November 21, 2023
Gleanings
- I do love to inject a bit of novelty into our Advent. And I’ve loved creating a new Yule Log for ELEVEN out of the past THIRTEEN years I’ve been posting here on SSJ (and, before that, on The Lunchbox Season). That’s a top-ten list and a bonus! But I hereby proclaim, “Eleven yule logs is enough.” My work is done in the tree-like cake department. They’re all my babies and they’re all my favourites. And I don’t need to build my catalogue up to a dozen log-cakes, let alone a baker’s dozen.
- This is one of my favourite things about the novella form: the way that worlds are created with just enough carefully crafted elements and strong imagery to bring them alive and to gain your trust, and the rest is on you. Novellas just don’t have the time or the space to hold your hand. I find myself loving that.
- That what we must do is awaken our own creativity, generosity, and create small islands of sanity when we cannot stop the insanity that is occurring elsewhere.
- My Significant Other tends to get depressed around his birthday. And he’s had a hard year. Last year’s birthday was spent in the hospital and this year is a significant milestone so I decided that we needed to celebrate. Really celebrate.
- I did have a minute of thinking, “hmmm, I never even tried this on before today, it would be terrible if I were allergic to yak hair and found out during a six-hour meeting.” But if the yak hair did give me a terrible rash at least I would be sitting with fifty dermatologists, and maybe some of them have cutting-edge creams in their carry-ons. (The denouement: no issues! Me and yak hair sweaters are best friends.)
- I quilted rivers all over the quilt, trying to echo the routes, the oxbows, the chaotic systems of those days. I listened to the news and quilted, hoping to find a way to see something positive in what had happened.
- I read that Bening trained relentlessly for a year to hone her stroke, and averaged four to eight hours in the water, day and night, in all kinds of weather conditions. She was adamant that she would swim every stroke in the film. Nyad was obsessive and single-minded in her pursuit of her goal, and Bening was obsessive and single minded in pursuit of hers. “We build these cages for ourselves in our brains about what we can and can’t do,” Bening says. “We get so used to that, that we sort of even forget that they’re there.”
- It is poisonous stuff, though, and—to bring Amis back into it—there’s such a sense of gleeful bad boy “look at me” about the whole thing, with all the metafictional cleverness deployed as back-up in case the whole “I’m only joking” excuse isn’t enough.
- There was a sense that the tree itself knew it had become a danger and the space it left was given like a gift, not only to the bee balm and juniper, lilac and witch hazel that have barely survived in its shadow but to me, personally. Its stumps invite me to weave ribbons around them and carve them with Cohen’s words.
- i feel that veil is thin, yes, and it is the grey boundaries between past and future in which i feel myself becoming a flock of birds. the neither here nor there, an inability to be present for it.
- Start with the darkness, the unknown hour. Roll over. Squint to see if the glimmer of light could possibly be the beginning of the sun rise. Notice the well-worn thoughts about not getting enough sleep and the old stories from days gone by that still want to dictate how this day with little sleep will go.
