Dipping my feet in slowly part II | #67
Part II on continuing into authenticity and a life of practice
On deepening my romantic partnership:
As someone who is both impulsive and struggles to make decisions, an amazing paradox to live with I know, it was always going to be extremely difficult for me to find and be with someone enduringly without turbulence.
When I look back at how things developed, I can see that Alex and I work because I was able to dip my feet into the relationship slowly.
We met through mutual friends at a party in London. At the time, he was based in Berlin and I was based in London so our love interest ‘began’ over text. As fate would have it, we ended up at the same two-day event without planning to go together. It was a month later and this time in Finland.
As the weekend ended, the spark between us had grown into a warm fire. We felt enough of something there to explore a romance that was long-distance.
Beginning our relationship this way gave me space to continue the independent life I loved without losing myself to being with him. I could obsess over him, text him all the time, get excited by him but to be together, we needed to figure out logistics like a plane ticket. It created necessary breaks to slow down what would have been a runaway train.
Even before we met, he’d already planned to be in London for six weeks leading up to the UK regional Burn. This was happening a month after we decided to be together. He was building an art installation with a group of friends and staying with one of them.
It was the perfect arrangement for me to dip my feet in further -- an opportunity to live in the same city without jumping off the deep end living those six weeks together. And as fate would have it again, I was also building my art installation at the same place as him.
We spent the entirety of the UK regional burn together, camping and getting to know each other before some more time apart. I went away for ten days before he visited and then I visited. We then put ourselves to the ultimate life test by going to Burning Man together.
We navigated individual and shared spaces, learning from where we tripped up and even scheduling half an hour every week as a dedicated space to plan and untangle things. We experimented with him living in London where we built a great routine of going to yoga, walking to my work together, cooking and watching movies at home.
Our 2025 was filled with many peak experiences -- we got to attend an intimate retreat with Krishna Das, a renowned kirtan guru upstate in New York, sit with plant medicine in Peru and visit the Amazon. And by the middle of July, we’d both sold, donated and given everything away to embark on a period of travel. The rhythm and routine we’d built earlier on allowed us to understand being together was not just all high-highs.
Many of the steps were slow but sure. We learnt about our own boundaries and those of the other, as well as so many new things about ourselves.
While starting a relationship in a long distance manner is not a generally necessary step in one’s self-preservation, I know that it was necessary for me.
By dating someone who I needed to hop on a plane to see, it created the infrastructure for me to dip my feet into the love. This allowed us to be co-conspirators in a life we love and a love we love.
On finding my way towards installation art:
I’d always loved drawing but like many things considered unworthy of adulthood, it was parked until my life-obliterating and truth-seeking period.
That summer, I enrolled in a week-long drawing and painting school. I then found a studio I could cycle to with different drawing and painting sessions six days a week. Quickly, I pitched a work-exchange agreement which unlocked unlimited access to the different classes and workshops.
A few months in, they ran a workshop on making wooden frames. Getting them made was expensive and yet were usually required for exhibiting. I was planning to exhibit soon so I went along. It allowed me to make the small but necessary leap from drawing and painting into woodwork.
I was a fast learner. After my first try, I was already showing others how to do it. It sparked possibilities in my mind and led me to ask what could be next?
A few months later, I applied for and got an art grant to make my first wooden installation. It was for the UK burn that Alex and I went to together. The installation was a three-part immersive meditation on the role of chances and choices in our lives -- a wheel spinner, three doorways and a cemetery to the things that could have been and should have been. A year later I created a more elaborated version of that installation for show at the largest outdoor art museum in the world - Burning Man.
At Burning Man I met so many people who were awed by the concept of my piece. I gave away nearly three hundred stickers and hundreds of laser cut memorabilia.
I wanted to bring art to Burning Man and I did. Now I want to bring bigger art to Burning Man and more art to more burns and gatherings. I know I can and I know I will because I dipped my feet in, I grew in confidence and now I have more in my toolkit to make it happen.
I’ve been back in Reno for two weeks building two other art pieces commissioned for the San Francisco Embarcadero. It is quite a big deal! And this opportunity came up because I met the team at the makerspace where we were all building our pieces of Burning Man
On diving deeper into energy healing and bodywork:
I became interested in the power of touch when I was training to be a yoga teacher back in 2018. A big part of the training was learning how to hands-on assist yogis with their practice. I was often told in the early days that my touch came on too strong and abruptly. Being at the grace of my fellow trainee’s loving touch was extremely healing and opened me up to a world of possibilities I had never been privy to.
My desire to know more about touch and how it could impact another person’s well-being lingered so a couple of years later, I decided to do my first full-body massage training. This was quickly followed by another training called gua sha which focused on elements (earth, water, fire, wood and metal) for the face.
Thinking this was the end of the journey and I just needed to gain experience with clients, I started working as a freelance massage therapist with Urban Massage, it is an app like Uber for massage. I realised that I wanted to go deeper and I wanted to learn not just about muscular-skeletal but also about energy. I had become convinced that energy healing is a powerful modality for understanding how we relate to ourselves and the world around us.
Earlier this year, I did Reiki Level I and II training and I have since been seeking out teachers and resources to deepen my understanding of energy and its phenomenal potential for healing and well-being. This is a relatively newer journey of dipping my feet in so there will be more to report as time passes.
On our current nomadic explorations:
Right now, Alex and I are exploring the world together. This is also a form of dipping our feet in slowly. We are learning about the environments we like, reflecting on the life we want to design for ourselves and allowing ourselves to relish in the regularity of change a nomadic life entails while knowing that we may want to settle for a routined life in the same city in the near future.
On a life of dipping my feet in slowly:
Dipping my feet slowly into anything is, as I have discovered, a wonderful way to live. It gives me space to explore what I like, how much of it I want to have around and how deep I want to go into it. It also gives me space to try things without over-investing and the lightness of tiny experiments with no end goals.