in a non-creepy way

hallooo out there!  i'm back and here's what i have for you: two books on my reading list, one about sex and the other on inner wholeness.  are you with me?  first is mating in captivity by esther perel and second, the book on the taboo against knowing who you are by alan watts.  here are some links for you regarding- link no.1 and link no.2.  because i care about your quality of life and, um, your sex life.  in a non-creepy way.

also, i do have a shop update coming later in the day!  FINALLY.  there's some good stuff, seeriously.  and i'm not just saying it cuz i made it.  

xx

beauty and thrift

i found a couple billy collins books at the fleamarket this weekend for a dollar each.  i left behind a painted yellow late 1800s table which was sadly out of my price range.

also found: 2 old incomplete scrabble games from the swap shop with which i'm hoping to create one complete.

blueberry picking season will end soon here.  i want to go one last time.  we recently picked about 14 pounds in a hour or so at a new favorite pyo.

the peaches are perfect now...drippy and sweet.  

the poison ivy is growing so tall and green i hardly recognized it by the elderberry i was collecting for dyeing.  last night my itchy arm kept me awake for enough time i was able to read a joyce carol oates story.  her writing is perfect 3 AM material.

i bought a $500 car this weekend.  it sticks out in a parking lot.  bondo-ed, painted flat black, window not working so i have to open the door to pay the toll on the highway.   

the image above is from this tumblr.  there's nudity and sexual reference therein so click the link only if that won't bother you.  i think it's a beautiful collection of images.

stars and dark rollers

my current therapies of choice: walking a few miles a day (yesterday a fox ran silently right across my path), listening to the open yale course "the early middle ages" while i stitch  (i'm thinking about plato and the allegory of the cave today) and reading a few pages a night of the orphan master's son by adam johnson.  i've been interested in north korea since watching any documentary i could find about the country and reading nothing to envy a couple years ago.   

my daughter olivia (michael was her boyfriend) and i were in a bookstore recently.  she wanted to find a book to occupy her mind.  after a 45 minute search she came back with "the orphan master's son" under her arm, having no idea it was the book i was reading as well.   

i am searching for answers and for truth.  my attention is making what was previously invisible, visible.  in the beginning of "the orphan master's son" the main character, jun do, is working in underground tunnels.  the north korean soldiers are expert at navigating in the dark without modern technology, even without light.  i'm about 150 pages into the book and there is so much that is beautifully written about light and dark.    

here's a small excerpt from the book in a time period when jun do is working on a fishing boat:

Not that he envied those who rowed in the daylight.  The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked through during the day.  At night, they were things you looked into.  You looked into the stars, you looked into dark rollers and the surprising platinum flash of their caps.  No one ever stared at the tip of a cigarette in the daylight hours, and with the sun in the sky, who would ever post a "watch"? At night on the Junma, there was acuity, quietude, pause.  There was a look in the crew members' eyes that was both faraway and inward.

around here

around here i've been knitting, making soap, sewing, shipping, also mending a pile of things including a pillow case and that chenille bedspread up there.  

i've been thinking about things like happiness vs. fulfillment, energy efficiency vs. reducing energy growth and use.  i've also been thinking about little people and alternate realities.  

the soap making has been great.  my favorite thing about it aside from making something good to use is the smell that fills the house.  i made olive oil eucalyptus soap last night and olive oil lemon this morning.  i'll have some of both in the shop in a few weeks.

i'm about to go read and listen to this.  

at the enhabiten shop i'm offering the sale in the shop through the end of today.  if you want to take advantage of a 20% off discount use the coupon code FLIRT at checkout.

wink wink

x

ROBIN MACARTHUR

*here's a link to robin's blog, woodbird*

what can you tell me about the building and decoration of your house? 

Our house has been an ad-hoc creation that seems to reflect the stages of my life to a T. It began with a small, one room cabin I built with my dad when I was sixteen. It was breezy and full of salvaged windows and sat on crooked stumps and piles of rock. I would go there to drink wine with friends and sleep with boyfriends and write poetry and smoke cigarettes by myself. It was perfection. At twenty-five my boyfriend (now husband Ty) and I were living in New York but wanted to have a place to return to for all seasons of the year, so we added on another small rectangle that was insulated. It was still funky--the electricity came from a two-hundred-foot extension cord that ran through the woods, the windows were old breezy single-panes, and there was no running water, just an outhouse and a stinky bucket under the sink. Also perfection! We spent a summers and a few winters there, then moved to Philadelphia. At twenty-nine we decided we wanted to have a baby and that we wanted to raise that baby in the woods on the land where i was born. So addition number three: this time with a septic system and real electricity and some double-pane windows. We just got a dishwasher, which makes our house verifiably bourgeois. 

can you tell me about your writing and reading?  

Books. I love books, and read probably six in a month. I have an MFA in fiction writing and though I usually devour fiction, the last four months I've been after much more lyrical things, tied to what's real. My favorites right now are Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Gtting Lost, Megan Mayhew Bergman's Birds of a Lesser Paradise, Terry Tempest Williams' When Women Were Birds, and poetry, which I've been reading a lot of: Gary Snyder and Sharon Olds and Mary Ruefle, at the moment, all of whom feel like old friends who crawl into bed with me when I curl up to read. My favorite poem right now is Olds' New Mother, which if you've ever given birth, (which I'm about to, for the second time), might mean something to you. "The first time you're broken, you don't know you'll be healed again, better than before."

how does music fit into your life?  tell me about your relationship with your grandmother and her music.  what music are you currently listening to?

