Monthly Archives: June 2012

Something Good

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view of the high park fire as seen from my corner this afternoon

Kind and gentle reader, today’s post is hard. I need something good more than usual, keep asking Eric to “tell me something good,” but all I really want him to tell me is that this fire will stop, that no one else will lose their home or get hurt, that all the animals will be safe, that our favorite places to hike won’t completely burn up, and that it won’t reach us, that we aren’t in danger. The lizard part of my brain is having such a hard time with it, keeps screaming at me “grab the dogs and run!,” and my heart is just breaking for all the hurt and damage. The High Park Fire, as of the last update, was started by a lightning strike, has burned 36,930 acres and 100 structures, and is 0% contained.

So in light of all that, it feels a little silly, naive to share a list of things I saw this week that I thought where awesome, but at the same time, it feels more important than ever…does that make sense?

1. If you are interested in helping, one way to do so is to donate to the Larimer County Humane Society. They have taken in pets from evacuated homes, are “currently providing temporary shelter for cats, small mammals and farm animals (the size of a goat or smaller) displaced due to the High Park fire,” but are at capacity for dogs (in Colorado, we love us some dogs, so there are lots of them). They need help feeding the animals, so have set up a way for you to give a donation online. I’m sure there are plenty of other places to donate, this just happens to be the one closest to my heart.

2. The Denver Botanic Gardens. We needed a break from worrying about the fire today, so we took a spontaneous trip to Denver to look at things that were lush and alive. We walked around for over three hours, and I took lots of pictures, and we got lots of ideas for what to do with our new beds in our front yard. We were laughing at ourselves, because if you add in both dog walks, we did about 4.5 hours of walking today.

hidden bench, can you see it?

dreamy purple clematis

3. Kizuna exhibition at Denver Botanic Gardens. As a lover of most things Japanese and all things bamboo, I adored this strange and wonderful instillation spread throughout the gardens. “This season’s signature exhibition, Kizuna: West Meets East, brings together two installation artists working in bamboo: Tetsunori Kawana and Stephen Talasnik. Through different working methods, both artists employed this versatile natural material to create large site-specific works for the Gardens.”



4. I want to make this list: Jamie Ridler’s Discovering Delight. In fact, I think we should all make this list, throw out our “to-do” lists and live this one instead. I will if you will…

5. 7 Ways to Celebrate Summer from Positively Present. This list is a good start, but I bet if we tried really, really hard, we could think of more than seven ways.

6. How to Make a Living as an Artist at Create as Folk, by Laura Simms. Be sure to watch the video, if for no other reason than Laura is just so stinking cute.

7. How to Unstress and Truly Enjoy Your Vacation from the Positivity Blog. Can you tell where my head is at?

8. Welcome to the World, Book Baby by Susannah Conway. This is a really great post about her new book, This I Know: Notes on Unraveling the Heart, how it came to be, and links to her virtual, online book tour.

9. Really cool terrariums by the slug and the squirrel.

10. Photo a Day, June Challenge List. I wish I had time, because I love this idea and think it would be really fun, so I’ll save the link and maybe do the one in July.

11. A sweet little video about life and how fast it goes by, in honor of the baby robins next door who are learning how to fly today.

12. The color of. Oh, I could waste so much time here…”a system created to find out the colour of anything, by querying and aggregating image data from Flickr, a popular online photo sharing community. It is an attempt at answering a potentially complex and abstract question in an objective manner, by using simple algorithms on data originating from subjective human perceptions.” You can search any term. Here are the ones I just made.

Love is cooler, calmer, gentler than fire, but they are clearly similar.

13. Quotes from Ray Bradbury on Brain Pickings. Ray Bradbury passed away this week at the age of 91. I adored him for most of my life, and am sad he’s gone, but glad he left such a wonderful legacy.

14. Want To Know Yourself Better? Ask Yourself These Questions from the Happiness Project. These look good.

15. You Can Be at Peace from Jennifer Louden. Oh how I adore her…

16. I love Rosie Thomas, and apparently, so does Susannah Conway, who shared this link to an interview with Rosie. I love hearing stories about how someone “finds art” or “becomes an artist,” those magical origin stories, and this article also pointed out that Rosie has a new album that I didn’t know about, which I am listening to as I write this post, (oh, and it’s really, really good, so #16.5 on the something good list is her new album).

17. Do These Petals Make My Stem Look Fat? by Sunni on the Daily Breadcrumb. Oh that Sunni, so precious, so brilliant. This post, which I adore because maybe you’ve noticed by now how much I love flowers?, also reminds me of this quote: “If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change,” (Buddha, who is precious and brilliant as well).

18. This quote, shared by Judy Clement Wall in her latest post on A Human Thing: “You can’t control what other people think about your art. Think about the part of yourself that you can control, which is your ability to be kind and loving and creative.” ~ Ann Patchett, Yoga Journal

19. Calm.com, my new favorite website. Go ahead, try it and you’ll see what I mean.

20. Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zero, Man on Fire.

i’m still standing

Day of Rest: I’m Wide Awake

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the sky over my backyard

You may have heard already, but the wilderness northwest of Fort Collins is burning again, 14,000 acres so far, 0% contained, structures burnt, people and animals evacuated from their homes. It started as 2 acres, quickly grew to 200-300, then 5000, and 8000 by the time we went to bed, growing to 14,000 during the night. Just last week, because of other wildfires, the Poudre River ran black with soot and smelled burnt. Today, the sky is brown and there is ash falling. All day, I have felt so sad.

While I was out watering, after our morning walk, I found this Dragonfly clinging to one of my dead roses. They don’t normally stay still for as long as it did, so something must have been wrong, but it was so amazing, the blue and brown, the shimmer and wingspan. And then, on one of my newly blooming gifted plants, a fat bumblebee, similarly still, but beautiful. I wondered if they were somehow dazed by the smoke from the fire.

You know how I get stuck on a song sometimes? Last week it was I Won’t Give Up by Jason Mraz. This weekend it’s been Wide Awake by Katy Perry. I like her a lot, and I won’t apologize for it–just as I adore Pink and Kelly Clarkson, and refuse to feel any shame for it. In plenty of other ways, I have sophisticated musical taste, but there are some songs, some artists that I love without reason or justification–they are simply honest, uncomplicated, real, and I feel their work on the level of my guts, in the pit of my stomach.

When I listen to Wide Awake, I think about how Katy believed in something and it turned out to be wrong, and how bad that feels. You put your faith and energy and love into a situation, and it ends up breaking your heart.

That’s sad, but the grief that follows the mistake, the misstep, the wrong move, the misunderstanding can be precious, can gift you with a clarity impossible through other means. You are hurt, broken, but suddenly wide awake. You know how things are, who you are, and you find you are stronger than you thought, and that you are able to let go of the dream, the promise, the future and the past, the pain, the blame, the guilt, you are able to let go of all of it.

Susan Piver, in her book The Wisdom of a Broken Heart, writes “The heart that is broken has been broken open.” My experience shows this to be true, that the brokenness makes the cracks that let the light in, and being broken, your heart becomes tender and soft in a way it wasn’t before. You become a warrior with a broken heart, the gentlest and most powerful. You are wide awake.

P.S. Kind and gentle reader, if you are like me and get dizzy or carsick easily, don’t try to watch this video. Things are moving too fast, so maybe just listen instead.