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deseos-de-la-via-lactea

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evilbuildingsblog

Louisiana, untouched since Katrina.

#unsheltered futures

sarakipin

From Valentine’s Day 2022 🌹

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bambuita

Cherry tomatoes meet green beans 🥰

10/7/21

#want a little arch

rjzimmerman

Toni Morrison was more than just a titan of American letters—she was a prolific birder, gardener, and observer of nature

Excerpt from this story by Sierra Club:

Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Toni Morrison is not typically thought of as a nature writer. But embedded in her works are profound lessons about the natural world. Morrison was a prolific gardener, birder, and mother to many houseplants (including a jade plant grafted from one that belonged to Nelson Mandela). A 1981 interview in The New Republic reveals just how deep her fascination with nature was. “I must confess, though, that I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals. I think I exercise tremendous restraint in this, but my editor says, ‘Would you stop this beauty business.’ And I say, ‘Wait, wait until I tell you about these ants.’”

Nature is alive with its own memory

Morrison doesn’t just describe the natural world; she makes it a central character with a memory and will of its own. Morrison begins Sula with the memory of a predominantly Black town called the Bottom. “In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.” Even after the Bottom’s transformation into a recreational space for white residents, Morrison asserts that the land never forgot its original purpose: as a haven for the story’s Black characters.

The fate of humanity is closely tied to that of the earth

Nowhere are natural elements more apparent than in Morrison’s celebrated novel The Bluest Eye. The story begins with an aberration in the natural world, the line “There were no marigolds in the fall of 1941.” The narrator suspects it was “because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow.” This meditation on flowers soon turns to the earth and connects the fate of Pecola’s child to the soil: “The seeds shriveled and died; her baby too.”

Understanding nature connects us with our truest selves

In Home, Morrison’s 10th novel, Frank Money, a Korean War veteran, returns home to Lotus, Georgia, to rescue his sister, Cee, from abuse. Traumatized by violence from the war, Frank is also in need of healing, and the siblings find themselves yielding to the natural folk remedies of their elders in this rural community. “The final stage of Cee’s healing had been, for her, the worst. She was to be sun-smacked, which meant spending at least one hour a day with her legs spread open to the blazing sun. Each woman agreed that that embrace would rid her of any remaining womb sickness.”

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improbabilefashionista

Tadashi Shoji at New York Fashion Week Fall 2017

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cornbreadlesbian

Visible Mending Guide

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officialbabayaga

toured mark twain’s house today and it was really cool and fun and i think we should keep painting geometric designs with metallic paint on walls to reflect more light

officialbabayaga

i’m also completely obsessed with the metallic gold Candace Wheeler bee wallpaper that was in one of the rooms. the bees & leaves were on the walls and the webs were on the ceiling

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