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Hey y’all!

Thanks for all of the birthday wishes last week - y’all are the best. And yes, I know that 52 is not old - my line that 52 was the age of old men was more an attempt to say that is how it felt in my head - that I was much too young to be that old. But if you have to explain it…

In any event, I felt tremendously loved and affirmed by you all. We buried our 16-year-old cat on my birthday - he had been sick and was getting worse, and it was just time. I will write about it soon, but right now, it’s too fresh. He was my best boy, and it was hard to let him go. Grief is the price of love, and it is expensive.

But over the weekend I found myself in the Ozark mountains of Missouri, and the therapeutic value of long periods of silence and mist-covered mountains when one is grieving is not to be underestimated. It was exactly what I needed. I got back late Sunday night, and took Monday off (which is why this missive to you is behind) and now, back to work!

Five Beautiful Things

I don’t know how to describe this - Thomas Denniger takes found objects and uses them to make 3D collages that disguise the original items. It’s weird but right in my aesthetic. (thanks to reader Christina for the link).

A time lapse of a cactus blooming…

Claudia Chanhoi is an artist whose work pokes fun at patriarchal social media censorship rules - for instance, the Meta platform’s ban against female nipples, despite the allowance of male nipples. She draws minimal art - often nudes or partial nudes - but inserts non sequitur items in the picture. Imagine a simple drawing of a human breast, but then put a sun over it and it becomes a mountain instead. I love this, and the hypocrisy it exposes. This may be NSFW if you work for puritans.

Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, doing the stair dance in 1932. This man was a genius.

For we, the grieving:

To the living, I am gone,

To the sorrowful, I will never return,

To the angry, I was cheated,

But to the happy, I am at peace,

And to the faithful, I have never left.

I cannot speak, but I can listen.

I cannot be seen, but I can be heard.

So as you stand upon a shore gazing at a beautiful sea,

As you look upon a flower and admire its simplicity,

Remember me.

Remember me in your heart:

Your thoughts, and your memories,

Of the times we loved,

The times we cried,

The times we fought,

The times we laughed.

For if you always think of me, I will never have gone.

~ Margaret Mead

Check this out:

My friend Wendy Piersall has put out a new coloring book for adults full of meditation mandalas. If coloring is your jam, I hope you will check it out.

TCB

The most clicked link last week (~9.8 % of opens) was this reel of a humanizing moment with a chimpanzee.

June is Membership month here at LISB, and so I must remind you that I made the decision years ago to have no advertisements, no classifieds, and no sponsors on thai letter. Nothing to come between me and you - I have no agenda here other than to share beautiful things with you.

It costs me hundreds of dollars and many hours each month to publish LISB, and it is all paid for by our members - people who pay somewhere between $5 and $25 a month in order to make it free for everyone else - sorta like NPR, but without the nasally voices.

If you enjoy my work and these weekly emails from me, I hope you will consider becoming a member. While there are occasional perks, the primary benefit is that it keeps me putting things out into the world. Learn more about being a member here.

Thank You!

We had five new members join last week while I was away - thank you for making my work more sustainable.

A simple fact of newsletter publishing is that every single time you hit send, you lose subscribers. On one level this is good - you don’t want to pay to send emails to people who do not want them. It is discouraging, though. But my open rates stay in the 60% range, and I get high click rates and lots of personal replies, so obviously the people who haven’t unsubscribed really like this newsletter!

Thank you for reading - it means the world to me. If you want to help this newsletter out, please share it with your friends, or consider a post on social media with a link to the subscription page, telling folks why you like it. My only means of advertising for 9 years has been word of mouth, so please - tell your friends! Other ways to support it include buying me a cup of coffee, sharing the web version of this letter on social media (link at the top of this email), send me cash via a half-dozen ways, or if you are really energetic, send a postcard or old-school letter to the address at the bottom of the page - I love mail!

I’ll see you here next week. Until then, take care of yourself, and each other.

HH