The Commonplace

There is an old tradition, older than the internet and wiser than the algorithm, of keeping a commonplace book. A place to gather. Quotations, recipes, remedies, the name of a paint colour that stopped you in your tracks. One hundred small things that mattered enough to write down.

So this is that. Every Friday, one hundred things on a single theme: to read slowly, to dip in and out of, to carry into your weekend like a basket of good things. Not a to-do list. Just the pleasure of noticing, gathered up and laid out for you.

This first list is yours, entirely and without condition. All one hundred things, with nothing held back, because you should know what you’re being invited into before you decide whether to stay.

From next Friday, the first twenty-five things will always be free. The remaining seventy-five are for paid subscribers, those who have decided that a weekly act of gathering is worth the small cost of keeping it going. If that’s you, you are so very welcome and appreciated.

No. 1: Spring, At Last

1. The French have a phrase for it: le renouveau. The renewal.

2. Open every window in the house for exactly three minutes, regardless of temperature. The Swedes call this luftning and consider it non-negotiable. The cold air is the point.

3. WRITE IT DOWN:“One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.” (Gaston Bachelard)

4. Buy yourself peonies this week. No explanation needed.

5. Read: Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. For the woman who feels everything too much.

6. The Japanese call it mono no aware, the bittersweet awareness that everything is passing. Spring is its highest expression. Stand in it.

7. Stand outside and face east toward the rising sun and set one intention for spring in whatever words come to you. Let the direction hold it.

8. WRITE IT DOWN: “She was a girl who knew how to be happy even when she was sad.” (Marilyn Monroe). Pin it somewhere you’ll see it.

9. In Lisbon they call the ache of spring saudade, a longing for something you can’t quite name. You know this feeling. You were born knowing it weren’t you? Surely.

10. WATCH: Certified Copy (2010, Abbas Kiarostami). A film about a woman in Tuscany in spring who may or may not be pretending. You will think about it for weeks.

11. Keep your kitchen counters completely clear except for three objects: olive oil, sea salt, and one beautiful thing.

12. “April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land.” (T.S. Eliot). He wasn’t wrong. But we go anyway.

13. RECIPE: make a simple French tarte aux fraises this weekend. Blind bake a pastry shell, fill with crème pâtissière, lay strawberries over the top like you’re arranging flowers. Eat it standing up.

14. Face east when you drink your morning tea. In Vastu and Feng Shui, east is the direction of new beginnings

15. Take a walk somewhere you’ve never been. Spring makes strangers of familiar streets.

16. LISTEN: Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Put it on while you do the washing up. Notice what happens to the washing up.

17. WRITE IT DOWN:“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.” (Louisa May Alcott). Think of it as forecast, not metaphor.

18. In Morocco, spring smells of orange blossom and something just slightly rotten underneath. That’s the truth of it. Beautiful things often have something composting at the root.

19. Clear one drawer completely. Do not organise it. Simply empty it and leave it bare for a week. Notice how it feels to have one empty space.

20. READ: The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford. For the recklessness of it. For Linda. For the reminder that women have always wanted more.

21. The Italians eat ribollita in late winter and early spring: a thick Tuscan bread soup, twice-boiled, made better by leftovers. Make it. Eat it. Know that you are ancient.

22. WRITE IT DOWN: “She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.” (Louisa May Alcott). Wear it as a badge.

23. LISTEN: Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit. Not as background music. As an education in what a human voice can carry.

24. The Greeks had Persephone. She didn’t come back reluctantly. She came back because she’d learned something in the dark worth bringing with her. Consider what you’re bringing back.

25. Buy one extravagant ingredient this week: saffron, good vanilla, truffle salt. Use it on something ordinary. Scrambled eggs. Toast. Because this is what abundance practice actually looks like.

26. Practice the Scandinavian tradition of utepils: the first beer of spring, drunk outside. Even if it is only six degrees

27. WRITE IT DOWN: “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.” (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar). Say it out loud.

28. In Kyoto, the cherry blossom season lasts exactly two weeks. The Japanese gather beneath the trees to eat, drink and weep a little, understanding that beauty and impermanence are the same thing. Plan your own hanami this spring. A blanket. Wine. The sky.

29. RECIPE: a simple salade niçoise for one, eaten outdoors, even if outdoors is a doorstep. Tinned tuna. Hard-boiled eggs. Olives.

30. Change your pillowcases. Spray them with something that smells of the sea or green things. Sleep differently.

31. READ: Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. A woman alone on a beach, thinking? Still the most radical act.

32. WRITE IT DOWN: “I am not resigned.” (Edna St. Vincent Millay). Two words for spring. For midlife. For all of it.

33. Take triphala before bed: the Ayurvedic formula of three fruits that gently detoxifies and prepares the body for seasonal transition

34. LISTEN: Nick Drake’s Pink Moon. On a spring evening. With the window open. Alone.

35. Take your coffee outside this week, even once, even briefly, even in a coat. The ritual matters more than the comfort.

