Hi friends,
It’s 6 months today since I bought this flat and I’m starting to love all 506 sq ft of her.
Because she is so dinky, I’m blessed with both sunrise and sunset light which will only excite you if you’re residing in the far far FAR northern hemisphere like I am. If you’re following along with her renovation on instagram then you’ll already know about my healthy obsession with natural light.
Random things that caught my eye this week:
1. A poem
David Whyte’s beautiful poem ‘CLEAVE’ on love and separation.
‘We were born saying goodbye
to what we love,
we were born
in a beautiful reluctance
to be here,
not quite ready
to breathe in this new world,
we are here and we are almost not,
we are present while still not
wanting to admit we have arrived.’
Here’s 1,58secs of David reading his poem ‘Everything is waiting for you’ :
Holy shit, his voice is beautiful.
2. This iPhone calculator timesaver
This little hack has changed my life. Changed. My. Life.
How did I not know this?!
3. An uncomfortable film
This South African film looks absolutely beautiful but harrowing.
*note: the film is in Afrikaans with sub titles which is a harrowing language to listen to at the best of times
4. Thanks twitter
How I’m currently signing off emails thanks to Karen Kilgariff:
5. Listening to
12 new songs from my VERO AMORE* - Ludovico Einaudi.
*that’s ‘true love’ for the non-italians
‘I recorded ’12 Songs From Home’ between March and April 2020 during the peak of Italy’s lockdown. In March I started to play live concerts regularly on social media. Switching on my phone to connect for 30-40 minutes with the world it, has been a beautiful and intimate alternative to the spring tour that I had to postpone. This new release is the memory of those home live concerts, my memory of this time, the memory of a strange and new atmosphere that we won’t forget.’
5.5 Immigrant mindset
Some great news: The first 45 volunteers who received this company’s vaccine have all developed antibodies to the virus.
Read this great article about CEO Noubar Afayen, and how he is using his immigrant mindset to tackle the virus.
Afeyan, an Armenian entrepreneur who was born in Lebanon and left the country with his family during its civil war, credits his background as an immigrant in his success and encourages others to realize the inherent value in the immigrant experience.
“I view innovation as just intellectual immigration," he says. "When you leave the comforts of what you know, expose yourself to criticism, go to something that people don't believe is possible, persist, persist, persist, until you make it inhabitable so that people come and tell you how obvious it was years later. That is what an immigrant does.
“I would invite people to think of the immigrant mindset when they are doing these kinds of innovation, particularly cutting-edge innovation, and recognize that it is a strength that the kind of resilience, the adaptivity, all the things that we think are rarefied skills in an entrepreneur, that's what every immigrant has to go through.”