Commonplacing

Hello friends—a few links of interest and a poem for your week.

On traveling at the speed of soul—and how a pilgrimage is not a one-way act: “The real destination is your own front door.”

Thanks to

Samantha Clark

’s beautiful newsletter The Life Boat, I now know that a Cloud Appreciation Society exists. What joy to know there are people who feel that looking up with appreciation and awe is worthy of organization.

Specious Bridgerton headlines aside, a new book collects the work of Eliza Haywood, who knew how claims of free speech in an unfree society are used to silence the marginalized (more on that below, if of interest).

Print wars and the origins of free speech

I fiercely love that

15thCenturyFeminist

is sharing lists of the many women writers across centuries. (Note to the world: Women. Have. Always. Been. Writing).

A surprising connection between Pittsburgh and Glasgow—not only are both centers of 19th-century urban industry, but they also share a dialect.

Unsurprisingly, the history of the 1864 abortion ban in Arizona was partly in response to elevating the medical profession—which was only accessible to white men—by suppressing women’s knowledge of healing and medicine.

On the role that pareidolia—seeing forms in random, abstract forms—may have played in the creation of ancient cave art.

And I so loved this wise and beautiful interview between

Amanda B. Hinton

and

Swarnali Mukherjee

.

And a poem by Rosalía de Castro (1837-1885):

They say that plants don't talk, nor do
     brooks or birds,
nor the wave with its chatter, nor stars
     with their shine.
They say it but it's not true, for whenever
     I walk by
they whisper and yell about me
                                     "There goes the crazy woman dreaming
of life's endless spring and of fields
and soon, very soon, her hair
    will be gray.
She sees the shaking, terrified frost
    cover the meadow."
There are gray hairs in my head; there is frost
    on the meadows,
but I go on dreaming—a poor, incurable
    sleepwalker—
of life's endless spring that is receding
and the perennial freshness of fields
   and souls,
although fields dry and souls burn up.
Stars and brooks and flowers! Don't gossip about
   my dreams:
without them how could I admire you? How could
   I live?
                                     —trans. by Aliki and Willis Barnstone

Spring comes so slowly up here, but when the swallows return and the sun is high above the mountains, Alaska doesn’t hold back. View: Potter’s Marsh, looking south towards the Kenai in south Anchorage.