I was standing over a pot of poaching water after about eighteen hours of doing things that don’t announce themselves. The garden had been watered and fertilised, words had been written, and the website, for a brief and shining moment, had behaved.

I like my poached eggs with a splash of apple cider vinegar. Old habit. The first egg went in perfectly. The second followed whole, shell and all. I stood there, looked at it, and laughed. “Once a Chef.” Two types of eggs, you see.

And it struck me, not about the egg, but about how life actually is when you’re living it. It isn’t curated or presented, and it certainly isn’t waiting to be acknowledged. It is simply lived.

Lately, I’ve noticed something in the way people reach for each other online. Not the words, but the reaching underneath them. It isn’t attention they want. It is to be met. And those are not the same thing.

I grew up in a world that didn’t have language for half the things we now debate. There were no frameworks, no explanations, no neat categories. You got on with it, or you didn’t. I am not a victim of my life. I am the result of it.

There is a strange performance now around being seen, as if visibility is the same as being known, as if saying the right things replaces living them. But life doesn’t work like that. It still looks like a kitchen at the end of a long day, a body that is tired, a mind that is quiet, and a laugh when the egg goes in whole.

I chose not to build myself around being noticed. There is a way of living where you don’t offer yourself up for approval. You simply live, and what is meant for you finds you.

Less, it turns out, is not absence. It is space. And in that space, something real can actually meet you.

— Saint Parousia