October 6, 2020
Gleanings
- I mean, how hard can it be? I had an idea, a story arc and time. All I needed to do was turn on the tap and it would flow out. Right?
- We made friends, we built a life—a good life—together, we have a language-for-just-us and code words and in-jokes.
- On Wednesday night I read the final chapter in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to my youngest daughter—thus closing the chapter on one of the major post-diagnosis goals I had set for myself.
- What a joyful thing. Evoking a response, a thought, interpretation, connection through your own expression.
- “October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins. O autumn! O teakettle! O grace!”
- My truth is that the quiet, almost eremitic hours I spend in the forest, are sacred and essential – how I am able to find peace in this time of high anxiety.
- Every day my walk is the same. And entirely different.
- But when, like most of us, I ran low on white flour in April, I used whole wheat instead and discovered that the recipe wasn’t just as good as it was with white flour, but better.
- And thinking about archives at the same time because I was already lamenting that I’d never done the thing that I’d always thought I would do: keep a regular reading journal, keep track of everything I read, and when, and what I thought. I was disappointed in myself beyond words and then, man, I realized that if only I’d done the same thing with the quilts I’ve made over the past 35 years…
- The Voyage Out soon began to spill into other areas of my life.
- “I’ve trained myself to do many different things in small segments over the course of the day…..Yesterday I began by making a butternut squash cake for our meeting, then I worked on my kintsugi.”
- Sometimes you have to kill all your darlings. Throw the whole book out and start again from scratch.
- What I found most disturbing about the book is that I know Mattie Rigsbees.
- Just as a cook needs to learn to diversify in the types of foods and the differences in spices, cooking methods, and ingredients used, so too should a photographer embrace their own diversifications.
- Sometimes, writers of dark fiction blur the lines between horror and the psychological thriller.
- This year, I took a different kind of breather, challenging myself to walk 300 kilometres, or an average of 10k per day. On twenty-nine of those thirty days, I walked.
