"May your choices reflect your hopes not your fears" - Nelson Mandela
I've been waiting for my thoughts to cohere, as if a few more days in the current milieu will bring my scattered thoughts into some sort of patterned motion. But it's been weeks since I've been here, and so I'm back, wearily disregarding the verisimilitude of eternal winter, my own brain fog, and the overall shadowiness of the world right now. Not to say those themes won't come up during discussion of this month, be we are declaring them surmountable.
How to address this February? In doing so, we must acknowledge its long standing as a short month that drags on; as a time that seems like it should be warmer than January, but isn't; and that we generally amuse ourselves with embracing Valentines Day or a full-scale eschewing of it. But we also have to honor the fact that it comes as a year-marker of the hardest time in many of our lives. It's nearly March again, and so many of us are still trying to understand, process, and recover from March of last year, and the world-scale tragedy and long-term disaster-relief that has followed.
I entered January exhausted, and with limited rest and additional weights, reached February pretty burnt out. Still, I knew it was a new month, a new page, and I was determined to read hope there. So I made a Spotify playlist and a Pinterest board both called "February Aesthetic", filled with a sort of cathartic romantic beauty meant to lift my spirits, and the hearts of those I shared them with.
Because I cut out refined sugar in January, I had to wait until February to begin my adventure with macarons. I'd never made them before, but was convinced I could manage, and that they're well worth adding to my repertoire. My first couple batches I struggled with getting the color right (natural dyes, and adding it too late) but I got the form and "feet" down on the first try, and a week or so later, I managed these pictured below in cheerful colors. I'm very happy to have these cheerful confections in my baking arsenal now, but my sugar intake has spiked in a less than optimal way, so I'll have to work on that next....
Besides these festive sweets and a few cut-out hearts, I didn't do much for Valentine's. Days like these, pandemic and all, it's hard to feel the difference of one day to the next, what with all the Fridays that feel like Wednesdays, and the Sunday-Tuesdays, and the Monday-Thursdays (wait, we're almost to Lent again, aren't we). One of these days I'll catch up.
Because February is also Black History Month, I wanted to read mostly Black authors in February. I started with one that's been on my list for a while, Hidden Figures. And it's every bit as good as I thought it would be. Many of us have seen the movie, which is also brilliant, and I look forward to rewatching that as well. Now I'm in the midst of A Promised Land, and still working on getting through Stamped. Also on my list is The Condemnation of Blackness, but I don't think I'll get to it before the month is up. What are you reading this month?
More on what the second half of my February looks like in future posts
I'm going where there's more ochre in the painting, and less titanium white.