Again this year a bird has made her home in a hanging plant on our porch. This plant is a better choice than last year's and so far there are at least 3 babies that I can see but it's hard to tell without disturbing them. They're wrens and every morning mom comes back with a noisy breakfast for everyone. I water the plant by misting it each day so I don't drown them.

Eating is such an opportunity to take a necessity and turn it into a gorgeous, luscious experience. Food is nourishment (hopefully, depending on what's chosen), and also so many other things -- a cultural experience, an artistic expression, a means of bringing friends together, a reminder of childhood and family, a connection to the constant reality of needing to sustain our own lives, a venue for all our idiosyncracies, quirks and creativity -- and we get to indulge several times a day. I have enough idiosyncracies about food to supply a small country, dozens of personal rules and I break all of them regularly. I adore food and everything about it -- shopping for it, growing it, preparing it, eating it, sharing it, looking at it, smelling it, arranging it nicely on a plate. Sometimes at a restaurant the food isn't arranged as nicely as I'd like and by the time I've finished reorganizing my plate and making it look more to my liking, everyone else has finished eating. At the same time though, I can easily go to the store and get my lunch directly from the produce bins and eat without even having a plate. I don't like heavy, diner kind of food unless I'm driving cross country and then I'll stop in absolutely the worst diners, the ones that serve things like chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes and I'll eat whatever the special is and look at the people and make up stories about their lives. In anyone else's culture I'll eat just about whatever, and I love those experiences.  In spite of being obsessed with how beautiful food is, at least once a day I have a blended salad kind of thing, greens and either fruit or veggies whizzed up in the blender as a smoothie, because the added nutrition that results from breaking down the otherwise undigestible bits is worth not making it pretty on a plate, plus it tastes spectacular. The one consistent quirk I have is a dislike of large quantities of food on my plate - the gigantic portions that a lot of restaurants serve up nearly make me ill and sometimes I have to pack up half of my plate to go before I can bring myself to start eating. I nearly never eat at those buffet places, partly because food sitting out on a steam table is never very good, but also partly because I'm so uncomfortable eating around those big heaping plates of stuff, the cult of quantity over quality, and it just makes me feel sad to be there. I like to see a big border of plate around the food, because I really like to see the food.

And then, the other aspect of food that I'm obsessed with is the fact that our bodies are built out of the foods we eat. This seems obvious -- but apparently not to everyone. I work with people who have all kinds of challenges, I've had friends and coworkers over the years who have physical, emotional and mental health issues, and rarely have any of those folks changed their food first, and for the most part not even second or last. I'm amazed when people go to doctors, take meds, accept a poor quality of life and never once think, maybe all this garbage kind of food isn't good fuel.  People who believe that the chemicals in the pills they take have power in their life for some reason don't believe the chemicals in their food might also. It seems crazy to me.  And it isn't even truly about convenience - the people who say they eat microwave garbage or fast food things because they're so terribly busy probably spend more time on their food than I do. It doesn't take any time to "prepare" a piece of fruit, and I can put together an amazing salad in less time than it would take them to drive to a fast food place and get through the drive through. (And if I throw the veggies in the blender I can be done before they would get their car started.) I don't own a microwave and I don't think this slows me down. I think terrible food is an acquired taste and raising children on frozen convenience foods and drive-thru's is a kind of child abuse.

Food is more than "just" nutrition, but it shouldn't be less. The way we choose to fuel our lives says so much about the quality of that life. And the way we approach the things we do every single day matters so much more than the big one time gestures people get so excited about. We're built out of the nourishment we choose and our lives are nourished by the little everyday choices we make and food deserves to be beautiful, delicious and healthy for human consumption. Otherwise, why bother?

This question made me laugh out loud and then decide not to bother to answer it at least half a dozen times after which, at 2am, I've decided that I want to answer and announce that I have absolutely nothing to say about this. A safe place? How would I know? It isn't like I have any experience of being anywhere safer, or even anywhere other, than my own mind, which I tend to take with me wherever else I am. And, do I think this reflects the world? Well, it does for me. That seems to be pretty much how the system works. I count on my mind to reflect the world and that keeps me pretty busy but in my spare time I'm planning to knit a car out of steel wool.

