24. Swampfeather Season, Part III: The Map

Want / feel

In this edition: the third and final part of this series. Part I is here, and Part II is here. Relation and conflict and the paths we take through it. More crows. Stories embedded in landscape. Fear of what’s to come.

Early December. We are all sitting on Ella’s living room floor, Ferdi’s hands moving swiftly along their crocheting, me smudging mascara along my cheeks, Ella patting my back. We were supposed to go dancing like Ferdi and I had a few weeks earlier, but then I started crying and couldn’t stop, and so instead we are doing this.

I eventually get up to go to the bathroom, hiccups receding, and when I return I announce calmly, “I’ve figured out what I need to say in that voice note to Rishi,” which had almost nothing to do with why I’d been crying – they’d just texted me a few hours earlier as I was beginning to unravel.

Ferdi clicks their tongue, looks up at Ella. “The way this woman’s mind works,” and they are so matter-of-fact, “It’s like she’s flat on the floor sobbing one minute, and the next she’s up and the software update has downloaded and she’s solved three other problems. She really said ‘I’m on it.’ Like, wow.”

Still very much walking an emotional tightrope, I start crying again, hands stretched out to them. I have been feeling increasingly seen by Ferdi all year, especially since I noticed that they do something in our friendship that I often find myself doing in others: providing meta commentary. They notice how our connection has grown and changed, and they give it significance and attention. They took me to the movies on my (rescheduled) birthday, and I took them to brunch on theirs, and they made note of it out loud: “This is a significant moment for us! I think we’ve gone up a level!”

There’s something of an art to that kind of noticing and narration – overdo it, and it ends up feeling cloying or forced or expectant. It has to encompass the realities of both people, find the common ground, and reflect or celebrate within that terrain. Writing about my friends and loved ones in this newsletter often serves a similar purpose, which frequently makes me nervous. If I quote anyone at length, I usually send them the draft for their okay before I publish. It makes this writing feel suddenly important to me above and beyond its own existence. I don’t really know what it means for other people, except that sometimes I’ll get a small glimpse – at the Unicorn Team meeting in early October Ferdi started talking about Figs for Breakfast, and announced wistfully to the room, “I sometimes wish I was a point of view about to be discovered by Caitlin Boulter,” which is a heck of a thing to hear and something I suppose I’ll be contemplating for a while to come.

We didn’t get to that point by accident. Ferdi and I started out very much at odds with each other, vibes-wise, but with a common interest in building something we believed in, and just enough common friends to keep us in each other’s orbit. Sometimes I wonder if it’s easier in some ways to start out with a level of discord, because you learn to navigate it in that relationship early on, and conflict doesn’t fundamentally challenge the existence of the connection.

The great irony of 2024 is that I made it an hour longer by going to the UK. One of the hardest, strangest, most painful years I’ve ever had, certainly the most relentless, and I extended it for myself through time zone magic. Lisa and her friend Ruth and I rented a little house in a small medieval market town called Ludlow, and spent three days cooking and walking and doing jigsaw puzzles and reading books. On New Years Eve – a difficult holiday – we hiked in the forest and waded into the freezing river and lay down on mossy logs, and later in the day I sat by myself on the old town weir and let feelings run over me like the water over the lip of the dam.

It will probably surprise none of you, having read this far, to learn that I’ve been reading tarot cards for twenty years now (I still use the deck Bridie gave me on my 16^th birthday). But I’ve never read them for Lisa before, and so after dinner that night, we sit down and spread the cards out in front of the fireplace.

I love reading tarot because it gives me another way to talk to my own brain. Of course it works by tapping into the extraordinary human tendency towards pattern recognition and interpretation, but it works so much better if you inject it with magic, with mystery. It allows for thought and conversation outside the confines of your own brain, even if you’re just reading them by yourself.

The three of us pore over the cards for hours, gasping and laughing and crying, sitting solemnly, ritually prepared, sleepy and slumped on the couch or floor. The format lets us reach into difficult corners. At one point we touch on a conflict Lisa and I had a few years ago.

“What I realised when we were going through that, was that – well, you know, from the start of our friendship you were always sort of a guiding figure,” Lisa tells me slowly. “Because you showed me around Göttingen, you knew where everything was and who everyone was. And so I’d sort of had you in mind as this person I looked up to in a way that’s like, nice, but also maybe too much. But when we hit this moment, and we had to figure out our dynamic, one of the things I had to get into my head was like: Caitlin’s not my mum. What she thinks of me doesn’t need to affect me in that specific way. And if I don’t agree with her all the time, it’s not a bad thing.”

I stare at her, mystified. This is my closest relationship in the whole world, in some ways, and there was something I hadn’t understood about it for more than a decade. To me, Lisa’s always been this magnetic and shining gem of a person, someone I clicked with instantly and always feel excited to see and better when I’m around her, and none of that becomes any less true – it’s more, I just suddenly have a whole new slice of insight. “Wow,” I breathe.

