A good hobby. . .
This morning I woke up to the most beautiful rainbow outside my bedroom window. We’ve had storms, dark skies, and strong winds this week, along with cooler temperatures than usual for summer solstice. And since our home sits at the top of a little mountain here in Maine, when the weather gets wild we’re intimately aware of it. So this morning’s rainbow was a sight for sore eyes (even if accompanied by a 4:58am sunrise). Here’s my best attempt at capturing it ⤵
I’m an amateur photographer. Not even that really, just a lady with an iPhone trying to capture her best memories to print on her tiny photo printer for her gratitude journal so she can revisit them again and again whenever the mood strikes her ⤵
But even though I’m an amateur at photography and certainly an amateur at journal creating, gardening, watercolor painting, ceramics, baking, book blogging, hiking, biking, kayaking, and poetry writing, too, these hobbies have become so important to me in recent years. They’ve brought me joy in my lowest of moments. They’re my anchors on the days I feel most adrift. They’re bits of the real me I cling to when life’s busyness and frantic pace threaten to make me forget who I really am.
Speaking of hobbies, I ran across these gorgeous words about the topic while collecting quotes this week ⤵
“In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive: [she] insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit. . . And so in order to be a source of true fulfillment, a good hobby probably should feel a little embarrassing; that’s a sign you’re doing it for its own sake, rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome. . . It’s fine, and perhaps preferable, to be mediocre at them.”
They come from Oliver Burkeman’s popular primer on life entitled Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.
It’s a book I’ve had for years but only read every now and then in fits and starts, one of my favorite bits being the chapter at the very end, after the Afterword, called “Confronting Finitude: A Conversation with James Hollis”, where this quote resides:
“You see, there is something rather infantile about modern popular culture, which is all about distraction. Twenty-four hours, seven days a week, in perpetuity. What is it we’re distracted from? Well, one thing is an encounter with our own depths. Another is our encounter with mortality. And the flight from these things leads to not only a fugitive life, but a superficial life. We can recognize mortality, finitude, and our susceptibility without succumbing to despair.”
I don’t know about you, but that lands pretty soundly for me.
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Now, back to that rainbow and this quote it brought to mind. . .
“You are seen. You are loved. Who you really are is my very favorite you.”
These are the words that always drop into my heart without fail whenever I see a rainbow. Partly because the rainbow has symbolic meaning in the religion I was raised in, but mostly because the rainbow has become a global symbol of promoting everyone’s right to the freedom to show one’s true colors and be proud of who they are, who they love, and how they choose to live their lives.
I’ve embraced this freedom. I love the celebration of pride June brings, and I hope no one in my world ever has to wonder if who they really are is anything but okay with me. It is. Always. Maybe it wasn’t when I was younger, but it 100% is now.
As Bob Goff famously said,
“I used to want to fix people, but now I just want to be with them.”
Same. Except I would add that I was a fool to think think they ever needed fixing in the first place. I hope whoever needs to read those words today finds their way to this message ㅤ♡
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Another quote I’ve loved this week came from Whistler, a novel by Ann Patchett I wrote about in last week’s message. . .
“There was no protecting anyone, no matter how much you loved them. . . “
At first, I thought this quote was a bit too sad, a little hopeless, or maybe borderline pathetic, but the more I sat with the words the more I realized the truth and the liberation within them — especially for those of us whose kids keep growing up and have now become adults who drive on interstates and jump off cliffs into lakes and do other terrifying things. Especially for those of us who tend to over-protect, over-worry, and over-everything too much. We love people. We love them hard. And sure, there are times when we can and should do some protecting, but really, truly, there’s no protecting, there is only loving.
Loving is enough.
Wherever you are this weekend, whatever hobbies you’re diving into or solstice shenanigans you’re coordinating, I hope the very best sunshine and rainbows chase you down. But if they don’t, because sometimes they won’t, I hope you feel seen, loved, and 100% accepted — & should you want to chat, I’m around :)
✌🏼️💓 🪴📚
Celeste
P.S. A book I’ve been waiting to see published for over two years just hit the shelves this week! It’s The Lemon Grove by David Balkin, a dear friend of mine who graciously let me help him edit this book and has now sent it out into the world. Unfortunately, the only bookseller carrying it currently is the one whose pockets I refuse to line (but KDP is still the best place to do free independent book publishing right now so thus is our fate for indie books). Surely, it will be available at local shops soon. In the meantime, you can read more about David’s work here: “A New Author in His Eighties Shares Thoughts on the Meaning of Life” and if you want, go ahead and grab a copy here.
(this is me trying out screen printing as a hobby)