between births
This week:
- 38 years blew through the window and landed in my palm.
- Twins – our momma goat gave birth to twins. Our first goat birth.
- We finally earned our wheels.
1. meet jellyspoons, mocha, and james
2. 1975
3. llama kisses
the ugly earring
ug‧ly [uhg-lee] offensive to the sense of beauty; displeasing in appearance
March 6, 2013
March 4, 2013
you will greet yourself/ arriving at your own door
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
poem: Love after Love by Derek Walcott
image: Graciela Iturbide, Quince años, 1985
February 26, 2013
she has only admitted to being a retired poet
in another life, another time, los angeles was my home,
and her home, too.
the lava lady. the wellington witch.
we spent our saturdays together
combing through the Goodwill racks.
February 14, 2013
no society that loved
No society that loved children would consign nearly one in five to poverty. No society that loved its children would put them in front of television for 4 hours each day. No society that loved its children would lace their food, air, water, and soil with thousands of chemicals whose total effect cannot be known. No society that loved its children would build so many prisons and so few parks and schools. No society that loved its children would teach them to recognize over 1,000 corporate logos but fewer than a dozen plants and animals native to their home places. No society that loved its children would divorce them so completely from contact with soils, forests, streams, and wildlife. No society that loved its children would create places like the typical suburb or shopping mall. No society that loved its children would casually destroy real neighborhoods and communities in order to build even more highways. No society that loved its children would build so many glitzy sports stadiums while its public schools fall apart. No society that loved its children would build more shopping malls than high schools. No society that loved its children would pave over 1,000,000 acres each year for even more shopping malls and parking lots. No society that loved its children would knowingly run even a small risk of future climatic disaster. No society that loved its children would use the practice of discounting in order to ignore its future problems. No society that loved its children would leave behind a legacy of ugliness and biotic impoverishment.
love this so much – the entire: Loving Children: A Design Problem by David Orr
by way of the good: Reference Libraryimage: Evelyn Ackerman (at Sam Kaufman)
by way of the good: Stork Bites Man
January 8, 2013
i want to be with people who submerge
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
poem: to be of use by marge piercy
January 4, 2013
trolling and finding: diy macrame
my love for macrame includes one day learning how to do it.
Materials:
+ Waxed cord—you can also use hemp, yarn, suede cording, or any type of string, really.
+ Scissors
+ A flat surface—a board, piece of cardboard, or a wall all work.
+ 4 push pins or nails
Instructions for a macrame friendship bracelet:
Step 1: Cut one piece of cord at 1 ½ yards long and another 2 ½ yards long. Fold the two strands in half and pin them into the wood, cardboard, or wall at their middle. The two longer strands will be doing the knotting, so make sure they are on the outside and the short strands are on the inside. Pin the inside strands in place.
Step 2: To make a square knot, first create a loop with the left outside strand, tucking it under the two middle strands and over the right outside strand. Create a loop with the right outside strand, this time crossing over the two middle strands and tucking under the left outside strand.
Step 3: Reverse the process, crossing the left strand over the middle and under the right one and the right strand under the middle and over the left. Pull both outside strands up and out until you create a knot on the two strands in the middle.
Step 4: Repeat step 2 and 3 until you have created a series on knots—under and over, over and under, then pull. You can continue with this knot to make a full bracelet (jump to step 9 to finish), or you can move on to step 5 to learn a half knot, which looks like a twist.
Step 5: For the half knot, the string in your left hand will always go under then over, and the strand in your right hand will always go over then under.
Step 6: Pull and repeat 5 until you have about 2 inches of loose string at the bottom of the bracelet, and tie the ends into a knot.
Step 7: Take the bracelet off the board and pull the end knot through the loop at the top. Ta-da! You have a macramé friendship bracelet.
image: cold picnic macrame necklaces (drool)
instructions: cold picnics 7-step macrame guide (with pictures) via of a kind.
December 26, 2012
bone
“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show. ”
quote and painting: Andrew Wyeth, Trodden Weed, 1951
