인연

 

Felled by another Korean romance. I guess this is my lot in life.

Held

 

I am willing

is an inside job.

Leaving behind

I won't

You can't make me

is an act of faith.

I am a supplicant

skinned knees and bleeding

(finally) 

ready to surrender.

Food Autobiographies

 

Cup of Jo readers just experienced a firestorm. Swept up in the fun of describing life as a food travelogue, folks created poetry...

Born in barbecue, stayed in barbecue. Barbecue forever. -Anne

Born in hotdish, and now I live abroad in raw herring. -Penny

Wine to cheese curds and then back to wine. -Molly

Grew up in garbage plates, married bibimbap, then settled in funeral potatoes. -Niki

Left sourdough for gado gado in a fry bake. Now live in elk tacos on a plow disc. -Anna

Life In Six Words

 

In 2020, a seventh grade teacher asked their students to write a memoir in six words. 

One student wrote:

Brave birds still fly through fog.

What an assignment (I didn't know this was a thing)! I think mine would be:

I'm at my most magnificent now.

How about you?

Birdie Is M.I.A.

 

Our family is currently down a member with two feet of freshly fallen snow outside.

This isn't Birdie, but looks a lot like Birdie:

Turns out there are a lot of cats in town who look like Birdie, but aren't.

Thanksgiving

1. Alone 

View this post on Instagram

II. Arrival 

View this post on Instagram

 

III. Reunion

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Findus And His Farmer

 

Sweden for the win!

Ironically, it was a Bolivian friend of Evan's who recently recommended this delightful children's book series from Scandinavia about a farmer and his cat. 

The stories deliver wholesome fun which feels like a revelation given the volume of problematic stories out there (ostensibly) for kids.

Devotional Practice

Partnership is a species of sacrament-- to publicly commit to being in each other's care is to invite the universe to occupy the space you hold together and be moved by its sanctity.

I think this is what that can look like in practice:

Love moves in mysterious ways.

Give A Comedian An Inch...

 

...and they'll convert it into comic gold.

Cozy Simple

Turns out my happy place may well be Katie Fontana's home spaces.

Tonics

I. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce: I am here for this cultural moment. 

II. Muffins and Sanditon: a "therapist"'s response to the atrocities in the news. 

III. Helpful: what not to bring to a desert island stranding.

IV. Ibuprofen and Frappuccino: a guide to pronouncing tough words like Chateauneuf-du-Pape.

Enough Love

There is a little boy next to me, he must be 2 or 3.

Even when his legs are fully extended they don’t touch the seat in front of him. Mostly he just touches me, which is okay. His father looks to be in his 40s, salt and pepper hair, broad shoulders and unexciting blue jeans. He’s tall. I assume he is the kind of tall that takes care of people, like reaches for things in the overhead bin for old ladies or carries multiple children to the house at once; that gentle, spacious tall.

Do you want to lay down? he keeps asking his son in English, who does not want to lay down. Baby, do you want to take a nap? he suggests, but the son does not want to take a nap. I like how English sounds in his mouth; it bounces, like rain in a hard city.

We take off. The son and I look out the window, watching the world get smaller and smaller.

Then the father, all six foot mountain of him, curls himself into a seashell and lays his upper body in his son’s lap. Without speaking, his son puts one tiny arm on his shoulder and one tiny arm around his head and his little back is strong and his little eyes are soft, and like this he holds his father. Now the son is making circles with his palm, very small ripples across the landscape of the man he came from. Now, with one finger, he is slowly stroking his father’s wild sideburn. I think they must have done this before.

The father is asleep. If you held them up to your ear, I bet you could hear the ocean inside them. I bet everything in their ocean has a home to belong to. Even I belong here, simply by being here, a bystander in the company of strangers.

Why are some children born into sweetness and some are born into war?

Line up their fathers and how could you tell their tenderness apart. I cannot fathom at this beloved moment or at any other, how a grown man could ever shoot tear gas at another man’s child. How a woman could walk their baby 3000 desperate miles to our doorstep and still some mothers would not let them in. It does not take concrete to build a wall.

