vol 5. monthly recs & rabbit holes

kalediscope light, folding laundry, zen poetry

Sourced from issue no. 45 of Rabbit Holes:

here are a handful of visuals, words, poetry, and pieces of art that stirred my soul for the month of February:

1. 💻 Open this issue in your web browser (not phone) at a time where you have at least 30 mins to read.

2. ☕ Grab hot tea or coffee

3. 👚 Change into something comfortable and ideally sit against some fluffy pillows, with your computer on your lap at a 45 degree angle

4. Light a candle 🕯️

5. 💨 Take 5 breaths and listen to this meditation

6. Meditate on a question you have and run it by this tarot reader

7. 🎵 Press play for music. Listen while you read this issue.

---

poetics & art.

Mahmoud Darwish (trans. Mohammad Shaheen), Like a Hand Tattoo in an Ode by an Ancient Arab Poet

“I am the daughter of myself. I am born of my own dream. My dream sustains me.”

— Rosario Castellanos (trans. Magda Bogin), excerpt from “Wailing Wall” from The Selected Poems of Rosario Castellanos

Hundreds of Rainbow Glass Panels Emit a Rotating Kaleidoscope in a Playful Kindergarten

In Tianshui, China, a clear dome casts sunlight onto 483 polychromatic glass panels lining a kindergarten’s windows, railings, and doorways. It gives the spacious building a kaleidoscopic effect, refracting varying hues onto the white walls and minimalist wood furnishings. “Color shades can grow and shrink as colors overlap and become different colors, or move from a vertical plane to a horizontal plane and back again,” architect Keiichiro Sako wrote on Instagram. “I hope that spending childhood in this beautiful light will foster the creativity of the children.”

Yulia Iosilzon’s Paintings Transform an Ancient Flood Narrative Into an Elegant Observance of Renewal

In flowing, otherworldly oil paintings, London-based artist Yulia Iosilzon steers from depictions of stormy skies, bearded men, or monumental vessels. She proposes thinking about the flood narrative as a form of renewal and regeneration rather than a tale of destruction. Art history scholar Dr. Rebecca Birrell says in an essay about this body of work:

In a myth known for its binary thinking, its brutal and unyielding transmission of devastation, hopelessness and shame, Iosilzon imagines an alternative. Their exact narrative content remains ambiguous, but of the several open-ended possibilities contained within these paintings, all embody a courageous hopefulness, a refusal of cruelty.

words.

[essay] If you were rich, would you fold laundry?

I remember a McKinsey women’s event where fifteen or twenty young consultants from the San Francisco office sat around a glossy oval table listening to a junior partner speak about her successful ascent. The topic turned to work-life balance, as it always did at such events, and she advised us as follows: If there is a household task where it matters that you do it, then do it. If the task is agnostic to you, then outsource it. I vividly remember her examples:

Putting your children to bed? It matters that it’s you—you should do it.

Laundry? Doesn’t matter who does it—outsource it.

Made sense to me. I was twenty-two. She was successful. We were in an office with marble countertops in the kitchenettes. Who was I to argue?

—

For me, looking back on that advice now with over a decade of distance, I am most interested in what that junior partner’s advice implies about living—that tasks like laundry folding don’t matter, and anyone who is able to should reinvest the time that we would spend folding laundry into higher-value activities, namely those that make money. I imagine this taken to the extreme: an allegedly frictionless life with no laundry folding and no cooking, no dishes and no cleaning sinks, no grocery shopping. Our cultural vision for the good life is shaped by powerful people at top, and this seems to be the vision. Erase that menial stuff, only do the good stuff.

Here’s the problem I see with that: optimizing for the most possible paid working time would make me absolutely miserable. In the job at McKinsey, which I hated, more hours would only make me sicker and meaner. In a job I love, writing, I simply cannot be genuinely productive for more than a handful of hours each day.

An ideal is emerging for me, a triad of types of work: The work you do to get paid, the life maintenance tasks like laundry, and the creative things you do for you. The economy-oriented work, the basic needs work, and the soul work, each of which brings something different to a full life. Three legs that create a solid foundation. I think the benefits of the paid work and the creative work are more obvious, but I would argue the maintenance work also has benefits. The role of these tasks in this triad is to anchor me to the world. They remind me how life is sustained. They remind me to value such work at the level it should be valued.

[essay] To Annie Dillard's Astonishment

What I know is this: Dillard is my favorite writer. She changed me, thoroughly. As if a stranger runs up to you on the road, reaches down into your gullet and pulls back up through your throat until you're left standing there, turned perfectly skinside-out. Then, she runs away, leaving you nothing but bewildered.

Dillard's writing is transfixing because she is, herself, transfixed. Her gift (and perhaps burden) is an unrelenting sense of astonishment. The kind that we educate, consume, belittle, and generally 'enculture' out of ourselves. Like beating sacred dust from a rug.

I don't know what's worse: to have your sense of wonder dimmed until you join the rest of the world in a sputtering half-life, or to retain a blinding sense of astonishment, rendering you mostly incapable of relating to others. I imagine Dillard still wanders the valleys where mind and world collide, sucking down cigarettes and coffee, transfixed by bugs.

We must rekindle our astonishment using the full force of the tax code, or we will continue crippling ourselves to a fate worse than death

[essay] Ontological Intervention

In Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, systems analyst Donella Meadows considers “the mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises” as the highest leverage point  for bringing about systemic change (actually, she places “the power to transcend paradigms” as one level above this, but, for reasons that will hopefully become clear, I think she is wrong about this). She quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson (one of my heroes): 

Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to … their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. Observe the ideas of the present day … see how timber, brick, lime, and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons…. It follows, of course, that the least enlargement of ideas … would cause the most striking changes of external things.

I wholeheartedly agree with Meadows and Emerson here. While it is very difficult to change the underlying paradigm of society as a whole, any society is made up of individuals. Those individuals can undergo a paradigm shift at any moment. When enough individuals have made a shift, society as a whole will follow. 

[essay] The Art of Embodied Sensemaking

One of my long-standing frustrations is that people interested in personal growth and spiritual practices often shy away from difficult political topics, while people interested in debating politics often shy away from personal development and spirituality. Workshops and retreats are full of powerful psycho-technologies that help us deepen our knowledge of ourselves. However, they can also transform our understanding of what’s going on between us collectively. If we only focus on improving ourselves, we overlook vital practices for making sense and acting wisely in the times we live in.

Eventually, we have to stop focusing inward and instead look up. To bring our gaze out to the world and engage whole-heartedly with the chaos we find in our social feeds and the nightly news.

[resource] 16 of the best IFS Meditations: Guided Practices to Heal Our Inner System

Explore these curated IFS guided meditations that help us understand and heal our inner system. Get to know parts and protectors, connect with the self, and explore specific issues and topics through an Internal Family Systems lens.

[art] How Lee Mingwei's art is mending the social fabric

Inspired by personal and world events, Lee Mingwei’s art aims to bring people together in difficult times, promoting healing through connection. This short documentary traces the artist’s journey from his formative years in Taipei to his artistic beginnings in the Bay Area to becoming the globally renowned contemporary artist he is today. Featuring interviews with the artist, his close friend and M+ Museum Director Suhanya Raffel, and exhibition curator Claudia Schmuckli, the film invites viewers into Lee Mingwei’s life and work to answer the question, “How can art mend the social fabric?”

---

thanks for coming down the rabbit hole with me today. for the full issue you can jump down 🕳️🐇