Letter 17: Meditative Pauses
Letter 17: Meditative Pauses
When we cocoon
Happy Wednesday morning! Today we welcome a new contributor, Beth Wooten, as she shares a beautiful, artistic perspective.
Molly and I had originally planned to publish Beth Wooten’s letter last week, before the world fell apart….yet again. Beth speaks on the act of cocooning in her piece, and as I watch my nature-minded friends’ videos of butterflies emerging from cocoons in their gardens, the English teacher in me can’t help but make the symbolic leap of the beauty that can be found in hiding one’s self away to heal, grow, or be made new before re-entering the world. Many of us are not quite ready to emerge from the difficulties the past year and a half have inflicted on us. And, as Beth contemplates, maybe that’s okay.
In many ways, I see Beth and myself as two sides of a coin. We’ve been asked if we’re sisters because we look similar and we have similar personalities (if you’re into the Enneagram, Beth is a 5 wing 4 while I am a 4 wing 5). Beth is the person you see at a mutual friend’s Christmas party and you chat in a quiet(er) corner all night, spilling secrets over small-batch cocktails. Beth is so easy to talk with and be around; she’s a calming presence—contemplative, measured, easy, wise, and bitingly funny. This is a letter I’d recommend reading with a glass of wine later this afternoon, prepared to contemplate and let yourself utter a sardonic chuckle. — Emily
by Christina Rossetti
One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
A saint, an angel — every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more or less.
Small town ballet lessons defined a particular segment of my childhood, and I have a weird sensory memory from backstage during our annual recitals. As I would wait in the wings, watching the big girls on the stage with the impossibly tall curtains retracted during the show, I loved to wind myself up in the excess folds, cocooning burrito-style in the muffling, maroon velvet curtain so that it wrapped me in a dark and protected moment. I would rest in there, taking a private little intermission from all the eyes that I truly did want to notice me. It smelled like dust and Aqua Net hairspray and child breath. Surely it was an odd habit of an odd girl, clearly a coping distraction from my nerves surrounding public performance and ambivalent feelings of exposure.
Adult life, too, requires some resting in the wings as much as some costuming, coiffing, and shuffling in front of public gaze. I’m not complaining. I like both. I’m an introvert with an exhibitionist streak. I’m certainly not defending introverting over extroverting or vice versa, but I have been processing how the two vacillate and ebb and flow through our lives. Depending on the season, we need both to be seen and unseen, in the scene and out.
The American painter Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) explores the public gaze in many of her paintings but from a different point of view. Cassatt painted compositions of women as members of the audience, not as just subjects but as an audience in her own right with a gaze of her own.
Moreover, many of Cassatt’s other pieces show women out of the public eye in private moments, slumped at leisure or with children draped over them. The whole of her work feels like a softly-lit, less-screamy version of my own. She paints the dance between public and private life, on display and in cocoon.
Covid forced us into some serious cocooning, and I leaned into it. Maybe to an unhealthy degree. In fact, I’ve had a hard time coming out of it.
We had friends and family move away, and additionally, I’ve been horrified by…life, and my social self just closed up shop in a manner of speaking. The world seemed terrible, and so I circled the wagons around my home and haven’t really uncamped from that spot. Work was my single outlet last year. I did my thing and then crawled back in bed without much remorse.
I have always touted that community is essential and beneficial and that prolonged isolation is often dangerous, but in my own recent relative isolation, I haven’t found it to be destructive. I’ve just been feeling fallow for a while. I think that’s okay, but I’m still trying to figure it out. It doesn’t feel permanent, but it does feel necessary…maybe beneficial.
A meditative social pause.
Or maybe I’m just rationalizing hiding from life for a minute. Who can say?
Sometimes we pull the frame in tightly and other times expand it. And we’re flexing that here in The Learning Curve itself as we show ourselves and peek into others’ lives. We’re living in that ebb and flow of public and private. Thankfully, while social media can objectify and strip people of power, it can also give us control over seeing and being seen in creating and performing image, and, hopefully, integrating it with an honest story.
My Favorite Things
Sun Bum Coco Balm Cherry Grove is remarkable. It is a nice consistency and doubles as “eye cream” for my crow’s feet. Even better, people will ask what smells so good when I put it on. Side note: Maybe I have people who get too close to my face on a regular basis.
Ina Garten’s recipe for Panzanella is all I want to eat all summer long. People who like protein can put rotisserie chicken on it. It balances out the excessive amount of pizza we’ve been eating. Yes, yes, I’m sure it does.
I am not naturally maternal. I have to study. My favorite parenting books to help understand not just kid relationships but adult relationships and self-relationships are The Whole-Brain Child and How to Talk so Kids Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk and recently Raising Worry-Free Girls.
Tajin on EVERYTHING. On the rim of a Ranch Water or Margarita? Yes. In guacamole? Naturally. On chicken or beef or anything? Why the hell not?
I have a controversial opinion. Long sleeve dresses are the best thing to wear in the heat. Gauzy, billowy, long sleeve dresses. I don’t need underarm-skin-on-underarm-skin contact in the summer. I’ve been wearing this one like everyone hasn’t already seen me in it yesterday.
Best wishes, friends, on your stages and in the wings both,
Beth Wooten
P.S. Earlier this week, we asked you to send us your favorite past TLC letter (maybe it was a story, an idea, a line, or a photo…) from our first fifteen. Please consider emailing us—we’d love to hear from you! 💗
