Small beauties (003)
When you think of beauty what comes to your mind?
So, you know that we at Studio Styles are putting together a print magazine for you guys here at Restful. I have set out to make a beautiful object that would hopefully serve as a sleeping aid as well and I am enjoying the process and the conversations.
Now, we need help understanding you who are our readers and what your needs are so that we can meet them with this smol anthology. Please use this link to schedule a short call with me to gist about what you like in a magazine (or an object that stays in your bedroom) so I can make/add that.
https://calendly.com/readabc/come-tell-me-about-your-magazine-preferences
Now, on to the things I gathered this week:
“My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” —Oliver Sacks, in his last book Gratitude
Yesterday, I listened to the <1hr book Gratitude by Oliver Sacks, one of my GOATs of “vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms and extreme immoderation in all [his] passions” 🥰🔥 (The phrase in quote is one way he describes himself in the book). Gratitude is a collection of four essays he wrote in his final days; all four essays went viral when they were published in the New York Times. It was a wonderful life Sacks lived, a life I am grateful to God for, for the fact of its beauty, for all the joy and gratitude he found in it, and for all that he left us with including the hope of understanding he gave me in 2019 when I picked up his book Migraine (which I’m just finding out was his first book!).
If there is one thing I can actually say I currently consciously practice, it’s gratitude. It wasn’t always so. Ross Gay helped. Pleasure Activism helped. Migraines helped. 2020 helped. But before all that, my idea of prayer helped.
I remember as a child knowing and believing in 1 Thessalonians 5:17: Pray without ceasing. I was sitting on my mother’s toilet when I asked her if Paul really meant all the time, literally. And she said yes, all the time, every single second. And so mentally, I figured that if such an instruction could be passed then it could be achieved, and at the very least striven for. But back then I was confused about the fundamentals of what prayer was meant to be. (The way God was back then, there were ways to do things and ways not to do things.) Prayer to me was supplication. And in moments of remembering I should be praying without ceasing, when I ran out of things I wanted, I’d just start listing all the people and countries I knew and asking God for their heart desires.
Now, my favourite form of prayer is THANK YOU! Wow, thank you for the light, thank you for the colour red and maroon and brown and all the colours in between, and all the colours really! Thank you for this chair, thank you for this life. Thank you for this water and for my throat and my ability to feel and sense, etc etc. It’s endless, it expands me with the spacious feeling of beauty. And it truly is a prayer you can make as frequently is humanly achievable.
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Which reminds me of my favourite On Being podcast episode: ‘The Inner Landscape of Beauty’ with John O’Donohue. I listened to that yesterday too and was struck by a different part than my usual favourite bits. The part was where Krista asked about John’s work in corporate workplaces. (It sounded like he offered some kinds of consulting services for companies on finding synergy in the workplace.)
Part of his response was an encouragement, a reminder that fortified my spirit:
And one of the loneliest things you can find is somebody who is in the wrong kind of work; who shouldn’t be doing what they are doing but should be doing something else, and haven’t the courage to get up and leave it and make a new possibility for themselves.
But it’s lovely when you find someone at work who’s doing exactly what they dreamed they should be doing and whose work is an expression of their inner gift. And in witnessing to that gift and bringing it out, they actually provide an incredible service to us all. And I think you see that the gifts that are given to us as individuals are not for us alone, or for our own self-improvement, but they’re actually for the community and to be offered.
I recognise that this is not a privilege everyone can afford all the time but every day is a good day to think to yourself about whether you can be a bit more courageous with what you’re spending your days, your time, your energy, your spirit, doing. In ideal situations, ‘our work should be,’ as O’Donohue writes in his 2004 book Anam Cara, ‘a place where the soul can enjoy becoming visible and present. The rich unknown, reserved and precious within us, can emerge into visible form. Our nature longs deeply for the possibility of expression in what we call work.’ (p.134)
Anyway, here are some perennial fave quotes from that episode:
beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. And I think when we cross a new threshold, that if we cross worthily, what we do is we heal the patterns of repetition that were in us that had us caught somewhere. And in our crossing, then, we cross onto new ground where we just don’t repeat what we’ve been through in the last place we were. So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.
What I love is that at the heart of Christianity you have this idea of intimacy, which is true belonging, being seen, the ultimate home of individuation, the ultimate source of it, and the homecoming; that that’s what I’d call spirituality, is the art of homecoming. So it’s St. Augustine’s phrase, “Deus intimior intimo meo” — “God is more intimate to me than I am to myself.”
Then you go to Meister Eckhart and you get the other side of it, which you must always keep together with it, where in Middle High German he says, “Gott wirt und Gott entwirt.” That means, “God becomes and God un-becomes.” Or, translated, it means that “God” is only our name for it, and the closer we get to it, the more it ceases to be God.
