even*cleveland: gifts that warm

gifts that warm

Nippon Kodo's porcelain animal incense burner, for wafting scents. (In addition to this dreaming rabbit, there is also an extremely charming cat.)

Twelve pieces of Grasmere gingerbread, plus a jar of rum butter, for gentle heat.

Handmade and reusable Mino Washi paper snowflakes, to make any day a snow day. (Photo found here; also available via the Cooper Hewitt shop.)

A draft-proof lantern, for a steady glow.

A basket-making kit from Underwater Weaving Studio, because handcrafts counteract doomscrolling's chill.

Sheepskin slipper boots, for toasty toes.

A mug by Bjarni Viðar Sigurðsson with a micro-milled stir-in mix for the coziest drink.

Amente's blanket coat, for bundling up, and Nishiguchi Kutsushita alpaca leg/wrist-warmers, to block drafts.

Kinto's Aqua Cuture vases, because a glimpse of green and growing things is always a light.

The Details of Our Escape, a roleplaying game that encourages players to think about communities and possible futures as they guide a caravan of 2,000 people searching for a new home. (Discovered thanks to Karissa's newsletter.)

A paper fireplace with sea-salt chocolate logs, to keep the home fires burning.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

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