I begin here with a beginning that hopefully feels mid-sentence or mid-glue stick. The problem is always what to say (beautifully, ideally) and what to leave unsaid (not very much, hi I’m haley it’s nice to meet you), and where to put it all. This is now a place. Welcome and please do kick it while I thumb through the options of what this is.

Come for the long-awaited promise of words from me. Stay for logic, jewels, poetry, accounts of travels and/or travails, monologues on motherhood and other hoods, a theory nobody asked for on most anything, and possibly some very pretty things. Refreshment? Let’s say refreshment. A substack that is in some ways an ice cold cherry lime sharbat in the courtyard bagh on a hot day.

A commonplace book is, apparently, a longstanding writerly and artistic tradition of a book where anyone from Virginia Woolf to Marcus Aurelius accumulated and copied down the passages, images, and fragments that struck them. A sort of personal analog internet. I’m interested in pinteresting my own head as well, let’s see how the writers block dissolves. I avidly consume the substacks of others, literary vampire. I turn, then, to the honeyed names of the East for my little scrapbook, recognizing that being a magpie of the heart is a generational inheritance.

A safina — سفینه — literally, a ship or vessel. Figuratively, a collection of treasures. The Met has a collection of 14th-16th century safinas, personal anthologies or art. An ark of poetry, fragments, drawings, calligraphy.

A light table is a ready surface, a tool for illumination and seeing.