bests of the summer

Because I am woman of habit, I have to keep these things up, even when it's months late –

bear island, nothing better // meeting rosie // lemongrass cider at surf club with amber d., over and over // and having a female friend to talk to about politics // SIMON // franny's poetry reading // mepkin abbey, always // you are a god of seeing // sunrise walk on the beach with a. // jamila woods in person // breakfast tacos with derek // alexandra's birthday party // a day in durham with elsa, soren, + torunn // walking home drunk with tor // all my best lady pals together on a blanket // margaret's fairy houses // lazy sunday afternoons at bobbit's hole // my native flower garden (ugh, I miss it) // brewery bhahavana + banana walnut cake with a. // murakami for the first time // the ymca pool // a grocery store cake "in the colors of RISD" from holy family folks // cajun dance in a furniture-maker's barn // jean's baptism // whale-watching in maine with my family // that early, early morning alone watching the sunrise in portland // ACADIA // strawberry granita // touring apartments in providence with mom // sweetest gift + note from max // sitting on the rocks on belle isle in richmond // tea parties with margaret // best, best durham birthday party // penland, a gift // the clientele // living with kendra, ryan, langdon, and elias for two weeks // mary karr // birthday rosemary grapefruit drinking vinegar + morning buns // best birthday overall with the best people // getting back in the darkroom and remembering why I love photography // grilled cheese with tomato jam // our backyard picnic table, even if short-lived (v. worth it) // new swimsuit, first bikini // mornings with amber j. at penland // just amber in general // pizza + whiskey with frank // by each try to simply merit the fitness of a lone occasion // things coming to an end, things coming toward a beginning

[pictured: flowers from my garden <3]

with you nothing is simple yet nothing is simpler

A few weekends back, in Asheville, with some of the people I love most in the world. I feel so lucky to get to live life with these folks – and their children!

It is a Sunday night. A. and I had frozen pizza, greens, and margaritas for dinner, then he went on solo bike ride and I took a long bath and walked to the co-op for frozen yogurt. As I think about moving at the end of the summer, one thing I will miss is that walk – a brief hello to Charles, checking in on the garden at the one house at the corner of Burch and Exum, the magnolia tree at the corner of Wilkerson, pausing to cross Chapel Hill Street. And then, of course, there is the sweet comfort of grocery shopping, something I'll never quite be able to explain. I love it – seeing what's new, comparing prices, lifting each grapefruit to see which one is the heaviest and juiciest. Do the radishes look good today? Is the ice cream on sale? Should I get the chocolate with cacao nibs or almonds? Unlike so many of life's questions, these are questions I can always answer.

[all 35mm, Asheville, NC]

bear island

We booked a camping site a month or so ahead of time, hoping that we could take a day off work and go to the beach – so glad we made it happen. We had the whole island to ourselves, the best mac and cheese made over a camp stove, and a long, long morning walk on the beach. I am dreaming of getting back here before we move.

[Bear Island, Hammocks Beach State Park, all 35mm]

eleven zero one

We are moving into a new home this week and leaving behind our yellow house, a space that (minus the cockroaches) has been comfort and safety to me these past two years. I slipped on my wedding dress for the very first time in the bedroom, and a few months later put it on with my mother and sister by my side in that same room. It is the home Austin and I first came home to after our honeymoon, and the place where we have grown in love and understanding for one another. We have argued in this house, planted rosemary and lavender and mint in the front yard, built a raised bed with our own hands, strung lights in our backyard, hosted any number of bonfires and parties. We have filled this space with friends, over and over again, on air mattresses and at the dinner table, the leaves extended to fit as many people as possible.

I rode my bike by the yellow house a random hot spring afternoon in 2015, and thought, I want to live there. I memorized the address and looked it up online when I got home, and found out that it was a rental property, and due to be up for lease come the month that I needed to move. But, the realty company wasn't sure the current tenants would be moving. I spent that next month praying and riding my bike by it almost every day. I called the realty company every week to see if there were any updates, and finally heard word that it would actually be up for rent. It was a little more expensive than we anticipated, but a friend told us to go for it, that the first house that you live in as a married couple carries deep and meaningful memories, and that it would be worth it. So we did.

It wasn't until later that I noticed that the address 1101 was also our wedding date, November 1st—a silly coincidence, but one that makes me happy, and makes it seem fitting that it has been our first married house.

the roundedness of things

At the end of the summer A. and I made a guide to filling our days, something we did a long time ago to fill those pockets of time together with good things. Our list for September included: more porch dinners, visiting friends in Asheville, biking the downtown trail, singing on the kitchen floor, church vacation and finding spike ball friends. There were plenty of things we didn't get to (going to the swimming hole, picnicking in the gardens, etc.)—we'll have to carry those over to October, which is now, somehow, just around the corner.

After a three-week hiatus, I really am just in the mood to cook, cook everything! Tonight we made these sorrel pesto rice bowls, and I want to make this banana bread with muscovado and chocolate. I also want to get some chard from the market to make chard with chickpeas, lemon, and tomatoes.

