symbolism

in our family, we celebrate milestones, large and small, with champagne and oysters. we’ve had a lot of celebratory oysters over the last month. i hesitate to say that because it can sound like “hooray for us,” but we also spent some dark and frustrating months a few years ago, when STILL blog felt as if it were stagnating, and steve felt as if he wasn’t making any progress on his writing, and we didn’t know where our daughter was going to get into college. what is particularly fun about our recent, and surely temporary, success is that it is the result of simply carrying on–of plodding through the daily work of trying to live a creative life, which can quite often feel like drudgery. in fact this oyster shell is a perfect symbol of our recent good news. it is personally meaningful to us, it took years to reach this stage, it isn’t pretty, but it is delicious.

oyster shell with barnacles

hunnit bands

when you have a fifteen year old boy, in the hip hop era, and you listen to music with him in the car on the way to school, and you see an image of rolls of green packed together in rows, your first thought is not of the pattern of lacework veins on the undersides of leaves, but of rolls of hundred dollar bills, and your mind on your money, and your money on your mind.

hunnit bands aka dried green leaves.

which way

never ask a bamboo branch for directions. its leaves will point the way, and the branch will say, “go everywhere.”

bamboo

carrots

you think you are looking at flowers and seedheads. but break one of these stems and smell, and you will realize the truth, that you are simply looking at the visible parts of a bunch of wild carrots. also known as daucus carota.

queen anne’s lace

softie

i do have thorns that i can deploy when i need to. i am a softie at heart. and my softness is where a lot of my inspiration lies. and softness sometimes needs a little army to protect it and allow it to stay soft.

agave