the gift of NOMA

i got this lovely surprise yesterday in the mail from bloggy (and real life) friend sandra in minnesota. she's not blogging that much these days (facebook has ruined blogging in many ways), but i link you to her blog anyway. i had lamented some time back (undoubtedly on facebook) that the library wanted their copy of NOMA's cookbook back and i was regretfully allowing them that. and now i have a copy of my very own! the photography is stunning and tho' i lack liquid nitrogen in my home kitchen, i am actually going to attempt some of the recipes. i've not actually been to NOMA in copenhagen, which has been crowned the best restaurant in the world the past several years and has 2 michelin stars, but i have been to several restaurants where the chefs were trained there. they've had a huge influence on the food culture of denmark and scandinavia - there's in general much more focus on local and unusual ingredients (hay, for one) than there was before the new nordic food revolution they've led.  i've given the book pride of place on the bookshelf in the living room - with my beaded south african cow standing guard over it (an impulse buy in the airport in cape town). it's a gorgeous book and shouldn't be shut away in the cupboard in the kitchen with the other recipe books. thank you, sandra, it was such a lovely surprise!

balkan ghosts

somehow, as summer comes on in earnest, i get a strange longing for the balkans. perhaps because my first trip there was a summer thing. or maybe because of finding husband there oh so many summers ago. but whatever it is, i get a kind of balkan yearning this time of year. so when i can't just pick up and head south, i turn to my bookshelves. this time, to rebecca west's epic black lamb and grey falcon, about the journey she took through yugoslavia in the inter-war period.

tho' there is much to take issue with as far as the orientalism of the book is concerned, largely dame west is open to the experiences she has. she's not that fond of the parts of yugoslavia that were part of the austro-hungarian empire and has more of a soft spot for those parts that were under ottoman domination and this i can relate to, since i feel exactly the same. i've read the book before, a couple of times, but i find that this time around, i'm reading it with new eyes - more european ones. i think i understand a lot more of the subtleties of the references to the growing influence of hitler in germany and what that meant in europe at that time.

but one of the things i'm most struck by on this reading is simply how well-read and intellectual she was. and it makes me once again long to have lived in that era. in 1913, she started a long love affair with h.g. wells and even had a child with with him. by the time of the balkan journey in 1938, she was a well-established novelist in her own right and had settled down and married banker henry maxwell andrews, who accompanied her on the journey. ahh, but she lived such an intellectual existence. i long to live that way (maybe minus the tumultuous affairs, tho' on the other hand, maybe not) - a life of high level discussions and thinking and writing about the events of the day. i tell you, 1913 was my ideal year.

but mostly, the book transports me. many of the political issues she describes are still relevant today and the discussions still thought-provoking. i love seeing the marginalia from my previous readings and adding more from this time around. and i long to live that way and travel that way--on trains winding slowly through the balkan countryside and most of all, to have time to think like that. to really think about things and how they're connected and what they mean and how they impact the world. how have we gotten so far from living intellectual lives?

i need the rhythm of a train journey and the erudition of a literary salon. i wonder if i can find that without being in the balkans. it seems somehow impossibly far away.

top books: how many have you read?

the guardian published a list of the top 100 works of fiction of all time. the list was voted upon by 100 top writers from 54 countries and originally released by the Norwegian Book Club. cervantes' don quixote was voted #1, but the others are just listed in alphabetical order.  i love lists like this, even if they are utterly subjective.

here's the guardian's list (i just lifted it from their website, hence the capital letters)...how many have you read?

Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, (b. 1930), Things Fall Apart
Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark, (1805-1875), Fairy Tales and Stories
Jane Austen, England, (1775-1817), Pride and Prejudice
Honore de Balzac, France, (1799-1850), Old Goriot
Samuel Beckett, Ireland, (1906-1989), Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy, (1313-1375), Decameron
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, (1899-1986), Collected Fictions
Emily Bronte, England, (1818-1848), Wuthering Heights
Albert Camus, France, (1913-1960), The Stranger
Paul Celan, Romania/France, (1920-1970), Poems.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France, (1894-1961), Journey to the End of the Night
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain, (1547-1616), Don Quixote
Geoffrey Chaucer, England, (1340-1400), Canterbury Tales
Anton P Chekhov, Russia, (1860-1904), Selected Stories
Joseph Conrad, England,(1857-1924), Nostromo
Dante Alighieri, Italy, (1265-1321), The Divine Comedy
Charles Dickens, England, (1812-1870), Great Expectations
Denis Diderot, France, (1713-1784), Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Alfred Doblin, Germany, (1878-1957), Berlin Alexanderplatz
Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881), Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov
George Eliot, England, (1819-1880), Middlemarch
Ralph Ellison, United States, (1914-1994), Invisible Man
Euripides, Greece, (c 480-406 BC), Medea
William Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962), Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury
Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880), Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education
Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain, (1898-1936), Gypsy Ballads
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Colombia, (b. 1928), One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
Gilgamesh, Mesopotamia (c 1800 BC).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany, (1749-1832), Faust
Nikolai Gogol, Russia, (1809-1852), Dead Souls
Gunter Grass, Germany, (b.1927), The Tin Drum
Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil, (1880-1967), The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Knut Hamsun, Norway, (1859-1952), Hunger.
Ernest Hemingway, United States, (1899-1961), The Old Man and the Sea
Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC), The Iliad and The Odyssey
Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906), A Doll's House
The Book of Job, Israel. (600-400 BC).
James Joyce, Ireland, (1882-1941), Ulysses
Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924), The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle Bohemia
Kalidasa, India, (c. 400), The Recognition of Sakuntala
Yasunari Kawabata, Japan, (1899-1972), The Sound of the Mountain
Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece, (1883-1957), Zorba the Greek
DH Lawrence, England, (1885-1930), Sons and Lovers
Halldor K Laxness, Iceland, (1902-1998), Independent People
Giacomo Leopardi, Italy, (1798-1837), Complete Poems
Doris Lessing, England, (b.1919), The Golden Notebook
Astrid Lindgren, Sweden, (1907-2002), Pippi Longstocking
Lu Xun, China, (1881-1936), Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Mahabharata, India, (c 500 BC).
Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt, (b. 1911), Children of Gebelawi
Thomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955), Buddenbrook; The Magic Mountain
Herman Melville, United States, (1819-1891), Moby Dick
Michel de Montaigne, France, (1533-1592), Essays.
Elsa Morante, Italy, (1918-1985), History
Toni Morrison, United States, (b. 1931), Beloved
Shikibu Murasaki, Japan, (N/A), The Tale of Genji Genji
Robert Musil, Austria, (1880-1942), The Man Without Qualities
Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States, (1899-1977), Lolita
Njaals Saga, Iceland, (c 1300).
George Orwell, England, (1903-1950), 1984
Ovid, Italy, (c 43 BC), Metamorphoses
Fernando Pessoa, Portugal, (1888-1935), The Book of Disquiet
Edgar Allan Poe, United States, (1809-1849), The Complete Tales
Marcel Proust, France, (1871-1922), Remembrance of Things Past
Francois Rabelais, France, (1495-1553), Gargantua and Pantagruel
Juan Rulfo, Mexico, (1918-1986), Pedro Paramo
Jalal ad-din Rumi, Afghanistan, (1207-1273), Mathnawi
Salman Rushdie, India/Britain, (b. 1947), Midnight's Children
Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran, (c 1200-1292), The Orchard
Tayeb Salih, Sudan, (b. 1929), Season of Migration to the North
Jose Saramago, Portugal, (b. 1922), Blindness
William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616), Hamlet; King Lear; Othello
Sophocles, Greece, (496-406 BC), Oedipus the King
Stendhal, France, (1783-1842), The Red and the Black
Laurence Sterne, Ireland, (1713-1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Italo Svevo, Italy, (1861-1928), Confessions of Zeno
Jonathan Swift, Ireland, (1667-1745), Gulliver's Travels
Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910), War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Thousand and One Nights, India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt, (700-1500).
Mark Twain, United States, (1835-1910), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Valmiki, India, (c 300 BC), Ramayana
Virgil, Italy, (70-19 BC), The Aeneid
Walt Whitman, United States, (1819-1892), Leaves of Grass
Virginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941), Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse
Marguerite Yourcenar, France, (1903-1987), Memoirs of Hadrian

