going monastic

going monastic

my two boys (my husband and my 15 year old son) looked at the calendar last week and realized they both had this whole week off. an almost unheard of event in our house. with impulsive abandon and lightening speed they had lined up two fishing guides to do some flats fishing out of islamorada, florida. they invited me along, but i passed when i heard about repeated 4 am wake up times to get to airports and  marinas on time. so, for the first me in a very long time i have a size-able chunk of time all to myself.  it is quite possible that it may be as long as 20 years since i have had more than a day entirely to myself (our daughter eva is 20 years old). my plan is to go monastic. i am going to sleep until i am rested. i am going to eat healthfully, lightly, and consciously, i am going to read a lot, i am going to love up the puggle, i am going to get outside to walk,  and i am going to make a still blog photo each day. that’s it. no shoulds, no parent drop-off ad pick-up, no soccer practice, no piano lessons, no socializing, no laundry, no dishes. just a sleep, eat, walk, read. i think i am going to like being a monk.

red osier dogwood (Cornus sericea)

  • Stephendon says:

    Hi Look what we adopt looking in the course of you! an captivatinghit town despatch
    To leaning click on the collaborative in this ecstatic

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zKmwiabG811Wans0_REdrQpmpl5HVVcm/preview

    reply
  • Carol says:

    Sounds like heaven. Happy, restful Thanksgiving

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  • Ellen Hoffmann says:

    Props to you. When I’m home alone, the food groups go out the window.

    reply
  • Charmian McLellan says:

    Don’t forget the wine!!

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hairdo

hairdo

i love queen anne’s lace in any form but i especially like it when its seed heads have dried like this. partly it’s because the plant is a significant fixture in the landscapes of both of my current “homes,” of minnesota and the languedoc. partly because i love knowing that it is a form of wild carrot, and i can break its stem and smell carrots anytime i want to. but mostly it’s because i love the little marie antoinette hairdo that the seed heads tie themselves up into when they have dried. a hairdo both wild and civilized. like the plant itself.

dried queen anne’s lace

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it’s the worst, possible time, of the year

it’s the most worst, wonderful possible time, of the year.

my husband and i talk fairly often about our role as contemporary parents, and how it involves a new dimension that is unlike the parenting our parents did, and certainly the parenting our grandparents did. we are among the first generations of parents whose primary task it is to raise children in opposition to the prevailing culture, whereas parenting for all of he rest of human history has been a process of integrating children, through rites of passage, into the prevailing culture. christmas, for me, is one of the most egregious examples of this–a supposedly spiritual holiday fully given over to advertisements, hucksterism, and grasping materialism. and yet one of my core beliefs, as a natural rebel, is that the prevailing culture does not have to dictate anything, if it’s not something i want. and so we have adopted two traditions in our family–a christmas eve dinner at our house where anyone in the family is welcome, where we cook good food all day, and sometimes many people show up and sometimes nobody but the four of us shows up, but regardless of who shows up, we get to cook a good meal for dinner. and on christmas morning we build a fire and eat awful pillsbury orange rolls and open presents and stockings while the dog begs for food and we all drink too much coffee. it is a strange little ritual, cornered into expressing itself in a nerdy and unusual way by a mainstream we can’t help but find dysfunctional. it works. it will do. i’m looking forward to it. that’s enough.

misfit christmas tree

 

  • Lynn says:

    Hucksterism and awful pillsbury orange rolls!
    Your tradition is very much like ours.
    I really enjoyed this post!

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one stalk many branches

one stalk many branches

last night we hosted a concert by jeremy messersmith, who is a whimsical and moving minnesota songwriter and a beautiful singer and so he qualifies as one of my favorite singer-songwriters. but beyond the singing and guitar playing, what was interesting was seeing a household full of strangers fold into each other, and talk about their lives and then become a concert audience for an hour and a half, and then break out into small conversational groups afterwards. we all had one tiny square of common ground–the lyrics to jeremy’s songs. and by the end of the night, those little plots of common ground had expanded into a community. and i wish more art was doing more of that. more of the time.

early winter milkweed

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announcing a STILL fine art collection

announcing a STILL fine art collection

warning: long post.

i’m trying an experiment this year: the short version: i hope to sell a limited number of curated collections of my prints, as an art-quality set, to be shipped in time for the holidays. don’t worry. STILL blog will remain what it has always been, and will not suddenly become a vehicle to sell prints of my work. but i do want to take one day to describe this new project, and then we will return to our regularly scheduled programming.

i get a lot of requests for prints of my work, and i sell quite a few high-resolution digital images to individuals and businesses. but selling digital files sometimes feels as if there is a step missing. i like the physicality of a beautiful ink print on luscious textured rag paper, and i like the deeper connection that happens—the transfer from one human hand to another—when a print that i have looked at, assessed in good light, swept a speck of dust from, and placed carefully into a box for shipping, becomes part of somebody else’s home. i miss that connection, and decided this year that i would like to work with paper and ink again, in a very limited way, under conditions where i can make the final product something that meets my own standards of simple beauty and minimalist calm, and that carries STILL blog into the realm of fine art.

as a result of all of this, i have decided to create a set of seven signed and numbered prints of STILL images that I will be offering for sale. i have curated the images within a complementary color palette, i will have them printed at 11” x 17” by a fine art custom printer, on my favorite, heavy, museum-quality Hahnemühle cotton rag paper, and ship them in a custom-made, archival French folio, timed to arrive anywhere in the world by the upcoming holidays. this first collection will be called the Zen Collection. my goal is not to sell a lot of prints, or make a lot of money, but to sell prints that make me proud, and that i hope will bring some of the spirit of STILL Blog—its love of nature, its craving for simplicity, its invitation to moments of calm—into the homes of a few of my friends among you, in a way that is new and unlike the daily stream of digital images that appear on the blog. the collection will be beautiful and elegant and restful and of collectible fine-art quality, and also, because of all of the above, expensive. there is no way to do this cheaply—not only because every step will be done at the highest level of materials and technique that i can manage, but also because, frankly, i don’t want to try to do it cheaply, or to cut corners to try to create a larger market.

for this first experiment, i simply want to make something as beautiful as i know how, and offer it as a small, art-quality collection curated by the artist herself, and see if there is interest. i could make this more financially viable by offering less expensive individual prints, but i love the idea of this harmonized collection, and i want to try to make something a little bit extraordinary in this particular form. i hope I won’t offend any of you with this foray into new territory. the first images have come back from the printer, and they are breathtakingly beautiful, as i hope you will see above. if  you are interested in a set, please order one online here, by november 30. i will be shipping the collections out around by december 7. thank you again for being yourselves, and for being part of my life.

love,

mary jo

Link to shop: https://still-by-mary-jo-hoffman.myshopify.com/

  • Claudia says:

    I would like to see online options to order but the link does not work. Love your blog, and all that you do!

    reply
    • Oh goodness, I didin’t realize that the links in details were not working. They work when I am logged in as Admin, so it never occurred to me that they might not work otherwise. THANK YOU for brining this to my attention. In the short term, here’s a link to cut and paste: https://still-by-mary-jo-hoffman.myshopify.com/
      And I will try and get my web designer to fix the link throughs for me.
      Thank you Claudia!
      Mary Jo

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  • Nicole E. says:

    I adore this idea. as a fellow creative, to have the artist themselves curate the collection is Fantastic, and part of a story that I as a potential buyer am interested in. You’re 100% correct in your sentiment about the tactile exchange from 1 human to another. I wish you the best in this endeavor and look forward to seeing these curated collections unfold & evolve. (already took a gander at the link – it works now)

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