Paris Pages (3)

The Rose and the Garden

Upon securing a rose and a baguette, e.g. living my best Parisian life.

Dear Friends,

Happy Saturday. As promised, here is a collection of some of my Paris Pages, selections of my morning pages from Paris. I thought I’d hold off posting them the last two weeks as I didn’t want to inundate you all with e-mails. Today, I’m sharing two entries with you all: The Rose and The Garden, the latter of which was inspired by my visit to the Luxembourg gardens, which I loved. Next week I’ll share The Wine Cave. In each of these, I record a little memory from Paris along with some ponderings on those experiences. Sometimes my ramblings are merely that— ramblings! But they help me ponder themes I’ve been thinking through in my scholarly and creative writing: attention, metaphor, perception, how our habits of attention shapes what we see. I hope you will find them enjoyable. Do stay tuned for next week’s which is one of my favourite memories from France !

I am also attaching some pictures from the trip, along with links to some music and shows I watched while in Paris. It was really such a gift of a trip— truly relaxing, but also fairly productive on the writing and research end of things. I look forward to sharing some of the projects I’ve been working on with you, although of course it always takes a while for things to actually get published. It has also given me ideas for some of the writing I hope to do here in the autumn.

Over the next few weeks, I will be posting the final episodes of the You are a Tree series. I look forward to sharing that with you all. But for now: Paris Pages!

The Rose

I have the urge to take pictures of many things on this trip. For example, right now I am sitting in the presence of a beautiful rose— my beautiful rose. Its stem is submerged in a bottle that was once filled with wine— rosé to be precise. The rose and the bottle are by the window on a little table which also holds two teacups and a teapot with a single blue fish painted on it. It is pleasing, this scene. And I want to take a picture of it. But why?