I am staring out of the window of the bus, trying connect the treads. The impossibility to keep on functioning in the corporate culture that divorces me from my humanity, that has no use for the best parts of me: passion, depth, creativity, joy and imagination. None of these belong in the grey office walls. They don’t match the carpet or the muted tones, the politically correct, the hushed, the dead end swallowing all change. I don’t match. I have to hush myself, but I don’t know how, I never knew. Both hushing myself and speaking my truth hurts. The culture I work in does not acknowledge the ebbs and flows of human psyche and I don’t know how to flatline.

The second thread: the necessity to find a spiritual practice. I am volatile and intense, impulsive and difficult, even with myself. Especially with myself. Back in the day when I was practicing, the practice grounded me. It didn’t save me from solitude or doubt, but it grounded me. It provided an infrastructure of love and discipline. I don’t think I could go back to my orthodox faith, even less to the Protestant one, but I need a practice.

I am staring at the landscape, disfigured by humans. Asphalted roads are snaking between rectangular boxes of identical stores. We’re passing a mall. The trees are few and isolated. They don’t look sick or sickly, just out of place. I can relate. I feel myself like a tree in an outdoor mall. I know that I belong. I am natural, rooted in the Earth, rooted in reciprocity, I feel my roots growing every day. But the landscape around me is bewildering. I am so separated from other trees, I barely see them. Instead, I am figuring out who I am in the midst of concrete and aluminium boxes, filled with fluorescent light and all kinds of stuff taken from the earth and transformed through the chain of human and other than human suffering into something unrecognised, unnecessary, totally superfluous.