Julian JP Lee

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Dear friends,

What fascinating and terrifying times we are living in.

The last I wrote to you, the year was still young. June had not even arrived yet, and there was so much that still seemed possible for this year, 2026.

Today, I am writing to you from the darkness of my room in my family home, where I am resting after a tired and tense week.

My cosy little room feels very much like a cocoon like this— blinds drawn all the way down, doors shut, lights off. In fact, I have always felt that rest was to the human being what the pupal stage was for a caterpillar-butterfly.

When I rest, I feel myself dissolve. So much structure and strength I have had to bear is relinquished, muscle and bone returning to biological soup.

Time slows, or actually, becomes more of an abstract idea. There is no 2pm meeting to hop on to, no more timelines and progress bars. There’s just the here, the this, the being and the now. All else is left aside…

The dissolution of rest brings great comfort and great peace because it is a profound unbinding of who I am from the expectations I place on me.

For a day, or maybe just 2 hours, I’m not a poet or a filmmaker, not an environmentalist or my Mother’s son. I’m not even someone called Julian John Paul Lee. No.

For the time that I rest, held here in my little cocoon of a room, in quiet, comfort and peace, I’m just a being.

I’m just a strange bag of bones, blood and breath, sitting or sleeping in a womb.

Here, my strained shoulders and my overwhelmed mind are freed to fall apart. And in the cool timeless solace of the little cave, I am freed to be built anew.

In my dreaming, I travel far, far, far— and deep, deep, deep. I don’t remember most of the places I go as my spirit walks the wild wastes of my imagination and the strange mazes of the mind.

And that’s okay. The only thing one needs to do to rest is to rest. And I believe we each already know what it is we require to get the rest we need. We need merely be still and listen.

Friends, the land of Dreams calls me.

I need to go now to step over the garden wall, into that vast and marvellous country where nothing is real, but where everything is true.

May you have peace.

May you have healing.

May you know joy.

And may you be loved.

With warmth,

Julian