I have just started working with a 4x5 view camera, and it is everything. There is just something extraordinary about throwing a dark cloth over your head and staring at a reversed, upside-down image on the ground glass—something I have never felt with a digital camera, or even a 35mm camera.

A poem out in the world, and Frank Ocean's Blonde all the time.

These words, which A. sent my way:

"When Jesus warned, 'everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted,' he spoke, apparently, of two alternative mistakes and not only one, a false self-promotion and a false self-humiliation, both in need of correction. The reality that exposes false pretensions catches up with us, not only to throw us down from heights of importance we have arrogated to ourselves, but also to dig us up from bunkers of insignificance we have hollowed out for ourselves. Hiding like Saul among the baggage, we shall be dragged uncomfortably before those who expect something of us. Perhaps, after all, there is truth in the suggestion that the two failings join hands behind the curtain, that modest invisibility is not very different from boastful self-promotion. Whether publicizing oneself or shrinking from publicity, one hopes to avoid the candid gaze that sees through one's self-image. What is required is that we know ourselves as we are known. To refuse self-knowledge is to refuse to find ourselves in the world God loves, to refuse to love ourselves." 

(Oliver O'Donovan, Finding and Seeking: Ethics as Theology, Volume II, 54-55)

[singing on the kitchen floor, a favorite activity, 35mm]

this to that

may the tide

that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

[Lucille Clifton]

intent on what they touch

We were out of breakfast foods this morning, so today began by walking to the coffee shop around the block to pick up some muffins, which A. and I shared together on our porch, drinking coffee and avoiding a bee. It was a much needed slow morning after an all too busy week—one of those weeks which by the end of it I had no energy or kindness left to offer anyone.

Other things, lately:

Sarah Coakley on prayer (part II and III, as well).

Caroline Walker Bynum on Gertrude of Helfta.

Bruce Herman came over for dinner a few weeks back—and what a gift. He has a way of articulating what my own work is about that helps it become suddenly much clearer in my mind, and has encouraged me to plunge back into it. I needed that.

I have also been thinking about habits vs. rituals, and how those play out in my day-to-day life—what are those rote daily tasks that could become something more intentional, more beautiful?

I still think often about the food I had in Italy last summer—how simple, fresh, and good it was—and have been trying to emulate that approach in my own cooking. Rachel Roddy's column A Kitchen in Rome in The Guardian has been especially inspiring.

Dreaming about going to Look3 in Charlottesville. I have also been dreaming about going here.

And, here is a poem for the Feast of the Annunciation, an image for Good Friday, and a poem for when both fall on the same day (which apparently won't happen again for another century).

[Honeywell Pentax, 35mm, Durham, NC]

you are my crag

Lately:

Florist, on repeat.

These words, and all of Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine.

One Day Projects by Eliot Dudik and Jared Ragland.

Everything about this house, especially the bedroom.

A. gave me this beautiful book by John Berger for Christmas, which I am thrilled about.

The weekend consisted of this, breakfast club, bread-baking, the farmer's market, and much time spent outside. All good things.

Also, these words, from Minor White:

"If [the photographer] were to walk a block in a state of sensitized sympathy to everything to be seen, he would be exhausted before the block was up and out of film long before that. Perhaps the blank state of mind can be likened to a pot of water almost at the boiling point. A little more heat—an image seen—and the surface breaks into turbulence. Possibly the creative work of the photographer consists in part of putting himself into this state of mind. Reaching it, at any rate, is not automatic. It can be aided by always using one’s camera for serious work so that the association of the camera in one’s hands always leads to taking pictures."

[35mm]

a crown upon their foreheads

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I will be adding another ring to that finger in just a few days, that is, on All Saints' Day, which seems so appropriate—this calling forth to the wider community of the Church to pray and guide Austin and I into the covenant of marriage. A feast day indeed.

And, my favorite words from the marriage rite in The Book of Common Prayer: "Let their love for each other be a seal upon their hearts, a mantle about their shoulders, and a crown upon their foreheads."

[photo from the day we got engaged, in Balancing Rock, NC]

the heaped ashes of the night turned into leaves again

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I love mornings in this house.

And these words: "This also is Thou; neither is this Thou." (St. Ephrem)

And this: "How can I live now with my heart open to the things that memory will call lovely?"

[in my kitchen, these days of living alone]
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for grace

A few things, recently:

Jessica Ingram's Road Through Midnight: A Civil Rights Memorial at CDS. Such a beautiful, haunting exhibit. I still cannot believe I get to work at this place that I love so much.

Elephant Micah + Joan Shelley at Dear Hearts a few weeks back.

Today I tasted a sweetness long forgotten, something I have not known since those days of fierce independence, when I was in step with my own longings, attentive to the world, patient with myself. It is what I have been praying for, wanting back, feeling as if I had perhaps lost forever amidst these months and years of saying for grace, for grace, for grace.

