A slender cord of grace

Hello friends,

We have a lovely neighbour here in Stockholm who we “dog swap” with. We both have rescued Irish greyhounds, called Joy and Grace, and they get on very well. Over the last few hot, sunny weeks we had Joy living with us while they were away on holiday. A friend of mine said it sounded like a 1950s Christmas card: “Joy and Grace be with you!”.

Joy The Dog has gone back home now. The Swedes all returned en masse from their summertime adventures last week. And as we all slide back into familiar pre-summer rhythms, the feeling can be comforting for some, but some feel like they miss the joy from summertime.

It’s important not to mourn the summer as it slides away, but to look forward to the grace (see what I did there) of seasons moving gently onward. Don’t let yourself be whipped up by the fear that summer wasn’t made-the-most-of or that not enough memories were made or sun bathed in.

So. Inspired by the dogs’ summer companionship, this month is all about things that bring more joy and grace into the world.

August
by Dorothy Parker (1893 –1967)

When my eyes are weeds,
And my lips are petals, spinning
Down the wind that has beginning
Where the crumpled beeches start
In a fringe of salty reeds;
When my arms are elder-bushes,
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart;

Summer, do your worst!
Light your tinsel moon, and call on
Your performing stars to fall on
Headlong through your paper sky;
Nevermore shall I be cursed
By a flushed and amorous slattern,
With her dusty laces’ pattern
Trailing, as she straggles by.

Dorothy Parker, a prominent writer in the early 20th century, was known for her quick wit, sharp critiques and one-liners (“Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone,” she wrote). She wrote poems, essays and stories, and was part of an elite club of writers, actors and comics called The Algonquin Round Table – also known as the “Vicious Circle”. It’s unusual then, for Parker to take this nostalgic gaze at August’s temporal romance, and the sweeter for it. But not in the way we might expect.

August is a strange month, described as “middle-aged” by Helen Hunt-Jackson, and can leave you with the feeling of being spat out the other side of a dream, wondering if you enjoyed it enough, if it was enough to sustain you. It plays into a primal sense of security – summer: abundance, winter: scarcity.

This time, Parker says: I won’t be duped. The first half of the poem seems to say: when I’m beautifully old, when the rhythm of time is decaying my body gracefully; try and trick me then, Summer. She sees the fakery of the tinsel, pretending to be the moon; the actress, flushed with the effort of playing a part. She’s ready to look past the illusion to the weeds, the crumpled, the rangy – to see the divine everything-ness of the seasons, rather than a sparkling dream.

*“Hot Dogs” August 2007 cover for the New Yorker by Mark Ulriksen.*

Alone time is an opportunity

Picture the scene:

An apartment. It is the evening. The door opens and Tim walks in. No lights are on. There are sounds of china crashing and posh-people-voices shouting.

“What is happening?” Tim shouts down the hall.

“Period drama!” I reply, shouting over the TV which I have on loudly so I can hear the swishy fabrics of the skirts and the secret whispers of the service staff.

This is how I spend my alone time: sometimes I go to the gym. Often I knit. I make little snacks that aren’t really meals (“girl dinner”, anyone?) Inevitably I wear my ugliest and softest pyjamas and I watch period dramas. It is a joy.

When Tim went away to India for ten days early for a little solo adventure, I was sad for two hours, and then proceeded to thoroughly enjoy my ten special golden days of Becky-time. I missed Tim. I wanted him around. But also: I went for a lovely quiet fika on the quay, I wrote an essay, I hugged the dog, hung out with some friends, cleaned the cupboards and listened to Radio Four all day, a lot of period drama was watched. It was lovely. Because this: alone time is an opportunity.

Research has found that people tend to feel that they’ll be perceived as lonely if they do something recreational alone, and yet travelling and dining solo has become more popular than ever. Julia Cameron, Godmother of the creative lifestyle, suggested “artist dates” in her 1992 bestseller The Artist’s Way. And while we might be going out alone more than before, it is actually harder to actually be truly solo today. And that’s because this: phones.

In an article on solo dates, Faith Hill references Valerie Manusov, a communications professor at the University of Washington, who said that “some of her students pretend to be on the phone when they’re walking by themselves; they’re afraid, they’ve told her, of looking like they don’t have friends.” But even if we weren’t afraid of looking alone, are we actually aware what hanging out with ourselves even feels like any more?

We know that extended periods alone are bad for our health, but emerging research suggests that the opposite is true too – extended periods without solitude can be harmful too. It’s important to allow the internal monologue to work through ideas, problem-solve and self-soothe. It’s important to get to know who you are in the world, without always being in relation to someone else.

Continue reading about the benefits of solitude here.

Prothonotary swamp warbler / Audubon, Maria Popover.

A slender cord of grace

A few months ago, Maria Popover gave forty friends a forty-card deck to honour her fortieth birthday. The Almanac of Birds, a kind of tarot deck for the soul, combines two of her greatest literary loves: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and James Audubon’s Birds of… series. Divinations, she calls them.

“Each year on my birthday, I perform a “Whitman divination”: I conjure up the most restless question on my mind, open Leaves of Grass with my eyes closed, and let my blind finger fall on a verse; without fail, Whitman opens some profound side door to my question that becomes its own answer, one inaccessible to the analytical mind.”

A slender cord of grace

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