it takes two

we attended the wedding of a good friend of mine this weekend. we used to work together and i used to say that she was the keeper of my brain, or at least my memory and on more than one occasion, my sanity (i should note that the times when it didn't work are entirely my own and not at all her fault).  it was so great to be there to share in the happiness of her day.

it was a gorgeous weekend and she and her new husband looked so relaxed and happy amidst their friends and family. the church was lovely and filled with lilacs and people who were happy for them and children who plugged their ears when the organ played (what is up with organs? they're a terrible instrument). everyone gathered after the ceremony in her parents' beautiful, wide front yard for champagne from her father's own vineyard (in denmark, yes, it's true - and it was good!). then on to a dinner and party that lasted 'til the wee hours of the night. it was truly a stunning beginning to what i am sure will be a long and happy life together.

we stayed with her parents' neighbors, as we were a bit slow (what, me, procrastinate? really?) to book the pension they had reserved and all the rooms were gone by the time we decided we needed one. that turned out to be quite ok, because her parents' neighbors were a couple that knew husband when he was a child growing up in the heart of copenhagen. we had a leisurely breakfast with them in the sunshine before we left, reminiscing over the old times and the people husband knew when he was growing up. it is a small world after all.

but it got even smaller, as it turned out that the groom's parents had worked closely with my father-in-law on his technolution drawings - helping him with the latin names of all of them. husband and i had some nearly-tearful moments talking to the groom's mother about him. it's been more than five years since he died, but we do still miss him. it was very nice to meet someone who had known him and worked closely with him too. it made us both happy and sad at the same time and sometimes those are the best kind of emotions because they're so keenly felt. you feel alive at moments like that, when you are truly feeling something, even if it does make you feel a bit sorrowful.

a little bit weird to run into such connections from BOTH sides of husband's family (his parents split when he was 5) at a wedding where our connection to being there was actually through me, the girl from the other side of the world.

and it makes me think, once again, that we were undoubtedly meant to be. and tho' i shudder at times to think of the chain of events that had to be as it was for us to meet and how easily they could have gone another way, perhaps it's times like this that should make me realize we really were meant to be together. these things can't be coincidence, can they? there must be strong connections binding us - and we would probably have found our way to one another no matter what.

and now, our long weekend is winding to a close. a new week awaits. with new projects and new challenges ahead. but these experiences (and a lot of sunshine) leave us fortified and ready to face it head-on. but first, a bit of rest.

* most of the photos above were taken by sabin.

when one thing becomes another

husband and i went for a walk in the woods on sunday. our real purpose on such a walk is what we like to call forestry. because we always spend some time liberating small beech trees to bring home for our hedges. we're thinning them out, helping the forest, you know, forestry. husband is making a labyrinth in front of our house (we hate being like the neighbors, you see) and it requires quite a lot of beech hedge. we don't mind waiting for it to grow up, so we bring home really small saplings from our forest walks. you can see the beech trees above, they're the ones with the brown leaves that don't fall off 'til the new ones push them off in spring. the ones you can see in the photo are larger than the ones we take, those are like only a foot high.

anyway, on our walk, i kept stopping to take photos of things like seriously tiny mushrooms:

i am amazed at how there are always mushrooms of some kind growing in this forest, no matter what the weather or when you go. year round, there are mushrooms or fungi of some sort. i only know of edible ones in the autumn, but there are probably some you can eat year-round. it's just that you don't want to mess around with that if you don't really know them well. 

we got to talking about inspiration, which, as you well know, is on my mind of late. i said i felt driven to take pictures of mushrooms for some reason that i didn't yet understand, but that i felt it would come to me eventually. and i wondered aloud if there was some way to fast track that process, because right now, it seems like it's taking an awfully long time from inspiration to product, so to speak.  

just as an example, two years ago, when peter, my father-in-law died, we got these ceramic "odin's eyeballs" that had belonged to him. odin is the head god in nordic mythology.  part of the story, which i need to do a bit more looking into, is that odin dropped his eyeball into a well, in order to gain the gift of knowledge. i don't remember the exact reason that peter had these eyeballs (there were several sets, we got one of them), but it also had to do with seeing clearly after the breakup of his long marriage in the late 90s. in any case, they have held a strange fascination for me since they came into our home. they reside on the window sill in our addition and i am drawn to them often. one snowy day, i took them out and took some pictures of them and we used them for our snowman's eyes.

combined with the memory of my friend michellea's fantastic i-eye collage and heavily influenced by this photo from flickr (and who wouldn't be inspired by sandra juto?), i have been feeling that i need to do something with eyes. and somehow, all of this input clicked into place on friday and i came up with this pillow, which will be the first item i list in my etsy shop later this week, together with two more i'm working on that are of the same theme.

but it took me a really long time to get to this point (especially if you take into account that the first inspiration came clear back in 1990). if i really want to have an etsy shop and be part of a local artist's group and contribute something to eyebuzz's first 'zine, i'm going to need to fast track this inspiration a bit. (i'm trying to find my way here and any advice is appreciated, by the way.) 