And these words, from that summer of forgetting long ago:

Walk

Some things are solved by walking
in the night alone, striped by light

in the corridors of unknowing, you walk
down the street, past the rosemary hedge,

the wet hydrangeas that eat your shadow,
your shadow like a cookie that the sun

cut out of you—sun-stalker, you say
to the blue mouths: but then there is

the ping-pong moon, the warts of the
weeping willow, the uprooted crack

waiting to fault you for lack of confidence:

this is the world of Walla Walla,
of couching black blistered beetles—

don’t even try to run,
the only way is to walk.

[honeywell pentax, 35mm film, balancing rock, nc; words from seattle]

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why we must struggle

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"If we have not struggled
as hard as we can
at our strongest
how will we sense
the shape of our losses
or know what sustains
us longest or name
what change costs us,
saying how strange
it is that one sector
of the self can step in
for another in trouble,
how loss activates
a latent double how
we can feed
as upon nectar,
upon need?"

(Kay Ryan, Say Uncle: Poems)

Found this poem torn from a book and taped on a retro orange fridge the other day, and have been thinking about it ever since. This, especially: to name what change costs us. 

Also: missing my old room back in Durham, and looking forward to creating new spaces there soon.

[honeywell pentax, 35mm]

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what calm or one clarity

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things things:

Father John Misty stopping by Spotify.

A photographer of dust.

Christian Wiman in the Oxford American.

Psalms for Ferguson by a professor from DDS.

Chekov wrote non-fiction too.

The air has smelled like dirt recently and a few crocuses have popped up in the sandy front yard of my house. After two weeks of being sick, I am done done done with winter and all that comes with it and ready for some hints of another season. Goals for the near future include planting a few seedlings for the summer, making travel plans for Iceland, and finding a job, not necessarily in that order.

[milosz monday at monuts, when it was open on mondays, honeywell pentax, 35mm]
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sightlessness to sight

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"We travelers, walking to the sun, can't see
Ahead, but looking back the very light
That blinded us shows us the way we came,
Along which blessings now appear, risen
As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,
By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark."

[Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 1991: V1. Given]

And so another year begins, and the feast of Epiphany approaches, the conclusion of the Cycle of Light. I am back in North Carolina, preparing for a final semester of school before graduation, trying to imagine what this next year may look like, or what it means to speak of the manifestation of God when in reality it seems so ambiguous. I want light, clarity, certainty, but I more often feel darkness, anxiety, and doubt, particularly recently.

Yesterday a friend mentioned something about what it may mean to walk in the dark, seeing that God created the light and the dark. And it was in "the thick darkness," after all, that Moses encountered God at Sinai: "The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was." I found some small relief and hope in her words, that perhaps this present anxiety is simply the blessed light that yet to me is dark.

[windowsill, honeywell pentax, 35mm film]

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every age

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“That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don't ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.”

[William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying]

Though words are no good, this weekend in words: Derek, road tripping to Asheville, Mountain Man and Grouper on the Blue Ridge Parkway, craggy gardens and frosted rhododendron bushes, bald mountains, nineteen degrees, rum and cider and thyme, reading aloud bits of Faulkner, lemon and sugar crepes and wine late into the evening, ceramic earrings, squash and farro, coats and scarves for the first time, long lines for morning coffee, all those strange childhood memories, and that even when there are no words there is another person who knows what you would say if you could say it.

Also, this song.

the art of living

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“To recover from our disease of limitlessness, we will have to give up the idea that we have a right to be godlike animals, that we are at least potentially omnipotent, ready to discover ‘the secret of the universe.’ We will have to start over, with a different and much older premise: the naturalness and, for creatures of limited intelligence, the necessity of limits. We must learn again to ask how we can make the most of what we are, what we have, what we have been given. If we always have a theoretically better substitute available from somebody or someplace else, we will never make the most of anything. It is hard to make the most of one life. If we each had two lives, we would not make much of either. Or as one of my best teachers said of people in general: ‘They’ll never be worth a damn as long as they’ve got two choices.’

To deal with the problems, which after all are inescapable, of living with limited intelligence in a limited world, I suggest that we may have to remove some of the emphasis we have lately placed on science and technology and have a new look at the arts. For an artwork does not propose to enlarge itself by limitless extension but rather to enrich itself within bounds that are accepted prior to the work.

It is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits. A painting, however large, must finally be bounded by a frame or a wall. A composer or playwright must reckon, at a minimum, with the capacity of an audience to sit still and pay attention. A story, once begun, must end somewhere within the limits of the writer’s and the reader’s memory. And of course the arts characteristically impose limits that are artificial: the five acts of a play, or the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Within the limits artists achieve elaborations of pattern, of sustaining relationship of parts with one another and with the whole, that may be astonishingly complex. And probably most of us can name a painting, a piece of music, a poem or play or story that still grows in meaning and remains fresh after many years of familiarity.

We know by now that a natural ecosystem survives the same sort of formal intricacy, every changing, inexhaustible, and no doubt finally unknowable. We know further that if we want to make our economic landscapes sustainable and abundantly productive, we must do so by maintaining in them a living formal complexity something like that of natural ecosystems. We can do this only be raising to the highest level our mastery of the arts of agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, and ultimately, the art of living."

[Wendell Berry, "Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits"]

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