Marginalia: Making things by hand and chasing joy
Journal prompts, pages from my junk journal, and snippets from things I’ve been reading.
Hello loves,
I had something entirely different planned for us this week, but I’m grappling with a nasty bout of viral fever, which means that I’ve had no energy for anything, let alone trying to organize my thoughts and wrangle sensible sentences together.
Instead, I’ve been alternating between curling up in my favorite spot on the couch and lying in bed, buried under a pile of blankets. When I do have a bit of energy, I read. Articles and poems and quotes and books. That seems to be about all that I am able to do. I’ve been slowly making my way through Charlie N. Holmberg’s Boy of Chaotic Making, book 3 in her Whimbrel House series. If you have suggestions for cozy reads, share them with me in the comments?
For this week, I’ll leave you with some quotes and snippets from articles I’ve been reading, a journal prompt and a few pages from some of my older junk journals. Enjoy!
In his recent newsletter,
wrote about handmind, or working with your hands. It’s something I often think about, how doing things with our hands helps us slow down and be a bit more mindful. In a digital, industrialized world, making things by hand feels almost radical. I have a lot of thoughts on this, so you can expect one of the future issues to focus on working with our hands.Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time.
—Alan Jacobs
On a completely different note, I stumbled upon this article by
recently, and it was as if she was echoing what’s been on my mind and heart since a while now. The narrative around an entrepreneurial spirit, burning ambition, knowing what you wanted to do since you were a child is so pervasive it feels like it should be a universal truth. That there’s something wrong with you if you’re just happy to clock in and clock out. To let things tick along gently. It makes me wonder how many stories we absorb that make us feel like there’s something wrong with us, when there really isn’t? After all, so much of what circulates on the internet is meant to sell us something. The messages that gain virality are the dramatic “rags to riches” stories; the quiet, soft stories are often harder to sell.I loved the security and independence that working gave me. I didn’t relate to people who had an “entrepreneurial spirit” - selling lemonade when they were young or finding a gap that needed filling during their university years. I was happy to do my hours, use my skills and clock in, clock out.
Stress-free.
Predictable.
Safe.
Comfortable.
Stepping out with no plan is the complete OPPOSITE!
—Mika
You know the Universe is sending you secret messages when you stumble upon this quote by Rilke when you open Instagram for the first time in 2 days. {And that’s a little clue about the subject of an upcoming issue — improving our relationship with social media.}
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
A journal prompt for you: Make a list of tiny joys. Let this be a running list that you can add to over the week or month or longer. Try to do something from that list every day!
Send me some cozy book recommendations? Or tell me if any of these articles/quotes resonated with you? The comments are always open, or you can simply reply to this email.
You can also hit the like button or restack to Substack Notes to let me know you enjoyed this post. xo
That quote by Rilke is really beautiful. I have also been trying to do more things with my hands. I am doing the 100 day challenge with poetry. But I try to write my poems with pen and paper and then type them in. It really helps to channel the flow of thoughts rather than being distracted by the spell checks and what not. In terms of book recommendations, I recently finished reading Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries and I really enjoyed it. I also like The Door-to-door bookstore. I hope you feel better soon!
Austin Kleon’s handmind article really resonated and after reading it, I switched to doing more of writing in a notebook.