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Archive for the ‘Beauty’ Category

April 2025 TBR

Posted in Beauty, Books, Hope, Poetry, Reading Challenges, Resolutions, tagged , , , on April 1, 2025| 2 Comments »

Yay, poetry month! There are lots of ways to celebrate National Poetry Month. As usual, I’m going to read a lot of poetry (as well as prose written by poets), and I hope to write some as well during April.

Today, I am kicking off the celebration with a donation to the Friends of the Denton Public Library, a group that does so much to support the work our local library does for our community.

In addition to poetry, there are a couple of books that are coming out this month and some other exciting reads on my radar. 

Book Clubs

52 Book Club Challenge

Libro.fm Challenge

  • Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio – Listen to an audiobook mentioned on the Libro.fm podcast [general fiction]
  • Murder at Gulls Nest by Jess Kidd – Preorder an audiobook and start it on release day [mystery]

Bad Bitch Book Club

  • The Housemaid’s Secret by Freida McFadden – an anticipated sequel to a book you loved [mystery] – stayed up past my bedtime reading this in one night. No regrets.
  • The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin – a book that takes place in a library or bookstore [books about books]
  • The Midnight Library by Matt Haig – give an author a second chance at winning you over [fantasy/magical realism]

Nowhere Book Bingo

Overeducated Women With Cats Challenge

  • The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich – a book reviewed by OWC [general fiction]
  • Dear Writer by Maggie Smith – a book published in 2025 [books on writing]

What are you most excited to read this month?

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Friday Five – First Week Blues

Posted in Beauty, Books, Friday Five, Mental Health, Quiet, Resolutions on January 17, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Whew. This week. The first week of classes is always a wild ride but I am pretty sure this week has lasted 14 years. It’s been a lot. Add my own personal not-doing-great-mentally to the mix and…I’m just really, really glad this weekend has an extra day. I hope I’ll actually be able to take a mental break from work and to deal gently with all the other nonsense going on in the world so that the stress doesn’t just keep compounding. 

  • I love that Joy the Baker’s word of the year is joy. I also love a gentle January (which this one has definitely not been for me thus far), and this post is full of inspiration for unabashed moseying. 
  • I enjoyed this extensive list of ways to get involved if you are concerned about book bans. 
  • My friend is seeking legal assistance with getting her son the help he needs. Please donate if you can.
  • In light of my general overwhelm about financial…anything…I have enlisted the help of Tori Dunlap’s community, The $100K Club. It is way outside my comfort zone but in just the last three days is already helping me. The monthly membership fee ($47) is somewhat steep for my budget, but that is still less stressful than trying to piece together all this info myself and weed through all the advice people like to give (omg the mounds of opinions – most of them either completely irrelevant to me or just plain bad advice).
  • Susan Cain’s post about what she learned from her father on living a quiet life resonated with me. Today the encouragement to do beautiful things just for the sake of doing them was exactly what I needed. 
  • Edited to add this bonus because it’s so good and something I need to remember about myself this month as a reminder to breathe first and then respond. I don’t have to perpetuate bad history by making anger my default. People lash out when they’re sad.

I hope that you are well and that your weekend is easy/fun!

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Friday Five – Cultivating Joy

Posted in Beauty, Friday Five, Home, Joy, Revolution, Seasons on December 20, 2024| Leave a Comment »

I love transitional periods. This fondness makes today one of my favorite days of the year. The short last day of work before the break that starts another transitional period between the year we are finishing and the year ahead. Other than the time surrounding my birthday, this is usually my very favorite week.

It’s also joy season.

I mean, joy is for always. But I am paying particular attention to it these days, trying to find it wherever and whenever I can. I love this piece by Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes where she shares her secret for finding joy, especially this quote: “I cultivate joy as a discipline, attentive to finding it in life’s everyday moments, determined to ride this thing until the wheels fall off. In a death-dealing culture, joy is a form of resistance. I am decidedly oppositional in my joy.”

Seeing joy as resistance to the junk of the world is a nice motivation to pursue it more assertively.

