No.278
March ending, a list:
This building was constructed in 1879 and as such the original cast iron guttering is very tired. While I feel similarly tired the rusted, peeling gutters demanded attention and so I seem to have decided that I will personally restore and repaint them—not the first time they’ve been repainted by a patient person, or persons—along with all of the wooden fascia, and the painted stone surrounding some of the windows. Read: Harebrained, an adjective which should really be a compliment instead of an insult, the latter being incredibly insulting to hares, which are one of the most beautiful creatures to be alive alongside
I keep finding tiny carpet bugs on the windowsills, and I should be keeping track or tally or something to make sure we don’t have a growing carpet bug problem, but I tell myself if I keep dropping them out of windows then at some point or another they’ll stop appearing altogether. Also confusing is the fact that while they are definitely alive I never actually see them move, and all this is insulting in that they are here when we don’t even have any carpets
The weather is currently very confused, and I don’t know why anyone acts surprised at this anymore because we all know why it is confused
You saw a bird carrying an object that looked larger than the bird itself
Pleasing are the colours which accompany the essays introducing each of the seven chapters in Words to Love a Planet. From left to right: Seasons, Land, Time, Water, Weather, Home, Being.
More often than not I catch myself frowning
I like the thought of catching oneself, like catching as a game of tag, or catching as a soft landing, or like how sometimes you manage to catch something out of thin air—it is important, I think, to catch yourself
I’ve written about The Womens Press before, a no-longer publishing house, but this is what happened when you went without me to the secondhand bookstore in a nearby town:
From the introduction of my almost-published-now book:
“One of the more meaningful definitions of translation I’ve encountered framed the process not as one of moving words between languages but rather of migrating understanding or meaning across distances, and it seems both reasonable and right that the fullest, most vivid meaning of a word can only truly be understood by someone if the language in question belongs to them. We can close gaps a little, maybe even a lot, meet each other’s eyes in an approximation of knowing or empathy, but we can never close those gaps completely, and I don’t think we need to try to. What seems to me most essential is to make room in your life for other ways of being, room for people to be other ways around you, room for other ways to look at the living things already existing closest to you while helping those who exist at a distance. To consider, however briefly or thoroughly you would like to, your own life, your own lived landscapes, and the ways in which you are going about loving both people and planet.”
Unsurprising: it is hard to think reasonably when someone is drilling into the side of your stone house
In a lot of ways March in Scotland still feels like winter, and it is, and the spring (or ‘northward’) equinox makes far more sense as the beginning of a year—the Babylonian calendar began at this equinox, the Persian and Iranian calendars still do. It doesn’t feel right to begin something with a great energetic flourish when you’re still weathering the cold present, and the trees know this. The trees in question:
BOOK NEWS:
More harping, not least because Words to Love a Planet is out, in the US, in only 10 days. And now through until 12am CST on April 7th, as a small gift, anyone who either has already pre-ordered the US edition or does now pre-order the US edition can receive, in two different colourways, a high resolution file of one of the paintings in the book. (You’ll find this painting on page 220, towards the end, accompanying the Finnish word kaukokaipuu.)
Originally the publisher asked me what I’d like to do as a small gift for pre-orders of the book and I said send them a physical poster?! but they couldn’t do that for practical reasons and so instead these files you can download and use to print as anything you’d like, being plenty large enough for 70 x 50 cm posters, or things along those lines.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
The windows, doors, and still lives of painter Jan van der Kooi (b.1957)—the light in these of course, good, a type of light I’m currently sitting in having scuttled to work in a room on the southwest side of the house, the one that gets lit up during the latter part of an afternoon, an early evening.
Related: the alternate title, or subtitle I suppose, for the chapter ‘Time’ in Words to Love a Planet:
Time
Or: The light changes a million times a day, which can save you
But I needed to ground myself in what was real for a larger portion of time. I needed to touch things that have molecules and atoms, rocks and leaves. I needed to spend time making things with my hands and feeling that sense of completion. I needed to provide space for long periods of contemplation, write in longhand, hear the scraping of the pen across the page.
— Keri Smith, from this post, which a reader of this newsletter kindly shared with me recently (I’ve admired, and found value in, Keri Smith’s thoughts on many different matters over the years, and this piece is no exception)
(Today, here, the sun will set at 6:46pm, a time it feels like the birds wait for.)
AGAIN AND FOR HOWEVER LONG NECESSARY: Reading list for a Free Palestine. / The Environmental Devastation of Genocide / Ten free ebooks for getting free from Haymarket Books. / Support verified Sudanese support campaigns. / Email templates and support options for a Free Palestine.
Beautiful 🙌