11. You Have the Right to be Here
All lives can’t matter until Black lives matter.
Here’s five things to make your Sunday a lot more interesting.
1. A poem
Neil Gaiman wrote a poem for refugees based off 1,000 tweets and 25,000 words he received to a question ‘what is warmth to you?’ He describes the incredibly hard process here.
The full poem is an ode to Syrian (and all) refugees as they spend their 8th freezing winter away from their homes.
listen to Neil read ‘what you need to be warm’ here
The final line of the poem resonated the most for me as a South African immigrant in the UK:
Sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place,
to hold out a badly knitted scarf, to offer a kind word, to say
we have the right to be here, to make us warm in the coldest season.You have the right to be here.
You have the right to be here.
2. For the love of bees
I found this delightful little UK shop called Beebombs a few weeks ago and have ordered a few bombs for my garden.
Did you know:
97% of native British Wildflower habitat has been lost since World War 2.
Damn. That’s alarming.
So I’ve enlisted the help of my anti-pesticides-all-organic-hippie-gardener and together we are going to make my back yard a little haven for bees.
The incredibly bee-unfriendly before pic of my back yard:
Let’s help all bees flourish.
3. Yoga Yoga
Julieanne teaches ‘yoga yoga’ in a beautiful studio just north of Brisbane, Australia in the town of Mckay.
“When new students ask me to describe what type of yoga I teach, I usually say "it's yoga yoga!" My practice is not a specific sub-brand of yoga. I offer asana alignment cues based on the varied lineages of modern postural yoga but mostly drawn from modern movement anatomy research which I have studied deeply in Post Grad Teacher Training with Ihana Yoga, Melbourne and under the guidance of physio and yoga therapists from Core Yoga, Brisbane.”
Studio classes can be practised online (woohoo) - have a look and book yourself in here.
Julianne’s instagram captions are hilarious, her doggie Paolo is adorbs and she has OCD just like me when it comes to organising props.
Paolo.
Be still my (organised) heart.
follow her wonderful instagram here.
4. Mousehole
These beautiful photos of Mousehole (pronounced “mow-zel”) which is a small fishing village south of Penzance in Cornwall. The Haarkon team take the most beautiful photos, check out the rest of their adventures here.
PS: I recently purchased their gorgeous book on Japan.
5. Reading
This mind-blowing book by Malcolm Gladwell.
I won’t spoil it but it is such a great perspective on the ways in which we consistently fail to communicate with one another or misinterpret and misunderstand. As we humans creep closer and closer to a purely online, digital age, it’s an eye-opener into the pitfalls and also the real dangers of how we talk to strangers.
‘What do we really ever know about other people?’
‘Sometimes the best conversations between strangers allow the stranger to remain a stranger.’
Listen to Malcolm talk about the human impact of COVID-19 here.
I recommend all of Malcolm’s books, but this small but powerful one especially:
Friend, I love love love my Sunday email with the latest treats from you!