How Much Is Enough?
This piece was written and sent this over two years for the Nectary, a research lab and “pop-up monastery” that was sourced by my dear friend Dechen Ellen McSweeney. In advance of our first prototype convening in Victoria BC in August 2025, I sent a “love letter” to the co-hosts Dechen, Ty, Zen, Tyler W, Garrett, Tara and Xavier to investigate the true stakes of a relational experiment that consciously foregrounds shared risk around money and (re)sources.
The next Nectary experiment will be taking place in Washington DC from March 20-May 12, 2026, featuring 14+ fellows committed to (re)sourcing sacred world. The day after I booked my flight, I cried with a tender heart, flooded with joy to reunite with my spiritual friends, grief that I will be away from my son io (who was in my belly when I wrote this letter). Ten days. Just enough. These tears too, are deep investments of soul.
A love letter to the Nectary
“How much is enough?”
Too much!
Stay away! Don’t come too close. I don’t want you to see me.
(I don’t want you to see how badly I want you to see me).
T hosted a presentation about the maternal gift economy at Skymeadow in June 2024. The entire time, tears rolled endlessly down my face. I didn’t understand why I was crying so hard. I think something in my body was cracking open. Consequently, I am a bit avoidant with Miki Kashtan’s work. It’s too radical. Too intimate. The animal body cowers away with fear, with the “dread” of potential transformation.
More!
My friend A wrote a piece called “creating a container for the soul”. It was beautiful, in that way that a friend’s creative flow can activate a clenched and heated tightness in the solar plexus that feels simultaneously like competition and inspiration. Is this jealousy? Am I jealous that something so beautiful came through her? I want something so beautiful to come through me. Can I come into contact with my desire through a healthy, collegial jealousy? I suspect that artists thrive off each other in this kind of edgy mutuality.
Not enough!
A part of me is kind of miserly. Bonnitta Roy calls it the “ledger mind” – this small mind that operates by the principles of scarcity and transaction, the protocols of calculating “fairness” and “balance” by keeping tabs, keeping track of who gives, who receives, who owes. I don’t like it. Can you help me release this?
“I love hosting dinners for my friends, but I don’t like that part of me that thinks about how much it costs. I look at the ingredient list and there is a cost-benefit analysis – I can’t help but think: “how much is this bread? Is it worth it?”
In our coffee check in, X shares his phenomenological experience of constantly feeling like he’s surrounded by an environment of “needs” that he must respond to. Me, our friends, our plants, our cat, our electronics and picture frames and bike helmets and dishes are constantly expressing their needs: whispering, mewling, crying, asking for and wanting attention. Sometimes, the cacophonic symphony of these needs crescendo into a deafening, continuous scream. We wonder: is this animism? Is spiritual friendship with Reality being intimate with the overwhelming aliveness of everything around us? All these objects in their unique “thingness”: living beings needing attention, love, nourishment and care.
“When X and I were travelling in New York for a week in September, our housesitter C called us with concern: Meowbot stopped eating for two days. We were supposed to go to Maine for an ayahuasca ceremony. We asked C to take her to the vet. She still wasn’t eating. We asked X’s dad to take Meowbot to the vet. She still wasn’t eating.
I booked a flight back to Toronto. We had one more day in New York where we stayed at my friend N’s house. I had panic attacks while X held my shuddering body, I kept imagining losing Meowbot. Tidal waves of despair, shame and overwhelm crashed through me, co-present with the unbearable intensity of my love and responsibility for Meowbot. Why does love have to hurt so fucking much?
I asked X to come back with me. “I need you.” I told him, wanting to be strong but feeling vulnerable. He booked his flight immediately and I felt my love for him bloom like red ink. When we got back home, Meowbot was shivering and hiding under the bed. X held her while I smeared food onto her nose to get her to lick it off. All day and night, I sat next to her and stroked her with as much love and affection as possible – I could feel her drinking in my love thirstily, touch-starved and yielding.”
More!
I wonder what agony I will go through when my baby cries or doesn’t eat.
Go away.
When I feel whole and nourished, I am oh so good, oh so generous in my abundance and benevolence. My body opens: let me fulfill you!