Although I have many musician friends for whom music is the thing of their lives, it's not at all like that for me. In order to rid myself of the anxiety of wondering how I can make room for all my passions, I've starting thinking of my life as a quilt of sorts, which is, fittingly, a very feminine art form. Say, a log-cabin design, with repeated colors and patterns. Music is one of those patterns and colors in my life. Playing it around the house might be a deep gray color--I was raised in a family of folkies and so banjo and guitar around the wood stove feel like a cat purring on one's lap. Performing is the bright red one--the time when I get to don tight jeans and cowboy boots and eye-liner and leave my daughter with my parents and stand up under lights and feel radically young again. The rest of my life is quite earthy and domestic--a vegetable garden, mothering, cooking, writing from home during naps. For those reasons I desperately need those splashes of Red Heart Red. 

My grandmother, Margaret MacArthur, lived in the farmhouse up the road from our cabin and made a career for herself as a touring folk-singer. She was also a mother of five who grew a huge vegetable garden, baked twenty loaves of whole-wheat bread a week, and filled her cellar with canned goods each summer. Her life was a rich, tangled, idiosyncratic blossoming quilt too, and for that I'll always be grateful to her for paving the way. 

I'm currently listening to the music of friends, most of whom live in faraway cities. I miss them and being around communities of musicians, so I keep finding myself listening to their tunes: Birdie Busch, Sam Amidon, Jack Ohly, Soltero, Dr. Dog, The Buried Beds...I could go on. 

has motherhood changed you and if so, how?

Both in every way and not at all! Motherhood has taught me a whole lot about patience and generosity. And I feel it's taken my heart, whose petals used to be a bit on the closed up side, and spread them wide open. But in other ways it hasn't changed me at all; I still do and love all the same things I did and loved before she came into my life. I still write, make music, perform. And I actually do all of that with a lot less anxiety; I'm assured that my life will have meaning whether or not my art is ever successful, which is radically comforting.

describe a typical day for you.

My daughter's in school three mornings a week. Those mornings I basically spend hunched over my computer. If we're in the middle of a Red Heart album, or playing shows, I spend a lot of time doing promo and booking gigs etc.. If we're not, that time is writing time for me, which is the most delicious gift I know. In the afternoons I romp about this land with my daughter--exploring woods and creeks and seeking out my family, who can usually be found nearby weeding berry patches or driving tractors or fixing things. The other four days a week I do the same--romp and explore outside of the cloisters of my mind entirely. Which is the other best gift I know.

current favorite recipe?  pregnancy cravings or aversions?

I'm a one-dish fan, since I have an aversion to a kitchen full of unwashed dishes. I therefore love soups: lentil and tuscan white bean are my standby faves. I also love kale salad with toasted almonds and feta. I would eat that all day. I just realized this all sounds unbearably healthy; thanks to the taste preferences of my husband and daughter, I shake it up with quite a few hot dogs. 

what makes you happy? what makes you sad?

The indomitable spirit of my daughter makes me unbearably happy. As she and I like to say to one another, "It's just too much! I just love you too much!" Spending time alone also makes me happy. Without those punctuations of time where I can sit and think and write and create I go crazy and get flustered and turn sad. Which I guess answers your next question. The state of the world also makes me unbearably sad. Which is one of the reasons I decided to have children; I needed a way to not sit around being sad all the time. 

what are your idiosyncrasies?  what makes you you? 

It might be better if my husband answered this one, but I'll try. My grandmother, the folk singer, has a heart-shaped pink bathtub jacuzzi-style bathtub in the upstairs bathroom of her muted, antiques-filled 1803 farmhouse. That bathtub has always exemplified, to me, the wonderful idiosyncracies of her untamable heart. I have a claw foot bathtub, which is not at all radical, but in my heart I still dream of being a hairdresser in a trailer in the desert somewhere, and that dream is essential to my understanding of what makes me me. 

robin macarthur

i was so pleased to meet internet friend, writer, and musician robin macarthur in person yesterday at her vermont home.  she and her husband ty make up the band red heart the ticker.  you can find robin's blog here.

i took a ton of pictures during my visit and you can look forward to these sometime early next week.  i'll also post an interview with her which i can't wait to share.

x

whistler

"Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, each with a long evolutionary history behind it, so we should expect to find that the mind is organized in a similar way.  It can no more be a product without history than is the body in which it exists.  By "history" I do not mean the fact that the mind builds itself up by conscious reference to the past through language and other cultural traditions.  I am referring to the biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development of the mind in archaic man, whose psyche was still close to the animal."

"....Thought forms, universally understandable gestures, and many attitudes follow a pattern that was established long before man developed a reflective consciousness."

-c.g. jung

just a few snaps from this morning.  the lightest of snowflakes are flying outside.  the sky is white and the air is cool blue.

...

i finished "the sun also rises".  i thought there was real beauty in the understated writing style.  i liked the descriptions of place and could imagine myself inside them.  but beginning with the trip to spain i had little affection for the characters.  they were all incredibly self-absorbed.  duh.  but you already knew that.  and how, HOW did they not all end up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning? 

but the way hemingway writes along with the experience of time and place- so good.

i hope you don't mind my amateur summaries/impressions of the books i'm reading.  if you've read these please share your thoughts.  i'm keeping a list of my reading here on the blog over on the right.  see it?  i welcome more articulate responses than my own!

at bedtime last night i started "man and his symbols" by carl jung.  this for two reasons...i've been thinking a lot about deeper human themes and my own dreams this past year and because it's a book already sitting on my shelf.  

also last night i had a thought i know i've had before.  it's that i'm not sure i want stacks of books in my house.  is that weird for a person who loves to read?  perhaps i need to give my books away.  and have an even flow going in and out as i read and pass along; more of a living and even exchange.  

i used to buy books but these days i've been borrowing from the library, finding them for free and reading what i already have on hand.  i look at my stacks of books and think they look a bit dead sitting and gathering dust.  and they should have more life than that.

"our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is as limitless"

-jung