The Sunflower Project

Sunflowers represent the sun. They represent adoration, as they follow the sun's path across the day's sky. They are symbols and examples of the golden ration. They are a combination of beauty and utility. Bees love them. They are easy to grow and yet impressive. They are perfect for the permaculturalist because of their ability to provide shade, borders, beauty, seeds, oil, and food for the pollinators.

I love them.

In my dining room hangs the above photograph of a sunflower from my garden two years ago. Above it, a framed photograph from my mom of a field of sunflowers on a breezy Pennsylvania afternoon. On an adjacent wall hangs a close-up of two sunflowers with some baby's breath from a wedding bouquet, a photograph taken by my artistic friend Gary.

So I've dubbed our dining room the "Sunflower Room," and I'm asking for contributions. If you'd like to participate, I would love to have you mail or e-mail me your favorite sunflower photograph for me to frame and add to our Sunflower Room as a reminder of our community of friends, fellow bloggers, family, and so forth.

So if you'd like to contribute, please leave me a comment below. And thank you. 

Wednesday Excursions

Alicia's Garden, Chesapeake City, Maryland

In the interest of sharing some of my summer adventures and in the hopes of motivating me to edit and cull through my hundreds of photos (and per request from MIL in Minnesota), I want to share some of my photos from my trip. So every Wednesday (hopefully), I will try to publish a few photos with captions of where they were taken.

Alicia's Garden, Chesapeake City, MD 7/10/11

friday fantastic

Clever Nettle had this posted on her blog the other day, and I thought it worth copying and sharing. It's from another blog called sighs and whispers, where vintage photographs are published. The lady is “Forest Piece at Schnaitsee,” 1972. Photo by Holger Trülzsch of Veruschka (Vera Lehndorff) from Trans-Figurations. She looks like a forest sprite, somehow eerie and whimsical at the same time.


I'm off to coast for the three-day weekend to sleep, read, grade, walk, fly kites, take pictures, eat, laugh, drink wine, sleep, soak in the hot-tub, listen to/dance in the waves, rain, and wind, and perhaps practice knitting or crocheting. What are your three-day weekend doings?

2010 restrospective

New Year's Day seems to be a rather quiet day. Perhaps because so many of us are fighting hangovers from the debauchery of the night before. But there's also a reflective quality in the day. I looked up my resolutions and goals for last year, and it's interesting to reflect on how far I've come in the past year.

For arts and crafts, I wanted to continue knitting and crocheting, which I didn't do. But I did sew: curtains, pillows, tote bags, stuffed animals, yoga mat bags. I had fun with it and I'm still enjoying it, and I'm confident that I will keep it going. I have a long list of projects, including curtains for my bedroom, new turntable curtains, tote bags for friends, and more stuffed animals. Plus, I do want to learn to knit, still, and make hats, scarves, and fingerless gloves. Plus, I became a better photographer this year. And looking back at my photos, I realized that I'm quite hard on myself, but I've done some good work this year.

I went further with my garden/homestead than I'd originally planned, but in many respects I also fell short. I have dried tomatoes, figs, and chanterelles, but nothing canned from my garden. I do have frozen kale and berries, peach jam, apple butter, and green tomato chutney. I have garlic bulbs wintering in stockings in the basement. We have drunk most of my own chamomile, and we haven't bought eggs since June or July. This year, I want to grow even more teas and herbs, more lettuce, peas, carrots, beats, leeks, tomatoes, garlic, etc. My bees need more management, so I will need to take some classes and do some work with them this year that may involve collecting wax and making some candles and finally harvesting some honey. Fingers crossed! My hens are fat and happy, and my garden sleeps under blankets of straw from their coop. My compost is lush and wonderful.

As for career goals, I got my full-time teaching job! At the school that I most wanted to be working at! That's been everything, really, having a job that I can put my heart into and apply my creativity and love of reading and writing and education. I can be organized and analytical and creative and weird. I can sing songs to my freshmen about conjunctions, and I can ask my juniors to create their own class agenda. Time to rev up. Back to work on Monday!

