warmth and soul-seeking
winter below the surface
life continues on.
—
“and don’t think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter. it’s quiet down there but the roots are riotous.”
-rumi
—
photo credit: science hub (nodules on the roots of the white clover)
peanut on the farm – rip, old girl and world champion
Peanut, the world’s oldest chicken, dead at twenty-one: The Chelsea, Michigan clucker, certified as the oldest living chicken by Guinness last January at age twenty, died of natural causes on Christmas morning, according to its owner, Marsi Parker Darwin of the no-kill farm Darwin’s Eden. In an article last year, Darwin credited her neighbor, Todd Gillihan, with bringing global attention to the hen she rescued from a cold, abandoned egg. He “pestered me,” she said, to go for the world record, resulting in coverage in publications as far flung and prestigious as the Smithsonian Magazine’s website, Washington Post, and the Times of London. A retired librarian, Darwin authored a picture book, “My Girl Peanut & Me,” which is available for on the Darwin’s Eden site.
—
“if i hadn’t started painting, i would have raised chickens.”
-grandma moses
—
source credits: ann arbor news, smithsonian.com, ann arbor observer
our class of 3’s-4’s
met with their learning partners
a 4th grade class
and together
they read a book
learned about what Dr. King
stood for and fought for
in his own peaceful way
talked about
what love, fairness, equality
meant to them
then created
a lovely art piece together
each to become a square
in a large paper quilt
created by the whole school
a beautiful collaboration.
—
“make a career of humanity.
commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights.
you will make a better person of yourself,
a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – March for Integrated Schools, April 18, 1959.
as michiganders
we grew up with detroit’s famous vernors ginger ale
not only was is good to drink and make floats and shakes out of it
but we used it as at least 80% of our medicine
if you felt
nauseous, had a virus, flu, unexplained itching, headache, were sore, tired, dizzy
or suffered from an unlimited litany of ailments
you were put to bed
and given cold vernors to sip on
but when the hot vernors showed up
on your bedroom tray
you knew your prognosis was much worse
and your days possibly numbered.
—
“there is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great,
and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something better tomorrow.”
-orison swett marden
my class, getting into the collage style of art
—
not me, but very similar to how my house l0oks
when i’m happily immersed in my favorite way to create art,
collage.
—
“collage is more than just an art style.
collage is all about bringing different elements together.
once you form a sensibility about connection,
how different elements relate to each other,
you deepen your understanding of yourself and others.”
-bryan collier, american writer and illustrator
seven year-old ernest hemingway, fishing at horton’s creek in michigan, 1906
—
“the thing is to become a master
and in your old age
to acquire the courage to do
what children did when they knew nothing.”
-ernest hemingway
treat yourself to something beautiful
watch this all the way through and feel the beauty of her voice move the audience to tears
-15 year old emma kok sings ‘voila’ – with andre rieu, maastrict 2023
—
“after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
-aldous huxley
during the wake
we all gathered inside
close together
to talk, eat, laugh, cry, listen to music, tell stories, remember
celebrate a life
the children from 4-10
all played together
went outside
chalk in hand
wrote a beautiful welcome to all who would come
and loving tributes to the one who had left.
“tears are words that need to be written.”
-paul coelho
“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do the people we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.
We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
—
in memoriam of r.s. – you will be greatly missed and thanks for the music
—
credits:
text: Matt Haig – The Midnight Library, 2020.
art: Grant Haffner – Into the night, 1978
I didn't have my glasses on.... 