36. In Seville during Semana Santa, the air smells of incense and orange blossom and something ancient moving through the streets. Spring in southern Spain is not gentle. It is operatic. Let your spring be a little operatic too.

37. JOURNAL PROMPT: She had a galaxy in her eyes, a universe in her mind. Write the woman you are becoming this spring. Don’t be modest.

38. Start a spring commonplace book of your own. Write down one beautiful thing a day. Not an achievement. A beauty.

39. Observe brahma muhurta (the auspicious time before dawn) and wake at least once to sit in the dark and watch it become light

40. WATCH: Amélie (2001, Jean-Pierre Jeunet). Not for the romance. For the way it treats small pleasures as a serious philosophical position.

41. Buy a bunch of herbs from a market stall: thyme, rosemary, tarragon. Put them in a jar of water on the windowsill. Your kitchen will smell like Provence for a week.

42. Make a mandala out of flower petals or coloured rice. Spend hours on it. Then destroy it. The Tibetan practice of impermanence as art.

43. LISTEN: Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark. The whole album. Start to finish. She is telling you something about wanting and having and losing that you need to hear again.

44. WRITE IT DOWN: “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.” (Sylvia Plath). Spring doesn’t erase the dark thing. It just gives you better light to see it by. This is progress.

45. Buy yourself a truly beautiful pair of gardening gloves. You deserve lovely things even when covered in mud

46. Use a jade or rose quartz roller to massage your face every moning. (Keep it in the fridge!) The Chinese gua sha practice that moves lymph and brings blood to surface.

47. The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker died in 1907, aged 31, eighteen days after giving birth. She had said: “I know I will not live very long. But is that sad?” Look up her paintings. Look at the way she painted women. Look at the way she painted herself.

48. In Buenos Aires, autumn arrives as your spring begins. The city is all wide boulevards and melancholy and dulce de leche and tango. There is something instructive in knowing the world is always seasonally opposite to you somewhere.

49. You are halfway through the list. Get up. Stretch. Look out of the window. Come back.

50. READ: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. Because female friendship is the great unwritten epic and she wrote it.

51. JOURNAL PROMPT: She was a free spirit. Not the Instagram kind. The kind that made people uncomfortable at dinner parties. Are you her? Could you be? What is stopping you?

52. Light a candle in the daytime. For no reason. For spring.

53. Observe the German Feierabend each Friday night: the deliberate end of the workday. Turn off the computer. Pour a drink. Declare the work finished

54. In Florence in spring, the wisteria covers entire buildings. The colour is the colour of dusk. Plan a trip, even if you can’t go. Planning is a form of living.

55. LISTEN: Édith Piaf’s La Vie en Rose. Then the Nina Simone version. Then decide which woman you are today.

56. Research a wildflower mix for somewhere impossible (a crack in the path, the edge of the lawn) and order it.

57. WRITE IT DOWN: “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” (Søren Kierkegaard). Spring is the annual reminder that becoming is still available to you.

58. Go through your wardrobe this weekend and remove everything that makes you feel like a smaller version of yourself. Do not replace it immediately. Live for a week with less. See what you actually reach for.

59. READ: Zami: A Biomythography by Audre Lorde. Because she wrote about the body and the world and the self with more courage than almost anyone.

60. WRITE IT DOWN: “I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.” (Carl Jung). Put it somewhere you’ll read it when you’re being stubborn about the past.

61. Make a spring altar on a windowsill: a bud vase, a found feather, a stone from somewhere that mattered. Ritual doesn’t require religion. It requires intention.

62. Go outside and actually look at what is already stirring: the buds, the shoots, the quiet ambition of everything

63. Make Danish smørrebrød (open-faced sandwiches on dark rye) arranged like small works of art

64. JOURNAL PROMPT: She was a woman who loved mornings but lived for midnight. Write your own version of this sentence. Then write the paragraph that follows it.

65. RECIPE: a simple Spanish tortilla: potatoes, eggs, olive oil, salt. Cooked slowly. Cut into thick wedges. Eaten at room temperature with good bread. This is a dish that knows what it is.

66. WATCH: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, Céline Sciamma). About looking. About being seen. About what spring does to two people who have nowhere to go.

67. WRITE IT DOWN: “I have wasted my life.” (James Wright, from the poem Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm). Read the whole poem. It is twelve lines long. It will rearrange you.

68. Buy one paperback from a secondhand bookshop this weekend. Do not research it first. Choose it by its cover, its weight, the feel of the pages. This is how the right book finds you.

69. LISTEN: Fado. Any fado. Mariza. Put it on and clean the kitchen and feel the ancient sorrow of all women who have ever cleaned kitchens while wanting something more.

