Hi! I'm so glad you're here. This week's note is about a collection of objects that remind me of people I love, experiences of time, and ways of sensing the world.

1. An embroidered cloth my mom gave me a few years ago that has always reminded me of her and of my grandma. I have sweet memories of spending time as a kid with an embroidery hoop, learning from my mom and my grandma how to trace an outline with thread. I love this cloth because it's cheerful, and I can't seem to figure out what it does or where it goes, so that I find it by the bed, in my sock drawer, on my desk; and every time I remember a thread of who I am and who I come from. Do you have things like this, that you hold on to? What (and who) do they remind you of?

2. An ornamental metal wand from an antique store in DC. I was wandering the city that summer, suddenly no longer working full time, with all these midday hours I hadn't had for years. I found the wand, didn't have the $5 in cash for it, and the owner waved off my offer of running to an atm, in a kind of "it's more trouble than that's worth" gesture. So, it turned from something I'd found to a gift I'd been given. I love this wand because I can't tell what it's for, or what it was attached to, which gives it a kind of presence apart from function. It sits on my writing desk sometimes, on my altar sometimes, reminding me of that time, of a kind of learning my body did. That summer I learned a pace I could move at, the ways things can shift from "found" to given, the time it was possible to spend just being, doing nothing productive. Do you have times like this, now or as anchors, full of spaciousness? I wonder, what do they remind you to remember?

3. The book Blind Spot, by Teju Cole, the writer and photographer whose work I've loved since reading his novel Open City nearly 10 years ago. He writes about an experience with sight and blind spot syndrome in this essay in Granta. This is a book that lives sometimes on my desk, sometimes by my bed, sometimes (rarely) on the shelf. Teju Cole's work teaches me to see, both visually through his photographs of buildings, mountains, reflections; and in another sense, through his writing, where the word seeing is a way of describing a presence where something should be absent, where a blank spot is filled. And I wonder, what has filled the absences in your life? Whose expression, through books, writing, art, stories reminds you to look deeply at the world?

Sending you love from the river,

Kali

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