💭 Share More Fragments


On my coffee table sits a huge spiral-bound sketchbook.

It's usually open to the latest creation. I mainly use it (1) for visualizing big picture thinking and (2) when I realize the need to re-establish my body+mind connection (since typing on my laptop easily tends towards forgetting).

This Venn Diagram Retrospective was drawn in it.

In the bottom corner of my latest creation, in Sharpie with blue colored pencil over it:

"thoughts lately: share more 'unfinished' fragments"

When I wrote "thoughts lately" I guess I thought I'd have more than one! Anywho, if I'm going to walk my talk of co-creating and co-processing (a term I'm playing with to mean being in a shared cooperative and collaborative process), it's wise for me to actually share "unfinished" (in quotes because is really anything ever truly finished? and perhaps seeking to be finished often equate to seeking perfection?).

Okay, that was likely one too many parenthetical notes and questions. Though, if you've been here more than a minute you've likely already noticed I tend to have a lot of thoughts within thoughts.


bell hooks just died. I am grateful for how she offered tangibility to the deep connections amongst and between the foundational and pressing social issues of our times.

And now, these fragments dance together:

  • my recently rekindled love for working for long, uninterrupted spans of time in the local library, specifically the teen section where teen friends nearby read aloud sections of books they've randomly picked out.
  • how one time recently I parked a ways away from the library and ended up carrying a big stack of checked out books, smiling and hugging them to my chest while the rain spat down – how it viscerally brought me back to walking through my small college campus twelve years ago
  • seeing myself in the way back of my college library with my shoes off and socked feet tucked in underneath me, reading Where We Stand for some education class, witnessing bell hooks' words embrace my wordless questioning
  • how valuable it is to be in a physical space where one can be uninterrupted – uninterrupted by others and more necessarily, uninterrupted by one's own stuff.
  • how solitude, loneliness, individualism move with group think, cooperation, and things like the body double
  • how attending to our attention is the root of so much

and this:

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as means of escape. - bell hooks

My wish for you, dear reader, is two-fold:

  • that you have access to places (and beings?) who offer you uninterrupted experiences
  • and that you have access to places (and beings?) who offer you words to your wordless questioning.

May both support you in attending to your attention and breathing with your unfinished fragments.

'Til next time,

Cassandra

P.S. The rest of that huge sketchbook page? I was experimenting with this "niche of one" concept that Justin Welsh writes about here.