92. Mostly, We Don't Want To Harm Each Other 🤗
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Friends,
It’s Sunday!
Here’s five things you may find interesting and/or meaningful.
1. Reading 🧱
I wrote about the incredible serendipity that brought this book into my life recently here:
2. A Poem ✨
Small Kindnesses
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
3. Namaste 🧘🏼♀️
YOGA!
4. Hot Stuff 🌶️
I have at least 3 bottles of this in my cupboard as it goes with EVERYTHING! Love this story of how Lao Gan Ma sauce became less of a cult following and more of a larder staple around the world.
“Mention Lao Gan Ma (老干妈), a brand of chilli oil founded in Guizhou in China by Mrs Huabi Tao, and those in the know will respond with almost evangelical devotion. It is an apt metaphor for a brand that has established its visual language through the iconography of Tao’s own image, which looms like the Virgin Mary from the label of each jar. The founder is displayed proudly as a mark of quality on each and every one of the company’s products, a white apron tied over a stylish roll-neck jumper and loose black shirt. Her face is notably stern, at turns irritated, stoic or pensive, depending on which exact angle you catch her at. Her dark hair is neatly swept to one side, and her nickname of “old godmother” (Lao Gan Ma) is emblazoned beneath.”
5. A Quote 📃
“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt
See you next Sunday.
PS:
