small pleasures

tiny life rafts

Good morning. How are you really doing?

If we’re being honest, I woke up with tears in my eyes at 4:30am today. I couldn’t go back to sleep. I was crying for all the big and small reasons. At the exact same time (both/and), this week has been full of big and small joys: old superman shows on TV with the boys, baking rosemary-jam-brie tarts, late night bookstore visits, Sammy’s waggy tail and muddy paw prints all over the leather couch. The spring rain smells divine, like the underbelly of forest. Happiness, at unexpected times, rises up and spreads out through my arms and legs. Like on Monday, when my dear friends Ellen and Miko performed a perfectly choreographed dance they made up in Meg’s kitchen while we cheered them on. Thank god I took a video. I also looked up last night to find a pink sunset sky for the first time in months:

Small joys and pleasures. We need them. They are like tiny life rafts. I thought I’d collect some joy for you this week (and wonder to myself whether that’s really all I should be doing with this newsletter?)

1. I’ve been listening to A Calling Home on repeat. It’s a hum-singing song, and I love those. I love being called home.

2. The Globe and Mail’s reporter Erin Anderssen published an article called Miracle At Sea, about Project CETI and the mission to decode whale song. Listen to this: “To travel with the whales, and call them by name… is to experience, in the depths of your human soul, the wonder, responsibility and sorrow at the heart of a meaningful life.”

3. In Sophie Strand’s newsletter, she talks about wanting to have bodies in books — especially plants and animals. She reminds us to write them. “There are hardly any animals and plants and ecology in these books. But weirder than that, these books have no real bodies in them. They are sterile terrariums inhabited by walking brains.” She goes on, and I loved this part: “I don’t enter a story with my brain. I enter it feet first like a kid jumping into lake water.”

4. Austin Kleon posted Pico Iyer’s quote from the David Henry Thoreau documentary in his newsletter this week. “Thoreau was saying: if you’re beginning to die within, take measures right now. There must be some cabin in the woods within you. There must be some space where you can regenerate yourself and remember what is most essential to you.”

5. Still been painting and painting and painting.

   

   Have you wanted to paint and you’re not sure where to start? I started painting a couple years ago and taught myself solely with online tutorials. I really love Sarah Cray at Let’s Make Art. She has this oath that she says at the beginning of every tutorial: “I promise to be kind to myself; I promise not to compare my work; And I promise to have fun.” I love this.

Good morning, it’s tuesday and we’re here together. Take measures right now. What feels good? We have tiny life rafts when we look for them.

love,

Kelly