Gardening days with the baby. I plop her under the broad canopy of the elderberry for a nap in the dappled shade. There’s a story that warns of falling asleep under the elder as it opens a portal to hell. This stems from christian fears of pagan gods; the elder is related to Pan because the stems are hollow and used to make panpipes. I reject these fears outright. Elder is a wonderful medicine that works to defend the lungs against infection. I have many fond memories of heating up elder for syrup in the fall, the aroma wafting of cinnamon, anise, and cardamom. Something I always do is plant the elder near the herb bed because it is believed to make your medicines more potent. The berries also attract birds like cardinals, jays, and robins. When the trees lose all their leaves, and the plants die back in the winter, seeing the bright red of a cardinal against the backdrop of an overcast city sky is a striking reminder of the fires of life. Etymologically speaking, aeld means fire. The hollow branches were also used to stoke the flames. Elder was one of the first herbal medicines that really stoked my obsession with the stories of plants. Elder, far from the causer of nightmares, is a catalyst for dreams. 1. dreaming baby 2. dandelion haul 3. woodland poppy 4. garden tools 5. elder leaves sprouting 6-8. elder in full bloom last summer

i read an article on liminality. it talked about workplace alienation and “the institutional gothic.” instead of 19th century crumbling castles and the supernatural sidestep of ghosts & other frankensteins, institutional gothic describes the contemporary world of liminality: abandoned playgrounds, abandoned amusement parks, abandoned malls, and specifically abandoned offices; the 9 to 5 maze of fluorescent lights, eerily buzzing white noise, flickering off and on muted yellows, stale air, cubicles rotating like a rubik’s cube, emitting a false sense of change, lack of newness, wandering lost in the collective dream, passing NPCs, followed by the fabrication of programs, the thought-forms of ChatGPT. but liminality for me has often described the mystery of life, forever on the threshold, always in process, the borderlands, one foot in two worlds. the rhythm of ocean waves. the wind gusting. the natural world eclipsing the industrial, commercial, concrete, and steel. although i enjoy the gothic liminality of abandoned places, the eeriness of it, the existential loneliness that sits side-by-side with solitude, i feel alive in the liminality of sunrise. every surface reflects it, it engulfs the morning, everyday. it’s mundane it’s so common. but it’s magic. i saw an indistinguishable life-form crawling across the slick sand. i thought it was a crab inching along the shoreline, until we walked closer, and i realized it was foam. foam blowing lifelike, animated by the wind, telling a story of its own. foam. froth. the ocean blowing bubbles like a baby. foam, alive and light and harboring the sunrise

We’re down the shore in Cape May. The house has a metal roof. The other night the rainfall crashed down with such intensity, like Thor in the sky, his great chariot thundering across the rooftop, wielding his famous hammer, crushing clouds until they burst forth with a heavy rain. It woke me up. For one reason or another, I am certain I was a sailor in a past life. Being close to the ocean, the quality of rain, coaxed me right back to sleep, as if it happened in a dream, in a distant fog.

It’s difficult to describe the surge of life that courses through my veins upon the arrival of spring. Passion is the first word that comes to mind, but the depth of that word connects back to suffering, and it’s not that. Excitement is apt but too short lived. Alive is accurate but the word itself doesn’t quite carry the gumption. It’s that feeling when your cup is overflowing. When words shed their meaning and fall short; if I was a painter I would paint you a picture to give you a more encompassing totality of the mystery arising. The little plants poking up, silently erupting, breaching the earth, bursting in blooms & color & the production of pollen. The vanguard of ants & bees that swarm & search for the season’s food. The birds chirping loudly, the roosters screaming at the sun. A new day. Warmth. Verdant. Growth. Lovely bits of soil under my nails, staining my palms, drawing me closer to the ground. Digging. Planting. Weeding. Digging. Planting. Trimming. Cutting. Pruning. Digging. Digging. Digging. When I fall asleep at night, all I see are the variety of roots I pulled & replanted - stringy, thin, bulky, snaking, running, crinkled, delicate, and strong. 1. Like the smoke of a fire drawing down a full moon. 2. The witchy fingers of black cohosh unfurling from leaf mulch. 3. Bloodroot blooms.

There’s always a major reflective period after finishing a build. Mostly because I spend the final day loading and unloading all the scrap material. I save so much. I can’t help myself. It verges on hoarding. I have piles and piles of wood. Stacks and stacks. The only way I can rationalize it as NOT HOARDING is that IT WILL GET USED. And I’m not just lying to myself. And I’m not just lying to you. There are many times I spontaneously start a DIY project, and to my disappointment, the lumber is in low supply. That is the truth of the matter. What’s more, there are many sentimental scraps of wood, and I save them, hoard them, not because they are useful (sometimes they are, but rarely). I save them because they hold a memory of the build. Salvager that I am, I hold the scraps until the stack grows into a mountain, then the scrapwood meets the axe. As I chop chop chop, I reflect on what I’ve made. On a full moon, a new moon, or whenever the mood strikes, the scrap meets the fire, and further, I reflect. The discarded salvage transforms to smoke & ash & ember & eventually I make peace with myself, until the next mountain. A small practice. Reclamation of material and time.

Happy birthday to this beauty. Pour some extra love on her today. This is one of the first moments we found out she was pregnant. When she gave birth and we arrived home with the baby, watching her hold and care for the little one, inspired so much confidence in me. Today and everyday, I love you

the most secret of smiles belongs to a baby when they’re fast asleep. the mystery flits across their face. what imponderable joys are they dreaming? little conjurers, the future is yours

This is my favorite bloom. Black cohosh in early morning light. Happy solstice.

the past several days in bloom & collecting seeds

art, flowers, and tonics

There are days when my brain is all words strung together in tidy sentences. They come easily. They flow. The meaning is present. It rolls off the tongue. Then there are days when I’m in a fog of images. Words still exist on those days, but they aren’t poetic. They don’t make sense. They are disparate, estranged, draped like dirty clothes, alienated & longing to be laundered, folded, and worn. They come with a great heft. Like a chore.