Broadcasting
materiality is a peculiar thing. i cannot detach from it, yet i should not be confined by it either. identity sits somewhere in that tension. does a vision hold when there is no material manifestation? maybe. maybe not. it is a fine balance—between chasing the elusive and demanding the proof, between trusting the unseen and needing the tangible to press against. one needs to be anchored enough to step into new tides with courage, yet not so anchored that calmness dissolves into stillness.
finessing that tension was part of why i chose to live in the trailer. for quite some time, home has become a complicated subject for me. i have struggled to pinpoint what it really is to me, perhaps because the blocks of the modern home construct simply do not exist in my surroundings. why do i crave it? familiarity, sure—but familiarity with what? as I trace the places i’d call home over the years—jessfield park of shanghai, jubilee gardens by the thames, park slope south, the davis antiquities scene, the resting pads of my felt bike’s aero bars—these are fields of resonance. energies i aligned with. frequencies i recognized.
perhaps this is where that zen-like detachment surfaces. materiality at the end of the day is a transient state—things that are seemingly grounded quiver with an infinity of tiny spaces, electrons and void dancing in frequencies we cannot see. what feels material is just motion at a certain rate, a vibration so familiar it dresses itself as form. so too does life seem real because we are aligned with the rhythm that makes solidity comfortable. and these forces instill upon us an inclination for inertia.
i certainly felt the pull of that inertia when i had to move the trailer three times in a single week. new neighborhoods. new operating systems. new angles of light through the blinds. it was a bit disorienting for sure. living in a trailer while demanding peak performance—physically, intellectually, creatively—in the innovation capital of our time calls for meticulous calibration. i had created systems to sustain that balance while staying spiritually intact. but when i was forced out of that physical configuration, these systems seemed to have faltered. i watched myself drift half a degree out of alignment.
but i believe there is always a way. that way is consciousness—a solitary voyage through an indifferent cosmos. murakami once captured the permeability of our consciousness, in a romantic context, through sputnik sweethearts. i dreamt of it last night. i was sitting in a planetarium, watching us as sputniks orbiting in vastness—circling, broadcasting—longing for a docking that may never arrive.
perhaps that courage and faithfulness—to orbit regardless of inertia’s history, materiality’s present, or uncertainty’s horizon—is actually the home. it is where i hope i have the clarity to return to time after time. from that vantage point, we no longer have to chase a certain reality—we just need to tune into that life that we have always broadcasted, that is already possible.