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This is a good question! Thank you for asking.
A little over 13 years ago my mom, after doing something hilarious, asked me, “are you going to write that down and put it on your little space book?” She confused Myspace (where my original blog was housed) with Facebook.
I responded, “Yes. Yes, I am,” and promptly created the mylittlespacebook blog. So, that’s how I got here – through mom and her funny business.
As I stated in my first post:
“I’m not entirely sure what will come next, but within the virtual walls of my little e-space you may find humorous anecdotes, half-intelligible thoughts hastily written in a chai-induced frenzy, a piece of blue glass, sobering reports from the Society of Knitters and Nutters (SoKaN), reviews of books that strike my fancy, a dead rat you can swing on a string, questionable questions, transcriptions of conversations recorded for posterity, ideas for inventions the world needs to make me happy, lists of things, a few polls, a kitten’s whisker, travel logs, observations from the natural world, philosophical contemplation, notes to self, and maybe even a pearl of wisdom if we get lucky.”
The “why do you blog” question has mystified me for years. I’ve attempted to write on this topic before, but I wasn’t able to explain it to myself. Today, as I was reviewing my posts and putting the links together that fit my original musings, I realized I am here as a random person on my own little heroine’s journey. I am doing my best to get to know myself and share some of the things I see, experience, think, make, and learn along the way. The blog is a multi-media scrapbook. It’s a way to keep track of my life and to share it with the people I love. I appreciate being able to look back at a certain month or year to see what I was doing and thinking. It’s interesting to be able to easily search certain topics to track how my thinking has evolved. It’s a nifty tool for expression and discovery.
Somehow the Christmas tree escaped the attic and showed up in its usual spot the day after Thanksgiving. I did not put it there and I was surprised to see it. The sight of it inexplicably infuriated me. Last year’s lights were still on it, but otherwise it stood unadorned. A week passed. Every time I walked by it, fury. November passed into December, as it does. The tree stood undecorated as presents came and went beneath it. Christmas came; Christmas went. The tree shined its naked light. Then it was January. January kept happening – day after day after day of it and the tree stood in stark indifference. Then suddenly and undeniably it was time to decorate the tree, so this happened…
It feels a lot better now.
So far this is how February is going:
“You may be stuck in your costume…forever!”
Going to Ground
Bygone morning’s coffee grounds
ground further down,
down
to
ground
by hyper worms, all caffeinated.
Leaves of autumn, brittle, perforated,
are integrated
as eisenia fetida binge and purge,
binge and purge,
and binge and purge,
in their castings new lives emerge
from rotten tomatoes, banana peels, cherry pits,
straw covered in the chickens’ shits,
avocado skins, watermelon rinds
strawberry stems and murky brines.
Other bits thrown in the mix:
pistachio shells and broken sticks,
ash from last winter’s fire,
lint from the laundry’s dryer.
In the midst of this debris,
a rotting jack-o-lantern held an errant seed.
A pumpkin vine sprouts from his wrecked grin
as his ghoulish, rotting face caves in.
When human footsteps fall that way,
sunning lizards go skittering into the fray
to join scutigera coleptrata and armadillidiidae
who work the lower strata in some mysterious way.
Above it all Our Lady of Compost stands poised and posed
overseeing all that is composed and decomposed.
Within her purview is order and disorder and
life and not-life at this strange borderland.
Knowing well her own disintegration will nourish
the next generation to flourish.
~~*~~
Today’s musings were inspired by my own heap of compost and also very much by Walt Whitman’s “This Compost”, a meditation on Earth’s resilience and ability to turn the nastiest diseased corruption into an astounding flourish of beauty.
So, about that job interview…
…You know, the one I wrote about in my last post?
…You know, the one with all the gravitas and questions that made me ponder how I do the work?
Well, I was offered the position! And I accepted it!
And I took all the unicorn smarts and BIG IDEAS (!) to someone else’s office,
where I sat at a computer
with all the e-mail,
and all the systems,
and all the passwords,
and all the plans,
and all deadlines,
and all the importance, day after day,
after day,
after, day,
afterday,
afterdayafterdayafterdayafterday
…like any normal person might!
(I really, really wanted “normal person” to work for me in this instance.)
And that went on for 11 weeks until I realized:
No!
and also:
whycoloured worlds of because do not stand against YES which is built by forever & sunsmell
(thank you e.e. Cummings)
…and then I quit.
Nearly everything.
All at once.
I recently had the imperative urge to make a wreath. I don’t know why. I’ve never made a wreath before. In fact, my lifestyle up to this point has been unconducive to entertaining whatever hidden forces compel people to adorn thresholds with festooned circles. I have owned exactly two wreaths my whole adult life – both were of the Christmas variety. Both were gifts. I have rarely managed to get them on the doors or take them off the doors during the proper seasons. When October swept in along came the need to stick a bunch of stuff in a circle. It was confusing to say the least.
