Reset Button

I went away this weekend.  I went to a place where I have never been before.  Sea, sky, and whales set in motion a trickling down to an artesian well, deep below the surface.  I left my home on Friday in the spring and returned tonight in the summer.

Okay. Let's begin again. The petal unfolds, the leaf unfurls, the wave returns.

Armoured against wonder

As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder. -Leonard Cohen

It was a creative decision.

Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don't have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall.-Ani di Franco, Good, Bad Ugly

So I took it, that first step.  I started writing things down.  I started and once I did, I could not, cannot stop.  Maybe it is like me and exercise and after the initial endorphin rush wears off, and after one too many days in a row of not doing it, the drive to do it will subside, but for now, it is feeding me.  Writing/photography, no matter how amateurish, is helping me to be in the world making creative decisions instead of just parenting and financial ones.  


Deciding to write things down,and choose pictures that I've (mostly) taken to go with the writing and share what I am doing as I go were the first creative decisions I've made in a long time.  I guess I was making them in imperceptible ways but they went without saying, they happened without conscious decision or thought.  


The decision to start noticing things and write about them, to look side to side, down and up and in  for beauty, has been an important decision for me.  Permitting myself to make creative decisions makes all the other decisions I make everyday bearable.  By deciding that I too am capable of being involved in a creative process,  I am letting myself to be assailed by beauty.  This decision and the subsequent ones I make each time I publish a post, persistently change me. 


I let myself see beauty and now I cannot unsee her.  I let her enter and now she won't leave.  I am, now that I know she's in the house, seeing her everywhere, sometimes just for a moment, but she can be found in the unlikeliest places.


She hollows out new channels. She demands new things of me.


The first conscious creative decision took so long to make.  I am so excited to find out where the next ones will take me.

In the sky

“What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.” 

-John Steinbeck

Thanks to a ferris wheel and budding tree flowers, I looked up.  Tilting my chin upwards, smelling a world that is beginning to have a scent of soil again and I lengthened.  The fug of early spring made me forget the blue sky. Seeing the sky, way up there, and the planes streaming through it, surprised me.

How about you?

The game is called "Try not to have a dream of it."

You have to try 

and not jump in the water

 if you do, your wings get broken.

Scratch and Sniff Socks

Really, what could be better? Are those socks not passing the sniff test?  Fret no more, just slap on some scratch and sniff stickers and transform those boring old, stinky socks into something you can scratch and sniff with pleasure.  Feel free to adorn those socks further to up the "oh wow" factor.


These socks were a cinch to make.  Simply cut the bottoms off of an old pair of tights and then decorate to your taste.  You may choose to add additional scratch and sniff stickers as required.

A day

I just found out about this cool project. It is called Aday.org.  People all over the world are being encouraged to submit photos on May 15th that sum up/depict some aspect of their lives on that one day.


They want photos about the home, work and technology use.  Check out the website and get ready to take some pictures.  All the photos will be gathered together and a selection of them will be published in a coffee table book by Christmas. 

I love the idea of this kind of project because it reminds me of one of my favourite heroine's, Busybody Nora, ideas about living in an apartment building.


"Their home was an apartment building in New York City near Riverside Drive. The building had eight floors, and there five apartments on each floor.  Some apartment buildings are much,much larger, but this one was large enough.  Nobody had ever counted all the people, but Nora had once told her mother, "A million people live in our building."  Mommy had corrected her. "Not a million, but maybe two hundred," she said. That number was big enough; it fascinated Nora and stuck in her head.


She like to imagine the other people in the building. It was funny to think about 199 other people all brushing their teeth at the same time. Or 199 other people all putting slices of bread in their toasters. Or 199 other people turning out the light to go to sleep."-Busybody Nora, 2001(republished)


The catch phrase of Aday.org is "photographing the world on a single day."


They invite us to "photograph what our lives look like on May 15th, 2012."


I think I'll send some pictures along, will you?