Welcome to Life is weather. Life is meals.
If you’re wondering what the hell that means it’s from one of my favorite of James Salter’s books— Light Years where he said “Life is weather. life is meals. Lunches on a blue checked cloth on which salt has spilled. The smell of tobacco. Brie, yellow apples, wood-handled knives.” In other words, it was his life’s work to evoke his characters’ fleeting moments, the picnic lunches and afternoons in bed, to assign meaning to them as they flooded by, and also to mourn the gaps between what can be lived and what can be recorded, contemplated, captured.
Ever since I first read it it’s been something I am interested in exploring while on a bit of a creative hiatus from being “employed”. I sold my children’s bookstore a year ago and have been on a stay-at-home-mom journey to figure out what the next adventure is.
This is a Substack that investigates life’s intermissions [and big questions]— especially in our creative work. It is curated by Emma O’Brien a Creative Strategist who has run her own literary startup [reads] with BFF Rachael Yaeger, children’s bookstore & gallery [nooks] & film curation catalogue [very good films] with Beth Wilkinson.
“I think, as I've gotten older, I've been able to be more reckless with my choices, because practically speaking, you get less careful. Your choices become more instinctive, and you feel like if you make a mistake, it won't destroy you.”
— Willem Defoe
“I make all my decisions on intuition. But then I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find that spear. That is intellect.”
— Ingmar Bergman
