HOLY BOOK

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Pacita Abad

SHALLOW GARDENS OF APO REEF, 1986

Oil, acrylic, mirrors, plastic buttons, cotton yarn, rhinestones on stitched and padded canvas

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Pacita Abad, Filipina artist, 1946-2004, best known for her special style of art, called Trapunto that mixed together painting, embroidery, and embellishment. From what I know, just the kind of woman I want to be!

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Baked Goods

BY AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL

Flour on the floor makes my sandals  slip and I tumble into your arms.

Too hot to bake this morning but blueberries begged me to fold them

into moist muffins. Sticks of rhubarb  plotted a whole pie. The windows

are blown open and a thickfruit tang sneaks through the wire screen

and into the home of the scowly lady who lives next door. Yesterday, a man 

in the city was rescued from his apartment which was filled with a thousand rats. 

Something about being angry because his pet python refused to eat. He let the bloom 

of fur rise, rise over the little gnarly blue rug,  over the coffee table, the kitchen countertops

and pip through each cabinet, snip at the stumpy bags of sugar,

the cylinders of salt. Our kitchen is a riot of pots, wooden spoons, melted butter. 

So be it. Maybe all this baking will quiet the angry voices next door, if only

for a brief whiff. I want our summers

to always be like this—a kitchen wrecked with love, a table overflowing with baked goods warming the already warm air. After all the pots

are stacked, the goodies cooled, and all the counters wiped clean—let us never be rescued from this mess. 

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Gardening situates you in a different kind of time, the antithesis of the agitating present of social media. Time becomes circular, not chronological; minutes stretch into hours; some actions don’t bear fruit for decades. The gardener is not immune to attrition and loss, but is daily confronted by the ongoing good news of fecundity. A peony returns, alien pink shoots thrusting from bare soil. The fennel self-seeds; there is an abundance of cosmos out of nowhere. -- Olivia Laing

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i thank You God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any–lifted from the no of all nothing–human merely being doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e.e. cummings

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YC, Singaporean Artist, Mid-Autumn Festival 庆中秋A colourful Mural at the back alley of No. 83 Pagoda Street (behind Lucky Chinatown)

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Gabby Malpas, Orchids in a Peranakan Teapot

via

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Cressida Campbell, VEGETABLE GARDEN, 1988

via

[vizuart]

Charles Howard Davis - Giverny, Harvest Moon (1880s)

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First Fall

BY MAGGIE SMITH

I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark morning streets, I point and name. Look, the sycamores, their mottled, paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves rusting and crisping at the edges. I walk through Schiller Park with you on my chest. Stars smolder well into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks, the dogs paddling after their prized sticks. Fall is when the only things you know because I’ve named them begin to end. Soon I’ll have another season to offer you: frost soft on the window and a porthole sighed there, ice sleeving the bare gray branches. The first time you see something die, you won’t know it might come back. I’m desperate for you to love the world because I brought you here.

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Lightening the Load

The first thing we have to do is to notice that we've loaded down this camel with so much baggage we'll never get through the desert alive Something has to go.

Then we can begin to dump the thousand things we've brought along until even the camel has to go and we're walking barefoot on the desert sand.

There's no telling what will happen then. But I've heard that someone, walking in this way, has seen a burning bush.

-Francis Dorff, O. Praem

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Sometimes I wonder if Mary breastfed Jesus

by Kaitlin Hardy Shetler

Sometimes I wonder if Mary breastfed Jesus. if she cried out when he bit her or if she sobbed when he would not latch.

and sometimes I wonder if this is all too vulgar to ask in a church full of men without milk stains on their shirts or coconut oil on their breasts preaching from pulpits off limits to the Mother of God.

but then i think of feeding Jesus, birthing Jesus, the expulsion of blood and smell of sweat, the salt of a mother’s tears onto the soft head of the Salt of the Earth, feeling lonely and tired hungry annoyed overwhelmed loving

and i think, if the vulgarity of birth is not honestly preached by men who carry power but not burden, who carry privilege but not labor, who carry authority but not submission, then it should not be preached at all.

because the real scandal of the Birth of God lies in the cracked nipples of a 14 year old and not in the sermons of ministers who say women are too delicate to lead.

https://twitter.com/tufftaffy?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

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[i carry your heart with me (i carry it in] by e.e. cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) i am never without it (anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling)                                                      i fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet) i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

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"Condolence" "Gone" "Adios" by Benjamin Clementine on Tiny Desk Concert

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ping zhu for Allo