It’s been a while since my last email and a lot has happened. Even writing that sentence feels like an understatement.

I have noticed that my art practice tend to complement the real-time processing lately while my words tend to follow after, especially after I have had some more space to chew on it, so here goes:

My relationship of 9 years ended early this year, and right after that I committed to do whatever it took to keep my heart open. I met someone new out of the blue whom I have a soulful connection while visiting Berkeley, started long distance while still co-living and untangling with my ex. Had my first art show right before leaving nyc, sold 4 pieces and was interviewed by Business Insider, and I’m currently in Taiwan starting my Taiwanese military conscription in 6 days.

I've been grieving under banyan trees, and lately with and witnessed by community at the Asian Diaspora Jam (an experience, that I felt I was cellularly transformed by. This was my featured testimonial, but more on that later).

I also have been learning to heal within relationships, rather than my old familiar ways of being alone, inside, and in withdrawal.

I've been grounding my sense of self, body, through creating and sharing art, touching as many plants and smelling as many flowers as I can.

I've been orienting with moving back to a country and land where I spent the first 18 years of my life, as a foreigner and resident, as a American, Taiwanese & Chinese man through taking film photos of my processes and walks.

I've also continued to practice what a core lesson this decade has taught me: the importance of tuning into, naming, and advocating for my needs and truth. One of them being having a deep longing to surround myself with a partner, kin, and ecology of intergenerational people that have the capacity for deepening intimacy and love, especially when it gets hard and through all shapes of ruptures and conflicts.

It has felt like my years of consistent practice, and solitude, and listening has suddenly crescendoed and pushed me to experience this torrential turn of events and multiple transitions. And I'm grateful also for the work I've done with all my parts for them to be on board, aligned, and navigate the bumpy seas as a team.

Before I start working with someone in a coaching container, I always share honestly about how it's primarily drawn from my own experiences, studies, and practices in transformation, healing, and spirituality. That I don't have coaching certifications, or typical credentials, what I do have is a hypothesis: that there is a central core part of me that is filled to the brim with creativity, playfulness, self-belief, curiosity, and unconditional love for myself and the world. And I believe that if I can keep finding ways to reconnect to it, to show up in relationships from that place, to create, lead, dance, live from it, I believe that I can live the most fulfilling, fun, peaceful, love-filled, abundant, devotional, relational, service-oriented, and even wealthy life.

I no longer feel the need to prove this hypothesis to anyone anymore. That I have received enough signs and gifts in my life to trust in the process of it, even if the outcomes don't always come in shapes I understand or am/was attached to. That I have found someone willing to surrender into the depths of life with me. That I have never felt more free, have more people in my life that love and accept me wholly, more connected to the multi-dimensional streams of my creativity, more connected to my body and the land that holds me, and more connected to both my mom & my dad sides of ancestry than this very moment.

And I feel so proud of all of it.
And I’m still figuring out the money portion, as I figure out how to support myself as an artist.

I appreciate you for continuing being here to witness me.

Questions for you:
What transitions or grief are you moving through lately? How are you changed by it?
What do you need that you are not receiving that I can offer you, even if its virtually and from afar?

I always knew I am a lover of love but never knew that I would meet someone that made me want to write love poems to process the intensity of the connection. We are also learning to create art to stay in connection even as I’m starting my year-long military conscription.

⚪️ my peony (poem about loving someone in the face of the uncertainty of the changing of seasons)

⚪️ I believe now (poem about expanding my heart to welcome the kind of love I’ve been scared that I didn’t deserve)

⚪️ faith healer (a dance between me and Kylie. The only prompt we gave ourselves was one person starting on the right and the other person on the left, and see what magic we can co-create, even from afar.)

▶ Favorite tree to sit under: this banyan tree

▶ Album on repeat: Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone

▶ Favorite Movie: Hamnet

▶ Book that spoke to me (still reading): The Wild Edge of Sorrow

▶ Gear I’m trying for offline music listening via CDs : FiiO DM13