When I feel small and overwhelmed, I hide and hoard what little I have. My body bristles: get your needs away from me!
Dear Nectary (?) Yin Monastery (?) (Srsly, what is thy name?)
“How much is enough?”
The Zen master Dogen says: “To be enlightened is to be intimate with all things.”
The ugly parts of me live in the “incognito window” of my dreams, hidden in boxes under the bed and in the closet. The only person I’ve been willing to share the wholeness that includes the ugliness is Xavier, mostly because I’m pretty confident by now he won’t leave me from the horror of what he sees. Intimacy is willing disclosure, with the desperate desire that we will love and be loved in our mutual wholeness, in our mutual brokenness. This is a tall, fucking order.
How intimate am I willing to be with all of you?
I don’t really know you, but I’ve shared moments of intimacy with some of you:
Dear T, you and I sat next to each other during morning check ins in Vermont. When I finished my apple in the morning, you ate my apple cores. One evening, while everyone else was at the sauna, I laid down on the couch and basked in your song like a hot bath.
Dear D, we ritualized our spiritual friendship with each other in Washington DC and it felt like a marriage ceremony. You spoke in your vow: “We, in our brokenness, will be the ones to do this", and I knew I was committed.
Dear Z, I saw the massive waves on the Outer Banks, churned up by a hurricane, crash against your tender body. I saw you dive into the waves on the last day and felt transformed by your transformation.
Dear X, ribbons ribbons ribbons, red ribbons all the way down.
Dear Lyric group? Who are you? D was writing a poem to you when we were in North Carolina together. I wondered who you all are. You all feel mysterious to me. I know your mythos. But what makes you cry? What makes you selfish? How do you say yes? How do you say no?
“I have to confess something: I hate circling because it makes me too naked. I don’t like to be naked. It makes me self conscious. I get shy about skinny dipping while camping. Maybe it’s because I’m Chinese and kind of prudish. Maybe I just like hiding my body and my secrets.”
Am I willing to be transformed by you? To be remade by you? I’m already so entangled in so many relationships, in so many needs. How responsive can I possibly become, without losing my self, my ground? My centre?
To say yes is to be exposed to you. And not just me: my child, my husband, my future, my past: all will be exposed.
When people break out of screens and pour into embodied space, there is so much. Too much. Teamingness of cascading relationality.
And you will be exposed to me: my baby will cry during our work together and I will feel and project your annoyance. I will feel embarrassed. Naked. I will want to hide. I might be resentful.
We will be inevitably, invariably transformed through the ingression of bodies of intimate space, making contact. Gross and subtle. This is the deep ecology of cross-contamination, of messy sympoiesis: the collective “future vessel” is more-than-self, more-than-human, more, more, more, MORE.
How many relationships is too much?
TOO MUCH!
I rush back home and close the front door. Rest my forehead against the surface and sigh with relief. Safe. A boundary that demarcates Sanctuary. Cocoon. Body. Nest. Home.
What is Home? I’ve stayed at D and Z’s home in Washington DC. T took care of Meowbot in my home in Toronto. Domesticity is so intimate, so close. You can open my drawers. We are separated by walls and borders and you can still hear my crying through the thinness of plaster. I can still hear you fucking. The porosity of this cocoon coos its needs and cries its longing – the future vessel of radical relationality. Oh, how I want to hide. Oh, how I want to meet you.
In-between is where aliveness happens.
My yes is a border:
What are the borders that separate me and you, that divide and conquer, that protect and nourish?
My yes is bondage:
What is the art of binding? Of re-membering that which was separated?
Embracing tethered freedom, I willingly fly into love’s cage.
I say yes to the alchemy of the in-between.
I say yes to making sacred art together.
I say yes to aliveness, come alive.
“I myself find it quite pleasant to pass from one atmosphere to another through crossing a border. I think that’s what a border is. It should enable us to multiply and savour the different flavours of the world; it shouldn’t be a wall that prevents us from entering or leaving. Consequently, what we need today is not to abolish borders but to provide them with another meaning, that, of a passage, a communication — a Relation, in other words.”
– Édouard Glissant