The Muse Letter

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A List of Things I Look Forward to this Spring
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A List of Things I Look Forward to this Spring

The Muse Letter No. 97

Sophia Hembeck
Apr 10
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A List of Things I Look Forward to this Spring
themuseletter.substack.com
Hilma Af Klint, 1920

There’s nothing more common than having an opinion about seasons. Justifications why this one is in fact one’s personal favourite and that one not so much. Even the most nihilistic person can’t deny that season’s changing affects them somehow, that it changes our outlook, our feelings towards the future.

To deny the effect is to deny change in general, to deny the process of continuous growth/decay and re-birth.

This year I find myself at another threshold or is it the same? A couple of days ago I found an unanswered email in my inbox from exactly a year ago which made me reflect upon the facts:

  1. That I am too one of these people that apparently forget/fail to answer sometimes

  2. What has changed and why

  3. What has not changed and why

Fariha Róisín said in the brilliant threshold podcast I recently discovered that she constantly feels like being in an in-between state, in the bardo: A liminal space between death and re-birth, a constant threshold so to speak. Something I relate to a lot. Like the moon ever-changing my shape throughout the month, never fully arriving, always leaving simultaneously.

William Butler Yeats wrote “Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward.”

To me, spring is the most poignant signifier of exactly that: A moment to look down the staircase and continue to rise.


A List of Things I Look Forward to this Spring

shadows dancing in my room, sunbeams finding their way onto my legs stretched out on the bed on a lazy sunny afternoon

barcelona and strolling through little alleys being in awe of the architecture and ordering too many tapas, drinking wine on terraces

trying new things like joining a cacao ceremony on portobello beach and sitting by a bonfire watching the sunrise

a fresh margarita in hand and texting a friend to come around to sit together in the park

reading books like The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford, Thin Places by Jordan Kisner, Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, and Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City

seeing my family again and eat spinach from iglu with mashed potatoes and a fried egg

make some promises and whisper them to the dandelion’s round ball of silver tufts before scattering them in all directions


SHOP

Things I Have Noticed - Essays on leaving / searching / finding is a poetic memoir I wrote in these weird pandemic times, about the process of finding ones own voice. 

SHOP HERE


IN CASE YOU MISSED LAST WEEK’S MUSE LETTER

Doing Hard Things: Self-publishing, Art & Validation

I think about art and writing and validation: a lot.

I have to because to an extent it is my livelihood, my purpose.

It’s been over a year since I self-published “Things I Have Noticed – Essays on leaving/searching/finding”, now in its 7th print run and over 1000 copies sold later it still feels strange to write self-published in my CV, still I need to ask when submitting somewhere if I, in fact, do count as published. Or if I am still new and fresh and undiscovered?

read it here


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