we don't love like flowers

I am sitting at the studio where I work, "woman-ing" (as my boss says) the gallery for the Saturday brunch hours. A. and I slept in for the first time in a very long while and went to the farmers' market and ate lemon poppyseed muffins on a bench and talked about naming our future dog Poppy, which almost makes me want to get a dog. We are in an in-between space, frantically trying to figure out jobs and housing and whether or not we are staying in or leaving Durham. Everything feels fragile. A trip to the farmers' market at once feels sentimental (if we leave) and boring (if we stay).

I have been inching my way through John Berger's Portraits, reading an essay most mornings with my coffee, and being reminded how much I love reading about art. My two main goals for this year were really just to (a) read more and (b) take pictures. I have been doing both, and it feels right. It feels like where I ought to be. 

We have fennel and leeks and lettuce and peas and basil in our garden, and the first thing I do each morning is walk into the kitchen, open the blinds, and look out on the raised bed to see if anything looks bigger than the day before. They rarely do, but there is great joy when the fennel looks just the slightest bit healthier and larger, or the leeks look rounder and more robust.

These words have been on my mind:

"Let us return, then, to that anointing of his, let us return to that anointing that teaches within what we cannot speak; and because you cannot see now, let your role be found in longing. The whole life of a good Christian is a holy longing. But what you long for you do not see, but by longing you are made capacious so that when what you are to see has come, you may be filled...So God, by postponing, stretches the longing, by longing stretches the soul, by stretching makes it capacious. Let us long, therefore, brothers, because we are going to be filled.”

(Augustine, Tractate 4 on 1 John 2:27-39)

[The Guggenheim in NYC last November, 35mm]

our balm

"...for we are the Lord's joy and delight,

and the Lord is our balm and our life."

[Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love]

Derek in Brooklyn last November, when I flew up for the weekend and stayed with him in his first apartment in NYC and we went to the Guggenheim to see Agnes Martin's retrospective and had a long conversation about politics over pizza and wine at the restaurant down the street. I stayed in a tiny room in the front of the apartment that only fit the twin bed that I slept on but that had this large floor-to-ceiling window which overlooked the street below—basically, my dream.

I see the shape of my nose and eyes reflected in his face, and my questions, doubts, and fears reflected in his own. Our shared introspectiveness sometimes makes us boring conversation-partners, but there is also always this sense that he understands some part of me few (if any) other people have ever understood. These are inadequate words: sometime I will write a poem about him.

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swings upon the hours

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Last month Derek and I went to NYC for the day and visited Ann Hamilton's installation The Event of a Thread at the Park Avenue Armory. It was like an indoor playground for both children and child-like adults, the type of place where there is no guilt for being happy. And it reminded me that this is the kind of art I want to make: art that presents strange new worlds.

"The Soul has moments of escape--
When bursting all the doors--
She dances like a Bomb, abroad,
And swings upon the Hours."
[Emily Dickinson]

[pictures from the armory, last one by derek]
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museum of modern art

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It was cold in the way that makes your thighs numb and the bus was forty minutes late, but spending the day in NYC was so worth it anyway. Especially because: (1) MoMA had a special exhibition on DeKooning. (2) Soy cinnamon lattes taste a lot better when you're drinking them as you walk through Times Square. (3) Derek is beyond patient with me when I stop us to pull out my camera every twenty minutes. (4) Walker Evans' photographs are a lot more stunning after you have studied them. (5) You get a lot of fashion inspiration by standing around art museums. (6) Shared apple cake and coffee at the cafe overlooking the sculpture garden was worth the somewhat ridiculous price we paid for it. (7) The design store was full of the best graph-papered artsy notebooks. (8) I like cities. (9) I have a ridiculously sweet brother.
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