the comfort of collecting

once again this weekend, i sought and found comfort in my craft stash. hours were spent making things by nearly all family members. sabin and her big sister spent several hours making monocules© on friday evening. on saturday, big sister raided the fabric stash to make a table runner for her mother and a pillow for her grandmother for christmas. i continued work on some snuggle quilts for my nephews. and it was all possible because we had all of the stuff right here, at hand - fabrics, clay, yarn, embroidery thread. when inspiration struck, we could immediately get down to work. and i felt justified in my pack rat ways.

and i looked around the house and realized that it's filled with collections of things. of course, i knew this, but i'm not sure i've thought that much about how much comfort and contentment those collections bring to me on a daily basis. from baskets of smooth stones to books to a collection of old (and new) cameras to the books that fill our bedroom and our dining room to the well-stocked perfume shelves in the upstairs bathroom. we're surrounded by our collections of things.

husband and i got to talking about the collections and what they mean. and why we have the drive to collect. husband has a tendency to explain everything through evolution. and he thinks collecting is the modern manifestation of the hunter-gatherer instinct. we don't need to hunt for our food these days, so that instinct manifests in other ways.  i know that i am constantly on the lookout (hunting, if you will) for interesting old locks and counting machines when i'm in the flea markets. and i gather interesting fabrics even when i don't necessarily know what i'm going to make of them - because i might need them for something or other one day. we indulge our hunter-gatherer instincts all the time.

collecting and acquiring is something we've discussed a lot as we try to decide how to approach our year of not buying things. one of the things we're thinking about is that we will only buy second hand (except socks and underwear, i'm sorry, but those have to be new) for the next year - at least for ourselves. sabin, on the other hand, will have to have new shoes and clothes, as fast as she's growing. but me, i can easily go a year without adding to my shoe collection and it won't hurt a thing. we don't have a fully-formed plan as of yet, but we're getting there. and we will undoubtedly find ways to indulge our inner hunter-gatherer and keep our collections dynamic. because the fact is that they also make us happy.

what do you love to collect?

* * *

i wanted to thank you all for your great insight on the photo of the last post. i'm really happy to see new people coming out of the woodwork. on friday, i'll let you know who has "won" the entirely subjective competition for the best thoughts on the meaning of that photo.

thinking and hyperlinks

as we've seen already this week, my mind works very strangely. i can go from a simple teapot to early soviet film in one post. and even (more or less) explain how i got there. and because i just finished malcolm gladwell's blink, i've been pondering thought processes in general.

consider the following series of pictures:

our brains are processing stuff in the background all the time. as an example: i tried to consciously note all of the things that went through my mind as i just went downstairs to pour another cup of tea--a simple and rather automatic act. along the way, i noted that one of the pictures in the stairway was a bit crooked and thought about how they get that way all the time because they're in such a high traffic area. i flashed also for a moment on the ruin of pergamon that was IN the picture and smiled as i remembered the heat and sunshine and how i was wearing white linen and sabin a sundress that day. as i stirred my tea, i looked at the skinny laminx cloth napkin that was sitting on the countertop with a sprig of evergreen still laying on it and one of my precious resurrection fern crocheted stones. which led me to think of the set of my own stones that i sent to margie yesterday. that in turn made me think of some of the stones upstairs in a dark corner of the bookshelves and i wondered if i should have included any of them. i went up, cup of tea in hand and looked at the stones and saw a shard of ceramic with numbers on it that i found on the old base in subic and i remembered the little bottle of sea glass gathered on a beach near there in the philippines. which made me think about how the treasured and revered sea glass is really trash that some jerk has thrown into the ocean in the form of glass bottles which then break and tumble in the waves until they are smooth, pretty pieces of tumbled glass that wash up on shore and which people actually sell on etsy. which made me think of my list and how i need to just get my eyeball pillows up on etsy already.

it has taken me nearly an hour to write and gather pictures for the above (while doing laundry and lighting two fireplaces and a dozen other tasks), but the whole chain of thoughts probably took under 30 seconds in reality. because our minds are fast. they link things and make connections. i've been thinking for awhile about hyperlinks and whether they map this thought process and reflect it. and that's part of why i set all the hyperlinks above.

