Hi friends,
Today, something new, something special. I made an illo-photo-poem to tentatively celebrate coming off a transitional season between work and homes. I’m breathlessly excited for both to settle into quiet normalcy as I remind myself in the interim: ongoing pandemic = existential limbo, leeching off each other.
Though covid or not, we’re always maneuvering the in betweens—of illness and health, young and old, work and rest, family and friend, friend and lover, home and home. This strange era keeps stretching those boundaries, pulling our hearts together and apart until the elastic in between breaks, yet surprise! Stronger bonds emerge from the recesses.
Paid supporters can expect another email with an accompanying personal essay, with more notes on the vagaries of life and independent work. Format inspired by Weiwei Hsu's comic log So.. Where's Home?, and idea of extra paid newsletter borrowed from Coleen Baik's The Line Between. Both two of my favorites. <3
A quote to prepare the palate:
...the experience of being in between—between the time we leave home and arrive at our destination; between the time we leave adolescence and arrive at adulthood; between the time we leave doubt and arrive at faith. It is like the time when a trapeze artist lets go the bar and hangs in midair, ready to catch another support: it is a time of danger, of expectation, of uncertainty, of excitement, of extraordinary aliveness. (Paul Tournier, A Place for You)
And amuse-bouche number two:
The photos that resulted are notably different from what we might ordinarily think of as photojournalism: they are dynamic but are not the action-packed singles of the kind that win photojournalism prizes. There is something far more patient at work in them. We feel that the photographer has not so much captured a “decisive moment” as gained us admission into private moments of long duration. Many of the images project the longueurs that are, after all, a substantial part of regular life: unhurried, unharried, the part of life that isn’t caught up in working for pay, the part of life that is a straight catalogue of the passing minutes. (Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things)
Onwards.
Credits
*Eugene H. Peterson
**Friedrich Nietzsche
***J. R. R. Tolkien
If you’d like to share this, find an online version here on my website. (Prettier experience!)
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😍 👏 ✨