ellievsbear
@theartofmadeline
Janaina Medeiros
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d e v o n
Jules of Nature
Cosmic Funnies
Product Placement
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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art blog(derogatory)
Three Goblin Art
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Xuebing Du
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Kaledo Art
noise dept.
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cherry valley forever
Love Begins
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@herecosmos
The Haddon Library I think is where all the anthro and sociology books are. It took me several tries going up wrong staircases to find the entrance. Were the wood paneling and endless book companionship worth the search? Sure, it’s a nice space. A bit chilly so I’ll wait for the sun to make an appearance again before returning.
Eating in and out.
One of those blue sky days last month. May's proving much more reluctant to show colour.
Today I read a poem about loam. Looked it up and found a soil triangle. My phone wants to autocorrect soil to soul. I can clearly do better.
A Sunday morning walk to the orchard tea garden with a friend. Featuring a stalker swan, tiny jars of jam, stories about lust and South America.
Friends in far-flung places-- London has been good to me thus far, and sunny days are gifts for any adventuring super-amateur photographer.
Speaking of pidgeonhole anecdotes, my friend found a rose another friend left in her mail slot about a week after Valentine’s Day. The rose was completely dried up. She didn’t know what to do with it - tossing it in the bin didn’t seem appropriate. So she did the only reasonable thing - put it back, where it may still be, even now.
notes from brunch:
apply a theory to a person, event, problem, belief: fearlessly, rashly, with as much clarity and flair as you can muster.
watch as it crumbles. take fastidious notes. ask plenty of questions. grab strangers by the arm as they pass you at high noon and wrest their opinions from them if they’re willing. respect their right to remain silent. disrespect your own right to remain silent.
step carefully into the smoking wreckage of your work. rescue the bits and larger pieces that survive. don’t overlook the small lives that started growing in half-penumbras out of the debris. carry it all in your own arms. don’t refuse when others want to help.
share your happiness with others but be precise, name the location of your rainbows, rather than the fact they exist, which everyone already knows if they attended an equivalent of kindergarten.
encourage others to play and to learn as much as they can from their playing. wonder hard about playing for playing’s sake.
take a lot of walks. trust in this maxim.
talk to people you admire. invite them to brunches and teas, often.
For other people, it’s playing with their hair or braids, twisting hands or fingers together, folding and unfolding the same piece of paper, picking at a sticker that’s already sorta come loose...
(cooked) kale is a lot of happiness in a small bowl.
I’d been expecting a letter for a few days, and had plenty of practice viewing my ever-empty pigeonhole. That day, however, I paused in front of it, unsure what to do. There was a chocolate egg in my pidge* that had broken out of its foil wrapping in a goo of orange and white outpouring, solidified and stuck fast to the floor of the long wooden slot that was my pidge. I reached my hand in and gingerly plucked it out, and it occurred to me that 1) some of the color I was seeing might be mold and 2) maybe if I had been in a better mood, I would’ve felt, rather than merely register, that the melted egg was quite beautiful. I asked at the Porter’s desk for some paper towels, which I wet and used to vigorously scrub out the remaining solidified pools of artificial color and sugar.
I didn’t know what zones of feeling were appropriate or most accessible, spending a good deal more time than planned scrubbing out the remains of a candy egg I couldn’t eat after discovering it, a gift I’d never asked for and which was also left with no note or signature. The Porter later said he found chocolate eggs in other people’s pidges. All of them still intact, inside their foils.
Sometimes there is nothing to romanticize about the things that collapse partially and can’t be called intact, for now.
*pidge is supposedly colloquial for pidgeonhole which is just a mail slot
Thinking back about 20 hours in time, I surprise myself by remembering how vehemently patriotic I became when talking to a “gentleman” from the Mainland. There I was, loving my parent’s country and my country, struck with urgency at the thought of either’s failure, obliteration, or slandering.
City of Light, City that Never Sleeps, City of Angels, City of -- Dreaming Spires! Does Oxford deserve the name? I’m not sure and I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. Seems even more of a preserved relic than Cambridge, if possible. I can now say I have walked out in the middle of an Evensong, and felt a lot less remorse than I probably might have otherwise, because both my hands were ice cold from holding the song booklet. It was mostly a joy to be in a place that so many of my friends and acquaintances had passed through before, like they were already a part of its long, long history and I was breathing it in by being there, years after they had frequented the city.
Self-help
by Matt Haig
How to stop time: kiss. How to travel in time: read. How to escape time: music. How to feel time: write. How to release time: breathe.
How to kill time: sleep.
There’s a book that riffs on L.P. Hartley’s “proverbial” line: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there,” about historiography, or something along those lines but it strikes me that our past selves, especially our past emoting selves, are also foreign, strange. Who was that, who felt so much that he had to heave* the emotions from his clattering heart, the angry guts, to the mouth, to the eye and its salty pipes? I’m interested not particularly in the ways we lose control, for that has been well-documented these many centuries, no. Rather than end the short story or pamphlet at the asylum or the cemetery, how does one return to sanity? The mad may speak of butterflies* but can you be happy in the meadows where you barely grieve your lost mind? How do you lose, cut yourself up among the wax paper that butchers use for wrapping meat, how do you keep yourself together enough to keep up the necessary functions? The functions that make it natural to clamber out of the warm blankets and into the still cold of a room recently a respectful witness to your slumber - what are the distractions that help us, the portals we can bookmark for emergency exits in a crisis? It would be ideal to feel spent, I think, at endings. Spent because we have transacted with so many, so vigorously, with the joys of risk and the enviable lightness of those who laugh away self-pity and every other woe of our awkward egos.
*see Shakespeare’s King Lear
It's such joy to be taken around a city by one who's loved it.
My favourite will always be the woman eating a whole box of pizza alone at the end of a long outdoor table beside Covent Garden. This was a few paces from where a girl clutching her hair in seduction of a camera was posing for the lens of a much older woman.
