Everything I Loved in April
Remember her?
Hello beautiful people!
I spent the first few days of May preparing for and hosting my second-to-last-ever retreat in North Carolina, which was the sweetest way to begin such a darling month.
There was mountain mist involved, and a real-time eruption of crocuses, and these masterpiece cookies if you can even imagine:
If you want to come to my actual last retreat ever, it’s next month in the New York area! I heard a rumor that crocuses might even treat us an encore performance.
During the retreat, I was thinking (and talking!) quite a lot about creative growth, and preserving that balance between authentic self-expression and what the current zeitgeist may demand.
Shall we discuss this in a future newsletter? It’s on my mind as I prepare to promote a very different type of book than I’ve written before (from the same brain, though! ;) and also navigate a completely different industry than the one I started in.
I strongly believe that creativity itself will tell us when to quit or when to gently release an identity that is more effort than joy to inhabit, but it’s tough to discern when there’s “making a living” to be had, and there’s also inflation, and tariffs, and probably Mercury in Permanent Retrograde.
I decided early in my career that when Instagram would inevitably disappear (or change so drastically that for all intents and purposes it has disappeared), and whatever followed Instagram would disappear, and that a cascade of new platforms and holograms from space and ChatGPT would “take my job,” that I wouldn’t worry or complain about it.
There have always been new technologies that result in irrelevancy for many people, and I trust in humans to adjust as we always have done. I remember an acetate about a 2000s blogger who took a magazine writer she admired out to lunch to talk shop, and the writer used the entire time to talk about how bloggers were stealing all the journalism jobs that they didn’t even go to school for.
That’s the opposite type of human that I want to be!
And yet, of course there’s real grief and worry to watch the change unfold, however familiar it may be, and to experience the societally-enforced pangs of “others are taking my place.”
That’s what’s been on my mind as I conclude the season of my life during which I lead retreats, and as I look back on the season of my creativity that expressed itself best on social media.
For now, I love writing this newsletter, but even Substack too is starting to give me the ick as it introduces more inboxes, more sharing, more ways to increase numbers of all sorts—none of which I want! I don’t want any of that!
AND, I don’t want to ever become a curmudgeon afraid of change.
That’s where you find me mentally this mid-May.
Where are you mentally this mid-May?
You can pre-order my book HERE, and there’s a fun bonus coming soon for all you lovely pre-order-ers!
Should we talk about April now? Or should we stay in this tedious little inconsequential crisis??
I vote April! Let’s go!
City Summer Movies
I was in the mood to watch a Pregnancy Movie™, of which there are so few that hit the right tone for me.
Upon scanning through a long listicle, the only one that appealed to me was Rosemary’s Baby.
You’re right, the one about giving birth to Satan. It’s just what I was in the mood for.
I’d actually never seen it, though I’m a fan of those stylish psychological thrillers with cocktail party scenes and frantic phone booth moments, and I found one aspect of it particularly scary and thrilling:
The movie hit its crescendo during peak summer heat in NYC, which is an unrelenting horror force of its own. Usually scary movies take place in the dark, in winter, in a forest with no one around, all to amplify the isolation and uncertainty of the characters.
But I felt that same desperate aloneness along with Mia Farrow in her bell-shaped gowns and pixie cut as she sweat and panted along the midtown streets of Manhattan, surrounded by people she had no reason to trust. Shudder!
Since I’ll be ripe in pregnancy during the most miserable peak of concrete crowded summer in New York, I appreciated that overly bright sun-splashed mood a LOT—especially for a movie about the occult whose activities go on in a dark basement (and an ultra-chic black bassinet!).
Listen to a great recap with fun tidbits here; watch co-star Ruth Gordon’s perfect Oscar acceptance speech here!
It’s rare to find movies that accurately depict suffering in NYC’s summer, but I was reminded of Do the Right Thing—one of my favorites, and a film I can easily feel on my skin just thinking about it.
