Vegan Lemon Loaf

Vegan Lemon Loaf

I created a Griffinch Picrew where you can make your own little Griffinch. I would love to see what you make!

Picrew

Griffinch Maker

Dress-up your own Griffinch! Illustrated by @avian_aves (the creator of the Griffinch) on Twitter. You may use the image for personal use.

Chickens in a winter garden  🐔

by Lucy Grossmith

People in rooms drinking tea, drinking wine in the same rooms and outdoors, taking trains and driving and planting tomatoes and harvesting tomatoes, kissing or watching others kiss while wanting to be kissed, a spider living by the stove as tigers and grizzly bears roam Ohio being killed after their owner opened their cages and shot himself, people talking about childhood while holding babies, hands behind the heads that can’t support their own weight, eating lunch and other meals at tables, sitting at other tables smoking or wanting to smoke, having a beer in a room before a funeral and a beer in the same room after the funeral, a spider living in the window as a woman cuts all her hair off in Nome and mails it to her mother’s chemoed head in Memphis, people going on too long and people letting people go on too long, standing in a doorway meeting the lover of their son, taking her coat, her scarf, offering tea, liking her smile, people drinking too much and people letting people drink too much, making beds for them, helping them in, people sitting beside people under trees, trees under clouds, clouds under sun, sun under whatever sun is under and beyond reproach.

— Bob Hicok, “Life,” in Elegy Owed

We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself. We can and do make small and tedious lives as we sail through the cosmos on our uncannily lovely little planet, and this is surely remarkable. But we do so much else besides. For example, we make language. A language is a grand collaboration, a collective art form which we begin to master as babes and sucklings, and which we preserve, modify, cull, enlarge as we pass through our lives. Some students in France drew my attention to the enormous number of English words that describe the behavior of light. Glimmer, glitter, glister, glisten, gleam, glow, glare, shimmer, sparkle, shine, and so on. These old words are not utilitarian. They reflect an aesthetic attention to experience that has made, and allows us to make, pleasing distinctions among, say, a candle flame, the sun at its zenith, and the refraction of light by a drop of rain. How were these words coined and retained, and how have they been preserved through generations, so that English-speaking people use them with the precision necessary to preserving them? None of this can be ascribed to conscious choice on the part of anyone, but somehow the language created, so to speak, a prism through which light passes, by means of which its qualities are arrayed. One of the pleasures of writing is that so often I know that there is in fact a word that is perfect for the use I want to put it to, and when I summon it it comes, though I might not have thought of it for years. And then I think, somewhere someone was the first person to use that word. Then how did it make its way into the language, and how did it retain the specificity that makes it perfect for this present use? Language is profoundly communal, and in the mere fact of speaking, then writing, a wealth of language grows and thrives among us that has enabled thought and knowledge in a degree we could never calculate. As individuals and as a species, we are unthinkable without our communities.

Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books