Here are some ways I plan to do that over my break from work:

  • Spending quality time with family and friends
  • Making art (writing, music, baking, crafts, etc.)
  • Reading for long, luxurious stretches of time
  • Cleaning out the parts of my apartment that seem cluttered to make them cozy and functional again
  • Unraveling my year and preparing for the new one

I hope you have a wonderful weekend, friends!

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Friday Five – Extraordinary, Mundane Fall Bucket List

Posted in 31 Days, Alive, Beauty, Bookshops, Coffee Shop Road Trip, Dance, Denton, Food, Friday Five, Home, Joy, Mental Health, Music on October 18, 2024| Leave a Comment »

“My bucket list of little things aims to live every moment as if it’s my first. To find the glory in what a seasoned eye might falsely consider mundane.”
Andrea Gibson, Things That Don’t Suck (Substack)

It has been a long week. Nothing particularly bad has happened. I’ve just felt puny and tired. The weather, however, is gorgeous. It was 52 when I left home. I am wearing a light sweater!

Today, I need a list of things to look forward to this season that aren’t super ambitious but still give me ways to ground myself and remind myself that I’m alive and meant to be living and not just muddling through.

  • Buy a delicious cup of coffee and drink it while browsing a bookstore. Take all the time I want.
  • Take shorter, more frequent walks. Not everything has to be hard all at once. A little bit multiple times a day is better than pushing myself and getting too exhausted to do anything else for hours.
  • Keep my hands warm and nimble with piano and knitting.
  • Make soup without rushing. Pan roast the veggies slowly. Add one ingredient at a time. Fill my home with cozy smells.
  • Take drives. Drive down winding country roads just outside of town and find the few trees in Texas that know what time of year it is. Drive down my favorite streets and let the memories of every time I’ve been there before flow over me.

This is what I want my season to look like.

What are you looking forward to this fall?

Reflecting on reading this month (and hopefully beyond).

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Day 9 – Practice

Posted in 31 Days, Alive, Beauty, Books, Core, Getting It Together, Home on October 9, 2024| Leave a Comment »

“I mean, I just worry… I don’t think about what I want, I just worry about what might happen to me and then figure out how to keep those things from happening.”

“…becoming who you want to be is just like anything else. It takes practice. It requires belief that one day, you’ll wake up and be a natural at it.”
Alison Espach, The Wedding People

This whole book was a roller coaster for me, and this was a good year for me to read it. I’m glad it came out when it did.

I live most of my life bouncing between these two goals:

  • Throwing all my energy into doing what I can to avoid bad things like losing my job (and thus my insurance and all the things I rely on my paycheck to cover) or death
  • Creating a life that actually feels worth living

I suspect it’s the same for a lot of people.

For the most part, I can trace my best days to the ones when my focus is on more creative aspirations than when I’m just trying to elbow my way through it. The energy required is about the same – I don’t tend to half-ass things, even when they’re not technically my passion – but the reward is far greater when I can see a tangible path toward the life I imagine to be ideal.

Imagine, because I haven’t actually lived it yet. I’m not quite who I want to be when I grow up. I’ve gotten fleeting tastes of the good life and my ideal self but have yet to make either my standard.

It’s a life surrounded by books and bookish people/events. It definitely starts later in the day than my current schedule usually does. It involves occasional travel, but it’s more about creating a life I don’t need a vacation from.

My future self is a person whose default is grace and generosity of spirit (and also resources, as long as we’re wishing for things). She is curious and has the time and space to drop everything for a good story. She is a solid but soft place to land for those who need it. However, when she invites people in, she lets them sort out their own feelings about whoever else shows up rather than doing their emotional labor/conflict management for them (I think this is one of the lessons I’m learning this year).

I love planning for this future self and the life I want for her. I hope they’re both possible, and I hope they’re everything I have imagined them to be.

I’m reflecting on what my reading is teaching me this year.

