What's Good?

The everydayness.

“Cozy Reading” print

New prints in the shop // Valentine’s cards for friends

Hello friends,

What do we do in an emergency? What do we do in a crisis? Those are questions surfacing with great frequency right now. They are important, yes. The answer of course, is largely unknowable. We can project and guess, but we never fully understand how we will react in the face of the unthinkable until it’s right in front of us.

But what do we do in the other moments? What do we do in the more average pockets of life? The mundane times? The not-much-to-say-about-them times? The everyday times? Even the times that take place in, and during, a crisis? After all, that’s the bulk of our lives.

I get the sense that we’re all in reactive mode right now. Watching a crisis unfold before our eyes, not entirely sure what to do, but attempting to steel ourselves to take on whatever is thrown at us.

This is not the place of great decision making, not the place of great creative dreaming, not the place of building and regenerating. It is a place of stress, it is a space of flight, flight, freeze, and fawn. This doesn’t speak to some individual inability to take on a difficult situation, it’s simply what the brain does.

It’s not a time to look away, but we can’t live inside the news either. We risk outrage fatigue, we risk replacing our own physical reality with one on a screen, we risk forgetting what is worth protecting. We need breathing room. We need tethers to the lives right in front of us. So that we can continue to plan, to dream, to build, to regenerate.

These past couple of weeks my friend Roshni was home visiting, which meant that she was walking distance from my house. We popped in to check on each other, walked down to morning swim group together, came back and drank coffee before getting on with our days. Living in a rural community, I didn’t have any friends within walking distance growing up. This felt like the ultimate luxury. Nothing grandiose, just everyday life being lived.

Daisy Buchanan

wrote this week about the question, “what did you do yesterday?” It’s a reference to a podcast, where people are asked, well, what they did yesterday. I loved Daisy’s reflections on the fact that the answers rarely involve anything glamorous. It’s mostly just the kind of day-to-day stuff that makes up most of our lives. As Daisy wrote, “where can we live but days?”

What have I done with my days? I went to book club last week, I worked on my own book, I texted with friends, I sent emails, I drank coffee, Luc made a fire in the woodstove when I came back from swimming, I watched All Creatures Great and Small, I packed to leave on a research trip, I tried to get my bookkeeping up-to-date for tax time, I had dinner with my parents.

I’m at the beginning of a month of travel, so this may be why I feel more drawn to the everydayness of life than usual. But I also think it’s because the everydayness is grounding, and in the midst of uncertainty, it’s what we have to come back to.

found in a book this week.

It’s snowing where I am right now. I’m away from my usual everyday life, in an Airbnb instead of my house. But the routines are the same: make coffee, sit down and write.

There’s a quiet, a settling that comes with the snow. I watch it fall outside the window, pondering the blanket embrace a fresh dusting brings. I open the door and stand outside with my coffee mug. It’s cold, and even though I am in a city, the snow has quieted everything. I can hear it falling. The snow feels like a buffer of sorts. Protective.

Yesterday, as I sat waiting to board my plane, I opened up

Chris La Tray

’s newsletter. He had included Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Gate A-4,” which felt fitting to read as I sat there looking around at my fellow travelers. A couple of friends had sent this poem to me several years ago when someone else had shared it in a newsletter.

Isn’t that the way with things? We pass good things on when we come across them. We hope that they offer something to the recipient. The magic of art and words on a never-ending, and unexpected path.

So I figured, maybe today is the day that you need this poem in your inbox.

I keep finding myself asking silently, “what’s good?” As if it’s some kind of mantra to seek out what is good around me. To not just constantly be stuck in a cycle of repeating what is bad. To instead match the intake of one reality with another reality.

What’s good?

The snow, the promise of seeing a faraway friend next month, frozen seaweed at the boat launch, the colorful mosaic in an airport bathroom, finishing a project, the conversation of strangers next to me, buying new books at the bookstore, painting with hot pink (IYKYK), putting a stamp on an envelope and knowing that it will appear in someone’s mailbox, buying seeds, a stack of library books that’s clearly too big to actually read.

A moment to sit down, write some words, send them off, and hope they do whatever they need to do when they land.

-Anna

I do love a pun. More cards here.

• Loved this piece on how to harvest a shape and

  Kristen Drozdowski
  advice of “instead of creating… recording, retelling, recollecting, remembering.”

• Bill McKibben
  on pushing back, and a new global day of action: Sun Day.

• Every time Anne -Louise Ewen sends a shop update, I’m always inspired by her new work.

• Thanks to

  Ali LaBelle
  for featuring the lovely art of French textile artist Sandrine Torredemer.

• Highly recommend

  Glynnis MacNicol
  ’s memoir I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself which I read last month.

• Katy Kelleher
  writes one of my favorite newsletters, all about color. This time: lemon chiffon.

• “the seal said, there is no ending. No beginning. There is only shapeshifting. And rolled on its back so that the sun warmed its belly.”

  Cheryl Strayed
  interviews Lidia Yuknavitch.

• And now of course, the poem….

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