Here is how the big vegetable bed looks right now….because it has been such a warm autumn, everything has grown quickly and lushly, which you might think is a good thing, but it isn’t really. It means that everything will be read to eat soon, and then when the really cold weather hits, the garden will be empty. Aah, well. Not much I can do about the weather!

(Go HERE FOR A REMINDER OF HOW IT LOOKED IN MARCH.)

I’m growing lots of Kale, green and purple, now that I’ve learned the best ways to cook it – it’s a great crop that grows throughout winter, much like silverbeet does.

My olive tree, which was about one foot high when I bought it, is now about six feet high and after seven years, has finally fruited! Maybe moving it from from the old garden to the new garden was ‘motivating’ for it?

There are lots of these dandelion-clocks about in the garden – I used to see them as a weed-enemy before I learned all the wonderful properties of the dandelion plant. Now I can blow them with abandon, like I used to when I was a kid.

Make a wish!

new to me lately, the turquoise tutu edition

May 18, 2012

op shopping, life is beautiful, second hand, vintage, simple pleasures, cluttering

5 Comments

Second hand treasures of late:

My new favourite mug – my mother collected these Scottish mugs in the early 1980s, but she didn’t have the OWL. I was pretty excited to spot an owl on the front…and then when I turned it around….whole owl family! (My nickname was ‘Brown Owl’ when I was a wee thing, apparently because of my brown eyes and because I used to go very brown in summer. Hard to imagine now. Aah, 70s childhoods, aye? I remember my friends and I used to slather ourselves in coconut oil to bake ourselves in the sun….)

Enamel rose tin with lid:

Rose embroidery. I especially like that it is square:

And my favourite find of recent living memory, possibly of all time….no, it doesn’t fit, it’s tiny. I bought it because it is the most beautiful, frothy thing and it brings me great joy to have it hanging on the studio wall. It was really hard to photograph, but I hope you get a sense of how crazy-beautiful this is. When the light shines through it, it practically glows.

$5, Highbury House op shop. The lady who served me asked if I had a daughter who did ballet…I said ‘no, I’m going to hang it on my wall’ and she gave me one of those nervous smiles people give when they deeply don’t understand what you’re on about and think you are a bit weird. Tee hee.

A TURQUOISE TUTU?? ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME? Thank you, op-shop goddess. *mwah!*

sunny side up

May 13, 2012

mattresses in op-shops, op shopping, parenting, simple pleasures, textiles

6 Comments

Here’s the latest of my ‘mattresses in op-shops’ finds – a sunny 70s floral. The bathroom of my childhood home had wallpaper very similar to this. 70s florals are like an instant time-travel to being a kid again for me.

My flickr group of mattress photos is slowly growing, come and play HERE if you want to…

I invited lots of my my american flickr friends to the group, but one of them reported sadly that american op-shops don’t sell mattresses because of hygiene laws….can anyone stateside confirm that this is the case?

My favourite photo in the pool so far is THIS ONE by talented local photographer Megan Young.

It’s Mother’s Day and I just got a card with a ‘delightful’ drawing of a cute bunny with a dagger through it’s head from my 11 year old – aaah boy-humour. He also baked me a banana-cake with chocolate icing. I love that my hard work teaching him to cook all these years is paying off and he can now independently bake cakes! He gave it to me at about 7.30am and said ‘Can we eat it now?’. Um, no.

I might as well have eaten cake for breakfast, mind you, because then I got presented with a stack of pancakes with banana and home-made raspberry jam.

Lucky, lucky life.

Big ups to all the mothers out there.*

(* I crack myself up trying to do white-girl street speak.)

win Graft!

May 10, 2012

community, life is beautiful, poetry, simple pleasures, these are the people in my neighbourhood, writing

11 Comments

I went to a lovely poetry event in Paekakariki last Saturday – the launch of Lynn Davidson’s ‘Common Land’ (VUP) and a local celebration of the recently launched ‘Graft’ by Helen Heath (VUP). Both poets were interviewed by Paekakariki poet, Dinah Hawken. It was a lovely laid-back affair with mood-lighting, a traditional ‘hall supper’, wine, tea and live music after the poetry. Quite relaxed and wonderful!

