What did you read this week? What do you find yourself thinking about as a result?
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After more than four months away from my novel, I’ve been able to work well again. It’s pure joy and such a relief. My internal compass is guiding me to stay with it. So, my plan is to keep things short this week. Instead of a thoughtful essay about any one of the seven subjects I’ve been developing in google docs, I will tell you about ants, the books by my bed, and the assassin who lives with me. Then I want to hear from you! Think of it as Show and Tell. I’ll go first.
I should be embarrassed to share this with you. Maybe the blush will come later. I have been writing around a parade of ants for the past six days. The ants arrive every August. The usual thing to do is to put a trap where they come in and wait until they go away (cleaning the house doesn’t hurt either but my internal compass has guided me away from that too).
Apparently I need new traps because the ants either walk past the three stations I’ve set up from the wall to the top of my desk and treat the final one as a feeding station. They keep coming back for more. Or maybe they keep coming back for me. These little guys bite.
The shame I ought to feel about this whole situation is missing. Instead, I am weirdly proud that I keep writing in the face of the onslaught. I have, however, invested in new traps.
How do you respond to the invasion of ants? Are they enemies, inspiration, or nothing to you, nothing at all?
Finished: Whistler, Safekeeping, A Three-Dog Life, Women Rowing North, Monster of a Land. Still reading: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. On Deck: Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby and No Straight Road Takes You There. All of these have my brain popping. I am really looking forward to talking them.
Just this morning, I copied the following passage from Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny in my common book. Sonia is working at her grandfather’s desk surrounded by his paintings of the Himalayas before he vanished into them years before. The paintings, she writes, are “portals to a world where human concern has no purchase.”
People may love the high snow mountains, but the mountains did love people. If love were an insignificant matter to the mountains, well, so were hate and fear. To be neither loved or hated, to learn one’s unimportance, to make one’s self beside the point, was surely a relief. A man might rebalance himself against the massive indifference.” - Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
What did you read this week? What do you find yourself thinking about as a result?
Here’s a post that alarmed some friends and reinforced the need for clarity. Frida did not break my hip. It may be only a matter of time, though. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to release her in a crowd of bloated politicians and watch them tumble like ninepins.
What job might your pet qualify for? And did you watch Ride or Die? What did you think?
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“…that year was a pretty rough one. I felt like I’d failed at my relationships and my work; really nothing in my life was going right. That feeling nagged at an insecurity deep down I’d always carried with me, a feeling of never being quite good enough, from the time I was very young.
What drew me to this story, and this horse, is no one thought Seabiscuit would amount to much either…The story is about Seabiscuit, and horse racing, and Depression-era America, for sure. But it’s also about how a group of people who’d been broken by life found something new in themselves, strengths they didn’t know they had. — Terrell Johnson on why Lauren Hillebrand’s book, Seabiscuit, was the right book at a very challenging time.
Right Book, Right Time
Terrell Johnson
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Aug 1
I’m a strong believer in finding the books that speak to us even when we are not looking for them. Many of us have experienced this bit of magic that can happen to readers. Welcome to our new regular feature where bookish folks from all over weigh in on a special book that found them at exactly the right moment. You never know, this may be how you find …
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Ciao for now!
Gratefully yours,
Betsy
Frida, Lily and the wide-open spaces of Dog Beach.
What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.
Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed.
I can’t wait to see what you send!
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