Yesterday was a hard day anyway and then to watch Notre-Dame burn just made it harder. Mom and I went to Paris together in 2006; it’s still one of my favorite memories.

Here’s Olivier Latry, one of the Notre-Dame organists, playing a version of La Marseillaise (from a service after the 2015 terror attacks).

I found this via Austin Kleon on Twitter and I was hooked after the first two paragraphs. “The Miracle of The Mundane“, from Heather Havrilesky’s essay collection What If This Were Enough?, has Mozart and connection and acceptance and is well worth your time. I had a hard time picking a pull quote, because the whole thing is so good.

Living simply today takes work. It takes work to overcome the noise that has accumulated in our heads, growing louder and more pervasive since we were young. It takes work to overcome the illusion that we will arrive at some end point where we will be better — more successful, adored, satisfied, relaxed, rich. It takes hard work to say, “This is how I am,” in a calm voice, without anxiously addressing how you should be. It takes work to shift your focus from the smudges on the window to the view outside.

[emphasis mine]

Also this:

We are called to resist viewing ourselves as consumers or as commodities. We are called to savor the process of our own slow, patient development, instead of suffering in an enervated, anxious state over our value and our popularity. We are called to view our actions as important, with or without consecration by forces beyond our control. We are called to plant these seeds in our world: to dare to tell every living soul that they already matter, that their seemingly mundane lives are a slowly unfolding mystery, that their small choices and acts of generosity are vitally important.

I was on the hold list for this book for a long time and finally picked it up from the library last week. It’s fascinating!

Granted, I’m reading it with a certain sense of smugness–since I started lifting last summer, I’ve made sure to get eight hours of sleep a night (because sleep is when your muscles rebuild and grow, bro!)–but it makes me want to make sleep even more of a priority.

In other words:

(From my second favorite episode of Adventure Time ever. [“Thank You” is my first-favorite.])

In addition to worrying about Toby’s ear (which is really slow to respond to medicine), this week’s stresses included a trip to Instacare Monday because I was afraid I’d broken my toe. The good news: it’s not broken. The bad news: it might be a neuroma, which is chronic.

I’m sitting out the gym this week–so my shoulders won’t be immediately getting broader–but I thought this piece of Instagram wisdom was good. It’s all about building resilience. And getting cannonball shoulders.

(via)

I’m not too proud to admit that I’ve saved a lot of encouraging images on Instagram and pull them up pretty frequently. Here are a couple on my mind this week:

A quote from Martha Graham, via Words of Women:

 
And this cartoon, which is PERFECT, from Sarah Andersen Comics:

We said goodbye to my mother on Sunday. She fought pancreatic cancer–from an initial cautiously optimistic diagnosis through chemotherapy to a surprise terrible diagnosis after surgery–for ten months. It took her health and it took her life but it didn’t take her beauty or her spirit, not even at the end.

She taught me how to sew. She taught me how to cook. She taught me how to take care of people. There won’t be a day for the rest of my life where I won’t want to ask her about my garden or show her fabric for my next project or tell her about my day, but she also taught me how to be strong.

She showed us all what it meant to be strong over this past year and what love really looks like. For that, and for everything else, I say: Thank you, Mom. I love you.

I have Monday through Wednesday off so I’ll be back Thursday. Be kind to yourself this coming week; even if you like the holidays, things can be overwhelming.

1. It’s the winter solstice today. We made it through the darkest part of the year. (I have to say, taking meds has made my SAD nonexistent this year, and it’s been great.)

2. Here’s Anne LaMott on hope, in an essay for National Geographic, and it’s a good one:

Everyone I know, including me, has lived through devastating times at least twice, through seemingly unsurvivable loss. And yet we have come through because of the love of our closest people, the weird healing properties of time, random benevolence, and, of course, our dogs.

At regular intervals, life gets a little too real for my taste. The wider world seems full of bombers, polluters, threats of all kinds. My own small world suffers ruptures…that leave me struggling to stay on my feet.

In these situations I usually have one of two responses: either that I am doomed or that I need to figure out whom to blame (and then correct their behavior). But neither of these is true. The truth is that—through the workings of love, science, community, time, and what I dare to call grace—some elemental shift will occur and we will find we are semi-OK again. And even semi-OK can be a miracle.

3. And here’s  Beatrix Potter’s “The Tailor of Gloucester” online, in case you need to read a Christmas Eve story about talking animals and sewing (aka the BEST Christmas story). 

I’ve talked about Ask A Swole Woman here before; she’s the reason I started lifting. She’s now writing a column for Self and, back in September, I wrote in to ask for advice on what pants to wear to the gym that aren’t leggings. (Remember these sweatpant knockoffs?)

She published my question last week! Of course, the kicker is that since I wrote in, I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with doing gym things (and how my butt looks), so I go to class in leggings like it ain’t no thing. As she says:

“…stretchy fitted pieces just do truly make a lot of the practical elements of lifting easier for everyone, regardless of your biology or geometry, and I do think many people end up making this transition not out of narcissism, but rather out of a kind of necessity. We are a stretchy-garment-loving people, and we come in peace.”

Indeed.

***

And in more internet fame, I posted Doc’s birthday shirt on my Instagram yesterday, tagging the fabric store because I am not proud (and because I want as many people to have nice ikat as possible). They featured my post in their Story!

Seeing it like that makes me realize that IS some pretty nice pattern matching, if I do say so myself.

Kottke featured this earlier in the week: a Random Koyaanisqaatsi Generator, which is “an internet version [of the film’s trailer] using random Giphy ‘gifs’ which have been tagged as slow motion or time-lapse, playing them along with the Philip Glass soundtrack.”

In other words, hours of dystopian arthouse fun!