Hi, I'm Nina Iordanova and this is the 34th edition of Something Good, a newsletter filtered through my 🧠, 🖐, and ❤️. Coming your way every two weeks, I hope you find something good here.
Sometimes I go up to Gemma and grab her face and yell, WHAT IS YOUR SECRET NAME?! WHAT DO THE OTHER DOGS CALL YOU?
And that got me thinking, well if dogs have a sense of smell that’s 100,000 times stronger than ours, what if that’s how they refer to themselves? By the names of different smells? Maybe Gemma is Berry in the Sun, and her friend Pippa the sheepadoodle is Last Year’s Forest Leaf.
And maybe, the same way that we have people from different countries with entirely different naming conventions, we’d have dogs like huskies whose names are First Morning Snow and Iceberg on a Warm Day, and desert dogs who look at them and think, I’ve never smelled that before, what does that smell like? What could that possibly be?
Sometimes I’m excited to have children just for the stories I can tell them. Can you imagine building whole worlds together? Using your imagination to draw and write and create, to imagine things together that don’t exist but maybe could?
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I remember taking LSD with someone I loved and laying in bed, his back to me.
“Let me tell you a story,” I said suddenly, swept away by images and ideas and threads that began to weave themselves as soon as I started to speak.
I traced my fingers down his back and there was no break between thoughts and the words that poured out, made up stories about polar bears, ants, fish, each one in its own world.
Did you know you can tell a story with touch as well as words? I remember being curled around him, ghosting my fingers down his arms in the blizzard-world of the polar bears, running the backs of my nails across his back in ocean waves, then sweeping each scene off to start again.
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I think there’s something beautiful about storytelling. And I think we do it more often than we realize.
I think we tell each stories through the clothes we wear, through the way we decorate our houses. We tell stories through the words that we choose to use, how we make each other feel.
Stories are worlds imagined, and there’s so many ways into that outside of books or movies. They might be shorter and they might not have a beginning, middle, and end, but there are so many ways to make people imagine.
And I think it’s wonderful to have that power, to be able to create worlds for absolute strangers and for the most intimate lovers. To share in something that doesn’t actually exist outside of you.
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I’ve been exploring how to take photos that look more candid and in the moment. I’m liking low-light photography that comes out a little grainy and blurry in spots, or using flash to add an element of chaos. Here are my two favourite photos in those styles from this week.
Hope you have a great summer weekend with everything that conjures up - ice cream, iced coffee, sitting in the park, and maybe a bit of pool time.
✨
Warmly yours,
Nina
Thanks for reading and I'll see you in two weeks! 👋