Simply Sunday - Fear of Rainbows and Other Musings for March 12

Inspiring quotes, new inspiration for keeping an illustrated journal, Week 11 prompts, and more

Happy Sunday!

I hope that Sunday emails offer a bit of an update, something to think about or reflect on, a book or quote to add to your list, and the link to the weekly Illustrate Your Week prompts. Grab a cup of coffee or tea, or refill your bottle of water, and join me.

First, a new post this week on the substack:

A List of 12 Things to Add to Your Illustrated Journal

If you keep an illustrated journal or are curious about starting one, this list highlights simple elements you can add, on repeat, to anchor your pages and your visual documentation in your real life.

12 Things to Include in Your Illustrated Journal

Threads of Thought from the Week

1. A quote about language and writing. I am always out of space on my phone, so in addition to simply deleting hundreds of photos every few days, I also often sit and go through the screenshots, jotting down book titles, show references, podcast names, and other things that I’ve saved in my daily online travels. (I wish I could keep them all in the photo stream, but there’s just not enough space.) This week, I added a bunch of items to various lists and deleted the images. In scanning for things to catalog and delete, this quote, from a while back, caught my eye:

   “There was so much to learn and practice, but I began to see the prose in verse and the verse in prose. Patterns surfaced in poems, stories, and plays. There was music in sentences and paragraphs. I could hear the silences in a sentence.” - Min Jin Lee

   Last year, we read Free Food for Millionaires (Min Jin Lee) as part of a book club I tried to run. It wasn’t a favorite book, but I especially enjoyed the end notes from the author and some of the interviews I read in preparing for the group discussion. The quote above is from “On Selling Your First Novel After 11 Years.” I find these lines about language especially beautiful.

2. The Book of Salt (Monique Truong) is a book I took a screenshot of recently. I don’t know when/if I will read it, but I added it to my list and deleted the photo. It’s the story, in summary, of a cook in the household of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. That sounds intriguing, right? Because it is Women’s History Month, and I often try to draw women from history at least a few times in the month, I thought about Stein this week. I know “of” Stein, but I haven’t read her work (unless I read something in graduate school that I’ve now forgotten). I have held the edition of Tender Buttons that Lisa Congdon illustrated, but I don’t know that I’ve read it, and I pulled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas last year to read and got sidetracked. I still want to read that one.

   I spent time looking at some photos and thinking about my drawing for this week in my illustrated journal. Sometimes, I spend so much time looking and not choosing that I run out of time for the drawing. But I think this looking (again and again) is important. Sometimes, we see in new ways or find a breadcrumb to follow. (I have, similarly, spent a lot of time looking at photos of Sylvia Plath.) This quote from Stein jumped out at me as so very apt and so very true to my approach to keeping a personal illustrated journal:

   “Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.” - Gertrude Stein

   Last week, I drew Dorothea Lange, and in that process, I discovered this phrase, which I think is wonderful: “I would go down there…to see if I could grab a hunk of lightning.”

3. I mentioned my morning writing last week, a habit I am rekindling even though it leaves me with many questions and also with the sometimes uncomfortable task of peeling away layers of my own resistance. I continue to share an image I snap of my coffee, pen, and composition book in its quilted cover as an Instagram story each morning. My photo yesterday was of the interior pocket, and I simply love it. I have many small quilted things like this that I’ve made, several “pouches” (for things or to hold a small device, Kindle, tablet, etc.), and they are all different in color and tone. One of my favorites is mostly black and white, with some bright pinks, oranges, and greens. One is a hodgepodge of greens. The composition book cover, in contrast, is more neutral. We change day to day and over time.

   I find myself perpetually surprised by how much I love this cover, and how it still speaks to me. At the same time, I itch to dump piles of scraps of fabric on the table and make a new one that specifically fits “this year me.” (Having written that, now it has weight, the tantalizing contours of possibility.) Anyway, here’s the pretty photo. There is warmth built into this panel, and wings, all of it a small mystery on the inside that only I typically see. It makes me smile.

   What made you smile today? I encourage you to write it down in your planner or journal.

   

4. It feels fitting to round out this sequence of words with a bit of Emily Dickinson:

   “I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”

The list is always random. So many little discoveries, moments of inspiration or insight, or paths of thought and memory could be included. There is always a sifting to see what rises to the top in the moment of making the list and assigning numbers. On a different day, a different mix might appear. The final one, also from my screenshot clearing:

5. “Porphyrophobia”: fear of the color purple. It isn’t necessarily my favorite color, but my most-used, non-black fountain pen ink is a purple (closely followed by a vibrant minty green). I have several favorite purple inks and consider drawing in purple to be very much a neutral. (If only they were waterproof!) This word was such a surprise. I didn’t realize there are phobias involving colors. There are. Chromophobia is an umbrella term, but like the fear of purple, there are other specific color phobias, like chrysophobia (orange or gold), cyanophobia (blue), prasinophobia (green), and xanthophobia (yellow). (There are others, too.)

This led me to discover Iridophobia. (How sad!)

Illustrate Your Week - Week 11 Prompts

The prompts for Week 11 are posted. Click here to view the weekly prompt set and some insight into what’s on this list for Week 11.

Thanks for Sharing a Bit of Sunday with Me!

I hope you don’t fear rainbows and that you, in fact, find them hopeful, magical, whimsical, or symbolic.

Thank you for following and reading. Leave a comment to let me know which of the random 5 had resonance for you today!

Have a great week.