pebbles №4: hello from hibernation
no community meetup this week, but here are some glimmers ❤️
Hello, beautiful sunbeam of simmering rage and buoyant hope!
how ARE you? *tobias funke voice*
My January felt simultaneously cozy and scary. There were some days that felt like quiet, gorgeous clarity—and many other days that felt like a punch in the stomach. (This vid sums up the mood for me.) But right now, today, I feel grateful for so much.
I’m writing you this note from Low-Battery Mode (not my laptop; my body) which means today’s pebbles come with just as much love, but less detail, than usual.
“alexis, sorry—did you just say ‘pebbles’?”
Yep! Some penguins search for the perfect pebble and gift it to another penguin they love. Like many of my neurodivergent friends, I'm a resource pebbler, like: here's this random meme that made me think of you, here's a song I think you'll be into, oh hey I found this cool resource, I'll just leave it here for you...
*lovingly lays misshapen pebbles at your internet-feet*
six pebbles that made my january glimmer a little
Getting someone I love to laugh so hard she joy-cried in her hospital bed, giggling “show me again! again!!” with this tiktok vid of a hamster scream-stretching (volume note: is loud)
Feeling inspired by Vicky Zhao’s Youtube breakdown of the Zettlekasten method of note-taking, and then updating my wild-ass database of notes and ideas in a way that makes WAY more sense for my neurospicy brain
Singing with my whole chest to late 90’s + early 00’s tween karaoke hits on this Spotify playlist while in the delusional phase of a long drive with a bestie
Drifting off to sleep listening to A Short History of Nearly Everything (narrated by the soothing-for-me voice of Richard Matthews)
Realizing I don’t hate exercising, I hate the way my asthma-lungs burn doing cardio-only workouts. And that I actually like strength training at home, since trying out the Ladder app. Like who is she??
PS: Not an affiliate link, it’s the link they give you in-app if you want to share it with friends, I’m not getting paid for this lol
Visiting and revisiting the words of long-term social justice and movement leaders (like Angela Davis and Grace Lee Boggs) to try to tap into their zoomed-out perspective on how to make change-work sustainable—and being reminded that “we need to embrace the idea that we are the leaders we’ve been looking for.”1
Anyways,
Alexis
Grace Lee Boggs, and Scott Kurashige. The next American Revolution : Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley, University Of California Press, 2012, p. 159. [emphasis mine]