Auburn-rusted, a bed of moss | field notes no. 02

Hello to you! This is a repost from my substack account, because I would like for these to live both here and there. This is the final repost; posting will align in both places going forward.

Field notes, August 2025

These quotes by Margaret Laurence:

“I can’t change what’s happened to me in my life, or make what’s not occurred take place. But I can’t say I like it, or accept it, or believe it’s for the best. I don’t and never shall, not even if I’m damned for it.”

― Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel

“Everything drifts. Everything is slowly swirling, philosophies tangled with the grocery lists, unreal-real anxieties like rose thorns waiting to tear the uncertain flesh, nonentities of thoughts floating like plankton, green and orange particles, seaweed — lots of that, dark purple and waving, sharks with fins like cutlasses, herself held underwater by her hair, snared around auburn-rusted anchor chains.”

― Margaret Laurence, The Fire-Dwellers

“When I say “work” I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.”

― Margaret Laurence

2. This poem by Dorianne Laux:

3. I was talking with my grandma recently about work, and living, and happiness, and I wanted to share with you what she said to me, in hopes that it will help you as much as it helped me:

“It doesn’t matter what you do, or who you help, or how you go about this. What matters is that you’re happy, and you’re able to show up in a way that best serves you, first and foremost. Because you can’t support others if you’re not happy and supported yourself.”

4. These paintings by Nina Koltchitskaia:

5. I’m once again jumping into the future when I should be rooted in the present (in short: looking at jobs I don’t need to be looking at). I struggle with the fact that there are endless possibilities for living—I don’t want to chain myself to one future, and so think about it far more than I need to. Right now: library vs. learning support vs. a bed of moss. All are appealing in their own way.

6. Wisdom from the notes app:

7. August 12, 2025: Had a dream last night that I was lost in a house of neverending doors; later, I bailed water from a sinking boat. In both cases I could sense that something was close by, but I couldn’t get to it from where I was.

8. Bits of the end of summer:

9. August 20, 2025: Spent the evening cataloguing my books. I still have a few shelves to go, and am already over 400 entries in my notion page. I don’t want to tell you the percentage of read vs. not read, but I will say that the gap is a lot larger than I want it to be. But the library calls me home constantly, and my own books continue to look pretty on their shelves. Something to try to remedy in the future

10. This month’s bibliomancy: a line from Alice Hoffman’s A Book of Magic, flipped open at random:

“Their blood spilled onto the sheets and he saw that hers was black, and he congratulated himself on being right about her. ‘You’ll return the favor to me,’ Sally said.”

Talk to you again soon.

—Catherine

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