scenes from a saturday adventure (of lizzy and jonny)

five (really) really good things (a guest post from kelly b)

clancy and kelly sporting new sharpie tatts, photo by kelly

I thought of doing a cheer to introduce myself, but I wasn’t a cheerleader. Maybe a sorority song...sorry GDI all the way...or maybe a Buddhist style chant, well as much as I like to think I am, I really am not that enlightened. So I will stick with what I know and just give it to you straight:

I am the next guest blogger for my dear sweet miss liz. I have slowly gotten to know liz over the past couple of years, via our blogz and last year I was blessed when I got to finally meet up with her at squam. To say the least I have fallen in love with the girl. I wear her aprons, scarves and mantra necklaces and when I do, they make me feel like I can conquer the world.

Where liz is soft and kind, I am a bit loud and silly. Liz is studious [she edits], I am not! liz drives a bug and I drive a vue. But we meet in the middle sharing our love of vintage finds, pretty necklaces, giggling, a deep love for our grandparents and our home state of Indiana. One day we are going to sneak off and rent a beach house on the ocean..right girlie!!

Since it is good Friday – how about five really REALLY good things:

1) if you haven’t heard of jeremy sweet – his name says it all. he is one sweet artist. Check out his new screen prints and other art work. sueno is one of my favorites…

2) don’t forget to submit your artwork for the squam art show! if you attended last September, then please submit. liz and susan are working so hard to make this happen for us. Plus you get to show in a real gallery…seriously – get off your duff and do it!

3) Looking for something black and white – check out my new find: megan auman. Her jewelry and sculpture objects can be found on etsy. They are bitchin’.

4) Have you seen the little terrariums at made by mavis? The greens of the moss make me drool.

5) …and my last really good thing is not a link. It just a shout out to each of the chicks who rock my everyday. I am so blessed that I get to hang with you whether it is, taking out the tandem road bike, belly laughing through lunch, watching you hold your new great niece, catching up on the phone because I am in the Midwest and well, you aren’t, or just keeping in touch through the blog lines.

On this good Friday, so much goodness in my life! peace. out.

(we would love to hear about your really good things. please share one or two or five in the comments)

*****

Kelly Barton has a warped .crazy .colorful mind, is happiest when she is creating in her attic studio, and truly believes in world peace. She dreams one day of living in warmer lands, listening to the crashing waves, as the sun beams down upon her face. She blogs over at camp indigo and her shop is the happy girl over at etsy. She would love for you to come visit…..seriously – anytime.

a photo series (a guest post from jonny)

for the last few months, jon has been taking photos using his "not so young" cell phone. he turned off the flash and the results are often surprising. they look like old photos taken with a larger camera, perhaps even a polaroid...

here are a few from his ongoing series:

evening sky, photo by jon

diffuse, photo by jon

space needle, photo by jon

march eve, photo by jon

wax moon, photo by jon

Jon says: Since the cell phone is with me most of the time, it is a convenient tool for capturing spontaneous pictures. At first I was disappointed in the resolution of the photos, but then I realized that they have their own sort of charm. I have found myself thinking more about the look of my surroundings when considering picture subjects.

*****

Jon is a teacher and likes to ponder the mysteries of the Universe… He lives in a little house in the Pacific NW with his wife (Liz) and their dog Millie.

See more of Jon's photos (including some "blasts from his childhood past") on his flickr.

notes for the journey (a guest post from kristen)

away, photo by kristen perman

Hello all, sweet Liz has graciously bestowed the honor of guest posting here while she's away. I've always loved Liz's Notes for the Journey. I find some great links and almost always find my wallet a little lighter because of some yummy etsy store or website that I can't resist. Wink.

Liz and I have been reading one another's blogs for awhile now. We share a lot of blogs in our readers and we also have blogs that neither of us visit. It's my intention to either remind you of familiar friends, or introduce you to someone or something you might not have seen yet.

Without further ado...

My crack online, the selby. I love the side links most of all.

