Weekly Top 10
introducing the new series for the things i've loved, found & saved recently + some things i'm reading or thinking about
Hi there - long time no see! I moved to instagram as my primary space on the internet over the past few years, but I’ve been meaning to get back to using this space again to share more things & create another community — so here we are. Hope you enjoy!
My husband bought me a lovely valentine’s day gift & I bought him a $16 incense.
Re-reading this & every excerpt from Mahmoud Darwish’s Journal of an Ordinary Grief
You want to travel to Greece? You ask for a passport, but you discover you're not a citizen because your father or one of your relatives had fled with you during the Palestine war. You were a child. And you discover that any Arab who had left his country during that period and had stolen back in had lost his right to citizenship.
You despair of the passport and ask for a laissez-passer.
You find out you're not a resident of Israel because you have no certificate of residence. You think it's a joke and rush to tell it to your lawyer friend: "Here, I'm not a citizen, and I'm not a resident. Then where and who am I?" You're surprised to find the law is on their side, and you must prove you exist. You ask the Ministry of the Interior, “Am I here, or am I absent? Give me an expert in philosophy, so that I can prove to him I exist.”
Then you realize that philosophically you exist but legally you do not.
Getting into the habit of really planning and organizing my thoughts, ideas and notes instead of just letting it float on by — this notebook is incredibly helpful in keeping me focused! Also tracking my reading & thoughts in this journal.
My kids are obsessed with this really artsy cuckoo clock in their room.
Human Stains, an essay by Heather Havrilesky on on the endlessness of housework and "the strange gift that laundry brings to our lives."
Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure… This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love’s promise… Our hope lies in the reality that so many of us continue to believe in love’s power. We believe it is important to know love. We believe it is important to search for love’s truths… To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice.
Self-Taught Botanist, the First Woman Photographer and one of the first people to get into Scientific Illustration, Anne Atkins is easily one of my most favorite women ever. Collecting different forms of her work has become a full time hobby now. Some favorites are this extraordinarily detailed book with all the cyanotypes which is sure to be a conversation starter, this smaller volume and these stunning notecards.
Slowly been making my way through Back to School For Everyone: Hybrid Poetry with Ocean Vuong - Reading list here.
Three Important Things by B. Wurtz, from The Paris Review Issue 241, Fall 2022
When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.