Hello,

It’s Stephanie Dandan. And this is Notes From the Ether.

I’m a multidisciplinary writer, photographer, artist. A Filipina-American immigrant born and raised in Manila, Philippines and grown in Southern California. I came up as a travel writer in the early 2010s, back in the travel blogging era when nomadic women were rendered unorthodox. I was a starry-eyed, stubborn, twentysomething dirtbag backpacker with an insatiable thirst to travel and reconnect with her roots. I left everything behind, sold whatever things I had left, packed my life in a big blue backpack, detached from an old, jaded self and pursued three things I love: writing, photography, travel. I traveled solo everywhere in Asia, Latin & South America, Australia, Europe, 22 countries and counting. I documented my journey in a travel blog, which garnered tens of thousands of readers worldwide and inspired people to seek the road less traveled. When I’m not writing I’m either surfing, in the ocean, by the ocean, meditating or delving into the otherworldly, gallivanting outdoors or reveling in music and the arts. Currently, I split my life between Los Angeles, the Philippine islands, and the road I call home.

Nowadays my life is a little slower, a little less nomadic as I look for beauty in the everyday mundane. But the hunger for living in-between is incessant, I still travel and yearn to be 33,000 feet up in the sky, 500 knots in the air on the way to the unknown. I stopped blogging years ago but I’ve always been a writer first. Although I’m currently a copywriter on the weekdays, I’ve been working on some creating writing projects like finishing an auto fiction novel I’ve been working on for years called, The Sun Follows You Everywhere, working on my first screenplay, and writing essays.

The ether. The ancient Greeks refer to it as a god-like element, and a substance that allowed humans to connect to spirituality and intuition. Ancient yogis defined it as unbound and all-pervasive, and the element of potentiality. Latin root of it literally means the upper pure, bright air. The dictionary defines it as the clear sky; the upper regions of air beyond the clouds.

I call it the mystery in which everything comes from, which is around us and within us at all times. It’s a sacred realm where I like to believe my grandma’s spirit went, where our ancestors are, where babies pass through, a portal to otherworldly dimensions and worlds, where we get our ideas and creativity from, where we go to before sleep, during sleep, where we dream. You get the idea. The ether is emptiness and everything all at once. And often times, as crazy as it may sound, I get messages from there. Good thing I’m a writer, and I often take notes. So here we are.

Also, I really missed having a writing home in digital space. One where I can share my usual existential ramblings, stream of consciousness babbles, rants on social and political issues, and many other things that either live in my mind. I need somewhere that’ll give me the liberty to just dump all my musings in public. I’m not sure exactly how this space will turn out, likely an amalgam of all that, with some random short thoughts, musings, meditations, maybe even some audio poetry, essays, or a literary podcast? Oh, the possibilities. We shall figure it all out together.

So, here’s to everything and nothing, all at once.

x

Steph