Dear friends,

This newsletter will be the last you will receive under the banner of The Long Walk.

When I started this newsletter on Substack three years ago, I intended to document my intellectual and emotional footprints by sharing a weekly open diary. That format didn’t last very long, and the newsletter transformed into a more open space where different forms of writing emerged. From it, walking projects were launched with their own respective pop-up newsletters.

Overall, I wrote forty-four issues of this thing, and it captured critical turning points in my life, most importantly, my coming across jiyū shūkyō—the spiritual, religious, and philosophical stance (or non-stance?) from which my life in the past two years has gravitated toward. This newsletter has captured the beginning of a more focused spiritual search, one that is nowhere complete but is very much embedded in community.

I haven’t written a lot for this newsletter in the past few months because I had to take some time away from writing.

The religious and spiritual calling that I thought I had left for good more than a decade ago has reemerged, and I can no longer turn myself away from it. When I left church life in 2012, I had grown to accept the writer/artist life as a replacement for that previous calling. Coming from a family with no artists and no formal training in writing (in addition to the necessity to heal from depression and the spiritual grief that came afterward), that writer/artist life never really gained enough traction until around 2021, when I moved to Los Baños, Laguna. That was when the experiments began: the poems, the essays, the photographs, the walks, and the newsletters were born. That was when I found friends in the writing and art world, friends who’ve become my most important advocates in the past five years.

But jiyū shūkyō came calling by the end of 2023, a few months after my first national writers workshop, and while I gained traction in getting more of my writing out there, the beliefs and assumptions I developed after leaving church life began crumbling around me as I began reading and being in constant conversation with my spiritual community. After two years of studying and practicing jiyū shūkyō (along with seiza and, most recently, Jōdo Shinshū, I can no longer ignore the disconnect I feel between this newfound religious calling and the conventional writing life opening itself for me. I had to stop writing altogether and pause and reflect on what kind of writing life I truly want to live and how that fits into the jiyū shūkyō—the free, creative, inquiring, and liberative spirituality that I’ve been trying to envision and build for myself in community since 2023.

I could’ve used this newsletter to “document” this process like I’ve done in some important reflections in the past. But I didn’t. I had to feel and experience what it was like to think about this without the pressure of performing. And so there were lots of reading, writing, and reflecting—none of which I could declare done, but all of which have reached a point where an important change could be made. And that change concerns this newsletter, because it is my main avenue of public expression.

After three years, forty-four issues, and four other newsletters that were born from it, I’m retiring The Long Walk.

The main reason for this is that after the deliberation process that happened in private, I realized that what I wanted to do with my writing is already more expansive than the initial concept of The Long Walk. For example, experimenting with walking was integral and inseparable from this newsletter (thus, the name), but walking will no longer be at the center of what I’m called to do moving forward. Because of this, the name “The Long Walk” no longer propels me forward like it used to.

I was surprised to hear myself telling myself I might just leave writing altogether. This wasn’t something I would’ve considered before I encountered jiyū shūkyō, and so I felt like I needed to listen to this crack within my soul. Reading Thomas Merton was an important part of this deliberation because he, too, found an inner disconnect between his religious calling and his initial calling to be a writer, a disconnect he was able to resolve eventually. In what seems to have become a form of a partial resolution for my own predicament, an epiphany came to me about last month—if there is any way I wanted to save my writing life and keep it moving forward, it has to take a backseat to jiyū shūkyō. It has to follow where my jiyū shūkyō would bring it and not the other way around. Retiring The Long Walk signals this important change.

What will happen moving forward #

After retiring The Long Walk, I shall launch a new newsletter, one I won’t be giving any special name. I will simply be writing under my name moving forward.

I will also be returning to Substack as the app to house my new newsletter. I don’t take this decision lightly, given my views on technology and platforms, but I want to prioritize simplifying my systems so that I can focus on what is the most important piece in all this: contemplation, reading, and writing.

I would aim to share something in the newsletter at least every two weeks. What I will be sharing in the newsletter will be matured drafts from my archives (what I call “talahardin” or garden of notes). These could be poems, vignettes, and short essays. I will also try to move away from purely narrative autobiographical writing and provide more space for three other concerns that I want to give more attention to: the dynamic, ever-evolving process of Life itself, my kapwa or “the other and I” that includes all forms of existents, and the places and landscapes I inhabit with others (along with the rich texture and histories embedded in them). I’m not abandoning the “I” as the subject of my writing. It will always be there. I’m just hoping to try to move it more out of the way so that the larger cosmos can be experienced better by the reader through my words.

Lastly, I plan to publish works in the three languages I speak: Pangasinan, Filipino, and English. Over the years, this has been a dilemma of mine. As a multilingual writer who writes and publishes in all three languages, I have always felt divided and have intentionally separated my writings in these three languages. I’m hoping to integrate them now in one place and fully embrace translingualism. To do this properly and since a huge number of my readers are in English, I’ll still be writing primarily in English and will write my updates in this language. When I do publish in either Filipino or Pangasinan, I will include translations into English. Since I will be publishing more short-form writings, I hope (fingers crossed) that this idea won’t be that time-consuming.

What This Means For You #

Now, if you’ve read this far, you are most likely one of the few readers and friends who truly read me. In a way, this message is for you. I value the attention and time you’ve given me over the years, and I don’t want to bring you along on this change if it doesn’t feel right for you. What led you to The Long Walk about three years ago is no longer what I will be offering you moving forward. So, I will definitely understand if you choose not to follow me with this change. In fact, I would encourage you not to.

As I begin writing in Substack in the coming weeks, I’ll be importing this email list there (which includes your email). If the ideas about the new newsletter I’ve presented above don’t resonate with you, I strongly encourage you to click unsubscribe below. This is perfectly reasonable and not something we should be worrying about. Whatever you choose to do, I will always be grateful for the time you’ve given me, reading my poems, essays, and vignettes over the years.

Last words #

To close The Long Walk, I would like to offer you a poem that came to me on an evening walk. With it, I hope to place a cairn to mark this brief yet meaningful stop in our journey together—a long walk I sincerely hope I’ll continue to share with you.

The cold wind
and the green hue of leaves
and the tintinnabulation of crickets
on a walk on a summer night
is a balm
for a walker’s wounds.

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