five things no. 12
with jess kirby from a common thread!
Folks, hello! I do love how I started five things (in January 2024!) with the intention to publish them in a somewhat regular cadence and yet, here we are. It’s been almost three months since my last one. Proud of us.
Today, though, I’m thrilled to bring one of my newsletter friends Jess into the five things fray.
is a newsletter written by , an ex-fashion and beauty influencer who left it all behind to start an anti-consumption newsletter about buying less stuff, and pursuing a more meaningful and intentional life. As someone who flirted with influencing but never quite committed to it (I am lazy and also, at the end of the day, shy!), I am so appreciative of Jess’s journey and the openness with which she writes about it.I’ve been reading A Common Thread for years now, and in that time Jess has become one of my good newsletter friends—when you work on your own, you need people whose opinion you can trust to tell you when you’re being insane, etc.! Making your own set of colleagues has been so important to me, and I’m lucky that Jess, whose work on consumption and consumerism and the influencer economy I’m always interested in reading, has become a friend and a colleague.
With that!
Jess’s Five Things:
It is officially dress, sweater and Birks season which is the short period of time between mud season and summer in Vermont when it’s cold in the morning, warm in the afternoon, and it’s glorious. I am on my second buy nothing year so my shopping is VERY minimal but there are many amazing secondhand dresses to be found (including the one I’m wearing in the photo).
The number one thing that has kept me sane in these current times is TRE (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises). It’s a form of somatic therapy that encourages the body to engage in a natural shaking response, and the result is a feeling of deep muscular release and calming of the nervous system (kind of hard to explain without sounding a bit wacky). It’s a mind/body experience like nothing else I’ve ever done and I feel an immense sense of calm and groundedness afterwards.. You can find providers online, and if you happen to live in Vermont, my friend does both in person and virtual classes. (Clara: Anyone who has ever touched my shoulders immediately recoils upon noting the TENSION in them, so I think I need this???)
I’m reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and the book is a salve for the soul. In a time when so many people feel despair, disconnected, and distraught, her words and wisdom bring comfort and guidance. This is one of my favorite passages:
Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.
Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
Never take the first. Never take the last.
Take only what you need.
Take only which is given.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others.
Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.
Share.
Give thanks for what you have been given.
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.
All I know is, if you make this crispy rice salad recipe, you might not want to eat anything else for lunch or dinner, ever again. I made it with brown rice instead of white and added some avocado on top. None of the ingredients are too obscure or hard to find either!
I watched the film Sing, Sing (based on a true story) on a flight recently and I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s about a group of incarcerated men including Divine G, a wrongfully imprisoned man desperately trying to prove his innocence, who find hope, healing, and community through the prison theater program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Several of the actors in the movie were formerly incarcerated and part of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program. I think it’s one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. (Clara: One of my favorite films from last year; it deserved so much more recognition!)
Clara’s Five Things:
I’ve been doing a lot of focus-requiring work, which means I’ve been listening to a lot of classical and jazz music. Sometimes I do playlists, but for the most part I prefer listening to albums. They set a mood and a time better than a playlist can. Here are a few from my rotation: Coltrane (John Coltrane Quartet), Rachmaninoff: Complete Works for Cello and Piano (Jordan Gregoris & Stéphane de May), Kind of Blue (Miles Davis), and Vivaldi: The Four Seasons (Sarah Chang and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra). On the matter of new music: I am loving Bon Iver’s SABLE, fABLE, Adrianne Lenker’s Live at Revolution Hall, Mon Rovia’s Oh Wide World, and Trousdale’s Growing Pains.
When the power went out in Spain last week (btw I am so brave for not having written An Essay about this), I was left sans light in my apartment until about 10:30 p.m. Which was honestly fine. I could not believe just how fine it was, actually. My neighbor from across the street and I mostly stared silently at each other from our respective balconies as we waited for sunset like … I guess this is happening? People were really buying candles and torches like we were nearing the end of the world, and good on them, I suppose, but luckily I’m great at prioritizing and used most of my cash on hand to buy (1) a beer and (2) an alfajor, meaning that I had to make do with my little reading light once the sun set. And it was fine! It’s funny: I only bought a reading light in the first place because the woman sitting next to me on an overnight flight last year asked me to use hers instead of the bright plane reading light, which she said (politely!) was disturbing her and her daughter. A few weeks later, I stopped at a bookstore and bought this cutie-pie teeny lamp; I use it on all my long flights now.
I’ll write about this more long-form eventually, but I read Mario Benedetti’s Primavera con una esquina rota (translated as Springtime in a Broken Mirror) and I loved it so much I just need you all to get on board so we can discuss. It’s not an arduous or tedious read and it will leave you pondering your existence. You get to read a Uruguayan author! Expand your horizons! What is not to love?? I want to say favorite book of the year so far, but I’ve read so many good books this year, including, of course, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, which I discussed in a recent essay. What a thing, to be so blessed with access to good literature, past and present! Giddy over it, honestly.
As always, my fellow newsletter writers have been killing it. Here are a few of the pieces I’ve been thinking about over the last month or so:
’s Craving the Analog, which put into words how much of my days are sometimes spent almost running down the clock; ’s The “Debate over Pure Literature,” which made me think about what it is and what it means to fictionalize a lived experience; ’s Will We Ever Be So Back Again, a heart wrenching and beautiful essay about loss and the people it transforms us into; ’s My Weekend as a 27 Year Old in Chicago (title inspired, I assumed, by this classic), which made me feel less lonely; ’s Why I left The Athletic, because I’m always rooting for friends from my previous lives embarking upon new projects; and ’s Be Honest: Do You Think This Lipgloss Makes Me Look Less Literary, which distilled all of my little thoughts about the inane reaction to Katie Kitamura’s lipgloss (itself an inane sentence) into one genius essay.
I mean: looking at this view for two point five days temporarily cured me of all my real and imaginary ailments. I’m working on a little travel diary for it, but I did go to Mallorca with a friend over Easter weekend (see above) and it was so fun and chill and beautiful; honestly, we mostly walked and ate and had little drinks and looked wistfully at the sea, which … more or less boils down to the meaning of life for me. I spent a couple of combined hours floating and treading water and acquiring a gorgeous little sunburn that would’ve made my mother mad and my grandmother proud had they been nearby/alive (respectively) to see it. I always forget how much I love the sea and then it’s like … oh … interesting … this is what it is all about … why bother doing anything else? Oh, to be a fish.
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I am reading this right now, in my home, in Vermont and am wearing a sweater, dress, and Birkenstocks and I realized that's just something I do and honestly have never thought about before.
A lovely roundup, bookmarked many things, nodded in agreement to many others. Thank you both! <3