Nearly two months later I find myself reaching for this story again, trying to work through something with H. – both of us emotional, invested, anxious for ourselves and each other and the friendship and our friends – and I find myself in the position Lisa had occupied, explaining to him as she had explained to me.

“And I’ve just regarded you and your counsel and friendship so highly, but I think in some way that’s not really letting you just be a person with your own feelings that don’t have to be the same as mine, or don’t have to be more correct than mine,” I confess. “But I didn’t even really know I was doing that until this happened.”

Both friendships feel enriched by these conversations, shored up against the storms that approach, inexorably, inevitably, as time drags us through this increasingly difficult world. But I’m still frightened – have I done enough? Are we doing enough? Do we have enough? They’re so important to me, and I’ve lost so much, and I’m so worried about what’s coming.

It’s January, and it’s raining lightly, and the crows on Tempelhofer Feld don’t want to talk to me. I walked up here in a miserable mood, hoping to at least gain some solace and company from the birds. But no matter how I offer them, the walnuts aren’t compelling enough compensation. The crows fly away before I can even get near enough to show them what I’m doing. Eventually I end up crumbling the nuts and leaving them in little piles on the fenceposts, hoping they’ll eventually be found. There are rooks in amongst the crows today, and I wonder if their skittishness is contagious.

I sit on a bench by the runway and contemplate the Feld. Such layered territory, I’ve walked over it so many times with so many people, having so many big, thorough, heartbreaking, thoughtful, joyful, curious and light-hearted conversations. My sister used to come here with her friends, ten years ago, before I ever did.

I always include locations in my stories, because they make sense to me more that way, help me map out my life. Tyson Yunkaporta says this is an important part of memory:

In Indigenous culture, no information can exist unless it is located. The knower is always located within a map of knowledge and story that is profoundly place-based and corresponds with real landscapes. The paths and habitual routes throughout the knower’s landscape are storied and visualised from a bird’s-eye view perspective. Each point of interest on a path of travel represents part of a story and a repository for knowledge. As Aunty Mary says, ‘I am located, therefore I am’. ¹

Berlin is the first place I’ve come to with an intent to stick around. It’s got knowledge of my life stretching back to when I was seventeen. I can’t escape my own stories here, and they can’t escape me. Most of those stories were built with other people, some still here, some gone. When I can’t share the story with them anymore, can’t refresh it or resurrect it or refer to it, I have to find somewhere else to put it. I have to figure out what to do with what’s left. The “right story” in Right Story, Wrong Story comes about through abundant context, exchange, consideration, time and patience, and most of all through right relation. But the book is a journey into hell, in the legacy of Dante’s Inferno, and though it’s told with a lot of humour and generosity and insight, it’s also about despair.

The landscape here is not just filled with my stories, obviously. The knowledge that was abstracted in my youth, 16,000 kilometres away, becomes real here. There, the landscape holds the brutal story of colonialism. Here, where the bullet holes are still in the walls, where the plaques are laid in the pavement, where the empty library shelves ensconced in the ground across from the university I attended in for five years show the knowledge embedded in the site – the destruction of knowledge, of shared story, the book-burning that begins the story of a larger inferno – the landscape holds the story of fascism.

When I let myself think ahead, so much of what I find is fear.

The stories that have been warped, the knowledge that we needed to keep the horrors at bay, twisted so gruesomely and to such abysmal ends. I don’t know how to write about that, even now.

Instead all I can think about is what we’ve got, what our supplies are, both physical and intangible. Many people in my life have made note of my tendency to over-cater – I bought six big potatoes at New Years, three times as many as Lisa suggested, and in the end we had so, so much mashed potato and so many left over. I always want to make sure we have enough food, I always overpack my bag, I always want to know in advance what’s going to sustain us.

Connection becomes a substitute for food sometimes – will we have enough trust, enough resolve, enough shared understanding to nourish us? Will we have enough love, enough knowledge, enough discernment? The only way out is through, and the only way through is together, and I’m still watching the ice crack and wondering what I can do to stop it. What do I want to do, to stop it? I want to know what to do. And all the time I’m figuring out what I want, I also have to figure out what I feel, and they’re not the same thing.

You can’t stop ice cracking, of course, you can only figure out what to do now that it’s cracked. There’s something of the colonial mindset in my need to gather and stockpile more than we need for any one moment, and it needs a talking-to. But I also want to be able to give easily and abundantly of myself, to lean into the magic, to grow something strange and strong from dead matter, to become what the moment needs of me. And I feel hesitant, reluctant, something limping along within me, panting to stop, already nostalgic for the permissible hibernation of winter.

I want good boundaries, clarity, independence, honesty, agency.

I feel angry, rejected, lonely, desperate. I feel love, patience, desire, confusion.

I want closeness, I feel hurt. I want reckoning, I feel release.

