Oct 03, 2025

The Cartographer of Alchemy: A Newsletter

Mapping the soul work, surrender, and the art of transmutation. Witnessing life’s rawness into meaning through light, shadow, and the unknown.

Photo by Joshua Bartell / Unsplash

August-September 2025✨There are times when life looks like a desert. Nothing but sand in every direction, and no clear way through. But it's not this time.

🌿From the Inner Shore

A quiet note from where I’ve been, and what’s been stirring.

Hello Soul friends,

Greetings from an unusually early freezing afternoon here in Switzerland ❄️

I began writing the section below in Bangkok, at the beginning of September, but I couldn't seem to finish it. As you read through, you will see what I mean by these two months (August and September) felt like they were compressed into one.

At the beginning of August, we welcomed Bekki into our home. Then I took an unexpected trip to Bangkok, while searching for our new home to move into in December. A lot of departings and goodbyes, followed shortly by a trip here. And in between all of that, life just keeps life-fing.

In the midst of everything that was going in a flash, I had trouble balancing it all, but I'm back. And here we are, in October. Already.

August did not arrive quietly for me. It pressed in like heavy air before a storm, asking me to sit with things I thought I'd already put to rest. Old aches surfaced—memories, doubts, the unfinished business of the heart—and I found myself walking through days that felt both tender and unsteady.

Adopting Bekki shook something in me, in us. The foundation of our lives tilted, not in collapse, but in revelation. I saw how much more patient I've become than when Wallie first came into my life seven years ago. How easily I could loosen my grip, surrender to the mess of the present moment, and still keep walking.

It isn't simple. I am still spiraling around the essence of my Self, still learning to integrate the shadows and tend to the wounds that never fully close. Yet in caring for another wounded soul, I've found myself practicing patience, resilience, self-nurturing—again, and more deeply this time. A new dimension of love and self-love. It is not a coincidence. It is a gift.

There were losses this month, quiet ones, and beginnings too, tentative, like seedlings not yet certain of their place. What surprised me most was the quiet resilience that kept showing up—woven into the pauses between endings and starts. Life interrupts, rearranges, and asks us to stay open. Even when the spiral feels downward, even when it feels endless, we are not lost. We are circling closer to the truth.

From this Inner Shore, I can only tell you this: August was about staying balanced in the eye of the sea storm. Not running from the discomfort, not forcing answers, just staying close enough to hear the tides shifting, to feel the shape of change settling in. Messy, but honest. And maybe honesty is where the real mending begins.

With loving kindness,

Kwan.

✨What’s Unfolding

A truth this particular season is revealing to me. A reflection, affirmation, or statement that rose above the noise and asked to be heard.

This season keeps reminding me: a ship in harbor may be safe, but safety was never the point.

We weren’t built for quiet waters.

"Per aspera ad astra"—through difficulties to the stars.

🕊️Echoes & Offerings

My gentle gifts to you: links, quotes, tiny rituals. Sacred internet finds of what’s been echoing in my world—hopefully, it will speak to yours too.

There are words I return to when the world frays at the edges, when I feel myself losing the thread of why I am here. Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote them in a letter called "We Were Made for These Times," first published in her book Letter to a Young Activist During Troubled Times. They've carried me through more than one dark season by insisting on the simplest, hardest truth: not to look away, not to collapse into despair, but to keep connecting to the heart and to follow what feels like light.

This letter is its refusal of grand gestures. Estés doesn't ask us to fix the whole world. She asks us to mend what is within reach—to tend one wound, to offer one kindness, to light one signal fire. Reading her words, I feel the weight slide from my shoulders. I remember that the work is not to solve but to remain steadfast, to keep showing up, even when the spiral feels downward.

Do not lose heart❤️

🌒In the Quiet Hours

An update, transitions, and what I am working on. A little note on the background rhythm of things.

Today is the 3rd of October. I am finally sending this newsletter I started writing in Bangkok, from Switzerland.

I keep noticing how different the air was in August and September. The first half asked me to sit with the stuck places, the resistance, the waiting. But by the second half, the energy came as a volcanic eruption. What once felt immovable began to move, sometimes with force, sometimes with grace, but always forward. For a while, I felt as though nothing was landing, nothing was happening—September came with a wake-up kick, and collapsed every old structure of belief system I had about self-love. It was a real clearing out of the space for the coming new chapter.

Now that I'm writing this, still not sure how I got through August and September and landed here, I clearly see how fast those two months flew by, almost too fast to hold in the hand. The ground shifted beneath me in real time—things I had been circling for months suddenly breaking open, others appearing out of nowhere, demanding space. The time was compressing, folding in on itself. One moment dragged, the next erupted into forward movement. One way out with the old, and in with the new.

The speed of it all can be disorienting, and October will not slow down. Neither will the rest of the year. The task is to practice balance in motion, to remember that while change arrives suddenly, the ground we stand on is the inner one we keep building.

Between now and February, the next eclipse season, this is the work: hold close to clarity, to heart-truth, to the simple practices that tether you to yourself. Manifest patience, resilience, and the kind of quiet faith that allows you to meet change without fear. The shift is already underway. What comes next depends on how well we learn to walk with it in spite of the vibration of the shifting landscape ahead.

Buckle up, my friends. I hope we'll all enjoy the ride.

📖For all the stories I posted in August and September, short and long, you can find them right here.