at 58, i've got a ways to go, tho' i can say that some of them (berlin, alexanderplatz?) probably aren't on my list. and i find murakami to be distinctly missing, but perhaps he was among those who voted. i'm pleased to see no less than 4 dostoevsky - go russians! but really, where is alice in wonderland, shouldn't that be there somewhere? and really, if celan's poems are there, where is pushkin? and bulgakov is clearly missing. and although i liked zorba the greek, does it really belong on this list? damn these lists, they have a way of making me want to make my own.

strings of memory unravelling inside of me

wow, how did it get to be friday already? this week has flown past. late last sunday night, i promised that before the week was out, i'd write about my favorite murakami, so i guess i'd better get to it.

drum roll, please...and my favorite murakami is......

hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world. or is it wind-up bird chronicle? or is it dance, dance, dance? i have a hard time with this question. for one, because of murakami's recurring themes--realities which bleed into one another, seedy hotels, wells, young disturbed girls in need of mental help--his books blur together for me a bit.

i do think wind-up bird is the best and i certainly learned the most from it, including some things i didn't really want to know, like the art of skinning someone alive with a very sharp knife. but my sister has that book right now (she was a little miffed i hadn't warned her about the skinning), so i can't really refer to it in writing this, so i think i'll go with hard-boiled wonderland. you see, i need to refer to the actual book in order to write this, because what i love most about murakami is his language (tho' i realize there is a level of absurdity in that statement since i'm not reading it in the original japanese, therefore it's actually his translator's language). my extensively underlined, scrawled-in copy of hard-boiled wonderland is translated by alfred birnbaum and i actually find his translations less smooth than those of jay rubin, but not knowing japanese, i don't really know who is capturing the style and language of murakami's original better. but, as usual, i digress.

often the turns of phrase i love most are just that, turns of phrase, fragments, not even whole sentences. things like:

• invisible airborne sediments of time
• tapping into something beyond memory
• time folded back on itself
• a remnant torn from a bolt of the sky
• a distinct plum pit of chaos at the center
• the cut ends of my memory
• awareness spliced together
• the smell of memory, real memory
• the screen of consciousness

it's clear, looking over this list that i'm drawn to issues of time and memory. i knew that about me already. if i'd written that dissertation, i'd have written on conceptions of time and memory in eastern european postmodern fiction. i think one of the things i love about murakami is he transports me almost instantly to the higher level of thinking about these issues that i had achieved when i was in graduate school. it makes me feel good to know it can be instantly turned on again and that i haven't lost it completely.

i've always been interested in the intersection of memory and fiction, because isn't a memory already a fiction in a way, since it can never truly capture the reality of a moment as it was? does your memory of a real event actually change the event? or even construct it? i love that murakami explores these questions and that his gift is being able to express them so well. i often feel he has tapped directly into a thought i've had but had been unable to articulate.

in graduate school and for years in my journals i have written from a quote, just to see where it takes me. i'm often surprised where i end up. it's always interesting to see what comes out my fingers onto the page. all of my copies of murakami are full of underlinings and scrawlings and scribblings in the margins that will provide me fodder for this way of thinking through writing for years to come. here are just a few:

• "memories feign through scarcely perceived doors of my being."
• "i began to feel a string of memory slowly unravelling inside of me."
  
• "without memory to measure things against, how could i ever know?"
  
• "even without you knowing, you function as yourself."
  