What do you want for the year ahead? I was asked, so many times. Nothing, I replied.

In December, I wrote:

Letting go of narratives and ideas for how the future will go feels like letting go of hope - and in some way it is. I have to acknowledge that it’s both. I’m not holding onto anything right now and it doesn’t feel good. Every time I pick something up at the moment I have to put it back down pretty quickly, which stops me from planning things or creating enjoyable anticipation. I’m too proficient at creating images I want to bring into reality, even when those things are objectively beyond my reach.

What if what I want and what I feel never manage to be the same thing?

There’s no instruction manual. Not even one we can write for ourselves. It feels like the closest thing we can do is stitch together a map of where we’ve been, and where we might go. Embed things we need to know in the landscape, give ourselves stories for the future, try and remember how we got to where we are. Sort through our strange, misshapen coping mechanisms, and converse with them. Find right relation with ourselves, with our surroundings, with the people we need – and we need so many people.

Tyson Yunkaporta writes, only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, “Apocalypses are unsettling things, but they become much more interesting if you have prepped by stockpiling relationships rather than guns, gold and vitamin supplements.”²

In the café in October, H. tells me, “I tend to think about relationships of any kind as a ship that two people are sailing. Sometimes you’re left sailing it by yourself in rough seas, and if it’s breaking apart you have to figure out what pieces you can salvage of it as you build something else.”

On Ella’s living room floor that night in December, I ask Ferdi for something difficult, and they get stressed playing out possible futures. I say we don’t have to talk about it now, and they say, “No, I’m here, I want to talk this through, I’m just really feeling it. I just have to feel it and talk it through at the same time.”

On the phone two weeks later, Rishi tells me, “I think you and I both see how we’re all in this together, you know? Like we see that it’s everyone.”

And Ella tells me over and over, pushing cups of tea into my hands, “You don’t have to doubt yourself. You know yourself and your own story best, and you don’t need to rewrite your memories.”

And Lisa listens to me talk for hours and hours and hours, every wretched fear and misery and doubt, and says, “I’m so proud of you, you’re doing so well. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but you’re getting through this.”

It’s February 2025, and I’m back on the Feld. There’s a week of snow ahead, but today it’s bright and misty and crisp outside, and I’m walking through my favourite corner of the community gardens. There’s a blue tit peeping away in the bushes, and I fish out my blue lidded Tupperware container and leave a small pile of sunflower seeds nearby.

It’s been a few weeks since the sad rainy day in January, but I spot a crow watching me from the trees a little way off, and figure I’ll try again. I hold up a walnut towards the crow, then crumble it in my hand and lay the pieces out on a bench. I sit on another bench close by and wait, opening my book to pretend I’m not watching to see what happens.

It lands warily, hesitant to pick at the food. Every time it moves its head down it stops, and looks over at me. I put the book down for a moment and say, “Go on. I’m not moving. I’m just sitting here. I’ve got more if you want it.”

In the moment that it finally starts eating, two more crows fly over, and then another three after that. Soon they are surrounding me, squawking familiarly as I read my book and chuck them more crushed walnut pieces. They fight with each other, and I scold them, telling them there’s plenty to go around.

I’ve sat here before; I’ll sit here again. New shoes, new wounds, new words, new tools, old griefs, old wisdoms, old stories, old ground. Berlin is a glacier and a swamp and a settlement and a city and a battleground and a war zone and an exclave and a home. The ice is melting. Whatever’s next is coming.

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Thank you all for sticking around for this series, which was harder to write (and publish) than most. I’ve decided to stop promising that I’m going to write cheerful things in the next edition, because it feels like I’m jinxing myself at this stage.

If you haven’t yet, maybe you’d like to check out the EP of songs I wrote in the last six months, also called swampfeather season, which references a lot of the same stuff as this series:

It’s five songs (including the first ones I’ve ever written on the banjo) plus a couple of connective-tissue bits. I’ve never released music this way before - sketches, first drafts, the barest of bones - but I’ve been so stuck with publishing anything and getting in my head about getting it right, that I thought I’d try it out. I’ll see how it feels, and maybe do more in the future.

Speaking of the future, if you’re also feeling existential fear, one way I redirect my brain’s anxious energy is to support causes I care about. There’s lots of ways to do that, especially locally, but sometimes you can start just by sending some money to those who need help. To that end, here’s a few links you can explore to support those working hard to rebuild their lives in Gaza:

Operation Olive Branch
Donate an eSIM
Donate to the PCRF
Donate to UNRWA

If you’d like to get more Figs (whenever the next harvest may be) in your inbox, you can make that happen right here:

And you can leave comments here - please someone else read Right Story, Wrong Story and talk to me about it, it’s SO GOOD and much better and more interesting than I can represent through excerpts:

1. Tyson Yunkaporta, Right Story, Wrong Story, 2023, p. 84-85

2. same book, p. 19-20