The Cartographer of Alchemy: A Newsletter

October 2025✨Balance & relationship repair. Inner restructuring, examining structure and boundaries that no longer serve me. Emotional flow and momentum to act, especially in areas where my heart and instincts guide. A profound sense of inner growth, healing, and expansion is looming.

🌿From the Inner Shore

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

Hello Soul friends,

I just made a cup of chamomile tea and realized after 5 minutes that I had put cold water in a cup (we have a water dispenser that dispenses both hot and cold water at the push of a button)—brewing tea in cold water.

Where was my mind?

We're into the second week of November, and I'm back in Bali. This time I didn't cry (given the mayhem on arrival at the airport that evening. Almost one hour of power outage in the airport, while we circled forty-five minutes in the air, and landed at the worst chaotic airport we had ever experienced) which I usually do within the first few hours I arrive, but this time it feels more and more like home.

Normally, on relocation to a new country, it would take more than one year, sometimes two, to realize that this place is now my home. To fully accept the new and release the old. To not hate the new because of the longing of the old. The longer the time spent in the place, the deeper the bond, and the harder it is to let go.

I noticed the pacing of the change, and to my surprise, I didn't expect to see it unfolding at this speed. Five years' time in a perfect dreamland of Japan, the longest time we ever spent anywhere, would be blurred into a mere faint dream by a short year in the land of the extreme opposite end of perfect. This has nothing to do with the island, but it's everything to do with my inner land.

On my last trip to Thailand, I was able to bid my final farewell, with gratitude and a soft, open heart, to the first home I was taught to know and love. The letting go of the attachment to that belief, and replacing it with the deep embodiment of self-love, was the most prolonged battle I fought throughout my adult life.

I won, and from that moment on, my world was changed.

Reflections, emotions, dreams, and memories poured out onto page after page of my journal. It felt almost like the manuscript of the second half of my memoir was already completed. An arrival of springtime after a cold, long winter.

And just like that, my novel project came back on my desk.

Fearlessly, these characters will tell their stories.

🌙Take gentle care tonight,

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.

Before now, I often asked myself if I understood what self-love is.

How to not feel guilty when I need to put myself first.

How to actually love myself, guilt-free?

We hear about self-love all our lives, but have we ever been able to live it, be an expression of it, and fully embody it in every cell of our blood and bone?

How do I prove to myself that I embody self-love?

Here is the single clearest indicator:

"You stop abandoning yourself—especially in moments when you once would have."

Read the full essay here

🕊️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.

Maybe it was a full moon two nights ago. Maybe it's me being insecure about my pursuits while feeling hopeful. Or, maybe, I just stumbled on the page of my journal from January 8th, 2024—convincing myself that I am not passively sitting there and waiting, but trying to immerse myself in the light I perceived in that state of mind, as I saw potential and promising outcomes of my perseverance in that present moment.

Patience is not sitting and waiting, it is foreseeing. It is looking at the thorns and seeing the rose, looking at the night and seeing the day. Lovers are patient and know that the moon needs time to become full. —Rumi.

🌒In the Quiet Hours

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

Tend to home, inner life, and healing of the past wounds are still my primary focus for this second half of the year, a special topping added on to this month's already full plate by a return to NanoWrimo (a month-long writing challenge in November every year where participants aim to write a 50,000-word novel). I took the first hit in 2021, got through 50,000 words and more, only I didn't write a novel- I wrote a memoir. That first draft memoir is still sitting cold in my drawer, ever since I printed it out, with no further development to it.

Avoidant in fear.

But it got me to face my truth, reflect on it, and craft a hefty piece out of it. I was able to put a lot behind me, embrace all that I was, mend the wounded inner child, and emerge on the other side with superior clarity.

In the end, that act of avoidance was not a total loss of effort and time.

This November, I dust off my commonplace book and go back to 2023. I reconnect with all the voices I created in the outline, revisit the scenes and settings, and all the world-building, and try again.

With this inner critic muted, and the self-loving me running the show, I am curious to see what will reveal.

Stay tuned.

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

🤍 If You’re Walking This Path Too…

🌻And if something stirred in you—a thought or a question, quiet reflection, I’d love to hear from you.

Just my humble invitation to connect 🤍

Thank you for spending time with me today. See you next month 👋