70. Spring cleaning is not about cleanliness. It is about excavation. What are you digging for?

71. In Prague, spring arrives overnight and the city turns baroque and blossoming and slightly mad. The Czechs have a word for it: litost, a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery. Spring can do that. Feel it. Then go outside.

72. RECIPE: tabbouleh made properly, with far more parsley than you think is correct and lemon and good olive oil and the patience to let it sit for an hour before you eat it. It tastes of somewhere warmer. Go there, briefly, at the kitchen table.

73. READ: The Collected Poems of Sharon Olds. Because she writes about the body, her body, her parents’ bodies, desire and age and flesh, with a directness that will make you breathless.

74. JOURNAL PROMPT: She was not interested in being rescued. She was interested in being understood. Write about a time you needed understanding and received rescue instead. What would you have said, if someone had simply asked?

75. Write down three things you want your garden to feel like this summer. Not look like. Feel like.

76. Learn to identify five European birds by their song. Blackbird, robin, wren, thrush, nightingale. Listen for them. They are already preparing

77. WRITE IT DOWN: “I am larger, better than I thought. I did not know I held so much goodness.” (Walt Whitman, Song of Myself). Read it this spring. All of it. Take weeks.

78. LISTEN: Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel.  Mirror in the mirror. Ten minutes of music that sounds like what spring feels like when you stop rushing through it.

79. Practice Nadi Shodhana (alternate nostril breathing) for five minutes daily. The yogic technique that balances moon and sun within you

80. Make a batch of natural soap, melt and pour with dried petals or ground coffee or oat flour, and wrap it in wax paper and tie it with string and give it away or keep it and feel the satisfaction of something made with your hands to be used daily.

81. RECIPE: Prepare muhammara, the Syrian red pepper and walnut dip, and eat it with warm pita

82. Take one photograph this weekend that has no purpose, not for Instagram, not to remember anything. Just the way the light fell on something ordinary. Keep it for yourself.

83. LISTEN: Massive Attack’s Teardrop. Because it sounds like the feeling of spring arriving in a city, being young and old at exactly the same time.

84. In Tbilisi, Georgia, spring means churchkhela, strings of walnuts dipped in grape must, hanging in the market like strange jewels. Try one thing this spring you have never tried before. One new taste, one new smell, one new voice in your ear.

85. WRITE IT DOWN: “Do I dare disturb the universe?” (T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock). Yes. Always yes. Especially now.

86. RECIPE: a green sauce, salsa verde, made with whatever herbs are in the garden or on the windowsill. Parsley, capers, anchovy, lemon, olive oil, blitzed together. Put it on everything for a week. It tastes like things are beginning.

87. READ: Outline by Rachel Cusk. Because she took the novel apart and rebuilt it as something stranger and more true.

88. WATCH: Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman). An old professor on a long drive, remembering. About the life behind you and the spring you still have left. Not sad. Something better than sad.

89. JOURNAL PROMPT: I am not afraid of my own complexity. Write into that. Write the parts of yourself you have been asked to keep quiet. Spring is a good time to take up more space.

90. Plant a row of sweet pea seeds on a sunny windowsill. They need the head start and you need the hope.

91. Listen: Sufjan Stevens’ Death With Dignity. Because grief and spring and beauty are not opposites.

92. The painter Leonora Carrington lived to ninety-four, made surrealist art until the end, and once said the only things worth doing were cooking and painting. Cook something this weekend as though it were art.

93. JOURNAL PROMPT: “I am larger than I was. The spring did that.” Write your spring inventory. What has opened in you? What are you ready to put down?*

94. Wash all your curtains. The dust of winter comes off in great grey clouds and the fabric underneath is softer than you remember

95. LISTEN: Chopin’s Nocturnes. Late at night. With one lamp on. The music was written for exactly this.

96. In Marrakech, the medina in spring smells of rose water and leather and the sharp green of fresh mint piled in the souks. Somewhere between overwhelming and paradise. Let something overwhelm you this week. Don’t manage it. Just feel it.

97. WRITE IT DOWN: “One must always be drunk - On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.” (Be Drunk by Baudelaire). Pin this somewhere sensible people will see it. Aim to shock. Spring doesn’t have to be so nice…

98. RECIPE: a bowl of strawberries macerated in a little sugar and aged balsamic and left for an hour. Eaten with thick cream or good yoghurt. The balsamic is not optional. It is the whole point.

99. Stand outside tonight, even for five minutes, and look at the sky. The spring sky is a different sky. You are different in it.

100. WRITE IT DOWN: “And I said to my body softly, ‘I want to be your friend.’ It took a long breath and replied, ‘I have been waiting my whole life for this.’” (Nayyirah Waheed). Begin there. Begin again. It is spring.

The Commonplace returns next Friday. One hundred more things, on a different theme. Bring something to write with.