Weekend Reading
July 21, 2024

I’ve been fortunate to see a few wonderful dance performances this summer.

The first was a performance of Glass Pieces in May, which I wrote about the following Sunday.

In the past two weeks, I’ve seen productions of Romeo & Juliet and Like Water for Chocolate.

Three very different kinds of dance performances, spanning the distance from classic to contemporary. Each one of them was exhilarating.

I’ve always loved going to the ballet, but I didn’t use to prioritize it as much as I have in the last couple years.

Over the weekend I was thinking about why the art form is resonating with me so much right now. Why is it elevating and inspiring me more than opera, or theater, or other forms of performing art that I’ve always enjoyed?

The thing that I keep coming back to is that I tap into some sense of freedom as I watch a dance performance.

Ostensibly, I’ve experienced geographic freedom this month, through taking a vacation. There’s tremendous freedom in my life in the form of countless privileges, and also in the fact that I don’t have dependents.

Internally, though, I often feel paralyzed.

Increasingly, especially in the last two years, I’ve felt so insecure. This makes self-expression and professional expansion suddenly a challenge.

And, as I’ve mentioned many times in recent weekend reading posts, I’m so much more fearful than I used to be. Is there anything more inhibiting than fear?

No wonder it’s such a meaningful time for me to observe movement—beautiful, graceful, exuberant movement.

A yoga teacher said in class this week that everything healthy in nature is moving, or flowing, somehow.

Maybe this rekindled love of watching dance will somehow help me to release that internal immobility, that feeling of being stuck. I believe in the power of art, and I believe that it’s possible.

Happy Sunday, friends. Here are some recipes and reads.

Recipes

1. Excited to use my grill pan to make this eggplant with za’atar—I’ll sub lemon tahini dressing for yogurt sauce!

2. These easy vegan stuffed peppers look so colorful and comforting.

3. I love a sheet pan salad, and Deb’s sweet potato salad with pepita dressing is the next one that I’ll try.

4. The season is right for this dish of simple stir-fried zucchini.

5. Blueberry rice crispy treats—what a fun idea!

Reads

1. Wired magazine makes a case for maintaining a sensitive, nuanced, and up-to-date understanding of how sex differences impact healthcare, from drug development to anesthesia dosing.

2. The remarkable story of one ultramarathoner’s comeback from a traumatic brain injury.

3. People around the world were shocked and saddened to learn of the killing of Cecil the Lion in 2015. This article uses that event and its aftermath as a case study in altruism as it occurs within and between species.

4. I stumbled on a Grubstreet article from 2021 about Courtney Kennedy, a chef who left the fine dining world to cook instead at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, serving patients with cancer.

I love the way Kennedy describes her shift in sense of purpose: “There is no ego, in other words, only a desire to make patients feel cared for.”

5. This article proposes that curiosity and uncertainty are two ways of framing the same thing, which is our response to the unknown.

It describes a recent study that used brain scan data to demonstrate that human curiosity seems to grow in response to increased uncertainty created by visual images.

This leads to a question, which is whether we could train ourselves to respond to all uncertainty with curiosity, rather than anxiety or perceived threat:

“Another way people can deal with other forms of uncertainty is to intentionally treat it the way their brains automatically treat the visual kind. It might be as simple as a matter of reframing. For instance, Amy Poehler once described dealing with nervousness by reframing it as excitement, since the two feelings resemble each other: ‘That way you acknowledge the physical feelings without putting a negative spin on things.’

The same goes for uncertainty and curiosity.”

It’s an interesting possibility, right?

This occassionally-anxious person is hoping to dance through the coming week with more curiosity than fear, more excitement than unease.

Till soon,

xo

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

    No Comments

You might also like

Hope everyone’s been staying warm and easing into 2018 gently. My New Year’s Eve plans were quiet; they involved yoga and meditation at the turn of midnight, followed by bed. None of that happened. My mom and I unexpectedly spent NYE in the emergency room. It wasn’t really an emergency; we knew we were being cautious when we went for her to get checked out. But of course it was a great relief to be discharged with the assurance that everything was OK. It…

Happy Sunday, and happy weekend. I hope this edition of weekend reading finds everyone well! I’m on my back from a weekend with family, and enjoying these reads and food photos along the way. This chickpea and rice pilaf with fresh herbs from Kraut|Kopf looks phenomenal — so simple, yet so hearty and satisfying. I’m totally smitten with Andrea Bemis’ recipes lately (she’s the mastermind behind Dishing Up the Dirt) and this roasted eggplant and summer squash salad with tangy miso dressing is…

Happy Sunday, everyone. I was happy to see such supportive and thoughtful responses to Alisa’s green recovery story on Friday (and I got a few green recovery submissions over email that night, which is always a big treat). Thank you for sharing your impressions, and if you haven’t read Alisa’s perspective, it’s really thought-provoking and worth exploring. It’s the end of another busy week, and so I took some moments this morning to catch up on health and wellness news, recipes from around the…

Happy July 4th, everyone! I hope you have a celebratory day, filled with good company and good food. Steven and I are having a low key holiday at home this year. The avenues are quiet, the cars have all been driven away, and the city feels uncharacteristically spacious. Part of what I love about New York is its grittiness and bustle and noise, but when the city is empty over these long summer weekends I can admire it in a different way, peeking…