Lots of mornings, this is my best time: in the dark and quiet before things emerge from sleep to rub life in to the day.
Golden
This stretch of land at sunset, walking an arc in the golden grass. Every step a word along the path, a palimpsest.
Up the Rattlesnake, MT, 2017
Moving
Homeward: Tukwila to Beacon Hill, 2017
Cozy
I'm pretty sure I overuse this word, but I'm choosing to see it as a testament to a feeling that has always been important to me. Being warm and held in a soft spot, preferably surrounded by quilts your sister or grandmother made is the best. Hygge is part of my culture of origin's ethos, the flow that comes from being together, as much about psychology as it is about the physical world.
Tenderness
Family walk on Thanksgiving Day up Mount Jumbo, on the edge of Missoula, MT. All kinds of weather, everyone walking close, then spreading out to run, or hanging back to look, the dog running circles around us all.
Humor
We had a conversation about humor the other day, with some of us wondering if the seriousness of life and happenings around us makes the sharing of humor more dangerous, full of pitfalls or opportunities to offend and fail.
I started looking for evidence of humor's robustness in all kinds of places: self-reflection and revelation, letters switched in envelopes and sent to the wrong recipients, someone you love and trust poking gentle fun at an uncomfortable truth, a genuine and unexpected surprise, morbidity brought to light in a dark time. I think there is plenty of room for this list to grow. And what's not to love about seeing your astrological sign turned slightly askew, your Capricorn's solid determination goat-fish tail turned to an all-grabbing eight-limbed-cephalopod?
Public
A deep memory: walking along the Seattle waterfront with my family during a special trip to Ivar's for fish and chips, discovering the pennies smashed inside the bronze ship's wheels on the concrete rail at the water's edge. Years later, in the early 90s, Norie Sato's pieces for the In Public installation program through the Seattle Art Commission inspired a similar kind of wonder, pulling invisible historic narratives from back to an interactive present. Now, back again to see the changing profile of the waterfront in contrast with these personal icons. Thinking of ways that stories are experienced, made significant, or shared through placemaking, and the role of public art as a platform, springboard, container or mirror.
"For those who have developed a sense of place, then, it is as though there is an unseen layer of usage, memory, and significance -- an invisible landscape, if you will, of imaginative landmarks -- superimposed upon the geographical surface and the two-dimensional map." Kent C. Ryden from his book, Mapping the Invisible Landscape
Wonder
This ear.
Jane, 2016
World
"What a wonderful world!" thought Dominic. "How perfect!" Had it been up to him when things were first made, he wouldn't have made them a whit different. Every leaf was in its proper place. Pebbles, stones, flowers, all were just as they ought to be. Water ran where water should run. The sky was properly blue. All sounds were in tune. Everything had its appropriate small. Dominic was master of himself and in accord with the world. He was perfectly happy.
from Dominic, by William Steig
Warmth
One joke in our household is that I'm not allowed to go to PAWS anymore. Each of the two times my kids remember visiting the animal shelter under the naive premise of petting the cats, we came home with one of our own. The first one claimed us in cat-dog fashion, jumping on our laps and drooling when we pet her; we lived with her and her unique cat neediness for a year. Soon after, we found ourselves smitten with the second, the runt of a tumbling litter who was so tiny she walked effortlessly in the narrow gap between the cages and the wall of the shelter. Though we'd been warned about feline pride order and the recipe for disaster we were cooking up by introducing another female at home, we persisted. After some initial (feigned?) skepticism from cat one, the two became inseparable.
It may be indulgent to post cat pictures in this saturated world, but this one represents a high water mark in the representation of unfettered love.
Feisty & Winglet, 2007