99. I Took A Chair Outside And Watched The Sun 🌞
Friends,
It’s the weekend.
Welcome to The Dossier #99! In honour of our shorter attention spans (thank you pandemic) I’ll be introducing a condensed but still interesting and/or meaningful version from next week, stay tuned.
I hope this email finds you:
Here’s five things you may find interesting and/or meaningful.
1. Reading ❤️🔥
I wrote about discovering the sexy side of one of my favourite poets and I’m not mad about it.
2. Women In Art 💅
My new favourite artist - Blanca Miró Skoudy - from Barcelona.
Find out more about her here, and follow her on instagram here.
3. Reading 📰
We should all know less about each other.
“Social-media platforms have long justified themselves with the idea that connecting people would make the world more open and humane. In offline life, after all, meeting lots of different kinds of people tends to broaden the mind, turning caricatures into complicated individuals. It’s understandable that many once believed the same would be true on the internet.
But it turns out there’s nothing intrinsically good about connection, especially online. On the internet, exposure to people unlike us often makes us hate them, and that hatred increasingly structures our politics. The social corrosion caused by Facebook and other platforms isn’t a side effect of bad management and design decisions. It’s baked into social media itself.
In a country descending into a perpetual state of screeching acrimony, we might be able to tolerate each other more if we heard from each other less.”
4. Resting 🛌🏽
How to rest well - Taking a break isn’t lazy – learning to recharge is a skill that will allow you to enjoy a more creative, sustainable life.
“Rest is like breathing or running. On the one hand, it’s completely natural; on the other hand, it’s something you can learn to do better and, in so doing, you’ll more effectively harness its power to benefit other aspects of your life. Just as swimmers and Buddhist monks learn to use their breath to maintain energy or calm their minds, busy people need to learn how to rest in ways that will help them recharge their mental and physical batteries, and get a burst of creative insight. That requires developing new daily practices, and thinking differently about rest.”
5. A Poem 💣
We Lived Happily During The War - Ukranian poet Ilya Kaminsky
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
See you next Sunday.