Dear Somebody: In the dead of winter.
Five things from this week that I'd like to remember
A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
The work I’ve done all week has amounted to nothing, nothing I am proud of, anyway—but each morning, in the dead of winter, while the snow bares its teeth, as the light trickles slowly onto my desk, I sit and think of the hundreds of tulips we planted last November; the hundreds of snowdrops, too, and how one day soon will be the day that each bloom stands and turns its shining face towards the sun.
The work I’ve done all week has amounted to nothing, nothing I can show or use, anyway—but each morning, in the dead of winter, while the snow bares its teeth, as the light trickles slowly onto my desk, I sit and do my best to order a feeling that sits inside me into sentences or pictures that another person might one day find comforting or clarifying. It doesn’t always work out, but what one thing always does? I stand and turn my shining face towards the sun.
TUESDAY
Does It Honor Life? in Yanyi’s The Reading; Krista Haston’s board of cutaway houses; Thelonious Monk’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960.
WEDNESDAY
“Clarifying the why behind the work you make, and the work you wish to one day make, is necessary for maintaining creative longevity on a small and large scale. Artists who pursue their craft for internally seeded reasons, such as a sense of personal satisfaction or because it aligns with a personal value, will persist in circumstances where those who are achieving goals for external reasons will not.They will be able to endure disappointment and discouraging circumstances because there is meaning behind their pursuit. Their creative practice is steady, unwavering, and often leaves them with little choice: It is something they must do because it reflects the person they wish to be and the person they believe they are.”
—An excerpt from my latest essay, Finding Your True North, for Issue #64 of Uppercase Magazine
THURSDAY
“To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful.
Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us.” —Carl Jung
FRIDAY
Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.
He went flying down the river in his boat
with his video camera to his eye, making
a moving picture of the moving river
upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly
toward the end of his vacation. He showed
his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,
preserving it forever: the river, the trees,
the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat
behind which he stood with his camera
preserving his vacation even as he was living it
so that after he had had it he would still
have it. It would be there. With a flick
of a switch, there it would be. But he
would not be in it. He would never be in it.
—Vacation by Wendall Berry
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See you next week!
xx,
M