I thought one of the most beautifully considered scenes in the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All At Once, a film so chock full of stress and hilarity and sadness and love and the loudly absurd, is the one in which Evelyn (usually played by Michelle Yeoh) and her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) find themselves in a multiverse in which they both exist as rocks. Following a cacophony of light and color and sound—I’m not going to explain the movie; if you haven’t seen it you should and it’s better to go in knowing as little as possible—there is a sudden stillness, wind in the mountains. A spare, subtitled conversation between these two women who are, for a moment, stones.
The summer came crashing to a close and ushered in a particularly busy few weeks for me, work-wise—compounded because I’ve been preparing for a trip to the Southwest desert and the California coast—but in talking to friends and colleagues it seems like I’m not alone in feeling particularly overextended. Maybe there’s some frenetic energy in the air. Perhaps something, like, planetary is going on. (Maybe it’s the temporal reverberations of NASA crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid—theoretically comforting, intellectually awesome, sort of amorphously disconcerting nonetheless.) There are upsetting things happening in various places on various scales, which you are no doubt reading about elsewhere. This week, this newsletter is just going to be that rock scene amid the anxiety, a quiet little moment of imparting some things that have recently felt like gentle brain massages. It’s going to be quick. There might be typos. It’ll all be OK.
One of these things is searching for tiny beautiful rocks on newly crisp morning beach walks with my dog, an inheritance from my mother, who keeps nice-feeling stones in the pockets of her jackets and in bowls around the house.
When one is not on the seashore, there is Pebble Instagram. Simply photographed stones, sometimes shot solo, sometimes in quite satisfying collections and configurations. Soothing, soothing, soothing. I want to look at these looping spirals of rocks veined with quartz (also called Wishing Stones!), these fossilized corals, these polka dot rounds of Jasper. Will leave you with some of my favorites, and a few other nice things below. Let me know what’s calming you down, lifting you up, have a happy weekend, back in a couple weeks. Probably with more pictures of rocks, big red ones, the desert’s as lovely as the sea.
Read…
…both brilliant, quintessentially British books I recommended this week in my column, Anything Good, which also includes recommendations from Andrew Sean Greer and Jennifer Egan, and a few from the V.F. staff. If you’re in the mood to listen to a book, I’ve been on a memoir-via-audio kick, because there’s something so wonderful about hearing the author read about themself. I tore through Dani Shapiro’s explorations of relationships (romantic and parental, primarily) and then downloaded my colleague Delia Cai’s Anything Good rec—hard concur on that one.