Luzie is here in the States for a year from Berlin as a Fulbright scholar teaching at Gettysburg college. Her time here is ending soon; in this beautiful post, she writes about living in the moment.

I'm not much of a cook despite my small love affair with chefs and cookbooks and cooking blogs. The Wednesday Chef is one of those blogs. I bounce a little in my chair when there's a new post in my reader and I plan recipes for the week from the recipe index. Tonight when I go to Whole Foods, I'll pick up the ingredients for gingerbread.

My friend Jen is a bit of a superhero. After years of helping the homeless find housing, her little family of three sold off most of their worldly possessions and packed the car to move to Belize. Her blog posts are compelling and thoughtful and for me, a bit awe-inspiring because I know I could never be that girl.

It wouldn't be proper for me to leave here without a little enabling, I mean a glimpse at a few of my favorites over at Etsy.

These bags are beautifully constructed with a fun interior fabric. Divine. These polka dots would be perfect on top of these coasters, don't you think?

Thank you Liz for allowing me to visit here,

Kristen

*****

Kristen Perman is a coffee-drinking, tea-loving, mama, acupuncturist, and herbalist in love with photography and polaroid, trying to find her way in a suburban oasis. Read more from her at her blog, Sticking to the Point, and visit her etsy shop, Abishag, to see more of her photography.

gramps

my grandfather died on march 28 as jon and i were on a plane flying across the country to south carolina to see him. we spent the last week with my family. i was able to stay in my grandparents' home.

it was a gift to stay in that home for six nights as family came and went. it was a gift to take down a mug from the cupboard for tea . to sit on my grandfather's bed and lay my head on his pillow . to walk around the yard in the morning chill and see the lily of the valley peeking out and hear the neighborhood children's laughter....

it was a gift to show my family the family tree she had shown me the last day i saw her in 2004 . to hear my uncles talk . to hear the glass of the china cabinet rattle and remember hearing it as a child when i would walk through the living room hoping not to get caught but then suddenly that noise would fill the house and i would scurry out before she found me and then to share that very same memory with my cousin...

it was a gift to stand before him and tell him how much their love shaped me and how i would share that love for all my days . to listen to my great-aunt tell the stories and the tall tales and the snippets of truths i did not know . to hold jon's hand when i struggled and to always know he was there as a constant source of grounding for us . to feel my mom's arms around me when i crumbled when the surrealness gave way to truth . to share moments of what is real with my brother...

it was a gift to walk through the house and soak up every corner and breathe in the smells and take in every texture and open my heart to memories . to hear my uncle sing a song grandpa sang to us all and in that moment to be able to hear his voice fill that kitchen and remember that it always lives within me, within us, and know that the energy surrounds us if we are still enough to feel it...

gramps and me . at the beach . probably 1978

it was a gift that my mother held the phone up to his ear that night before so that i could say i love you and to then hear him rally for a moment and recognize my voice and tell me he would see me soon and to hear him say i love you and then repeat those words again as she took the phone away . it was a gift to have those last words be the last words i would hear and to know he was saying them to me . it was a gift to see the photo of him with me and take it home in the frame so that i could have a little piece of him, of us . it was a gift that today, as i am back in my home now, that i easily found the poem he wrote a few years back and emailed me...it is a gift to find that poem today and hold him in the space around my heart...

In my room on a chest

sets a picture, one of those I like the best.

A man and a child walk along in the sand,

He looks down at her as he holds her hand,

she's looking back at someone and seems to say,

don't worry, I'm with my grandpa today.