• "as you create memories, you're creatin' a parallel world."
  

what would it mean for a string of memory to slowly unravel inside of me? would it be the dissolution of a relationship? or would it be an unfolding of a long forgotten memory (a paradox in itself), a resurfacing of a moment of perfect clarity, brought on by a scent or a certain cast of light? what would the unravelling feel like? would it make me feel free? or sorrowful? or joyful? lighter? heavier? reading such a sentence makes me want to be more conscious and on the lookout for such moments. perhaps strings of memory unravel inside of me all the time and i'm just not conscious of it. perhaps i can tune in and become more conscious of such moments, just by reading such a poetic sentence.

for me, this is why reading enriches my life--especially my inner life, but also my external life. reading murakami has sparked many an evening philosophical conversation with husband. he hasn't read any of it, but it's enough that i have. then i throw out some of these thoughts and we have endless hours of conversation.

i think murakami somehow confirms the vague feeling that i have that we are living simultaneously in multiple realities and that if we could just tune in a bit better, we could become aware of them and use them together in a more harmonious way. there must be moments of overlap. i feel quite certain that i'm living at least one parallel life in my dreams and i have flashes of this parallel existence in my waking hours, which no doubt help me cope with the reality at hand. i already think that creativity can flow between these realities that lie within us, and that talking about inspiration and having a muse is another way of trying to capture this. murakami just expresses it all in a way that speaks to me and makes me feel it might be possible to tune in and live more fully in all of my realities. which is why i'm also a bit apprehensive for the day when i've read all of his books and don't have any left. what if i'm not there yet when i've read everything he has to offer?

WWDD--what would dostoevsky do?

i have dostoevsky on the brain. that can be a dangerous thing to do because having dostoevsky on the brain often makes one manic and slightly febrile. it makes one think outrageous thoughts and do outrageous things. like brutally murder one's landlady. but i don't have a landlady, so no worries on that front. it will no doubt be confined to manically careening from one activity to another around the house today.

i think i got dostoevsky in my head when i reshelved my books last weekend. during college, i had dostoevsky in my head quite a lot. because i majored in russian literature (as one does when one grows up in a small town in south dakota and attends a big ten school in the midwest). there was a point in time when someone would refer to a particular scene in the brothers karamazov and i could turn to the page it was on within seconds. me and the brothers k were totally on intimate terms and i never could decide which brother i loved best--ivan for his cool logical mind, alexei for his goodness or mitya for his mad, slightly febrile careening around--he was probably my favorite, if i'm honest, tho' i previously wrote on this blog that ivan was my favorite. reading that book, i would completely enter the state of mind that was depicted there. it was marvelous and not many authors do that to me. just dostoevsky and murakami and john irving in a widow for one year.

but, what has me thinking about dostoevsky is also the way in which he wrote the brothers k. on tight deadlines, in serial form. publishing it practically as he wrote each chapter (without the aid of spell-check and word and blogger). weaving a complex plot as he went along, but each installment being published in a newspaper, so no revising or going back and adding some new plot element. he was under pressure, eternally in need of money and that manic state of mind he must have himself been in shines through and pulls you in.

imagine what dostoevsky would have done in the blogosphere...

favorite reads of 2008

a new year, a new box of beautiful pencils. since i decided to draw my purchases in 2009, ala kate of obsessive consumption, i felt i needed good tools with which to do it, so i got these lovely pastel pencils. they are beautiful, vibrant colors, but have a tendency to smear, so i may go back to my favorite stædtler triplus fineliners. but in the meantime, i am enjoying just looking at them in their pristine loveliness and they were pretty cool for drawing the embroidery thread skeins, so they do have their purpose.

i got a bit of alone time today. i warmed up the atelier and have had a couple of hours to myself out here (ya gotta love WiFi), listening to alanis, painting a bookshelf, looking through books, checking out my latest dozens kit, taking pictures of my pretty pencils. painting is so therapeutic, somehow in the methodic repetition of the strokes, my mind clears and find that i'm feeling peaceful and content again.

i'd also like to think that it's because we really got the colors right out here...the peaceful, yet creatively stimulating, warm teals, the old sideboard, being surrounded by all of my best creative supplies. but maybe it's also because i did get the tree taken down and that's not weighing on my mind anymore. the kids cleaned the bathroom sinks and swept, so that's not bugging me anymore either. whatever it is, i'm feeling much better.