TV that makes me want to be a better person
Two captivating shows I watched in April actually bent the little wire of my life in a slightly more upturned direction, with their narratives on how people die the same way they live:
Titanic: The Digital Resurrection
Titanic documentaries are one of my favorite genres. You name it, I’ve seen it, and I didn’t stop talking about it for weeks!
So nothing was going to stop me from beginning a free trial that I’ll probably forget about to watch the latest—a National Geographic (i.e. more trustworthy than some of the docs I’ve seen about aliens sinking the ship) show featuring a digital recreation of the wreckage underwater.
It was SO COOL going through all the nooks and crannies and underneath and upside down like a magical scuba diver. They used the recreation to solve some mysteries too, and tell the lesser-known stories of some notable passengers, and many passengers who were never noted.
Among the non-notables were the engineers and boiler stokers who spent the final two hours of their lives working in the underbelly of the ship to keep the electricity on as long as possible, knowing that the ship was sinking and knowing that it would be impossible to signal distress and save lives without light.
Can you begin to imagine giving up your own existence in hopes that people you’ll never know can have a chance at survival!? They had to make a split-second decision to give their lives for others, and they chose to spend their last moments doing just that: illuminating the rescue mission and burial site.
I can only I will not be forgetting those individuals any time soon.
As usual, I couldn’t stop sharing all the tidbits I learned because it was all just so thrilling and moving, so Mr. Mari had to impose a one-fact-a-day rule that I am still abiding by, a month later.
Dying for Sex
I thought I’d be too much of a prude for this show, but I was fully equipped for and captivated by the “dying” aspect of its premise.
I particularly loved how much laughter filled the episodes, which was so fun to watch—not to mention entirely accurate. In every caregiving or care-receiving situation I’ve found myself in, there is SO MUCH LAUGHTER.
Want to know where the most hilarity, mischief, and jokes happen in the hospital? In my experience, it’s the staff office at the NICU. Laughter is survival, so there’s a lot of it.
In caregiving, you really get to know the inelegant humor of the human body. A person who was once dashing and graceful becomes floppy and goofy with bodily functions going rogue. If they are dying, even the most articulate of wordsmiths start saying some pretty funny things. If you can’t laugh through all of this, you can’t keep going.
Thus, with all its silliness through tears, this show was the most accurate portrayal I’ve seen of caregiving and dying, and I was an absolute puddle by the final moments.
Plus…Michelle Williams, Sissy Spacek, and Jenny Slate? Dream team! Where’s the First Wives Club remake with them??
P.S. I was just re-puddled after reading this YouTube comment under the clip above:
The most professional thing you can do
I took lots of Latin dance classes in April—rumba, bachata, samba, merengue—partially in preparation for a trip to the Dominican Republic, which I just returned from! (and, oddly enough, didn’t find any spontaneous dance competitions so my skills did not come in handy…)
After years of classical dance in my youth, I took West African Dance classes throughout college (from this guy, still teaching, wow!) and realized “OHHHH, THIS IS HOW MY BODY NATURALLY WANTS TO MOVE!”
And, dare I say, how every body naturally wants to move? (Is there anyone out there who finds, uh, swing dancing, for example, particularly intuitive??)
Those Latin dance styles with strong roots in the African diaspora just feel so good to me—the body following the easy music cues, rather than squishing itself into rhythms that are perhaps better suited for soundtracking a royal banquet.
My samba teacher in exuberant action:
Now I’m back at it, and it’s all (mostly) coming back! I smile THE ENTIRE CLASS and experience my own personal height of joy once I can finally move into a meditative state with the steps—the structure for pure self-expression.
The teacher stands at the front, and rather than explaining the choreo, she just dances and invites us to follow along. Sometimes I get it, and sometimes I’m on my own Mari planet just trying to wiggle along while others are practically doing backflips in the front row.
One evening, she invited a new teacher up to lead the dance. I was lost in a heavenly realm as she lead an easeful, sunshiney bachata to the happiest song I’ve heard this year.
After the new dance leader went back to her place, our regular teacher told her, “You just did the most professional thing any leader can do.”