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So as soon as I walked out the door this morning and the sun hit my face I remembered my dreams; I was walking along the beach at high tide and I wanted to know if the tide was still coming in or going back out and I asked everyone I walked past but none of them knew. In another dream both my roommates (who are dear friends) were joyously running around the outside of the house naked

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Cooling off alone in my bedroom or the dark of the theater on a hot day, receiving my fortune in many forms, admiring the foxglove freckles and wild irises, walking nine miles around the ancient basalt waterfalls, and eating sheep milk cheese (as usual)

I'm leaving tomorrow...

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Weirdos of tumblr taught me how to ghost reblog my own posts, which is funny bc I do it to myself when I feel like deleting but secretly hoarding. Then if I want to I can release the post again from my drafts with the nostalgia that this is what the first half of June felt like for me, and that already feels so far away! How young and innocent I was then!

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I didn't bring my phone with me to either the second or third day of class but I think these pictures capture the feeling of the place rather well, considering they were the first things I saw when I arrived and on the first day when we started making our lactic cheeses

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Raw Milk Fairy Tales

Preface: Don’t Drink Milk, Eat Cheese

Published something like my Welbeck diary. Wrote about pigeons, hairnets, linden flowers, and a little bit about the history of Stichelton and the politicization of raw milk...

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Yesterday while picking blackberries from a bush high above my head, a single bead from one of the berries fell down the front of my dress, between my breasts, rolled down the length of my belly, and then popped back out of my dress and bounced onto the street... totally new and exciting sensation

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Just pictures from the past two days

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At his house. I let the chicken inside. Her name is Nori and it makes her very happy to peck at the wood floors for crumbs. She shit on the rug and I washed it off right away. The other two are too scared, they don't dare come in, just peek at me through the doorway. Losing track of time cus it's so nice and quiet here. Nice to read and write. He's gone for a month, but today he texts back "29 days." I am done explaining myself I think. I think it's actually a good practice to let others ask questions, just as you would express your own care through curiosity, let others do the same. I feel worn down from misunderstandings and judgment. I cast it inward toward myself, like it infected me. I've been craving solitude and now it's exactly what I've been given! I will swim alone. I will watch all the movies of Kira Muratova in my bed. For just some time, I will cook for my friends as the only means of socializing because I don't feel like doing much else... "Here's dinner and a cake! Goodnight!" Things are changing it seems but I'm hesitant to assess it right now. Best to feel it first. Dry heat, dry grass, dust flying up - I burn my legs on the seat of my car.

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Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing is a British writer and critic. She is the author of seven books, including To the River (2011), The Lonely City (2016), Crudo

It’s completely recursive. But critique can be productive when you disengage from the paranoia factory of social media. You gather the information and then you step out. When you stay inside that critique-based world, all you're doing is producing more revelations that promise to undo something, but never do undo it. And then it just moves to the next set of revelations that promise to undo, but also never do undo. So it's finding what comes next. I think we probably know enough about what's bad in the world at this point without any more added information, but we have very little information and very little sense of what it is we want to move towards. That was the strange gap that I identified, or became aware of, and started becoming fascinated by. We produce all of these dystopias, we produce all of these fantasies about how things could be worse, but we really don't spend very much time asking, what actual world do we want to inhabit? What kind of political systems, what kind of care networks, what kind of financial structures? This has become much more interesting to me—that is, broadly speaking, reparative work. Political as well as artistic.

An interview with Laing about the reparative work of writing and gardening that really hits the nail on the head for me...

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Made a strawberry banana funfetti cake with strawberry compote and strawberry cream cheese frosting bumping thiiiis

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Hahaha I'm the worst at making frosting. Strawberries sliding off and it's just... still perfect to me

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When they gave me a bicycle and I saw my first muntjac bobbing through the fields

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Got lost on my way home this morning, driving on the highway in a daze, but in my defense it feels like a long time since I've driven on the highway (an American highway.) It's all disorienting. I complained about the jet lag once I got there, but it's a just different form of torment on the way back. Now I sleep from 2 pm to 3 am like a gremlin. Well, last night I went to bed at 7 and then woke at 5 which is definitely an improvement. This morning I had to go to the farm to meet M and use her vacuum sealer, to re-seal the semi-hard cheese I brought back with me. I was so concerned about it being confiscated at the airport, but security could really not have cared less. It will age for 6 months now. I am so excited. I am even more excited to start experimenting making my own cheeses, although there are so many logistics to be concerned about. It may take a while... Yet somehow I feel like I've been jetlagged much longer than the past 10 or so days. The whole month of June seemed to pass so quickly. I don't want everything to be moving so fast, I don't like this feeling of timelessness. I think it's maybe a little bit funny that people call cheese makers "patient." That patience maybe has less to do with the actual passing of time, and more to do with accepting the unfulfilled desire for a specific ideal or outcome...

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This is exactly what the 9 hour direct flight 8 hour time difference Seattle/London jet lag feels like

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There are sheep on the other side of the tunnel

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I said single with flake because that's what all the other girls were saying and then I cried walking through Borough Market after exiting the cheese shop

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<3

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Past- present- future. But which is which! What's the name for the phenomenon... you are always changing but always staying the same... when I read the poems I wrote as a child, when I walk through the neighborhood and all I hear are the bees, when I'm in the airport holding a rose from his garden I feel like a time traveler who is in love!