Mountain hut booked: looking forward to watching the sunrise from Mt. Fuji's peak on the morning of my 30th birthday.

Mount Fuji seen from the International Space Station.

In evening’s dome each bird is a point of memory. It’s amazing sometimes how the years’ fervor returns, returns without a body, returns for no reason at all, how beauty, so brief in its violent love, saves us an echo as night falls.

And so, what can you do but stand there slack-armed, your heart overloaded and that taste of dust that was a rose or a road— Flight outflies the wing. Without humility you know this remnant was wrung from the dark by the work of silence, that the branch in your hand, the dark tear are your inheritance, the man with his story, the lamp shining its light.

— Julio Cortázar, “Resumen en otoño” (tr. Stephen Kessler)

En la bóveda de la tarde cada pájaro es un punto del recuerdo. Asombra a veces que el fervor del tiempo vuelva, sin cuerpo vuelva, ya sin motivo vuelva; que la belleza, tan breve en su violento amor nos guarde un eco en el descenso de la noche.

Y así, qué más que estarse con los brazos caídos, el corazón amontonado y ese sabor de polvo que fue rosa o camino— El vuelo excede el ala. Sin humildad, saber que esto que resta fue ganado a la sombra por obra de silencio; que la rama en la mano, que la lágrima oscura son heredad, el hombre con su historia, la lámpara que alumbra.

Hi Lana - How've you been? Wondering what a typical day is like for you?

Hello! Apologies for taking so long to respond—I have been really well, thank you for asking!

I wonder if you'll find my day-to-day life quite boring. I'm a serial planner and my schedule depends on the day of the week, but a typical Monday looks like:

4:45 - wake; stretch; run 5km in the park

5:30 - brush teeth; shower; get ready for work (skincare routine, get dressed, style hair, make-up...); breakfast, coffee, and listen to the daily news

6:40 - leave for work; listen to music or a podcast while walking to/through stations; study Japanese (Anki flashcards) while on the train

7:40 - arrive at workplace; check email

17:00 - leave workplace; listen to music or a podcast while walking to/through stations, study Japanese (Anki flashcards) while on the train (when finished flashcards, I usually just read or message friends/family)

18:00 - arrive home; change into yoga wear; clean up (I set a timer for 15min and go about organizing belongings from my work bag, doing a load of laundry, wiping surfaces, tidying up anything out of place etc. until the timer goes off)

18:20 - workout (legs, glutes); stretch; shower

19:00 - change into loungewear; eat dinner (usually prepared the day before)

19:15 - prepare work bag for the next day (make sure electronic devices are all charged/clothing is steamed/lunch is prepared etc.); wash any dishes left in the sink; read a book or watch an episode of a TV show

20:30 - change into pyjamas; skincare routine; brush and floss teeth

20:45 - respond to messages/emails I procrastinated on replying to

21:00 - sleep

“Repetition is a component of all ascetic traditions, and I like to think that my own habits constitute something like a spiritual discipline. My nature bends toward listlessness and disorder. Resolving to do the same thing each day, at the same time, has given my life a center, insulating me from the siren song of novelty and distraction that has caused me so much unhappiness in the past. I live a monotonous life, which is not to say a tedious one. (I believe, with Rilke, that those who find life dull are not poet enough to call forth its riches.) And I imagine that these tightly circumscribed days are radiating, with each turn of the circle, into widening arcs, amounting to a life whose ties are deeper, whose direction is more certain.”

— Meghan O’Gieblyn, Routine Maintenance

St. Vincent by Janette Beckman

Cooking is not about convenience and it's not about shortcuts. Our hunger for the twenty-minute gourmet meal, for one-pot ease and prewashed, precut ingredients has severed our lifeline to the satisfactions of cooking. Take your time. Take a long time. Move slowly and deliberately and with great attention.

Thomas Keller, The French Laundry Cookbook

[A critic is] someone who […] loves experience. I think it’s a disposition that comes even before attention to art. It is someone that looks at any phenomena and wants to extend their life by paying attention—by analysis—[by wanting] to juice this aspect of experience for all that it’s worth. Someone who is, in one way, battling death by saying I can extend this moment, and this one, and this one by way of attention. And so the best way to practice that disposition happens to be on art and therefore, [the critic] uses their taste, uses their standards, uses their whole apparatus of judgement, really, to express a kind of joy of being alive at the same time as the thing.

— Vinson Cunningham's response to the question, "What is the work of a critic today?" on The New Yorker's Critics at Large podcast

A leaf falls here/there, now/then

behind the rain, a curtain of rain,

the trees in their own time.

I see now that time falls in layers.

— Elisa Gabbert, "Life Poem I," featured in The Paris Review

Bowl with Stamped Floral Decoration, 1400s, Cleveland Museum of Art: Korean Art

Size: Overall: 8.8 cm (3 7/16 in.) Medium: glazed ceramic

https://clevelandart.org/art/1988.1057

Welcoming April

[...] but schools serve the political and economic order in which they operate, and whether they deserve a passing or a failing grade begs the prior question asking what it is they're supposed to teach. The answers change with time and circumstance. The curriculum proposed by Plato forbade the reading of poetry apt to "give a distorted image of the nature of the gods and heroes"; Castiglione offered instruction in a "certain nonchalance" likely to win favour of a Medici prince or a Borgia duke; John Milton believed "the end of learning" to be the knowledge and love of God. When Yale College in 1701 set itself up as a vessel of the true Puritan faith in the Connecticut wilderness, it undertook to supply the colony's churches with an orthodox ministry, and to bestow upon its graduates the warrants of Christian character and spiritual worth. Thomas Jefferson in 1819 established the University of Virginia to develop "the reasoning faculties of our youth," to improve in its nature what "was vicious and perverse" and by so doing to advance "the prosperity, the power, and the happiness of a nation."

— Lewis H. Lapham, "Playing with Fire," preamble to Lapham’s Quarterly Fall 2008 issue: “Ways of Learning”

Morning rain at Ryoanji temple in Kyoto (龍安寺, 京都)

Conie Vallese by Krisztian Eder for CO Natural World 2021 Ad Campaign - Fashion Campaigns - Minimal. / Visual.

Clothing: CO Natural World White oversized wool sweater

“Do not shorten the morning by getting up late, or waste it in unworthy occupations or in talk; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims