Hi! I'm so glad you're here. This week's collection is about memory - how it shapes us, invidually and collectively, how it's passed down, what it teaches us.

1. Omeros by Derek Walcott - a retelling/reimagining of Homer's Greek/Trojan epics, set in St. Lucia, where Walcott was from. I read this book-length poem before bed every couple of years. Every time, I find something new: a line, an entire section, that I don't remember reading before. The rhythm and storytelling of Omeros feels like a beautiful map, a way of engaging with dominant stories/systems that echoes back and transforms my memory of the original stories, too. I wonder, who in your life tells stories that helps you reimagine what's possible? Who reminds you that everything, even the most dominant stories and systems, is changed in our re-telling and re-reading?

2. Two unfired clay bowls I made in different seasons over the past few years. I've written about clay, and Alex Bell who taught me hand building, in a previous email. Alex said this when I was first learning: "Clay remembers the parts of itself that it was next to, so you can't stretch it too far too fast, or it'll crack." I love that clay has a memory, one that requires you to listen to it. Dry unfired clay holds the memory of my hands and fingers. Left out in the rain, it remembers and returns to its form as wet clay, and then dirt. There's a reminder here that no shape lasts forever, and that memory can call us back, help us return to the earth. What (and who) does memory help you return to?

3. A bouquet of asters from the yard. Neither my partner or I remember these flowers blooming during last year's long cold spring. But, this year, here they are, food for pollinators and anchors for spiderwebs. I think about the memory of the asters - the knowledge of the conditions that make blooming possible, passed down through seeds and roots. What a kind of love that is. And I wonder, what is spring teaching you this year? What are you learning in slow, deep ways? And maybe, maybe, what do you know, passed down to you like a kind of love in your cells and bones, about what you need to bloom?

Sending you love from the river,

Kali

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