If I were to set some goals for myself for 2011, they would be to grow as an educator and continue my work with rewriting the way we grade and measure our students' progress, to create a book club with a few fellow book-loving friends, to learn to knit, to keep on sewing, and to grow another wonderful garden with happy honey bees and plump egg-laying chickens. Plus, I want to backpack and camp, including biking around the base of Mt. Adams and then summit in a two to three day adventure!

 

Happy new year!

on a dark and rainy day...

...when one drives to work in the darkling rain and returns from work in the darkening rain, a girl wants, craves, needs art! Such as the above print by Timothy Karpinski.
Or perhaps some aurora borealis:

Or a reminder of the color pink.

Or maybe just a warm fire, a purring 10 pound gray tiger, no weeds to pull, and time to daydream.

light of the mind

My friend Avery is having an exhibit of her photos, and she asked some of her friends who have been or are writers to contribute a written piece for a photo of their choice. I love the photo selection which you can view here, but I chose this one because it reminded me of my role as an educator. Here's the poem that I sent off to her the other day (of course finding much fault with her a day later, but oh well, tis what it is).

The Light of the Mind

The teacher seeks to lead her students
out of the darkened room--
out of the closed spaces
that breed ignorance and beget fear—
into a world vast and surprising.

There is a key-hole,
a portal,
a chamber door into the sun
that even she seeks.

Sometimes, the darkness encloses her.
Sometimes, the sun warms her soul.
Sometimes she feels as though she's lost the key
or the magic spell.
Or that there is not just one, but many
riddles to unravel.

There are constants in this life.
Change. Oscillation. Growth.
Set backs. The fluttering of wings.
Heartbeats.
The constancy of learning
when the mind's doorway is open:

the constant journey
towards illumination
and enlightenment.

blogs, bee, teas, and things

I just discovered two lovely blogs. Tospann has an assortment of random photographs of lovely people, yellow thread and fabric, wine, and tea: a few of my favorite things! The above photo is from Tea For Joy, also a wonderful blog of art and photos with tea themes.

I'm thinking about taking this bee-keeping class. Yes, it's 101, but I feel like I could use a refresher course. Plus, my plans to build some bee-keeper community last September got derailed, so the class would be a way to make some connections. Also, I think that at some point I'd like to try a Langstroth hive, so there's yet another reason for the class. I just hope they're not Langstroth snobs who disparage top-bars and all hives that aren't Langstroth. The hive worlds have difficulties agreeing, somewhat like Republicans and Democrats in our current Congress.

All I want for Christmas is photoshop, I think. Or some sort of photo editing software. I'd like to continue to take photos throughout the winter, but it's rather difficult to take pictures at night with my craptastic flash or perhaps it's my limited knowledge of my camera that's to blame. I'm hoping to get oot and aboot with my camera this weekend, perhaps on a tromp through the woods to hunt for wild mushrooms and some digging in my own garden to plant those garlic and scallion bulbs.

Here's some loveliness from Tospann. It makes me want to sew.

the neighbors call him "toes"

A student, when he saw that I have chickens and bees, asked if I also have a tiger. Why, yes, I do.

 

I used the manual setting on my camera to take these pictures. I still need to play with it and experiment, but I really like the lighting and color and detail in these un-altered photos of sweet Elijah, known in the neighborhood as Toes.

Zen weekending

I'm going to the beach this weekend armed with blankets, beats/bass, books on bees, brioche, boyfriend, beautiful people, brauts, boil*, yurts, journals, camera, wine...Bring it, Nehalem!

*Boil is apparently some sort of delicious stew that a fellow beach-comber is concocting.

Meanwhile, here are some bits for a lovely, creative, relaxing weekend.
Anju Mulder's photography (that's one of her photos above), especially her "Illustrations and typography," has me swooning.

Vanessa Paxton's flickr stream has me mesmerized. Check out her photos here. 

Erotographomania: a mania for writing love letters

Here's another student poem:

I'm the time between day and night at the end of fall
and the beginning of a long gray winter season

I'm a spore floating on the spring wind
spreading new life to wherever I drift

I'm just there, no greater goal; no purpose
I'm just there

heartbeats

seahorses in red

Unfurling