On love and other things.
If someone asked what love is to me, I wouldn’t know what to answer. To me, love is in the small details — when someone holds your hand after you mention in passing your fear of crossing roads, when someone peels an orange and offers the first piece to you, when someone smiles at you the second you look at them, when someone says, “I thought of you” while sending something they saw… it’s many things. And I think that’s what makes it so wonderful.
Most times I’m unsure if I’m capable of loving, but who decides that, really? Like, is someone keeping score? I don’t know. It’s just that sometimes love can look like many things, it’s always different with someone. Always a different experience.
Anyway, I’m not sure if I’ve sent this poem before but you should read it. It’s called ‘On The Back Porch’ by Dorianne Laux and it is so wonderful:
The cat calls for her dinner.
On the porch I bend and pour
brown soy stars into her bowl,
stroke her dark fur.
It’s not quite night.
Pinpricks of light in the eastern sky.
Above my neighbor’s roof, a transparent
moon, a pink rag of cloud.
Inside my house are those who love me.
My daughter dusts biscuit dough.
And there’s a man who will lift my hair
in his hands, brush it
until it throws sparks.
Everything is just as I’ve left it.
Dinner simmers on the stove.
Glass bowls wait to be filled
with gold broth. Sprigs of parsley
on the cutting board.
I want to smell this rich soup, the air
around me going dark, as stars press
their simple shapes into the sky.
I want to stay on the back porch
while the world tilts
toward sleep, until what I love
misses me, and calls me in.
Makes me want to fall in love. Honestly, me and who!!!!!!!!!!!
Anyway, I was doing a bit of reading on fashion and the criticism against it and I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole. I was reading an article and I came across this line, “In academic circles, though, there is often a dismissal of fashion criticism as frivolous — an illegitimate field of cultural criticism. This can, in part, be attributed to fashion’s historical relation with femininity and consumption.”
I’m not entirely surprised, but it’s still a little amusing to me that we dismiss valid fashion criticism as frivolous when it has been anything but that. Anyway, I still need to read more before I can fully form an opinion; so that reading list looks pretty good and I’ll be occupied for a while.
So, over the 5 days, I didn’t send out a newsletter a lot has happened and it’s been…emotionally taxing, to say the least. I’m getting better, slowly and so is everything else in the house but the silent chaos that has made itself home is still quite loud. That said, I think I’ll only be sending out the newsletter weekly. Just once a week until I can find the strength to do two emails in a day.
Until then, stay safe and take care. I’m leaving you with some poems:
- Chana Bloch, “A Life on Earth”
2. Dunya Mikhail, ‘The New Year’, The War Works Hard (trans. Elizabeth Winslow)
3. Christine Garren
