Boryrory - A Small Shrub. - Tumblr Blog
I created a Griffinch Picrew where you can make your own little Griffinch. I would love to see what you make!
Vegan Strawberry Shortcake
“One thinks one has cut oneself off from the world, but it is enough to see an olive tree upright in the golden dust, or beaches glistening in the morning sun, to feel this separation melt away.”
— Albert Camus in January 1936, from Notebooks 1935-1942; tr. by Philip Thody (via tamsoj)
LOUISE GLUCK
from In the House With No Doors by Sarah Kay
Flora and Fauna by Vanessa Gillings
5 p.m,
a4,
pastels
( via )
Chickens in a winter garden 🐔
by Lucy Grossmith
“A week [after Sven’s funeral], I’m cooking fish on a wood fire outside and my son, Yves, brings me a glass of wine to drink and holds a bowl of olives. It’s getting dark and my eyes are sore from the smoke, so I feel for a couple with my fingers without looking, and pop one into my mouth. As I spit out the stone and try to define the flavour–sharp, bitter-black, Greek–a thought crosses my mind: From now on I taste olives for Sven too.”
John Berger, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, Confabulations
“The woman sets the table. She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan, as my now-dead friend taught me; they stand deeper and cook softer, he said. I take our plated, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat.”
Andre Dubus, “On Charon’s Wharf”, Broken Vessels
“When a dead tree falls in a forest it often falls into the arms of a living tree. The dead, thus embraced, rasp in wind, slowly carving a niche in the living branch, shearing away the rough outer flesh, revealing the pinkish, yellowish, feverish inner bark. For years the dead tree rubs its fallen body against the living, building its dead music, making its raw mark, wearing the tough bough down as it moans and bends, the deep rosined bow sound of the living shouldering the dead.”
Dorianne Laux, “Cello”
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
"Describing a place in the world you seem to belong" by butterbeetle on uquiz
“I mean, things are going to happen all the time. The unendurable happens. People we love and we can’t live without are going to die. We’re going to die. One day we’re going to have to leave our children and die, leave the plants, and the bunnies, and the sunlight, and the rain and all that. I mean it’s unendurable. Art knows that. Art holds that knowledge. All art holds the knowledge that we’re both living and dying at the same time. It can hold it. And thank God it can because nothing out in the capitalistic corporate world is going to shine that back to us, but art holds it.”
— Marie Howe, interviewed by Krista Tippett for On Being (via bostonpoetryslam)
Albert Dros
Kate Cayley, Lent
Vegan Lemon Loaf
Pinterest ♡
About once a week the world smiles at me so wide I can’t bear to look at it– suddenly there is so much light everywhere I fear I will go blind. Maybe it’s the way a stranger says excuse me while slipping by a crowd, the magpie hopping along next to the train tracks, the little bats fluttering around at sundown. I don’t know what it is but the sudden realization that I am alive & the earth is often kind. Isn’t that marvelous? How strange it is to open your eyes to another fresh morning & knowing you can start over at any point
Dante Émile, from "Listening to The Mountain Goats while on public transport"
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
Full Moons 2023