked him for a couple of books on land and mythology, so i have some foundational understanding and cursory knowledge of shared symbols and ideas before i dive into learning about the establishment of christianity in ireland and about her saints.

i brought one of the books to my bed, ready to read, but something in me suddenly snapped. a familiar spiral unfolded itself under my feet and i fell into it. how dare i dive into somebody else's history when i don't know my own? why do i spend so much time being a guest, when i barely know anything about my own country of origin? where is my home? what is my home? why do i feel shame for being interested in somebody else's home? especially if he feels like home to me. shame shame shame shame shame.

And where was home to you? 

And where did you feel safe?

And where was home to you?

What kind of place?

            porridge radio - pop song 

what is home?
oxford dictionary says:

where do i live? where do i receive care in safety? where do i flourish?

i listed everything that came to mind: places, people, music, activities, smells, cafes, tv shows, objects, rituals etc. places and experiences that felt familiar, that soothed my anxieties, that provided comfort in one way or another.

i lamented over how some of the things that were supposed to be integral to me are no longer such. in my first few years of living in the uk i kept saying that my soul still spoke russian. now i have to actively force myself to journal in russian, as most of the conversations i have and most of the media i consume are in english. sometimes talking to my parents i find myself struggling for words describing my experiences, purely because i never had these experiences back there.

some of the places that felt like home before are no longer available. i moved on or they simply don't exist anymore.

"home is where the heart is", - kindly adds compact oxford english dictionary. where is my heart then?
if i find my heart, i should be able to find my home.
it's hard to grasp it. my heart oscillates anxiously whenever it's looked at, hiding itself in a fog of motion blur from curious or potentially judgemental eyes. i know it knows what it loves, it knows what brings it peace. regardless of how much i try to obscure its voice, it always finds a breach in numbness and shines through, guiding me towards a better life.

last week in my local church we were discussing the holy spirit. that voice that calls us towards our vocation, towards higher purer ways of existence, towards a clear-eyed and clear-minded life of service and worship.

there is a song i love, a soundtrack from a soviet coming-of-age movie. its name is translated as "magnificent afar". the last verse goes like this:

i pray, that i'll be more clear and tender, 

and never should leave my friend in sadness, 

I hear the voice and haste after it, 

along the way without any trace.

the voice, the heart, the holy spirit. receptors and propellers of inspiration, of our movement through life, responsible for filling this earthly existence with meaning and purpose.

when i look over the list of what has brought me a feeling of home i see similarities, patterns, flavours of experiences that my heart consistently yearns for. these seem stable, even though the particularities shift and change.

• people
  what is a home without guests? without friends? without family? without momentary encounters that leave a delightful aftertaste?
• god
  i have always felt the presence of the divine powers at play. i have verbalised it differently throughout my life, tapping into various traditions and vernaculars. but that longing deep in my solar plexus remained.
• water
  so often i have found myself pulled towards the river bank or any body of water in whatever city i lived in. in st petersburg i sometimes traced the edges of the island i lived on with my steps. in london thames regularly beckons me. in edinburgh it was the sea.
• art
  whether making it or seeing it, the practice itself bring me back to the stable ground, away from anxiety, from rumination, back into the present existence, to a place where i can flourish.
• music
  many songs feel like a place of refuge to me. i would listen to them on repeat singing along, feeling them enveloping me in a beautiful energetic field.

languages, countries, people, artists, practices change. they leave their marks, their contributions to the overall tapestry of my life. but they are not in and of themselves a home. it seems to be a bit of a paradox really. home is a place of stability and safety, and yet one has to actively reencounter it, re-inhabit, make it their own again and again to keep it as true to their heart as possible.

i'm excited to learn about parts of my friend's home. after all there's plenty of god, water and art to be found there.

back to business baby

had a bit of a hiatus here, haven't i

well, many things have happened of which i want to tell you everything, but a few broad strokes for now:

- my friend and i did an exhibition in a phone booth

- finally had my spoken word show with three incredible jazz improvisers

- gave up watching youtube for lent and instead watched a bunch of amazing shows 

finally watching media itself instead of media about media (however i miss it, easter is coming, jesus is rising, 10s of video essays are waiting for me) 

- got rejected from all of the universities i applied to (huge bummer, trying to believe that "rejection is redirection")

- read a couple more books

"the employees" by olga ravn, "nova scotia house" by charlie porter and "soft tissue damage" by anna whitwham (a review of which is now live)

- my baby dog had a knee surgery, recovering very quickly

- went through a course for people new to christianity at my church. lowkey considering getting baptised, but having doubts for now. definitely enjoyed the discussions there.

soooo, plenty of updates, a lot of ideas, hopefully will write you more very soon. the university rejections definitely have brought me back to reevaluating what i want and what work i have to put in for that. getting more disciplined with my writing output is definitely a part of that. 

stay tuned. you will hear from me again very shortly. 

"soft tissue damage" by anna whitwham

        it’ll fade. we will get the sun on it.

an autobiographical work by Anna Whitwham retelling her experience of seeing her mother slowly fade away with cancer and the subsequent grief of losing her, and her intense and powerful however brief affair with boxing. the book intertwines these stories beautifully, sometimes explicitly through the use of cursive, highlighting the separate timelines, sometimes blending them into one line of reflection.

we see a person prone to fighting, familiar to hurting herself and others, choosing to channel her grief and anger into methodical and violent art of boxing.

        you’re going to get hit.

and getting hit she does. one spar after another Anna hones in her skills in preparation for her first fight, learning the choreography of fighting, feeling deeply into the strong animal nature of her body that requires nourishment and proper disciplined care. she speaks a lot about concerned and judgmental glances, so many being all too eager to give her a lecture on why this interest of hers is not normal. yet she perseveres, wearing fresh bruises and swellings as badges of honor.

throughout the story Anna learns to live with her mother no longer being there and yet being with her wherever she goes. she feels mother’s presence in her body, in the body of her daughter, in her sister.
she learns the edges of her body, its limits, its ways of healing and how she can rely on it.

i got a bit sad that she gradually decided to stop boxing after that one fight. regardless it served her incredibly. she managed to regain her lost softness, to re-inhabit the world in all her fullness, to love and feel loved again. and that’s a beautiful miracle.

time.

time with a friend. time

after rejection. time it takes

to smoke a cigarette and

look at the passers-by.

time before love. time of

love. time takes away.

time gives. time stretches

violently in involuntary

boredom. time crawls away

into her hole. time chased

away by a missing dachshund.

time of red. time of violet. time

of accepting the fundamental

mystery of divinity. time of

silence between thoughts.

time before you realise

it's not going to work out

well. time of passion. time

of misery. time of miserable

passion. time of meaty

sweet cherries. time stuck

between mirrors. time cropping

up between web-pages. time

leaping out of the window. time

before bed. time for a pencil. 

(inspired by time chapter in "Red Doc>" by Anne Carson)

why not a sphere.

this mortal flesh is such a bore

it eats, sleeps, shits

demands attention

wants care

why not a sphere

why this clumsy assemblage of pipes and boxes

full of sticky wetness

i'm hungry, i've overeaten

i can't sleep, i can't wake up

so much administrative hassle

for a container

hostile negotiations 

underwhelming compromises

just for a chance at dignified death

by the inspiration of your holy spirit.

words from the core of humanity

from the holy trinity

reverberating sending level 12 storm down my spine

and everything was beautiful

lines falling on my skin anointing me with pain and joy

the pure feeling of touch

that only the shared body could give

and everything was beautiful

jaywalking confidently through the corridors of our home

music pulsating through open windows

i take in a breath that carries histories in its blood 

and everything was beautiful