I mean, I love Irenaeus’s thing from the second century, which said that “[t]he glory of God is the human being fully alive.”
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Reading Gratitudes also reminded me of the Zimbabwean Nuvoyo Tshuma’s new novel Digging Stars which I’ve been ugh-ing to get my hands on. It hasn’t found a UK publisher (boo!) so it’s been difficult/long to figure out how to get myself a copy. (Just now I googled and saw that the London Review of Books has stock of it, so yay, if any of you are London-based.)
From her publishers (US):
“Digging Stars is a paean to the cosmos and a celebration of the democratic spirit of knowledge. Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s characters explode the rigid matrices of the academy to prove that science, art, technology, and history are all planets orbiting the same sun.”
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For work, I was brought to this video of the historian Abosede George discussing what children and youth studies can contribute to our concept of agency and it fanned all the flamesssss in me.
It seems to me that centering children enables us contain the agential bias and the fiction of individualism that it is built on. Taking children and youth as a starting point tends to foreground other dimensions of being human: our interdependency, our vulnerability, our dependence on others, including those who dominate us, and related paradoxes of being human. The last hierarchy in social life lies in the relationships is between social children and social adults.
In much of the world, the adult dominance over children and youth is understood as the natural reflection and natural outcome of age difference. The naturalisation of hierarchical difference between people has a history. We emphasise activists’ demands that push back against the naturalness of various ideas of hierarchical difference. The fact remains that the demands from the so-called periphery has to be met with response from the so-called centre. The expansion of humanity has to be demanded and also answered. There is nothing inevitable in that process.
The dismantling of the centre, I think is the point of non-Western histories, children histories. Coming back to the title of this talk, ‘what kids can’t do’… well, dismantling the discipline’s centres, and the world’s idea of ‘the centre’ and the centre-periphery binaries is one thing kids can’t do. But that the study of children and youth can help to achieve.
That’s all for this week, folks.
Internet gems:
Listen to bell hooks’s All About Love here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4VIhpiMRRlYkYa7eHTq1Pc?si=ZzhMX5iOQJWDIhgxxEBEXg&pi=e-BlIRnuuMQMyN
Just take your pie and vy. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMrQQJCqH/
On letting go when there’s so much love left: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-DaMrsRLnL/?igsh=MXR4eXVycTRwOXV2eg== from the book I Love This Version of Myself That You Brought Out by Jaymen Chang.
On Betrayal: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMrC8wwbJ/
Question:
When you think of beauty what comes to your mind?
Me, I think of soft things. soft cake or bread in my mouth pillowing my teeth, the in side of my cheeks, my tongue, the roof of my mouth.
Velvet and other velvety things to touch. The moment of being just about to fall asleep. Peace. Talking to myself and all the presences I carry in my head, the feeling of being left alone in peace. The feeling of flow.
My face. My mother’s and siblings’ and father’s face. Faces of my friends, present and past. Some outfits, some objects. Sharing one Thai food meal with Nwabunor in Bath in 2017 or so? There are many things!
I’m interested in yourssss. <3
 | A guest post by
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This is harder than I thought it would be. But here goes (I'm taking it as a writing prompt) 😅.
I think of the sunrise at Tarkwa Bay, the memories of growing up with my siblings, their faces changing over the years, their hair greying, but their ideals still rooted in the familiar and good. I think of my mother's elation at her own cooking, I think of the food itself; Ofe Owerri, Ofe Oha, Efo, her party jollof rice, her goat meat okro soup, of which I'm sure there exists none that can compare on earth or in heaven. I think of the feeling that envelopes me when I read a piece that touches my centre, that molds me into something new, that says I can breathe again, and reclaim old dreams. I think of the feeling that brought me to this world of writing and stressing over sentences and language. That keeps me. I think of the women I have loved, the friendships that have been tested by time, and not been found wanting. I think of spaces that were once empty, now occupied by progress, by dreamers. I think of my club, Real Madrid, my favourite players over the years and the game I love so much. There's also that image of Nadal, fist clenched, biceps tensed, arms pumping in and out, the loud call of "vamos!" after the most impossible, and the most spectacular return. My idea of beauty, my thoughts on it, are littered with anything that has held its own, bearing witness to its courage to simply be. Therefore, I think of my nephews, the softness of their hands, how they willingly give themselves to be lifted up by me. How they chortle in delight and question everything. How they are living proof that the story will outlive me. And every so often, I think of LÉON's Surround Me, the last few seconds, where she sings "don't let me go", how she sings "don't let me go", how it floods my soul and spirit, with yearning to be held and to hold on to everything listed here, and more.