* * *

now that i'm feeling in less of a deep blue funk, i think my head is clear enough to make the list of the best books i read in 2008. early in the year, i tried to keep a list of all the books i'd read. i did an installment of it in february and one in april and then, sadly, i didn't keep up the list. i did, however, keep reading. and reading. and reading. and i'm not sure i could accurately reconstruct because a lot of books were shelved in this house since april i might not remember all of those i read.

i discovered several new authors in 2008--haruki murakami and paul theroux and norwegian author eric fosnes hansen. i realize murakami and theroux aren't really "new" authors, but they were new to me and i went a bit nuts reading them, especially murakami. i think i only have two of his books left that i haven't read. they're on my shelf, being saved for a special occasion because i'm a little afraid of being in a situation where there's no new murakami left for me to read.

but here we go, my favorites reads of all those books i read in 2008 (not in any particular order other than the order in which they came to mind):

1. nigella lawson, nigella christmas. my new speciality--the julelog cake--came from this one, along with much of the other food i made in this house from thanksgiving through new year's eve. it's beautifully photographed, the recipes are easy, there are lots of pomegranates, and nigella writes like a dream. i want to lick her words off the actual page.
2. nigel slater, real food. most of the food i made in the first half of 2008 came from this cookbook. the coq au riesling sustained us through our kitchenless summer, because it worked a treat slow-cooked all day over the old rusty wood-burning stove in the yard.
3. jamie oliver, ministry of food. on those days when you're not inspired to cook anything, you can open this book and find something fast, easy, healthy and wonderful. jamie oliver has done marvelous things to make people all over the world into cooks, even when they thought they weren't. 
4. paul theroux, ghost train to the eastern star. this was his update of the trip he took 30 years before and which launched his career as a travel writer with his great railway bazaar. what won me over is that he may dislike singapore even more than i do, but he wrote so eloquently about it. but most marvelous of all is his mode of traveling for the sake of the journey and the experience. i hope i will be a better traveler on my next trip now that i've read him. and the best moment of the book is when he's in tokyo, hanging out with murakami!
5. paul theroux, dark star safari. i'm reading this right now and although i'm not finished, i'm putting it on the list (i began it in 2008). i am in love with africa thanks to this book. it makes me want to go back to egypt with a new attitude and i simply cannot wait to see what he says about cape town, which is one of my favorite places in the world.  i just ordered a couple more paul theroux travel books on amazon because i can't stand the thought of being without when i'm done with this one.
6. erik fosnes hansen, tales of protection. i discovered this norwegian author in an oslo bookstore on one of my frequent trips to oslo in 2008. especially the first tale in this book of three interwoven stories is haunting and will make you look at bees in an entirely new light. the underlying theme explores coincidences and whether there really are any. 
7. haruki murakami, wind-up bird chronicle. this is the murakami that started it all for me. i hadn't been so drawn in by an author since dostoevsky. and it left me in the same fractured mental state, seeing japanese everywhere and generally having murakami moments. the only thing i didn't do was manage to spend time down a well, but i probably would have had i come across one.
8. haruki murakami, hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world. this was my other favorite of the murakami i read this year, although this isn't to say that i didn't like norwegian wood, kafka on the shore, after dark and all the rest. there's just something about these guys who live in overlapping realities that i find so appealing. reading him puts me a heightened state of mind that is what i imagine cocaine is like. that's it, murakami is like cocaine to me. 
9. elizabeth gilbert, eat, pray, love. i know, it's one of those women's magazine must-read books, but this book was just what i needed at the beginning of 2008. to read of another woman's journey back to happiness after my bad break-up with my job, was just what i needed. and gilbert is funny and smart, if a little navel-gazing, but what do you expect in such a book?
10. robert scoble and shel isreal, naked conversations. the book is a couple of years old and that's a lifetime in the days of web 2.0, but it holds up well and offers tons of great ideas and advice for blogging in a business context. it made me realize that what i'd really love to do is find a way to blog for a living. i'm still pondering how to go about that one.

there are many other books i read and i might do a second installment of this list sometime later this week. i'd love to know the great books you read in 2008.

people of the book

i just finished geraldine brooks' people of the book  and although i don't normally do book reviews (despite reading copiously), i just have to say something about this book. i mentioned the other day that i was pleasantly surprised to find that the sarajevo haggadah, which the book centers around, is a real document, although the story brooks has spun around it is fiction. 

