An illustration from my latest Being column for Uppercase Magazine
A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
“Drawing—or mark making—has been a space for me to explore concepts without committing—before language, there were images,” writes Caitlin. After a few months without drawing, I feel bewildered, unsure of how to begin. I decide to start small to avoid overwhelm, choosing a pencil and a post-it note as my tools. I draw a small line and then another. As I layer them on top of each other, I realize I am drawing my infant daughter in stitches, the way a needle does with thread. This is the first spark—a signal that I’m on the right path. The tangible act of mark-making unlocks inspiration the same way somatic movement unravels anxiety: you must do to change how you feel. I decide to make an embroidered painting—a long-term project I’ll work on throughout my year-long maternity leave, to aid me in processing this season I’m in.
I choose it deliberately for the tedious, meditative nature of the work involved, and for its tactility. I need to feel the thread and needle; the drape of the linen as it pours over my knees. I need to feel the rhythm of my days without letting the movements mindlessly wash through me. I need to feel the frustration and monotony—and the sweetness and joy, without minimizing the weight and value of either.”
—Excerpted from A Season for Stitching, my latest Being column for Issue 59 of Uppercase Magazine
TUESDAY
“Wholeness isn’t something we acquire by stacking achievements or checking boxes or acquiring products or consumer goods. And I worry about this because I have two small children myself. They are five and six, and I’m thinking often about the world that they’re growing up in and what is that world telling them about who they should be and what success is. And what I worry about is that right now the world tells our kids and all of us that to be successful, you need one of three things: to be powerful, to be famous, or to be rich. But we all know people who have all three of those — who are wealthy, powerful, and famous — and profoundly unhappy, who don’t feel whole.
I think to truly feel whole — it’s not about acquiring something that we don’t have. It’s about remembering who we fundamentally are. Part of healing, to me, is about recognizing what we already have inside of us, coming to trust that, coming to rely on that, and ultimately coming to find fulfillment in who we are.”
—Vivek Murthy, in conversation with On Being’s Krista Tippet
WEDNESDAY
What I’ve been reading lately:
Matrescence by Lucy Jones, a beautiful part-science/part-memoir investigation into what happens to a person—spiritually, physically, mentally—during the process of becoming a mother.
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, which I looked forward to reading each night for reasons I still can’t quite pinpoint. It’s an agonizingly accurate capture of high school anxiety and adolescence through the eyes of Lee Fiora, a protagonist I cannot stand and also identify with entirely too much.
A Frog in the Fall by Swedish illustrator Linnea Sterte, who has absolutely caught me with her line work and color sensibility. This gorgeous 300+ page comic is about a frog who “experiences everything for the first time”—full of humor and sweetness, totally mysterious.
THURSDAY
We watch Past Lives and I learn about the Buddhist philosophy of inyeon, which serves as an explanation for why certain people connect and reconnect in certain times and places over the course of their lives. If two people have inyeon, they will find each other over and over again, in the tiniest of exchanges—crossing next to each other on the street, their sleeves brush as they board the train, one hands the other their change, the other is a postman and delivers their mail—the tiniest of exchanges, yes, except they’re all adding up, they’re compounding, over and over again, throughout 8,000 lifetimes—until their fates eventually collide.
FRIDAY
I sit here perpetually inventing new people
as if the population boom were not enough
and not enough terror and problems
God knows, but I know too,
that’s the point. Never fear enough
to match delight, nor a deep enough abyss,
nor time enough, and there are always a few
stars missing.
I don’t want a new heaven and new earth,
only the old ones.
Old sky, old dirt, new grass.
Nor life beyond the grave,
God help me, or I’ll help myself
by living all these lives
nine at once or ninety
so that death finds me at all times
and on all sides exposed,
unfortressed, undefended,
inviolable, vulnerable, alive.
—Ars Lunga by Ursula K. Le Guin
xx,
M
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