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Day 7 – Between the Pages

Posted in 31 Days, Beauty, Books, Church, Joy, Lush on October 7, 2024| Leave a Comment »

“He doesn’t say what he is thinking, which is that his church is held-breath story listening and late-night-concert ear-ringing rapture and perfect-boss fight-button pressing. That his religion is buried in the silence of freshly fallen snow, in a carefully crafted cocktail, in between the pages of a book somewhere after the beginning but before the ending.”
Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

The Starless Sea is one of my favorite books I’ve read this year. I love everything about it. The storyline is intricate and the characters are well-developed. It is full of mystery and surprise, and it doesn’t shy away from darker emotions.

Most of all, though, it resonates with me through little moments like this one. There is almost a holiness to the language, conjuring images and sensations that stir my soul.

I’m having a hard time putting this reflection into words. It’s something like church, though. I am a rarity among my friends in that I do actually attend church, and I find the sacred there. The care and love of a community. The big picture.

One of my favorite aspects of my faith, however, is that the divine isn’t confined to a building or a specific group of people. It’s in a million little things, like wind chimes and cloud formations. Kindness. A really good cup of coffee. A dish of water set out for the birds.

This quote reminds me of moments that make up a whole life.

I’m reflecting on my reading this month.

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Day 4 – An Always Within Never

Posted in 31 Days, Alive, Beauty, Books, Church, Health, Mental Health on October 5, 2024| Leave a Comment »

“I have finally concluded, maybe that’s what life is about: there’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It’s as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never. Yes, that’s it, an always within never.”
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Today’s post may be a little short. I’ve not been feeling well this week. I tried to push through, expecting my default version of taking it easy by going to work a little later and canceling a meeting or evening plans a couple of times would do the trick it usually does/used to do.

But no.

Last night I didn’t sleep a lot because I was up and sick with a fever and various other unpleasant symptoms. I finally admitted to myself around 4:00 that I wouldn’t be able to go in today at all.

I hate it. I’m so tired of being sick. It may be quite a while until I’m back to what I’m used to seeing as normal for me. The despair is so heavy at times that it’s almost a tangible presence.

I’m not much of a bright-sider, but I know that little touches of light and beauty are good tools to guide me out of the dark. Things like kind words from friends, the perfect cup of coffee, my favorite sweatshirt. My faith. My art. Constants that I can always depend on even when it seems like the bad things will never go away.

My always within never.

I’m sharing reading reflections this month. Click for the long list.

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Day 3 – Echo

Posted in 31 Days, Beauty, Books, Core, Home, Mental Health, Quiet, tagged , , , , on October 3, 2024| 2 Comments »

“Give yourself permission to make your networks echo chambers.”
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes, Sacred Self-Care: Daily Practice for Nurturing Our Whole Selves

I’ve gotten a lot of advice on how to take it easy this year. Most of it was wisdom I specifically sought out, whether in reading or asking questions of people who had either gone through what I was going through or at least seemed like they were doing something right.

When I read this quote, it punched me in the gut a little. It was gentle enough for me to be amenable to it but strong enough for me to take notice.

One of my core values is curiosity. I love learning new things. I am fascinated by perspectives and experiences different from my own. I aim to start conversations by being open to explanations and trying to understand rather than by assuming I already know their intentions and have decided they’re the worst.

This practice has served me well. I am more liberal than the average Democrat (Two-party system? More like two sides, same coin) and I live in Texas. I have a lot of…opportunities…to listen to people with whom I disagree. And with many people (not all – some people really are just assholes full of hate), when I listen to them, they let their guard down enough to listen back. And we both learn that we have more goals in common than we thought. They no longer see me as the enemy they imagined me to be.

Changing hearts and minds, one radical conservative at a time.

An echo chamber (wherein you surround yourself only with people who agree with you) is not generally conducive to this practice. My gut reaction to Dr. Walker-Barnes’s advice was immediately no.

Then the curiosity kicked in.

As I read on, I thought about all the places that I carve out in my life where I feel safe. Places where every word isn’t a constant struggle and every nuance doesn’t have to be analyzed and defined. They still challenge me and make me think (because I like that) but they at least give me a soft and loving place to do it.