Perhaps our anxious leaders have never held space like this, where no one is alone and there is always enough room. I want to bottle it up and share it. I want to swim in it and be free. I want to be immigrant and rooted, here, forty thousand feet above any given border.

I want to be held in the arms of the small world.

by Na Mee

Thus all the beauty and the horrors of this world arise from the same root: the presence or absence of love. Not feeling loved, and then taking that to heart is the only wound there is. It cripples us, causing us to shrivel and contract.

Thus, apart from a few biochemical imbalances and neurological conditions, the diagnostic manual for psychological afflictions (known as the DSM) might as well begin, "Herein are described all the wretched ways people feel and behave when they do not know they are loved."

All the hatred of ourselves and others; all our fear, egoism, communication problems and sexual insecurities; all the pathology, neurosis and destructiveness in the world; the whole nightmare of history, with its bloodshed and cruelty, boil down to one simple fact:

Not knowing we are loved and lovable makes the heart grow cold. And all the tragedy of human life follows from there.

by John Welwood

Cosmic Sorcery

 

Conjuring

A slight of hand:

one thing vanishes

and another appears.

The cost of creation.

Kali's alchemy.

A breath of life,

like magic.

Thanks is a feeble word

to carry the weight

of this gratitude.

Heroic Work

Excavation

Brush. Breath.

A dentist's pick.

Slowly down the ladder 

into darkness.

Feeling towards bones

held by the weight

of accumulated soil and stone.

Patient. Gentle.

Tender and reverent.

Seeking with fingertips

a change in texture 

that belies what's buried

asking for release.

Until,

(after many small acts

and much time has passed)

the beast sees light of day again--

and it is revealed that

love has overwritten fear 

(enough)

to uncover the structures within, 

all holey and holy. 

Disabling

Caged by alarm,

this pulse carries deadweight.

A less than, but not nothing,

of potential energy.

Moving past grievances,

we find grief (and roll up our sleeves 

for the delicate work ahead:

a stakeout, 

a blaring, 

a soothing, 

repeat)

A catalog of hesitancies:

anxious glances,

guarded moments of unfurling, 

tentative experiments 

with lift and loft.

There is flight 

(only occasionally at first).

Then there is soaring-- 

brilliant across the sky.

Blessing

This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.

Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.

A poem by John O'Donohue

Ann Patchett Essays

I. These Precious Days

II. My Three Fathers

III. How To Practice

Ken Nwadiogbu

 

Boom

My Brother

My brother is sharing his life story as it relates to work on a substack that explores how to move people and their wealth in order to effect positive social change.

The beauty and power of his story, as well as his capacity to be vulnerable and share it so widely as an act of service to the greater good, is a testament to the life Mike has led up to this point.

I am one proud and inspired sister.

A Triumphant Finale

The culmination of this series is tremendous-- wise, tender, funny, painful and full of love:

What began as sex education became a master class on family and relationships.

With a magnificent soundtrack to boot.

Time Between The Fingertips

Informed by these podcasts, my thoughts have been circling the concept of time. I want to capture some of this language while it is fresh for me...

The Greeks spoke of chronos and kairos. Chronos is ordinary time, calendar and clock time, measured and organizing, progressive and chronic. It is the time of our 2pm self. Kairos is extraordinary time, moments of disruption and inroading that can last an instant or centuries, liminal and acute, timeless and mystical. It is the time of our 2am self. 

The Greeks also spoke of apocalypse by which they meant uncovering, veil lifting, revealing, the bright clarity born of approximate endings. Apocalyptic time is thus a form of kairos time-- when there is a collective or personal experience of before/after. A pivot. An opportune time for rash decisions and plot twists. 

Time is fundamentally transformation and we cannot grow or change without feeling our own breaking. Tragic time. No creation without destruction. So we are born anew in times of vulnerability and vulnerable in times of rebirth-- when we have a keen and newly awakened sense of our own fragility.

And yet, as any Brené Brown fan knows, vulnerability is the gateway to love. Thus our breaking open is a great softening. A surrender to universal and specific, mundane love. 