the story she spins takes you traveling through time and through troubled times...from the relative peace and harmony of the convivencia in spain to the ghettos in venice at the height of the inquisition to the anti-semitism of the nazis and the blood and divided loyalties of the more recent balkan wars. you feel the cruelty and the fear up close. brooks is a marvelous writer and a wonderful storyteller.

this was one of those books which i have felt sad to have finished so quickly. i find myself thinking about it and wanting to go back and see what hanna, the australian scientist sent to conserve the haggadah and ozren, the curator at the bosnian museum are up to now. after only a couple of days with them, they feel like friends and i miss them and continue to feel curious about their lives. that's the best kind of story when you feel that way.

in a way, it's a bit like a well-written, well-told davinci code (which means it's actually nothing like davinci code, i admit)...laying some blame for brutality on the feet of the catholics, and taking us on all sorts of intrigues. there is a lot of mystery surrounding the sarajevo haggadah--who made it and why--and brooks' story of its origins and fate seems plausible, to the point where i want to go to sarajevo and see it. (i won't spoil the story for you here.)

a few years ago husband and i story-boarded out a tale of lost documents in the balkans, thinking that it's such a romantic and conflicted place that it would be the perfect setting for such a story. it was very interesting to find out that we weren't wrong about that. there must be other stories out there, just waiting to be told and that's the most intriguing thing of all about this book...that it gives hope that there's more waiting to be discovered.

if you haven't read this book, go get it from your library, you won't regret it.

random thoughts on a saturday

rafy, our wonderful polish carpenter, is coming tomorrow to put the floor in in my writing house. we came to a virtual standstill after the Big Party at the end of august, but now we are motivated to get to work again. the floor will go in tomorrow, then we can install the wood-burning stove, i can paint the walls and we can start USING that room. that will be wonderful.

because it's grey and dreary, like november always is in denmark, i'm sitting indoors, sipping hot tea and reading my latest batch of cookbooks from amazon.

sabin is sitting across from me, felting, or at least she was 'til she made a trip with her father to the hardware store.

i've got the nigella christmas cookbook in front of me. i do love her and her writing in all its voluptuousness.

it makes my mouth water and makes me want to try some new dishes this thanksgiving and christmas. and makes me want to get out the christmas decor and buy some apple cider to warm up on the stove with cinnamon and star anise. yum. nigella is slightly obsessed with pomegranates, but they are lovely and red and really quite christmasy.

i'm going to make bread and cupcakes this afternoon and we're having frikadeller (danish meatballs) for dinner. it's one of those days when you just feel like nesting.

so, so, so inspiring!!!

as we close in on being finished with the big things in the house and it's almost my turn (as opposed to husband's, who has done all of the heavy lifting and power tool side of things), i have been out buying fabric and then searching for inspiration right here in the blogosphere. and find it i have done.

starting with this absolutely gorgeous piece that heather at skinnylaminx is creating:

fortunately, i have convinced her to make it a little bigger and sell it to me, so it will be hanging in the opening from the old part of our house to the new--like a beautiful, extra-large (150cm x 350cm) super contemporary, lovely, gorgeous canvas! i just can't wait to see it in person!

and then i ran onto this beauty after i ordered some luscious fabrics from designer anna maria horner. it's a collage by stephanie levy and isn't it fabulous?

also on anna maria's blog, i found out about the wonderful quilts from gee's bend: 

and i even ordered up the beautiful coffee table book from amazon. i'll admit i ordered it for the pictures, but have found that the stories of these women absolutely blow me away. what incredible lives they have led and they have been exquisitely chronicled in this fantastic book. there's a whole section where the story is told in the women's own voices, here's just a little sample:

"i used to help mama work in the garden, raising collard greens, raising chickens. i love to raise chickens now too. i used to love to ride the mule. we had a pet mule, name of ollie, used to let us get up and ride his back. i used to could plow like a man. once i was grown, i could always work my crop out good, get finished, and go help other people. always was smart, loved to be doing something and helping somebody." --annie mae young

isn't that just marvelous? this book is definitely one to savor. there is just so much inspiration out there if you know where to look. what's beautiful and inspiring in your life today?