I see this all over my environment. For example, the picture above was taken in my office at work. I have

  • Twinkle lights (that need new batteries but still – they’re there)
  • Pretty bottles and rocks
  • A nice mix of inspiring nonfiction, fiction, and poetry
  • Fun stuff for play and art

A visual echo chamber, if you will.

The more I read, the more I wondered what it would be like if at least one of my social media networks was an echo chamber. What if, when I opened the app, I wasn’t immediately bombarded with every snarky, petty dig someone could think to take at people who are doing what I consider to be good in the world? What would that be like?

So I tried it on Instagram. Mass unfollowing. That alone was pretty cathartic.

The days that followed, though? Heavenly. There is so much wonderful going on out there. Did you all know this? I’m a little sad that I missed out on it for so long.

It’s still not all shiny happy news, but it’s very grounding. It’s a reminder that I’m not alone (because in Texas, I often feel very, very alone).

How do you feel about echo chambers? What purpose (if any) do they serve in your life?

I’m reflecting on what I’ve read this year.

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Friday Five – Delight

Posted in Beauty, Books, Food, Friday Five, Music, Nostalgia on June 28, 2024| Leave a Comment »

This week has been hectic both at work and in my personal life, but there have been so many things that have delighted and pleased me. Here are a few:

  • I am fascinated that such a thing as a happiness expert exists (I’m a fan, to be clear), and I enjoyed this article on their daily habits. 
  • Roxane Gay is saying goodbye to her column Work Friend, and she wrote a beautiful send-off to it. 
  • Dorie Greenspan of World Peace Cookies fame (and baking in general – the cookies are just how I was introduced to her) wrote a lovely piece on getting out of a personal rut/funk entitled “A book that’s bigger than you are.” 
  • Speaking of books, my favorite book I’ve read this week is The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff. It’s the follow-up to 84, Charing Cross Road, and it is just as charming. 
  • I love the Gaia Music Collective (I want to sing with 100+ people!!) but I especially loved this arrangement. I played this song for my piano recital the same month my childhood friend Ginger died, and it always reminds me of her. 

I hope you have a wonderful weekend full of all your favorite things and people!

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Friday Five – Inspired

Posted in Beauty, Dance, Feminism, Friday Five, Health, Lament, Writing on June 21, 2024| Leave a Comment »

This was a momentous week. This was the first week of the whole year that I had zero doctor’s appointments. Also no labs, no tests, no treatments, no “here is what this next thing is going to cost you” meetings. Nothing. It’s been nice. I could get used to this. I mean, I won’t, because soon I start radiation and will have a treatment every day. But it’s been good to have a break.

Inspiration has come from a lot of places this week. Enjoy!

  • I love this commencement speech that Reshma Saujani gave at Smith last year. Down with imposter syndrome!
  • This is terrifying and inspiring and bring it on (the menopause, to be clear. Some of the rest of it can just skip me right over, thanks.). 
  • I love this piece by Shawn Smucker. We are dancing animals! So we go to independent bookstores like Nooks to commune with other dancing animals.
  • One of my favorite things that show up in my inbox is Susannah Conway’s newsletter. I started following for pics of her cat and the occasional backyard fox, but she also shares a lot of wisdom and a glimpse into the kind of life I’d like to lead someday. She has several online courses, one of which starts on Monday. Journal Your Life sounds perfect for establishing a journal practice if you don’t know where to start or if you just need a few pointers to make it joyful enough to stick even on don’t-wanna days.
  • Finally, this week I read You Can Talk to God Like That by Abby Norman, and it was exactly what I needed to hear right now. I met Abby online many years ago, and she’s been one of my favorite people for spiritual encouragement and wisdom ever since. I’m probably going to talk more about this book in its own post once I process my feelings a little more, but if you were raised to always praise and always be thankful and maybe stuff your anger/hurt/disappointment down under a blanket of false positivity, Abby is here to tell you that’s bullshit, and I heartily second that emotion. 

I hope you have a good weekend, friends!

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