Hi everyone!
Hope this email finds you. We’re starting the newsletter off with a truly special passage about love and its silent development written by our dear friend Ale.
LOVE ASLEEP
by Ale Vansant
What happens when one falls asleep is they close their eyes and drift from the legible world. In this realm, the body performs processes of recovery, regulation, and regeneration. Other processes, one cannot account for with certainty. We see strange images, we sweat, writhe, rest, and when we wake, we may find feeling completely changed in us, as if love itself had been passing like a hormone from the thymus outward, transmogrifying. And it had been. On a winter day, one may think that a tree could not look more dead. But no different are flora through their dormancy, whose naked branches and trunks brim with metabolic and developmental activity. The objective is quiet but intrinsic—simply to keep from freezing.
In tragedy, on God, in poem, in song, the nature of love is mystic and various. Same for sleep, the facilitator of dreams. In Água Viva, Clarice Lispector writes, "And I work while I sleep: because that is when I move inside the mystery." She considers that the body is released, somehow, from the mind's deliberate fear and urgency, into a plane of pure reactions. In "That's Us/Wild Combination," Arthur Russell sings—With this our love to see, by its own light / Love inside of me, it's working at night—for him, the work in sleep is a continuum of the loving day's work. After swimming, after a long drive, after companionship, love beats in humility through sleep. Søren Kierkegaard, in Works of Love, remarks, "Love is by no means merely a human bond." Further, "Love makes itself inconspicuous, especially when it works hardest. In love's work, our labor is reduced to nothing. The building-up of love can thus be compared to the work of nature. While we sleep, creation's vital forces keep on. No one gives a thought to how they carry on, although everyone delights in the beauty of the meadow and fruitfulness of the field." The Lover believes that love is fundamentally present, if not how or why, moving in everything, even in disguise.
Love miscellaneous, borne as impossibly and secretly as a dream—it happens such that, after we have been growing it all night or all winter, we wake one spring to find we have decided definitively toward it, and each other. If the processes that occur in us while we are unconscious nurture love, not merely the volition we employ in waking hours, then the well from which this love springs is not from our singular hearts but from— ? Still, as a testament to our living and dormancy, our cyclic and symbolic suppositions, this nature grows on and on.
Thank you for sharing your lovely writing with us, Ale! I was so grateful to read it and be reminded of all of the amazing things happening to and around me regardless of my awareness. It makes the love inside my heart feel fuller and fuller <3 <3
Things have been moving along, feeling really good, enjoying some surprise warm days too much to have more than a few thoughts inside my stupid head… here are some highlights:
Other Things I’ve Been Doing
Watching An Unmarried Woman which was really good and I will have more to say about it at another time if anyone wants to ask me.
Thinking to myself “I should stretch before bed tonight”.
Not stretching :-( .
I’ll have more next time
Love,
Jess
Hiii everyone! I hope you all had a Valentine’s Day filled with joy and sweet moments with people you love. I personally ate some AMAZING candy and had a peaceful day. Yayyyyy
I was sooooo excited this week to share a piece written by one of our dear friends, who has a beautiful soul. She is an amazing artist, quilter and writer and also one of my FAVORITE co-workers to hang out with :- ) Even though Valentine’s Day was last week, reading this left me with a sweet feeling. Ahhhhhhh!!!
Not much to share this week other than the exhilarating feeling of SPRING coming up in a couple of months. There does seem to be something in the air lately…it feels like a lot of people in my life are opening new chapters in their lives…..feeling the LOVE….experiencing a general shift or change of some sort. Do you feel it too? All I can say is that I’m super excited. Not too speak toooooo much in generalities. Ok I gotta run Love y’all and wishing you well this week. Talk soon!!!!!!!!!!! <3
Love, Sophie
♡♡♡ And Finally, Happy Happy Birthday to our Beloved Subscribers ♡♡♡
Millie, Tanner, Emma, and Grace!!
We made you this cake…. what do you think?? <3 <3