OOH LA LA! #35

the grief is immense, but so is the joy (even small things like crosswalks and coffee creamer and feeling the cold wind for the first time again)

Sometimes I wonder - does this matter? Is it useful? Is it anything?

The grief in the world is immense.

And then I read a piece of poetry and remember.

In the wise words of Simone Weil:
“When we come upon beautiful things they lift us…letting the ground rotate beneath us several inches so that when we land, we find we are standing in a different relation to the world than we were a moment before.”

The grief is immense, but so is the joy.

It is always two truths all at once.

May we continue to name and notice all the beautiful things.

This week’s OOH LA LA! list includes: coffee creamer, waiting at the crosswalk, when you’re cold but then you get in bed and it’s warm.

At the grocery store this week, I splurged for an almond-milk lavender coffee creamer. It’s been months since I purchased such an item and I had forgotten how no splash of oat milk can do what a lavender almond-milk coffee creamer can. In the morning, I am sipping my coffee but I am no longer in my Brooklyn apartment, overlooking piles of trash on the sidewalk. Instead, I am in the French countryside, overlooking fields of flowers. The sound I hear is not the garbage truck, but soft chimes singing in the wind. No, I am not a remote customer service agent, I am a poet, twirling on the hillside, drinking my coffee in the fresh morning sun.

I love walking and I’m lucky I get to walk so much every day, everywhere I go. Lately, I’ve been paying attention to people waiting at the crosswalk before the walk sign changes to go. The energy there is restless, so hurried, so ready, like a group of school children waiting to rush the line in a game of Red Rover during an outdoor gym class. That idea made me laugh out loud.

Suddenly the nights have become cold and I am remembering the exhilaration of feeling crisp air on my skin. I was out late one night without enough layers and when I got home I was shivering and felt the cold deep in my bones. But then I put on wool socks and filled my rubber bottle with hot water and climbed into bed under blankets and let the warmth wash over me like a wave. OOH LA LA!

Thanks for reading! I love you and I’m so glad we’re here together.

I’d love to know - what is an OOH LA LA something you experienced or observed this week?

Reply to this email with 1-3 sentences about it if you want to share!

XOXO,

LJ

Here’s a longer reflection related to Weil’s writing on beautiful things, from Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being.

“At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering. Beauty, according to [Simone] Weil, requires us “to give up our imaginary position at the center. . . . A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions.” . . . Her account is always deeply somatic: what happens, happens to our bodies. When we come upon beautiful things . . . they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space; or they form “ladders reaching toward the beauty of the world,” or they lift us (as though by the air currents of someone else’s sweeping), letting the ground rotate beneath us several inches, so that when we land, we find we are standing in a different relation to the world than we were a moment before. It is not that we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the center of our own world. We willingly cede our ground to the thing that stands before us.”