of course the whole concept of hyperlinks is manmade, so it no doubt reflects something of a human thought process, since it is born of it. (why am i always getting myself into chicken and egg circles?) but is it an example of that sense i get of the internet as taking on kind of life of its own--evolving us (and perhaps itself) to the next level? or is it just a topography of thought insofar as thought can at all be mapped? how many thoughts did i actually have along the way during those 30 seconds that i didn't catch hold of, that couldn't be mapped? would my topography simply have blanks, or would i be able to fill them in if i could tune in to that unconscious level?

that's some heavy pondering for a thursday and i'm definitely not done thinking about it. how about you?

i love lucy

i've been thinking of lucy ever since i saw her last week at the zoological museum in copenhagen. it was, of course, just a replica with the bits filled in that were missing from her fossil, but somehow, i still find myself standing before her feeling awestruck.

Lucy (AL288-1) - 2.3 million years old

i think i had some distant knowledge of lucy before i picked up donald johanson and maitland a. edey's book, lucy: the beginnings of humankind from my father-in-law's bookshelves a good eight years ago. it was one of those lazy afternoons at his house in sweden. he was an architect and had designed and built the house when my husband was just a little boy and something about the design seemed to have bent time so that it felt like it stretched out to be exactly the amount of time you needed when you were there in that house. i was sitting in a low, comfy chair and when i glanced at the bookshelf beside me the lucy book fairly leapt from the shelf into my hands.  i picked it up and began reading. i read non-stop for the next couple of hours, husband fortifying me with the occasional cup of tea. i was transfixed. because it's a fascinating story, well told by johanson and edey.

they were digging at hadar in ethiopia in late november, during the last days of the dig season in 1974. johansen had lots of paperwork to do, but on a hunch, decided to go out with a graduate student named tom gray to survey locality 162. it was during the heat of the day that they stumbled upon what appeared to be quite an intact single individual primitive hominid. at 40%, it's one of the most complete hominid skeletons ever found. johansen lucidly walks through the tangled web of paleoanthropology and the politics of the naming and dating of fossils. it's fascinating stuff and has since led me to read a whole lot of other books on the subject, several by the leakeys--louis, mary, richard--who are perhaps the most famous paleoanthropologists in the world and one on the piltdown man hoax and one on raymond dart, who found the taung baby in south africa. paleoanthropology has a way of doing that to you, it keeps you coming back for more with beautiful fossils (like mr. toumai below), heated controversies and fiery personalities.

toumai (sahelanthropus tchadensis) "ape" 

6-7 million years old

i think i mentioned recently that husband and i spend quite a lot of time talking about evolution. our discussion these days is centered largely on what the next steps might be and whether we are part of/witnessing/being left behind by it. is there some step into cyberspace on the horizon...when will the 'net take on a life of its own (or has it already?) or will the next step be a cyborg? not really along the lines of bladerunner or even the matrix (tho' the matrix is closer to what we think is happening), but more subtle than that--starting with chip implants for faulty neural transmissions and the like. that's why i made the stack of books i did above. because for me, it starts with lucy, who, although australopithecus and not homo, isn't a direct human ancestor, she's part of evolution's picture and i'm very interested in where we're headed next.  and we can't really explore that without knowing where we were.

when i was a kid, i wanted to be a paleontologist/archaeologist, but actually abandoned the idea because i thought all of the good fossils would be found by the time i grew up. little did i know. i should have stayed interested in science in that way, because i'd love to be part of a dig, looking for the next link in the evolutionary chain, scribbling away and cataloguing my discoveries in a wonderful notebook.

i guess that's ultimately what lucy represents to me...the ultimate discovery--finding something that is so old and reveals so much, yet opens up a whole new set of questions that no one even imagined. pushing the boundaries of human thinking and knowledge, both back in time and forward. evolution this way...

happy birthday, darwin!

