Editor’s Preface

Cover image: Dioramas for Tanjong Rimau © Zarina Muhammad, Zachary Chan and Joel Tan, Courtesy of the  Singapore Art Museum

“Right intention is simply about coming home to yourself. It is a practice of aligning with the deepest part of yourself while surrendering to the reality that you often get lost in your wanting mind.”

—Phillip Moffitt, “The Heart’s Intention”, Dharma Wisdom

These past few months have been a spiritual journeying of sorts for me. In October, I was fortunate enough to be invited to Ubud, Bali to speak about ecofeminism at the 2022 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. There, I was in dialogue with other women and practitioners who shared a similar mission of uniting humanity through environmental awareness and a reawakened way of relating to Earth through physical, emotional, political and spiritual means. The festival showed me an alternative way of creating community and serving the community, and I returned to Singapore with Bali still in my heart.

Then in early December, I attended a meditation retreat for the first time in Bangkok, and what an experience it has been. Most significantly, I am learning to open my heart, and to focus on right intentions. I am discovering things and aspects about myself that have resurfaced so that healing can take place. I am releasing old, inherited patterns, beliefs, narratives and blockages from my system and integrating the learning into my everyday lived experience. I am coming face to face with love and loss and grief and healing and finding my way home to myself again.

Finally, I went to Sabah on the island of Borneo to live in the primary rainforest, where nature became my meditation. Daily I cruised along the Kinabatangan river in awe of Mother Earth and in search of wildlife. I learnt to recognise the distinct whooping calls of the female Bornean gibbon in the rainforest though I never saw her, and distinguish between the laughing cries of the oriental pied hornbill and the honkings of the rhinoceros hornbill. I observed the freshness of elephant tracks, and learnt to listen and speak with the heart, which opens one to understanding and communicating with the other across species and beyond language. I fell asleep to the sounds of the rainforest. I returned home and dreamt of the river.  

In all of these travels, I am finding my way home.

May you travel with this issue away and return home to yourself, home to Earth.

May it bless and offer you a refuge, a sanctuary, a meditation, a homecoming.

And may it bring you the peace that comes from knowing you are always home.

Esther Vincent Xueming

The Tiger Moth Review