Sonya's Patates Braavos: Edition #6 💌🥔

TLDR: book club, meet someone new, and Purim wholesomeness

welcome note 👋 

Hello, brave patates! 🥔 It’s been a quiet week, working and spending time with fam in Guelph. It snowed a lot here and felt like -15. Not down. How’s y’all’s week?

ICYMI, you can read past newsletter editions here. Enjoying your time here? Forward to others!

random cool things corner

• I finished the Dispenza book and the last chapter was fascinating: how humans may be impacted by solar flares, which change the Earth’s electromagnetic field, which in turn can impact each human’s own electromagnetic field - correlation doesn’t mean causation but many wars, conflicts, and violent events coincide with solar flares. While many things are in our control, many aren’t. I truly believe there is something greater out there.

• The book also cites peace-gathering studies - when multiple people get together and meditate while increasing their positive emotions such as compassion or gratitude, wars and negative events around them subside. Maybe that’s why people pray. Maybe if we all paid more attention to our inner worlds and focused on channeling love and gratitude, instead of draining our own energy fields with hatred and violence, the world would be a better place.

• I also started and finished The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho this week which connected in a lovely way with Dispenza’s work and my interest in how everything is connected. For example, I randomly chose the book and it starts in Andalusia, Spain, where I’m going very soon! What are the chances?!

• Next, I’m reading Irvin Yalom. What’s on your reading list? Patates book club?! 👀

business updates

• I published a new case study on my website: how my client went from making only $5K/month to $100K/month thanks to organic SEO copywriting.

• Another client approved my case study and let me put their name on it (always a win).

• Telfer gave me a wonderful recommendation on LinkedIn. Freelancers—and full-time folk—always remember to straight up ask for recommendations on there. Closed mouths don’t get fed. And people are usually happy to do it! Reccos there are public domain so you can reuse on your website.

• I am always interested in new clients for copywriting and content strategy. If you refer someone, you get a sweet referral gift 😉

subscriber feature: Lauren Hamilton📚🌎

I’m featuring one of my lovely friends this week so you can learn about someone else for a change and not just me. Without further ado…

Hi everyone! I’m Lauren, a digital nomad and marketing freelancer. I met Sonya when she interviewed me for my first year at the Telfer Women in Management Network and we reconnected years later after we were both let go from our first jobs and jumped into the freelancing world. I’m also proud to say I am one of the three peers who told Sonya she would kill a newsletter - and isn’t she? 

For the past two years, I’ve travelled the world as a digital nomad living in nine different countries (my favs being Singapore, Croatia, Portugal, and the UAE). Most recently, I got stuck in Paris for 24 hours during a layover! I love making content, especially about sustainable fashion and living, travel, and wellness (and I’ve been cooking lately??). You can follow my adventures on Instagram, TikTok, or check out my YouTube videos. 

food corner

• David has an air fryer in Toronto and I love this thing - crispy juicy chicken wings from frozen ready in 10 minutes!!

• I got Israeli cheese bourekas (flaky pastry with filling) for Purim from a Russian store and they were delicious. I also found Israeli coffee and I’m pretty sure I saw God lol. If you’re a caffeine addict - the Elite red and black brand is the best along with Lebanese coffee (silver and green package, usually with cardamom, sold in both Arab and big stores).

politics corner: Israel-Hamas war 🇮🇱🇵🇸

• A positive moment of light 💡 today, on Purim—a Jewish joyous holiday celebrating the freeing of the Jewish people from annihilation by the Persian Empire King—I want to share a lovely story.

• An Israeli Rabbi Elad Applebaum went to Abu Dhabi, UAE 🇦🇪 for a conference on tolerance. The Emirati Minister of Tolerance, Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, said: "The enlightened heart must know how to distinguish between good and evil.”

• The Chairman of the Fatwa Council of the UAE and the President of the Abu Dhabi Forum for Peace, Sheikh Abdullah Bin Bayah, said: "Our common religious duty is to refrain from evil and do good and to continue to enrich our religious tradition of enlightenment and tolerance, not of inciting hatred and extremism."

• Bahraini Muslim speaker Amjad Taha stood up and cried out to the families of the Israeli abductees, saying at the tolerance conference that there should be no tolerance for terrorism, and that bravery is needed to defeat it so that we can enlighten the world and not abandon it to fire and darkness.

• For two days, Muslim leaders approached Rabbi Elad one after the other, again and again, and asked: “How we were doing and about our safety; they sent us the energy of support and Faith.” In a radical divisive time in Canada, how refreshing it is to see a Muslim forum on peace condemn extremist evil, offer support, and prioritize the light. You can read the full story in Daniel Gordis’s Israel from the Inside newsletter.

• Parliament’s passed motion on the Middle East war is disturbing on numerous accounts. Here is the debrief.