Byeeee, January!

The winter doldrums are alive and well this week. T and I are both on the up-and-up, slowly, but have varying kinds of lingering meh. Coupled with the weather—gloom!!—and friends and family dealing with various issues and ailments, it’s been a bit of a low week. I won’t be sad to see January gone, even if it means we’re already a twelfth of the way through the year!

Two links in conversation this week, plus one:

• Mandy Brown and Jack Cheng are two of my “I’ll read whatever you write” folks. So it was especially fun to see Jack responding to Mandy in his newsletter this week. Mandy wrote about her “unified theory of fucks”—and how caring about the right things can fill you up, even as care pours out of you (in contrast to caring about things that will never fill you back up). Jack built on this, pointing out that “all work is care work”, and offering that the act of paying attention to beauty is one way of doing that care work for ourselves.
• A beautiful celebration of the huon pine, a rare, endangered species from Tasmania, and the process of making a table from some precious slabs of the tree. The longevity of this tree—described here fittingly as “permanence”—is incredible: “The 3,000-year age of living huon pines is one thing, but researchers have found fallen huon pine logs on the floor of the forest that have lain there, unmolested by decay, for as much as 38,000 years! Not petrified, not fossilized, just oily wood under a weathered surface, simply enduring.” This essay is full of amazing details like that—I was in awe reading it.

All the best for the week ahead!