Mortality entwined with love. Both core to the human condition. A condition that comes with the capacity to go in and out of our bodies. Our leavings, a grace granted by the push of suffering. Our returns, a grace granted by the pull of connection.

No self composed.

Old Art

 

These life-sized giraffes carved into rock in the desert of Niger-- gah! I still remember when I saw images of them for the first time in a National Geographic Magazine as a kid.

I can only imagine what it would be like to marvel at this neolithic masterpiece in person.

It is estimated that the petroglyphs are between 6,000 and 8,000 years old. A Taureg community living nearby is now tasked with protecting the remote site's historical legacy from vandalism.

Kickflip

Am I

I am

Energy Makes Time

 

I often find myself listening as someone talks about being out of time. I don’t want to demean any time-management tactics out there. My philosophy is to accept any and all tools, to tuck them into the toolbox until such time as they seem fit. Most of the recommended habits will work, at least some of the time. Sometimes blocking off some time on your calendar is exactly what you need. Sometimes shifting your schedule or skipping some meetings or putting yourself to bed on time does the trick. Knowing which trick you need now—and which one you’ll need next time—comes with experience and the kind of situational awareness that can be cultivated with (wait for iiiiit…) time.

But there’s something else I want to suggest here, and it’s to stop thinking about time entirely. Or, at least, to stop thinking about time as something consistent. We all know that time can be stretchy or compressed—we’ve experienced hours that plodded along interminably and those that whisked by in a few breaths. We’ve had days in which we got so much done we surprised ourselves and days where we got into a staring contest with the to-do list and the to-do list didn’t blink. And we’ve also had days that left us puddled on the floor and days that left us pumped up, practically leaping out of our chairs. What differentiates these experiences isn’t the number of hours in the day but the energy we get from the work. Energy makes time.

Here’s a concrete example, and perhaps a familiar one: someone is so busy with work and caretaking that they don’t make time for their art. At the end of the day they’re too tired to write or paint or make music or whathaveyou. So they don’t. Days, then weeks go by. They are more and more tired. They are getting less and less done. They take a mental health day and catch up on sleep but the exhaustion persists. Their overwhelm grows larger, becomes intolerable. The usual tactics don’t work.

Then one day they say fuck it all. They eat leftover pasta over the sink, drop mom off at her mahjongg game, and go sit in the park to draw. They draw for hours, until the sun goes down and they’re squinting under the street lights. And, lo and behold, the next day they plow through all those lingering to-dos. They see clearly that half of them were unnecessary when before they all seemed critical. They recognize a few others as things better handed off to their peers. They suddenly find time for attending to that one project they’d been procrastinating on for weeks. They sleep better. Their skin looks great. (Okay I might be exaggerating on that last one, but only mildly.)

It turns out, not doing their art was costing them time, was draining it away, little by little, like a slow but steady leak. They had assumed, wrongly, that there wasn’t enough time in the day to do their art, because they assumed (because we’re conditioned to assume) that every thing we do costs time. But that math doesn’t take energy into account, doesn’t grok that doing things that energize you gives you time back. By doing their art, a whole lot of time suddenly returned. Their art didn’t need more time; their time needed their art.

I’m using art here, because in my experience, most people have something shaped like that in their lives—some thing that when neglected siphons time and energy away but when attended to delivers it in droves. But you can substitute art for whatever activity or habit leaves you more energized, gives you that time back: puzzle night with your BFFs, organizing your colleagues, working a shift at the community garden, baking cookies for the block party, going to the woods, touching grass and all that.

The question to ask with all those things isn’t, “how do I make time for this?” The answer to that question always disappoints, because that view of time has it forever speeding away from you. The better question is, how does doing what I need make time for everything else?

-- from an essay by Mandy Brown

Laughter Is Good Medicine

and

Paris

 

Biking in Paris was a joy. Cycling to and from Domaine du Courances was a joy.

 

Mokonuts was a joy. The Mosque of Paris' tearoom was a joy. Ratatouille in a pita at Miznon was a joy.

Reading under the willow on the Île de la Cité in the rain was a joy. Boating by houseboats was a joy. Walking the Petite Ceinture of the 16th was a joy.

Covid at long last? Not a joy.