There is something so touching and encouraging about people who bother to do the things that aren't necessary, the things that are just purely delightful and quirky and entirely extra credit. Or maybe those are the things that are really the most necessary of all. I know just reading this story feeds something in me that's absolutely as essential as the parts that get fed with rice and beans -- nothing against rice and beans, mind you, but wow, this architect makes me proud to be human and, well, odd. I am so, so glad that there are odd people doing things no one ever would expect just for the sheer delight of it all. I want to send Eric Clough a love note - embedded in a puzzle, of course, and maybe hidden inside a wall...

This sounds like what people say at a funeral -- "doesn't she look peaceful?" -- and not exactly something that I aspire to or take that much notice of. Not that I'm seeking out angst or anything, but I get excited a lot, and laugh hard enough to cry, and sometimes cry for real either because something is sad or because it's so touching and sweet that I get overwhelmed and it spills out in tears, and sometimes I feel like I'm right at the edge of something amazing and my heart pounds hard and my eyes forget to blink but all in all, peaceful is just something that passes through somewhere wedged in the midst of curiosity, side-splitting laughter and total astonishment at all this amazing stuff I get to experience every single day. Although I guess maybe I'm at peace with being chronically excited?

The picture above is from a while back, just before Krissy's dreads and just after the new puppy. She had some kind of bug thing that day, which is why she was in bed during daylight hours. If I don't post anything for a while after this, someone should probably check to see if she's strangled me for posting this pic. But the point is, it's a great illustration of our sleeping dilemma. Most nights not all four of the dogs sleep in the bed, usually it's two of the dogs and two of the cats. It just seems like more. It seems like, oh, about 500 animals. And almost every night I wake up at some point pinned to the bed by the weight of a dog who during the day weighs fifty pounds but at night weighs as much as a small car parked on the bed next to my legs and tangled in the blankets, which usually doesn't happen with cars. Then too,  sometime between three and five am, the cats will start playing some game known only to cats which seems to be a cross between playing tag and working on a demolition crew. It seems like closing them all out of the bedroom would be a really obvious choice here. The other side of this sleeping arrangement though is that during the night I wake up and my hands find soft fur and silky ears and sometimes I wake up to purring sounds, or Lyra grunting and snoring (because she seems to be part piglet), or Willow licking at me, and I curl up against Krissy's warm smooth skin and the fur foks organize themselves around us and it's the warmest, sweetest, most satisfying sleep I've ever had, even if it gets interrupted for the kitty demolition derby a couple of hours later or when the car has to be reparked on the bed. It's like paper-scissors-rock -- the rewards of contact and connection, touch and love beat uninterrupted sleep hands down, every time.

It falls to the bottom of my pockets and my bag and then I periodically scoop it out and gather it off the floor of the car and from the dresser and dump it into this old chipped brown teapot that sits on the butcher block in the kitchen.
Sometimes we fish out quarters to dry comforters at the laundromat because they don't dry quite right on the clothesline; otherwise though it just accumulates until we break it down for playing some game for coinage (like backgammon) or cash it in at one of those vendo-sorters that give you Amazon credits.

"Oh look, what's that?!?"

These are my 3 favorite links today, all amazing. I just wanted to share.

Adrian sent me this one and I can't even imagine planning that out, let alone executing it. How totally mindblowing.
This house in Wales, which was built for next to nothing, mind you, and very fast too, is my most perfect dream house ever. It doesn't hurt that it looks like elves live there.
And these photographs make me laugh and make my brain tip a little all at the same time. I love that all these crazy scenes were set up.

And I have to add a postscript one - isn't this computer the most gorgeous thing you've ever seen?  Oh      my        god   .

And...okay, I love saying "three" and then counting to five. It's like the Hitchiker's Guide "trilogy", isn't it. Only not as funny of course. Well, anyway, that image above is from this great site by this guy I'd never heard of, James Jean, until I fell over his stuff. It's my current wallpaper, too, although a lot of his other stuff is standing in line to be next.

There is something about gates. They appear in my dreams, with pastures and open green fields beyond them. In my dreams they are never gates that would keep me out, they just delineate space, wild on one side, calm and green on the other. And always there is this play of sunlight and shadow at the edges and there are no animals to be found in these fields except me.
In waking life I like having an obstacle to climb over so that I can be somewhere set aside. And in waking life Willow goes through the fences with me and runs in the pasture flat out ears flapping banking and careening across the ground happy running. Willow is a dream dressed in fur.