i didn't realize it 'til today that husband and darwin have the same birthday, but when i think about it, it makes so much sense.

i went to a darwin exhibition today at the natural history museum (zoologisk museum) in copenhagen and here's what i saw:

i totally have a thing about lucy:

and how cool is the ichthyosaur?

and just imagining darwin's travels...

the level of thinking required is mind-blowing
and in my humble opinion,
simply not happening today
(tho' i hope i'm wrong about that)

and sabin got the opportunity to be a mini-scientist.

i know that tangobaby is proud:

more stories of this tomorrow, because there are so many thoughts that were provoked by this exhibition and on this auspicious day--husband's birthday, our 10th anniversary and darwin's 200th birthday. what a day!

horror stories

i can't stop thinking about the horrible story emerging from austria--where a 70-something father imprisoned is daughter in the basement for 24 years and fathered 7 children with her. is it a symptom of a sick society that such a thing could happen? have we really stopped taking note of the people around us to the extent that no one noticed that such a thing was happening, even the man's wife/woman's mother, who lived in the very apartment building?

when i used to take the train in to the city on a daily basis i saw the same people every morning, since people are creatures of habit and tend to sit in the same place, in the same train car, day after day. it used to drive me totally crazy that it never even occurred to these people who i saw on a daily basis to even give the slightest nod of good morning. i didn't necessarily want to sit and chat with people all the way into the city, but i would have liked the acknowledgement from another human being that they recognized me and that i was also there on a daily basis. the lack of any glimmer of recognition from my fellow passengers rendered me also unable to greet them myself. somehow, i folded under the cultural pressure.

i think that something like the austrian story could happen here where i live. although we know our neighbors on both immediate sides of us, we don't have more than a nodding acquaintance (they DO nod in recognition sometimes) of the other neighbors on our street, which is a cul de sac. some of the houses on our street are huge. these people could easily have the children locked up in the basement and no one would notice.

but, i don't mean to be humorous about this. this is serious. this is about how we are present in our own communities and in the life of that community. what do we do to contribute? i'll admit, i don't do that much. of course, i shop in the shops and grocery stores and frequent the few restaurants in town. there are even a couple of those restaurants where they know us and recognize us as "regulars." the same is not true of the other shops and grocery stores--there is a cultural barrier, preventing people from acknowledging that they recognize you, if they didn't meet you back in kindergarten.

we don't really participate in what little cultural life there is in the town--a small carnival came last weekend and we didn't go. there is a viking festival every summer and we've never made it over there. of course, with sabin being in school now, we attend events at school and have a chatting acquaintance with some of the other parents from her class. but, i can't say that we make any great contribution to the life of our community. if we want to see theatre or a concert, we go in to copenhagen. i can't actually say that we, from a cultural standpoint, live particularly locally.

even being here in the blogosophere is a way of NOT being present where you live. i'm getting the social interaction that i don't get from my community here online. and is that a good thing? i increasingly think that a film like the matrix is not so farfetched. i'm plugged into the online grid, so i don't need my local surroundings. i especially don't need to get my social life there. and i think i should be more troubled by that. and i am becoming more troubled by that.

how do we reconcile what is, to me, clearly a social evolution that we are participating in online with living and being present in our local communities? i'm sure that we will find way, but i think we need to push ourselves to think about it and participate in it and not just simply let it happen TO us.

what do you think?

yet another reason

chances of major injury to self caused by girl from the prairie attempting to open coconut from far away island in the pacific: HIGH

perhaps we are not evolutionarily (is that a word?) adapted to get into foods that do not come from our region of birth. yet another good reason to buy food produced locally!

however, the juice above was heavenly:

3 small beets
1 large carrot
2 apples
½ lemon
1 piece of ginger
1 small fresh coconut

just to set the record straight, i bought the coconuts before my big declaration yesterday about eating food that's been locally/regionally produced. it would have been wasteful to throw them out just because they were sailed here in a container from the other side of the world. and the juice was delicious. even tho' i almost lost a finger trying to hammer into the thing. sometimes eating is dangerous.