yesterday, in an attempt to get on this creative fast track, i gave myself a little exercise. i saw this beautiful embroidery by the ever inspiring margaret ooman of resurrection fern on flickr :

and i gave myself the assignment of making one like it from all of the scraps that were laying on the table after a weekend's worth of creativity. what i thought was that i would imitate it, that i would make a nest and a bird and eggs. that it would, of course, reflect my scraps, so it wouldn't be an exact copy, but that i would somehow end with something similar. well, something interesting happened along the way. i began by making the nest, but when it was finished, i saw something else. i saw a bowl. and among my scraps, i spotted a red felt circle, which demanded to be trimmed into apples. and in the end, this is what i created (#24):

i can hear the echo of margie's lovely nest, but i did end up making something my own. which i guess is what inspiration is about. and i did manage to fast-track the process--since i saw the nest on flickr on friday and made this already on sunday. so perhaps there's hope if you just push yourself a bit. if not, there's surely a ton of things i've been pondering in the back of my mind from the inspiration gleaned years ago, if i can just coax it out. 

i promise to stop harping on about creativity very soon. i'll start my new job and get out of the house and be with people and the navel gazing will surely taper off.  thanks for bearing with me in the meantime!

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...

keeping my vibe down

"i am someone easy to leave"

"even easier to forget"

a voice, if inaccurate.

did you ever have one of those days? well, it was otherwise a good day what with the retail therapy and all, but it's definitely been one of THOSE evenings.  

"i'm the one they all run from"

diatribes of clouded sun

someone help me find the pause button

you are all painfully aware of my kitchenless state. however, i was able to begin using my new kitchen sink today, which was a step in the right direction. tho' several times i still found myself taking dishes out to the bathroom. amazing how quickly one learns new habits and has to unlearn them.

all these tapes in my head swirl around

keeping my vibe down

so, inspired by having an actual sink, i bought salmon to cook on the grill. and i bought a mandolin to make a lovely salad of the fennel, zucchini, baby carrots and fresh new garlic that came in my dogme box from årsiderne today. i even went and got salty macadamias from Irma, although i don't even want to think about the food miles on those. i put the salmon in a pan in a bed of lemon, doused it in gorgeous, yellow, local, organic rapeseed oil and an inspire chardonnay blend from spiers (one of my favorite south african wineries--moyo, their restaurant is AWESOME, but i digress) and covered it in the fresh dill that came in the box so it could poach in the pan on the grill. in short, i actually felt inspired.

all these thoughts in my head aren't my own

wreaking havoc

silly me.

"i'm too exhausting to be loved"

"a volatile chemical"

"best to quarantine and cut off"

the kids set the table in the circle.  the sun was shining. the rest of the spiers bottle was chilled and sweating beads of moisture onto the bright linen tablecloth.  the fennel salad and a bowl of tzaziki were on the table awaiting the delicately poached salmon.  

all these tapes in my head swirl around

keeping my vibe down

all these thoughts in my head aren't my own

wreaking havoc

i called everyone to the table. the pan was hot and i had no gloves, relying on my inner chef's asbestos hands, so i set it on a chair that was next to the table.  and before i could do anything, it fell on the ground.  upside down. spilling my lovely salmon into snail trails, leaves and dirt, spoiling the whole thing.

"i'm but a thorn in your sweet side"

"you'd be better off without me"

"it'd be best to leave at once"

initially i swore up a storm, even inventing a few new swear words in the process. to salvage things and feed my family i went down to the grill where you can get quite delicious rotisserie chickens, which we could at least eat with the fennel salad and tzaziki i made.

all these tapes in my head swirl around

keeping my vibe down

all these thoughts in my head aren't my own

wreaking havoc

looking back, i think where it began to go wrong was when we opened the mail and received this invitation to a symposium in honor of my father-in-law that will be held this fall:

he died just after the first of the year two years ago. he was such a special person and we have so many of his books in our home. the invitation has a watermark of his signature in it. and it got me all on the wrong foot. he was very dear to me and made it clear that he loved me and accepted me wholeheartedly into the family. i worked closely with him on his technolution project, translating and editing for him to ensure the english was correct, my translations even being part of his exhibition at the library in alexandria, egypt a number of years ago.

when i ordered the wegner chairs today, it was to complement the first 4 he gave to us. as i photographed my bookshelves yesterday, he was on my mind, as our whole evolution collection was his. i love so much enountering his marginalia as i read his books, but somehow seeing his handwriting makes me realize he's no longer here.

he was a brilliant man. he invented a field of study of which he was the first professor at lund university in sweden. he surely had so much left to think and write and discuss. and i suddenly miss him so much.

but listening to alanis morissette helps me and it's her song tapes which i wove into the beginning of this posting.  sometimes you just have to wallow in your sorrow and cry your eyes out.