I woke up the last three mornings thinking it was already Friday, AND NOW IT FINALLY IS.
As I wrote earlier this week, I’ve been feeling the heavy, no-end-in-sightedness of this current moment real hard lately. I’ve been eating too many snacks and spending too much time in bed watching HBO (I’m obsessed with High Maintenance, but that’s a post for another time {though I *am* linking to over 20 hours worth of music from the show below for your SIP WFH pleasure}). I want to read but my eyes just trace over the same paragraph over and over. I’m tired all the time, even though I get plenty of sleep.
Since we’ve had to retire horizons for the time being, I thought it would be sweet to take a retrospective. What were you doing at this exact time last year? Scroll back through the photos on your phone and share a memory in the comments below 👇🏽 What were you getting up to, midsummer 2019?
I’ll start:
I know! I know! It’s a terrible photo. But it marks the beginning of one of the most lovely life experiences I’ve had - when I was on a teaching fellowship at USF and got to teach “Intro to Creative Writing” to a smattering of undergrads. On this day I got to go get my faculty ID card and there was so much excitement and expectation around those last days before the semester started.
What about you? Tell me tell me. Remembering these bright moments help us (ok, me) get through this foggy present.
Can’t wait to hear!
xxoodani
Links du jour:
🌎 This link takes you to views from people's windows all around the world. Hopping around from Accra to Amsterdam to Ann Arbor is the most calm I've felt in months. I've been pausing on-and-off during my workdays to stare out windows. It's surprisingly grounding, a way of leaving home for a moment, and a sweet reminder that there’s a whole world out there.
📚I’ve found the work of Dr. Pauline Boss around the concept of “ambiguous loss” to be a particularly helpful resource during this time. This On Being podcast episode on “navigating loss without closure” is one I keep revisiting.
🎼A playlist of twenty (!) hours and twenty-four minutes worth of a VERY eclectic range of music. Since last Saturday, I’ve listened to the whole thing and I promise it’s a great soundtrack for pretty much anything.
Hot days in the community garden, fixing the lock on the shed, grilling veggies on CSA pickup nights and our friend Amelia teaching my 11-year-old sun about infixation. Going up to Millerton for the opening of the Ancestral Heart Zen Monastery and my wife showing us the Swoon Armada raft hidden in the forest. Tomatoes with all the colors in the rainbow in them dropping from vines in our plot. I used to hate tomatoes and now they are how I understand how plants grow from the ground and pull up nutrients because they taste like the sun and dirt and rain, all at once. They taste like summer.
Wandering around the West Village with my best friend of 30 years. Eating, sweating, complaining about how hot it was and how much NYC has changed. Frizzy hair, blisters. The BEST Cacio e Pepe at Via Carota for dinner. squeezed in on a little 2 top, happy. Riding the subway back to BK, people watching, talking, talking, talking.
The two things that stood out: one I can still do and continue to do every week, which is hiking and looking for wildflowers. The other not so much. Weekly community concerts in the park are cancelled, of course, but watching a few videos from last year made me smile. Also noted were some four leaf clovers I found next to a lovely stream and pictures of my parents new cat climbing the fruit trees in their orchard. "Summer On" friends!!
Last July last year was so much more eventful! Highlights include: going to a Backstreet Boys concert (they were my first concert and I saw them again 20 years later!); getting $5 Friday smoothies with my best friend (this was so mundane then and would be such a big outing now!); and attending the 50 year celebration of Apollo landing on the moon at the National Mall (they projected video footage of the landing on to the Washington Monument!). My, things have really changed.
Hot days in the community garden, fixing the lock on the shed, grilling veggies on CSA pickup nights and our friend Amelia teaching my 11-year-old sun about infixation. Going up to Millerton for the opening of the Ancestral Heart Zen Monastery and my wife showing us the Swoon Armada raft hidden in the forest. Tomatoes with all the colors in the rainbow in them dropping from vines in our plot. I used to hate tomatoes and now they are how I understand how plants grow from the ground and pull up nutrients because they taste like the sun and dirt and rain, all at once. They taste like summer.
David, wow. *Runs off to google "infixation..."
(also: Swoon Armada!?)
I always felt similarly about tomatoes. But when they're good, there's nothing else like them.
Love you.
Infixation as in "unbefuckinglievable" - she was teaching Arlo the proper way to bisect a word and insert f-bombs in the middle.
And the armada: https://bit.ly/2BQxtKk
Wandering around the West Village with my best friend of 30 years. Eating, sweating, complaining about how hot it was and how much NYC has changed. Frizzy hair, blisters. The BEST Cacio e Pepe at Via Carota for dinner. squeezed in on a little 2 top, happy. Riding the subway back to BK, people watching, talking, talking, talking.
my heart is bursting.
The two things that stood out: one I can still do and continue to do every week, which is hiking and looking for wildflowers. The other not so much. Weekly community concerts in the park are cancelled, of course, but watching a few videos from last year made me smile. Also noted were some four leaf clovers I found next to a lovely stream and pictures of my parents new cat climbing the fruit trees in their orchard. "Summer On" friends!!
these images are the sweetest <3
Last July last year was so much more eventful! Highlights include: going to a Backstreet Boys concert (they were my first concert and I saw them again 20 years later!); getting $5 Friday smoothies with my best friend (this was so mundane then and would be such a big outing now!); and attending the 50 year celebration of Apollo landing on the moon at the National Mall (they projected video footage of the landing on to the Washington Monument!). My, things have really changed.
wow Lori! This just filled my heart with so much joy. reminds me of a high school summer - easy and free and full of smoothies and backstreet boys.