#29: the hollow, the thrust and the contour
Plus repentence and repair, being fully alive and visionary women
You’re reading This Might Resonate, a monthly newsletter from me, Emily. Welcome to all 861 of you! A favour: if you enjoy This Might Resonate, please forward it to a friend - they can subscribe right here.
I have some work capacity coming up from mid-May. Aside from reading and watching things, I help teams to collaborate and develop in regenerative ways through facilitation, organisational design, coaching and grief work. Read more and get in touch here.
Reading
Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times by
. I want to press this book into the hands of everyone I care about and demand we have a four hour discussion about it. One of the most radical and original non-fiction books I’ve read. An exploration of what makes a genuinely satisfying and meaningful life, through the lens of faith and Oldfield’s own experiences, rendered unsparingly and tenderly. I was lucky enough to have a sneak peak; Fully Alive is released on 23rd May, get your pre-orders in now!On Repentance And Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by
. What can a medieval Jewish philosopher have to teach us about conflict and repair? Quite a bit, it turns out. Ruttenberg takes us through Maimonides’ five stages of repentence and their relevance for our fractured times: naming and owning harm; beginning to change; restitution and accepting consequences; apologizing; and making different choices. I particularly appreciated Ruttenberg’s nuanced view on forgiveness.The Lifegiving Benefits of Befriending Our Mortality by
. I want to live inside this poem. “Awe is the most powerful medicine in the world. / I have never felt awe and shame at the same time, … / If you don’t / believe me, tell me the last time you saw / anything bite with its jaw dropped.”The ecology of magic: An Interview with David Abram.
How RIBA is decolonising its HQ.
Most read from the last edition:
TfL's AI Tube Station experiment is amazing and slightly terrifying by
What comes after Whiteness? by
.
Watching
A lot of TV, courtesy of a week in bed with a virus. I was saved by Nicholas Galitzine in variously: a rewatch of Bottoms, The Idea of You (genuinely sexy) and Red White and Royal Blue (fun, with a better script than I assumed). And the memory of his turn in Mary & George, which I watched last month.
Also:
Ripley: faithful to the grim industriousness of the book, I loved it
3 Body Problem: mind-bending fun
Baby Reindeer: so unconventional that I’m still not really sure what I watched
Station Eleven: a rewatch of one of my favourite shows
What We Do in the Shadows: a rewatch, silliness itself
Three documentaries about visionary women. Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, Signs out of time: the story of archeologist Marija Gimbutas and this 1961 film about Barbara Hepworth’s relationship with Cornwall.
Pre-virus, at cinema:
Monkey Man. I adored every second of this, from the kinetic action sequences to the joyful Hijra community who nurse the hero back to health (and kick some ass of their own)
Civil War. Visually epic but curiously hollow at the emotional centre. Give this a miss if the sound of gunfire is difficult for you.
Listening
Writing
. I’m so inspired by Fyn’s courage and vulnerability in asking their friends to create a ritual for them, and in allowing themselves to be cared for in such a deep way. I can’t help but wonder what might shift for me if I tried something similar, and how different our relationships would be if we normalised this kind of collective witnessing. Fyn and I also talked about: the importance of community in expressing chronic illness grief; the relationship between grief and isolation in chronic illness; how hard it is to ask for and receive care as a chronically ill person; the role that queerness plays in enabling communities of deep care.Still savouring these words
From The Hepworth Wakefield museum, visited on a family trip to Yorkshire last month (see also the runes above).
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