unproductive

Last night I stayed up too late, woke up late and got off to a slow start. I made a vase and then that vase cracked so I smooshed it into a ball. I spent the afternoon cleaning my painting studio instead of working on the three paintings that need to be finished. I then got a letter in the mail summoning me for jury duty next month. I spent the night sulking and icing my back.

I made a new playlist of mostly older songs that I grew up listening to as a kid.

I love rituals and this article made me love them even more.

And when you’ve got nothing else there’s always Mary Oliver…

I DON’T WANT TO BE DEMURE OR RESPECTABLE

I don’t want to be demure or respectable.
I was that way, asleep, for years.
That way, you forget too many important things.
How the little stones, even if you can’t hear them, are singing.
How the river can’t wait to get to the ocean and the sky, it’s been there before.
What traveling is that!
It is a joy to imagine such distances.
I could skip sleep for the next hundred years.
There is a fire in the lashes of my eyes.
It doesn’t matter where I am, it could be a small room.
The glimmer of gold Böhme saw on the kitchen pot
was missed by everyone else in the house.

Maybe the fire in my lashes is a reflection of that.
Why do I have so many thoughts, they are driving me crazy.
Why am I always going anywhere, instead of somewhere?
Listen to me or not, it hardly matters.
I’m not trying to be wise, that would be foolish.
I’m just chattering.

Balm to my soul

I listened to The Daily today, as I usually do. At the very end of the show one of the NASA astronauts talked about how he could see our planet from space, all the strife, conflict, challenges, turmoil, and made up borders invisible from so far away, all that can be seen is our beautiful planet. When I am out walking, away from the news and social media, it’s all that I see too. Here are a few pictures from my walk this morning. I am so glad I don’t have to travel to space to see how beautiful our planet is.

wrap it up

Trying to keep the days separate from one another has not been an easy task during the past four months. Taking a few photos every day seems to help, even if somedays I don’t feel overly motivated to document the day’s events. Hopefully, once this is all over I can revisit my posts and be reminded of all the good that happened and forget about all of the frustrations that came from craving normality.

Today, I spent a very large part of the day painting used newsprint for wrapping paper. Over the past few decades, I have learned that it’s more fun and more meaningful to make the things you can instead of buying them, especially simple things like wrapping paper. Unfortunately, a lot of our hurried society is often too consumed with other things to take time to make things meaningful. This makes me sad because there’s so much joy to be found in making things even if target sells a much less original version for a few dollars. Painting this wrapping paper for my daughter’s birthday gifts was enjoyable in many ways, just the act of creating was fun, and thinking of her while I thought out what kind of designs she would like to see on birthday gifts, and working next to my son, as he finished up painting an enormous box of cereal for his latest Instructables. Of course, I took many breaks to check in with our chicks.

little by little

…a little becomes a lot. Which can be a good thing, when you are making beads and feeling like it’s taking forever to make a handful, but then little by little they add up. I am trying to focus on this way of thinking, slowly good things will come.

Random thoughts… I need to start reading poetry again. There are only 179 days left of 2020 and 78 of them are summer. Nineteen years ago I was 42 weeks pregnant. My meditation practice has been lost. I miss wandering art museums. I want to make some Ligers. I need to stop reading the news.

the dice are loaded

One of my most favorite Halloween costumes my mom made for me when I was seven was a die made from a big cardboard box and black and white construction paper. I put my head through the top and my little arms out the sides and wore that thing so proudly to school and trick-or-treating. I thought my mom was brilliant for coming up with such an ingenious costume when most of my friends were superheroes or house pets. I like to think my mom passed that same cleverness on to me, as I love to come up with unique and playful ideas for myself and my children. There’s nothing more rewarding to me than when I can think of an idea the pushes me in a new direction or one that someone else feels worthy of taking and using to create something. I love it when my children are in need of an idea for a project they are working on and we sit around the breakfast table and brainstorm together. Although they usually come up with their own ideas, I like to think I am a conduit of sorts for getting them to that idea. I digress. Today, I made nine clay dice and realize now that I should have made ten so I would have five sets of dice. It was more challenging than I thought it would be, but I loved making them. I made a ball of black porcelain to fill in the die holes and hope that they don’t melt too much when I fire them. I also had a photo-shoot with Becky, our beautiful chicken named after a YouTuber that my son found and learned so much from. She’s awesome, check her out for all your chicken questions. I am also working on creating enough beads to do something, I don’t know what, but something with.

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“the dice are loaded” - I first heard the song “Everybody Knows” by Leonard Cohen as a cover by Concrete Blonde on the soundtrack from the movie Pump Up the Volume when I was in my teens. It was one of my favorite movies and songs back then.

wineberries and a small decline of the mosquito population

It feels like summer is in full bloom now that the wineberries are ripe and the mosquitos are ravenous as ever. I haphazardly smacked about fifty while picking berries this afternoon after I accidentally backed into a patch of poison ivy. Some people have this admirable knack for seeing poison ivy, I do not. Anyhow, it feels like summer in this weird, stagnant kind of way, where nothing is obviously wrong, everything is on cue, but there’s this weight of dread that something bad is lurking. Some days it’s easier to ignore than others and some days it just encases you like wet clothing. The things keeping me from sinking deep into the sadness of the world are easily seen in my pictures, from the key lime pie my daughter made, to the abundant source of berries in our yard that my son turned into a galette, to retreating to our stream when you want to forget about everything else. There’s a lot to be grateful for even when life goes off course and feels unjust for so many.

3 things

thinking back to when summer was a time of being carefree, the days felt long and a popsicle was the cure for pretty much anything. The radio called the shots when it came to what music was being played, riding bikes was the best form of transportation, and if you were lucky you’d get enough friends together for an afternoon game of kickball.

these plants must think humans have lost their minds, maybe they have, but how wonderful is this?!

this tea. it has taken me so long to find the perfect black tea to replace my morning coffee, which I reluctantly gave up years ago. I am on my second bag of this tea and love it, it’s rich, robust, and almost as good as coffee.

one a day

I am thinking about making one piece of pottery a day for the month of July. I say thinking because I love to break my own “rules”. Plus, I only have a small amount of clay left, and the clay store where I get clay has very limited hours for curbside pickup and is a 90-mile drive, but I think I have enough for a piece a day for a while. (If ONLY I had a source where I could dig it myself - if anyone in Virginia has a source I’d be so grateful to learn about it). This is a way to get me to slow down and focus on one piece, instead of how I am used to working in clay, which is to throw as many pieces as possible in one sitting. I love this idea of making one piece really well rather than making a lot of pieces pretty well. It feels more creative and so far, two days in, I am excited about the pieces I have made and the pieces to come.

3 things I am loving…

This is (and has been for 30 years) my favorite Bob Dylan album, listening to it tonight. Self Portrait and Desire are my next favorites, then Planet Waves and Blonde on Blonde.

The work of Joan Eardley. She was an artist from Sussex that died too young of breast cancer. I find her work so somber and beautiful. She was known for painting street children.

Carolina Ground is my new favorite place to shop online. My son, the family baker, dreams about having a pantry with buckets of freshly ground flours. We have two buckets, one 25 lb bucket of whole wheat flour, and the other 10lbs of all-purpose, which feels rather luxurious. There’s just something comforting about knowing we have flour in the house when it was so hard (almost impossible) to find at the beginning of the pandemic. I fear it will be hard to find again if things get worse and I want to keep his bread-baking obsession going. Of course, my dream is to have a bucket full of the “flower of the ocean” salt they sell, it’s dainty as salt can be.