*****

i'm going to take some time away from here for a bit. and i know, in the way things go, i will most likely be in and out with notes to share, but for a couple of weeks, starting tomorrow, some friends have agreed to step in and share some words and posts and links and really good things with you here in this space.

thank you for reading and being out there in the world...

blessings,

liz

five (really) good things

*****

jonny and i spent the morning at a rummage sale i wait all year to attend. these are just a few of my treasures...

it always about the stories for me...the stories...

would love to see or hear about your five really good things.
please share...

i dare you.

nothing to do with that...

having fun with color (stand in the light . new necklace in the shop)

i started a ninety-day poetry exchange today. i started writing one poem a day for ninety days today and i needed some words. i needed some words so that i could find a starting place to write a poem a day for ninety days*. i found this starting place by walking to the bookshelf and pulling down a well read favorite and gathering some words. i gathered some words today and thought you might want to comb through them and pour a few into your creative well...

mystery

elusive

ordain

harp

hurricane

bitter

goddess

cherry tree

rapid

flood

baptism

texture

ambiguous

witness
trap
chemistry

struggle

fudge

execute

synchronicity

emerge

naive

shrine

double

incessant

refuge

simple

laundry

pew

sigh

immediate

lament

pillow

vial

mannequin

seraphim

peasant

adopt

precise

sage

gift

tongue

vine

ground

artery

encounter

bike

catalog

intertwine

*to avoid freaking out

the feelings, always the feelings.

cannon beach light . july, 2007

a couple of years ago, i posted about a poem by sharon olds that made me exclaim "oh shit" right as i finished reading it. this "oh shit" had to do with the mirror the poet lifted in front of my life as i read her words.

i thought of this yesterday, as i sat in the mandolin cafe reading thunder and lightning by natalie goldberg. i thought of this as i found myself grabbing a sticky note and writing "holy shit!" with big arrows toward two sentences in back-to-back paragraphs on page 65:

In all the years I was writing I had never imagined this response.
I learned I can't control people's reactions.

she was specifically talking about her ex-husband's reaction to her novel Banana Rose and how the book mirrored some of her own experiences, including their break-up. as the reader (and having read the book), i had my own assumptions about how he would react...about how "family" always reacts. but then goldberg writes that when he called her to tell her he had read it, his reaction surprised her and they had the best and deepest conversation they had had since the divorce. she writes:

I learned I can't control people's reactions. My job is to work with my writing and make it the best I can.

to this i nod and say yes yes (even as i stare at my notebook and cross something out worried that a member of my family might read it if i suddenly died and my notebooks were found and read and misunderstood).

but the way my mind was working in the moment i read those words had me jumping to another thought: i simply have to let people have their feelings.

there is a need inside me to protect the feelings of others. yes, i smile, this is what i tell myself. i want to protect them from the truth i want to share or from feeling bad because i need to set a boundary or from misunderstanding me. i twist and turn possibilities in my mind in this attempt to protect. how should i say this? how can i tell the truth? what will they think if i write that? what if i said, "what you just said deeply hurt me" or "what you said last summer was like a sucker punch"? what would happen if i just said "no"? the twisting and turning in my mind has begun to make me nauseated. it is as though i am at disney quest in chicago with my brother in the late nineties and we are inside that red spinning rollercoaster-like machine and i just want out.

here is the truth i so do not want to admit...to me...to you...to this white space in front of me. i convince myself that i am protecting people's feelings, when in reality i am simply afraid they won't like me. that they will reject me. that they will see me for who i really am. that they won't love me.

that is the simple and real and wide truth.

and this is indeed a lesson i have sifted through before, written about before. but this is another layer to the lesson. i don't see growth as part of a checklist. there is not space for, "oh good. glad i got that one over with. time to move onto the next one." each day, we learn another piece, perhaps repeating a lesson in a new way (or an old way). again, we fall into the hole in the sidewalk, but realize we know the way out.

for me, in this moment, taking a breath and simply inviting myself to let people have their feelings is another layer to this deep understanding that i am only in charge of my reaction. and i cannot stop others from having their reactions. it might be obvious, but that doesn't mean it is easy.

this is what i am focusing on right now: as do my best to i come from a place of truth and love as i walk in my life, i am only in charge of me.

it all is, again, another opportunity to step into the light.
to step into the light and see.
to then stand in the light and open my mind and heart to what i already know.
to stand in the light and be open to whatever will happen next.