Good morning loves, and welcome to another edition of Daily Crumbs: Weekly.
It’s always so sweet to step into this space each Monday morning to share links and reads that make my heart and mind sing.
Right after I woke up today, at the crack of dawn, my youngest got up and wouldn’t go to her father. Extracting her from my arms so I could come here to write was incredibly challenging—for both of us.
It remindeded me of this piece on
and mothers and ER and caretaking.To the mothers.
To the mothers.
To the mothers.
What Your Brain Is Doing When You’re Not Doing Anything? Filling in the blanks, mostly.
According to research, the effects of the default mode network include mind wandering, remembering past experiences, thinking about others’ mental states, envisioning the future and processing language. While this may seem like a grab bag of unrelated aspects of cognition, Vinod Menon, the director of the Stanford Cognitive & Systems Neuroscience Laboratory, recently theorized that all of these functions may be helpful in constructing an internal narrative. In his view, the default mode network helps you think about who you are in relation to others, recall your past experiences and then wrap up all of that into a coherent self-narrative.
A beautifully assembled piece by Maria Popova on middle age and how it bridges childhood and adulthood.
The summons often begins with a call to humility — having failed to bend the universe to our will the way the young imagine they can, we come to recognize our limitations, to confront our disenchantment, to reckon with the collapse of projections and the crushing of hopes. But this reckoning, when conducted with candor and self-compassion, can reward with “the restoration of the person to a humble but dignified relationship to the universe.”
You know I love all things related to languages and subversion. Reuben Cohn-Gordon links both and asks a fundamental question in this essay:
What is the source of this impulse to naturalise, to perceive an underlying natural essence in what is fundamentally arbitrary? And what, if anything, does the answer have to do with language?
Something about filling in the blanks (bis) and conventions.
Language as a whole, a much more elaborate piece of common knowledge, evolves by a similar mechanism. Each time someone speaks to us, the choices of words, their intonation, the idioms they use, and so on are presupposing a language, which we accommodate. But everyone else is doing the same, accommodating the language we produce.
Lastly, a butterfly redemption story about how scientists, volunteers, and incarcerated women find hope and metamorphosis by supporting (and resurrecting) butterflies.
There, on my hands and knees, as I study their delicate wings, gawping eyes, and active antennae, I can almost feel the clock ticking on their ephemeral lives. I reflect on the recent bottlenecks their predecessors somehow wriggled through, and their miraculous reappearance in this region after having been given up for dead. I recognize the bright point of focus they provide for the human need to act against loss and extinction. I believe they have more to reveal about adapting to an altered world. And after lingering in an extended close-up viewing of one gorgeous survivor, I get up and head for home—feeling both anxious and more alive.
That’s it for this week, folks.
I hope you have a lovely, peaceful week.
Talk soon, xx.