midweek jollies vol. 10

women taking my breath away, pope leo's twitter, this week's instagram gems

Happy Wednesday and welcome to midweek jollies, a paid subscriber perk here at The Rewilded Life. The horrors continue to persist in the world writ large, but for this little sliver of time all you have to think about are various and sundry pleasantries. Included this week: female artists who have recently left me speechless, stalking the new pope’s socials like it’s my job (it is), and this week’s buried treasures of IG.

Today I’m checking in from an absolutely unbelievable stay on Lake Superior, where I annually(ish) gather with three dear friends. It is warm and sunny, our cabin is right on the rocky shoreline, and I’m currently typing this in a coffee shop tucked in the literal woods. If I’m dreaming, please do not pinch me.

Things I’ve bookmarked to show you lately:

“Erotic Decisions” by Tamara at Museguided

Eroticism, then, is about gravity, not about gratification, the pull toward something that reorients the self. And this gravity manifests not only in romantic or sexual relationships, but in every domain where desire dares to disrupt duty. A woman leaves a secure career to pursue sculpture because it makes her pulse quicken, not because it makes sense. A man moves across the world for a language he barely speaks. A reader becomes a writer because a single sentence broke them open. These are erotic decisions… They often look like madness to the outside world – irresponsible, inexplicable, dramatic – but they are the precise moments where life, real life, begins to throb.

“The Texture of Sadness” by Ellie at Ellie’s Substack

In yin yoga, we create a shape with our bodies and then offer it time, sometimes an uncomfortably long period of time. In the stillness and the quiet, our perception deepens. In this practice, we remember we are not the sensations, emotions, and thoughts, we are the ones noticing them. When we choose to neither escape nor reach out to grip onto the sensations, emotions, and thoughts, over time we may became able to observe them without judgement. Over time, we may begin to say, “I am noticing sadness,” without assessing that emotion as negative or bad. We can dwell with the sadness, offering it attention, and noticing it shift. And over time, we can bring that practice off our mat to our lives into moments of deep discernment. Our bodies can offer us information, and we can respond, getting clear on our why and how as we choose our what.

“The Mother Rubbings” by Catherine at Topography of Dwelling

The performance that created The Mother Rubbings was invisible.

No one (but my family) saw it.

It took place from March - July of 2020. I performed the piece twice weekly at the cemetery beside my home. I walked the rows of graves, taking rubbings of every headstone marked ‘mother.’

The objective of the performance was to record my grief during a time of social isolation: as I performed, I meditated on the surmounting loss of life due to COVID-19. The meditative actions of walking, kneeling, and tracing were akin to prayer or a ritual action in memoriam.

The performance resulted in an object: a graph paper scroll with rubbings of all the mothers in my local cemetery. By omitting their names and death dates from the scroll, I created an ambiguity in which the viewer can locate their own loss experience.

"The Mother Rubbings" by Catherine Reinhart, 2020