November Scroll
Birthday candles, artworks, and finding ten minutes a day to read Proust (as every writer should, or so they say)...
“I asked for one thing: a wet, murky, snow-less November. With the sun peaking through the haze so rarely, its appearance is akin to a celebration.
I received just that: a rainy, (almost) snow-less, mild and bare November.
The month that is not ashamed of its bareness.”
(On the other hand, it was a rather hectic month. I kept asking myself, “How come? Why am I always so busy?” Hence, don’t be surprised if you find this scroll much shorter than the previous ones.
I managed to decorate the house for Christmas, finished the top-priority work projects, and kept my kids clean and nourished. Is that something to brag about? I can’t be quite sure because my original plan to grind through November so I could take it a little easier in December…well, it shuttered, and I had to be okay with that.)
Recipes of the Month:
Green beans with Cranberries and Almonds by LivVegan Strong
Cream of Zucchini Soup by Ricardo
Artworks of the Month:
Poetry of the Month:
Movies of the Month:
Substacks of the Month:
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born by Escaping Flatland
One thing that sets these intensely creative individuals apart, as far as I can tell, is that when sitting with their thoughts they are uncommonly willing to linger in confusion. To be curious about that which confuses. Not too rapidly seeking the safety of knowing or the safety of a legible question, but waiting for a more powerful and subtle question to arise from loose and open attention. This patience with confusion makes them good at surfacing new questions.
If You Want to Be an Artist, Don’t Quit Your Day Job…Yet by Fairy Tales by Caroline
But—I recently read Real Artists Don’t Starve, and the part of the book that struck me the most was his exploration of the role of day jobs in an artist’s life. After finishing the book, I reflected back on the near-decade I’ve spent working a job during the day while pursuing my true passions on mornings, nights, and weekends. And I realized that perhaps the jobs I’d lamented as obstacles to my progress might actually have been quite the opposite.
Books of the Month:
“But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call “seeing a person we know” is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.”
And one random newspaper clipping that I wanted more people to read:
The Activity of the Month:
I had a lovely birthday celebration, so I’ll just leave it here.
See you in the next one!