But mine is not to reason why…I am a mere foot soldier in The War of Art.
When the battle horn sounded, the command rang out:
"Forward the Brigade! Charge the Salvation Army!"
Thus, into the Valley of Forsaken Things I blundered, Running with scissors and waving glue gun, While all the world held its breath and wondered, 'How dare this warrior woman fight so hard to have fun?' COVID to the right of me! COVID to the left of me! COVID in front of me! A cough and splutter ...eyes sealed and breath held tight against the potentially virulent cough cloud... ...and there...there in the distance ...buried in obscurity, came the small cry of a weak voice:
And I rescued the scarecrow from his Circle of Doom. May his golden years be spent in the garden watching the peas grow and giving the crows and hawk something to laugh about.
The circle was then restructured as such:
Keep fighting the good fight, Sweet Brigade of Light.
Hello again People of the Internet!
I have resurfaced from the deep.
It seems mushrooms have become all the rage around here. I blame Merlin Sheldrake for my fungi obsession. Somewhere mid-summer, I burrowed into the underland to explore the unmakers of the world through his brilliant book Entangled Life. I would review it, but I think it’s better to let the author speak for himself…and eat his own words…
It was from this book I first learned about zombie ants and the mad sorcerer fungus that animates them to achieve its nefarious goals. True story: There’s a type of parasitic fungus (Ophiocordyceps) whose spores shower down on carpenter ants as they go about their ant business. The fungus penetrates the ant’s exoskeleton, then chemically hijacks the ant’s central nervous system, forcing it to do things it wouldn’t normally do. Specifically, the fungus makes the ant climb up on vegetation, and lock its jaws on a vein of a leaf. The fungus continues to grows inside the ant’s body, and out through the ant’s feet, which it ties down to the plant’s leaf with threads of itself. Then it sprouts a mushroom out the creature’s dead body so its reign of spore terror can continue on to infect other unsuspecting carpenter ants. I drew this picture just for you because I thought you might want a visual:
Hey, what do you call a fungi that makes music?
A decomposer.
Waka waka waka!
Be good so you don’t get in truffle!
Sorry my mushroom puns are in spore taste.
I woke up this morning “full of awesome” with my new tiara!
“If you can’t find the sunshine be the sunshine,” the optimists say. I’m here to tell you, being the sunshine is a lot of work…and considerably messier than one might think, actually. The present state of at least three rooms in my house could best be described as, “there was an explosion at the rhinestone factory.” The shimmering mess of it all extends beyond my home even; yesterday, as I was going about my mundane rounds someone plucked a errant sequin off me. That reminds me of this time I went to the doctor because I was positive I would soon die from the reaction I was having to poison ivy and the physician squinted at me and said, “I think you have glitter in your hair,” before stammering, “Oh, no…I’m sorry… I see now that’s intentional.” (It was gold hair tinsel. I was feeling festive). I responded that it was totally ok and that I actually get that squinty look a lot. I went on to explain that I work with children and I just have live with the possibility that I could be covered in unintentional glitter at any point in a given day, so I just chose to embrace the sparkle. My filter kicked in before I got to the part about belly dancing, so the rest of the transaction unfolded according to the normal rules of social conduct.
But let’s get back to my tiara. I made it for under $6 from an ugly headband, plastic zip ties, fabric glue, and rhinestone adhesive sticker sheets…and maybe like three prayers and possibly a curse or at least a cuss word. Ok, maybe two.
Here’s its “before” picture:
I may add something else to it to give it a little more pizzazz before it makes its big film debut tomorrow. We’ll see.
You’ll figure it out.
Make-it month continues.
I decided to channel my all my emo and mopey-ness into further development of the raven choreography.
I can’t remember what came first, the wings or the song. Both appeared in my life around the same time about a year ago. The wings I purchased from Polish artist Dorota D.’s Etsy store Pracownia Dor. She hand-paints these gorgeous silk wings.
The song I’m working with was originally a poem set to music in the 1700s by Swedish composer Carl Michael Bellman (Fredman’s Epistles, No. 81). I’m using the Mediæval Babes’ version of this work, Märk Hur Vår Skugga (Behold Our Shadow), which you can listen to in the video below. The lyrics set a scene in which two fellows are graveside with the deceased: a wayward, trouble-making woman. As the two men reflect on their own mortality and stare into the abyss, one wonders, ‘Who will now command the bottle? Thirsty was she, thirsty am I, we are all very thirsty.’
I also revisited Poe’s poem The Raven for a bit of Nevermore inspiration and read up on raven symbolism in Viking mythology. I played with wing configurations, geometry, and whirling. I experimented with wing and wind, shutter and flutter. I perched and sat in an attempt to capture the ghastly, grim, and ancient in movement and stillness. Then when things got too morbid and ridiculous, I squawked and flapped my wings and flew the coop.
My Little Spacebook 