Snippets and Small Parts

The Isles of Curiosity and Wonder midsummer creative retreat will be back for another edition this year. 5 days all on an imaginary island, starts June 20th and is one of the seasonal perks for paid subscribers. If you’ve been debating on getting a paid subscription now is a good time to do so. And yes there’s Isles of Curiosity and Wonder merch.

Hello friends,

I’m writing this in the morning hours of the final day of May.

I love this season. Sunset gets later and later, evening walks can be pushed to past 9pm. The birds rise incredibly early. The weather is warm, but not too warm yet. Enjoyable, not stifling. Foxgloves and daisies line the highway, stretches that are at other times of the year boring and ugly brought to life by beauty.

I text with a friend about foxgloves. How weird they look, how they have such a good name. Right now there’s a patch of them near the water on my walk, and the purple and pink contrast with the blue behind. Like blue sea and orange lichen on granite rocks from a few weeks ago on the other side of the world, a beach lit up by fiery hues. Or the California poppies that line the edge of the bay, at night rolled up like orange pieces of paper.

A section of Braiding Sweetgrass comes to mind, Robin Wall Kimmerer discussing how two flowers match so well together, nature understanding what complements each other.¹ How does nature know, why does she do it?

I debate on whether I should page through my copy to find the reference so I can share it here, but then think about that other thing I read not too long ago by Oliver Burkeman about reading. You don’t have to retain everything. You read a book and just let it sink in. See what’s still there several months later.

I’m paraphrasing here. Vague inklings and memories from what has stood out on pages and that now has been translated through my own mind and words.

This has been top of mind lately researching a project. I try to remind myself that you can’t hold all the information and knowledge at once. You can only focus on snippets and small parts. You take in what you can, hope that with a little rest, a little movement, your mind will be able to connect the dots, shape something new.

If I was trying to turn these words into something more shareable, here’s the point where I’d link to a few different methods of researching and organizing. Turn an essay into something that has a takeaway, a word of wisdom. But I don’t want to go search the vast and endless internet for some additional tidbit of information that will quickly be forgotten, and I’m tired by everything always needing to have an answer. I don’t want to be a searching robot, I want to be a thinking, feeling human.

The most useful tip I learned this week was to add “-ai” at the end of search terms, so that you tell Google, pretty please don’t give me an AI summary. Half the time I forget to do it. “Command + T” such a learned and automatic physical reaction to having a question. Open a new tab to ask. There are so many tabs. There are so many windows with so many tabs.

Is this the digital showcase of curiosity?

In paper form, I read a book that’s written by a woman on another continent, about another life, and yet somehow it makes me feel more than anything I’ve read lately. The kind of book that makes your fingers start to twitch because you too want to be able to formulate complicated feelings in that way.

“It takes twenty-two hours to fly to London with a layover stop. You are so far away, people say somewhat accusingly, as if amazed that in this modern world that blips and fizzes by under our control, we still can’t move the tectonic plates any closer. Our geography seems to deny the technological progress as we keep drifting further and further apart.” -Kavita Bedford

I start to read another book, this one centered around bioluminescence. In digital form I learn about leaf sheep, an ocean-dwelling organism that photosynthesizes. Some people call it a “solar powered sea slug.” I spend hours reading old newspaper archives and academic journals about turn-of-the-century health cures. I sometimes wonder if you just swapped out the date for something more recent, would anyone even notice? It all feels cyclical. Like we never learn our lessons, always return to the same things.