In anarchiving FoAM’s multi-decade existence, we have threaded together various linked projects and preoccupations in a set of colour-coded routes. These routes are metaphors describing a reader’s journey through the publication, and the resulting experiences with materials encountered along the way.

This is a guide to the wabi-sabi route, which dwells with the transient, incomplete, and unnoticed.

This route allows you to wander and observe. Watching, abiding, it’s a chance to defer the temptation to intervene, and let things unfold. An invitation to seek out places of enchantment and seclusion, it can support reflection on transitions, liminality, and the often neglected art of bringing things to an end.

The threshold of the wabi-sabi route is barely visible, yet deeply worn. The atmosphere is thick with muted greys. It’s almost as if it’s not a place at all, but an in-between space, transient and often overlooked.

Exquisite & Liminal

Arriving at different times and varying speeds, we The we, here, is an invitation to engage. We are those involved in stewarding this publication to completion, and a wider we that includes you, the readers. We are all here, alongside each other, inside the experience, if not all at the same time. Nobody walks the path alone. find ourselves gradually slowing, as if engulfed by Frühjahrsmüdigkeit, an ambient springtime fatigue. The longer we linger, the less we move, stills from a world that continues to shift and flow around us. Behind the wooden temple, our edges soften, boundaries blurred by deepening shadows.

Stillness Where the Fireflies Glowed and Flickered In Shadow Warping Time Frames The Dance of Not-Knowing Times Like These Planning with the Seasons Fallowing Lying Flat Traversing Transitions Timelesness

Standing at the threshold, we are stirred by the slightest movements. Arrows and circles, warps and whorls, steering us from linear time toward something else. The movement carries us forward , gracefully stumbling, dancing with the unknown. We are on the path now, wandering, not moving forward. The path’s temporal order disorients our attempts to make progress, as the hold of regular, grid-like time loosens and frays. We find ourselves beyond the reach of the clock, spiralling through seasons, contorting our comportment to attune to the path’s dense polyrhythms. Though it may feel like we’re going nowhere, doing nothing, the path deepens, thickens, like a fallow field teeming with life. With no destination in sight, we turn 90 degrees, falling to the floor, sinking deeper into the transition, finding space to rest outside of time.

Immersing ourselves in the twilit expanse, we can barely make out the contours of the land around us. Our movement stutters to a stop, and we are left with a profound sense of being-in-the-world. Time is slowed as we take our first steps, hesitant, the damp earth welcoming our unsteady feet. Moving, yet still. Alert and receptive. We observe, we drift, using our bodies to measure the twists of the path, as it morphs into a flow of colour. Some of us exchange feet for hands. Turning upside-down, we see the world anew. We are guided by rocks & stones, by stories & histories, by birdsong, each and everynote evokes the skies within. Chanting, we are enchanted.

Crafts of Noticing Upon Arrival The House is Haunted by Itself Seeing Just as It Is Performing the Unknown A Spectral Ocular Walk with me Dwelling on Rocks Monster Code Becoming Birdlike Vernacular Magic

Surrounded by occult technologies, magic and ritual, we are transformed from static matter into a space of operation, a bubble-world. The bubble, a double agent, a symbol of existential uncertainty and a trope of playfulness. When the bubble bursts it disperses, leaving fungal patterns, fairy-ringed; echoing through the chatter and crackles of the radio spectrum. Mycelial voices condense into three sybils of old, their eerie utterances emanating from shuffled book-slivers. They urge us to delve deeper, to lose and find ourselves in the maelstrom of uncertainty, navigating with thread, needle, compass, artificial horizon. skirting the peripheries of the sensible, this unquiet matter. Ears to the ground, guided by weatherlore, we catch glimpses of the mythical amidst the mundane.

Figments of Affordable Mysticism Re-enchanting the Present A World Replete Approaching the Inexplicable Hexecutable Spell Kit Panpsychist Propositions Weatherlore Otherworlds Oozing

As the day subsides, we seek shelter, finding refuge in a network where new worlds fruit from the compost of the old. Locked down, cast out, alone or together, we are connected in our solitude. Despite the cultural dissonance and social upheaval that surrounds us, we succeed in finding places where we can belong. Things to grip, to hold, things that lend stability and comfort, while our surroundings seem to teeter, on the brink of dissolution.

Convivia & Refugia Cornerstone of the Outer Monastery Isolation Training Art of Something Larger Ties, Bonds, Grips

Walking this route, we are called to care, to cure, to comfort. Practices that help us to cope, regardless of the situation. We allow ourselves to be touched, to be vulnerable, open to impermanence, illness, and pain. We notice that pain, like sound, isn’t continuous, that there is silence and peace beneath. We find solace in the tendrils of kinship and friendship that cradle our failing bodies. Our burnt-out minds long to rethink the world, finding ways to mark our unacknowledged loss. We work to repair, restore, revitalise, coaxing damaged parts, systems, and structures back to life. And yet, some things, beings, situations remain beyond repair. We confront death in the thick of life, the individual disintegrating into the many. Whether natural or legal persons, kingdoms, cultures, ages, aeons, we feel the end is near. Rather than resisting, we choose to celebrate the conclusions. A closed life cycle. A release.

Being with To care, with care, for care Making Dis-ease Matter Rituales para mi corazón Beyond the Spoken Repair! Death and Gardening Conscious Closure

Stopping to honour our encounters, we find our memories of the path are fading fast, trailing away. We spare a thought for the things that hide in shadows or flicker in refractions, appearing and disappearing as we tread otherwise familiar streets. Endearing & enduring twitches of animate matter amid entropy’s relentless grind. Looking up, we continue on our way, striding, gleeful, accepting, towards the inevitable fadeout.

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Final Grumblings