Visiting Latvia from the Next Life

“Maybe you’ve walked through a ghost town before, or remember the eerie empty streets at the beginning of COVID lockdowns. Neither feeling quite reaches that of traveling through a ghost country. But rather than sensing you’re surrounded by ghosts, you realize that in many ways your return makes you one.”

Seeing someone use a street address as their email address struck a match within me.

According to the witch-prophet in the Goodwill, I have a kind gaze, one that renders what it touches beautiful. Like superhero laser eyes, but with art…I believe, in that way, that we all, on some level, are superheroes. Or witches, or prophets, or whatever. That is to say, I believe in magic. That there’s magic in the world. That we, as experiencers and as meaning makers, are magic.

2024 is a year of Miyazaki whimsy and Levinasian ontology: of existing through a thousand marvelous, miraculous, devastating encounters.