A Romcom, Rachmaninoff and Rumi

everything you need to recover from the toughest week this year

How are you all doing? Please do share in the comments below if you feel up to it. To say I’ve spent a lot of time questioning the arc of the moral universe this week, is an understatement. Amanda Lehr gives us some pretty good possible explanations of WTF it might have been up to. My favourite might be:

The arc of the moral universe is running very late. It’s sitting in standstill traffic behind a fleet of Amazon delivery vans, a burning Tesla, and a stretch limousine with Truck Nuts.

When things get too overwhelming,

♛ sometimes it helps to temporarily delete all your news apps.

Which is what I did, and I’m quite enjoying it.

It turned out that catching even a glimpse of any headline ended up being too triggering.

Maybe that’s a good sign; it means empathy is alive and well in me. It isn’t so much a case of burying my head in the sand as it is choosing to bury my heart in creativity, because I refuse to give up on my hunch that, in the end, creativity is what will save the world. There is a poem by Rumi that starts with:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

(Thank you

Rajeshwari Roy

for reminding me) I like to believe that the field Rumi is talking about is creativity.

For example,

♛ look at this beautiful poem by Nikita Gill

I will not give up

the flowers in my heart

for stones just because the world

is a hard place.

The world

is only a hard place

because it needs more

flower hearted people.

♛ Or while doing research for a novel I’m writing, I found this little piece of divinity.

12 Romances, Op 21: No. 7 How Fair This Spot, by Sergei Rachmaninoff, transcribed for the Trumpet, which is played by Tine Thing Helseth, and the Orchestra, which is the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

Who wouldn’t want to hang out in a field where stuff like this is dreamed up?

♛ I read a book, a lovely romcom by Yulin Kuang, called: How To End A Love Story.

Because sometimes we just need to immerse ourselves in something that guarantees a happy ending. It’s an enemies to lovers story which is one of my favourite romcom tropes. The prose is sharp; there’s juicy conflict throughout— which doesn’t get resolved until the end; there’s enough of a surrounding story to make it interesting, and— 🥁 the two main characters are writers. She’s a bestselling novelist who’s working on a TV adaptation of her YA novel, and he’s the second-in-command in the writer’s room. They haven’t seen each other since a tragic accident that bound them together and killed her sister thirteen years ago, and they’re about to get stuck working with each other for the next several months.

Interestingly, the author Yulin Kuang is friends with Emily Henry and also the screenwriter and director for Beach Read.

♛ I watched the new sitcom, English Teacher, created by Brian Jordan Alvarez

about the adventures of Evan Marquez, a teacher in Austin, Texas who finds himself at the intersection of the personal, professional and political aspects of working at a high school. It’s hilarious and exactly what I needed for a good laugh this week.

♛ I read a post from Elizabeth Gilbert through whom I first discovered Substack.

I implore you, if you need a little encouragement and hope this week, to take a look at what she posted. It was everything I needed to hear.

LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Elizabeth Lesser!

♛ And last, but DEFINITELY not least I discovered 51 mins of a new Chalamet interview

which got me all excited for December 26th when you’ll find me in a theatre sipping on a coke (lots of ice), eating popcorn and watching A Complete Unknown. The countdown is on…

PS. I do miss his old hair.

Until next time,

XO Ingrid

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I’m dying to know if you have any suggestions, ideas, thoughts on how you’ve coped this week. Please do share 💕 and as always— thank you.