monk mode
After every period of profane excess I enter a period of monk-like devotion to the art of living quietly. There’s a sacred homeostasis my body is inclined to, and if I spend too many consecutive nights drinking heavily and talking til 4 I will certainly spend the next week sipping barley tea, reading alone in a maple tree, or massaging my hands into the rich soil of the garden surrounded by earthworms and beetles, humming to that slow universal rhythm.
This compensation happens naturally. There’s no guilt in living gregariously and therefore the monk period post-partying is never a punishment for my revelry the days before. My body craves mindless joyous dancing with strangers in the dark as much as it craves a solo beach-combing expedition at dawn.
(In traditional Chinese medicine, there’s the idea of excess being dangerous. If there’s too much ‘heat’ in your body, an excess of yang, you consume cooling foods (cucumbers, tofu, honey, pears, etc.) to bolster your yin. But you cannot accumulate ‘cold’ all the time or you will deplete your yang and put you at risk for illness. Though I don’t subscribe to everything in traditional Chinese medicine, I’m enamored with this image of delicate pendulums tracing out our lives. It’s all about balance, baby)
Going to start posting regularly now. Used to tell myself a blogpost was only worthy if lengthy or meaty enough — “give people something substantial to chew on! make them a 5 course meal!” — but that’s silly. Have a nibble. Take a lil gander. Poke around with the tiny fork & knife of your eyes. Skewer a morsel and bring it to your lips, taste it, swallow.
From the journals of Sylvia Plath:
Love is an illusion, but I would willingly fall for it if I could believe in it. Now everything seems either far and sad and cold, like a piece of shale at the bottom of a canyon - or warm and near and unthinking, like the pink dogwood.
The latter! Oh, the latter.
recommendations for the reader
pick out potatoes from the market only if their shapes remind you of something. Examples:
a heart
an asteroid
a coffee bean
the loch ness monster
grow mushrooms at home, be tender
wear your hair in three askew ponytails, shake them around, pretend you are a ponytail percussionist
go to the top of a beautiful hill at dusk and look at the world suffused with a glow
daily ephemera
I’m listening to: Soledad y El Mar by Natalia Lafourcade ft. Los Macorinos
A quote that’s been on my mind:
What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration. One needn’t be, shouldn’t be, reduced to a puppy. If you wish to tell me that the city offers galleries, I’ll pour you a drink and enjoy your company while it lasts; but I’ll bear with me to my grave those pure moments at the Tate (was it the Tate?) where I stood planted, open-mouthed, born, before that one particular canvas, that river up to my neck, gasping, lost, receding into watercolor depth and depth to the vanishing point, buoyant, awed, and had to be literally hauled away.
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I’m growing: chocolate mint, purple basil, tomatoes, a variety of weeds that have flourished in my absence, hair in various locations, blue oyster mushrooms, taller?