Here are Dinah Hawken, Lynn Davidson and Helen Heath:

Here are two of my dear friends, whom I love very much and who will probably kill me for putting a photograph of them on the internet:

Here is a random shot of some people enjoying the night – I wanted to show you the beautiful rose-lamp! :

Helen writes a bit about it her launch HERE, with links to Helen Rickerby and Graham Beattie’s accounts of the launches, also.

Congratulations, Helen, on all the ‘graft’ that went into this terrific book. It has certainly paid off – what a great achievement!

‘Graft’ is rich and carefully-crafted book. There are affecting and emotional poems about the terroire of motherhood and grief. There are sad/funny/sad poems about a composite character from the Hutt Vally called ‘Justine’. There are playful and moving poems about science and scientists. In short, there is a lot going on in this slim volume and it is a dense, satisfying read.

If you would like to win a signed copy of Helen Heath’s ’Graft’, leave a comment telling me what your favourite poem by a New Zealand poet is. (New Zealand residents only, please.) I’ll randomly draw a winner in one week’s time. Good luck!

Here’s to charmed evenings in little town halls, with moody lighting, poetry, live music and home-made lamingtons! I could do that every Saturday…

rainbow chard

May 9, 2012

food, grew it myself, simple pleasures, yet another photograph of a plant

2 Comments

Electric

beet

the

garden.

The

brightest

high

iron.

Home-

grown

neon.

there is no cure for curiosity

May 8, 2012

life is beautiful, simple pleasures, things i saw out walking, yet another photograph of a plant

4 Comments

A friend sent me a little card with this quotation on it:

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

-Dorothy Parker

I am an eternally curious (nosey?) person. I often follow the path of curious things, which sometimes leads to adventures and happy accidents…and sometimes to wasted time and dead ends. C’est la vie, non?

Here are some things I saw out walking recently:

A boat called ‘Romance’…

A bear-face in a beam – do you see it, too?

Never forget to look UP! Look what I saw on a cafe ceiling, recently…wheat and coloured discs…

And, in my idea of heaven…a tiny secret garden in the middle of a big city…bursting with vegetables and herbs…

How do I know it was a secret garden? Well, firstly because it was tucked away in a corner you are unlikely to stumble on…and secondly, because the sign said so:

I hope you find some interesting things out walking this week. X

Curvy Voices

April 29, 2012

plus-sized yoga, writing, yoga life

i am back in town – do you hear me

April 27, 2012

i am a dork, life is beautiful, simple pleasures, things i saw out walking

8 Comments

The new chair sits next to the older chair and it looks like they are having a conversation. (Maybe I have been reading THIS book too much?)

I find this slid under my door. How intriguing!

Except it isn’t. It turns out to be from a religious zealot, just letting me know if I don’t confess my sins I will burn in hell forever.

How much more interesting if it had been from an old friend who wanted my attention….or a musician who really, really wanted me to come to his gig….or anything else, really. Still, great title!

When I took the kids to the museum, I experienced what I would look like with skinny legs in the hall of mirrors. I stood lookiing at my illusory skinny legs for far too long:

Then I became a giant on the new Museum carpet:

Finally, with the colder weather – the monsters return for hibernation. They leave their feet at our back door:

a day off

April 25, 2012

yet another photograph of a plant

4 Comments

After breakfast, I clean windows for two hours, inhaling the Windolene. It’s so blue and potent and grease-cutting. Maybe if the windows are clean I will see more clearly.

Clean my glasses.

Clean my eyes.

Clean my brain.

I have coffee with a friend and we talk for a long time about her exit plans. She’s off. It feels like the last supper. It feels like the launch of a great ship. I think about how I’m staying and all that that means. I think about how staying is not the same as not going anywhere. I’ve got a long way to go, right here.

When I get home, there is a small boy who covers me in ‘chicken kisses’, pecking at my face with pursed lips. He says, ‘You are my chicken-Mum!’.

There is warm banana cake. There is flour all over the floor – too pretty to sweep up. I can only clean one thing a day.

‘She looks like / she walked out / the middle of / somebody’s blues’ -Blondie

We talk about a feijoa orchard, a lavender farm. Our daydreams usually have plants in them, plants and land. In our daydreams we don’t owe money and people leave us alone. It’s peaceful and sweat counts for something.

He goes to the supermarket for milk and he comes back with medicine. The medicine is fizzy and tastes like pear cider.

Even when I am connected I am aware of myself being aware I am connected and in this awareness of my awareness, I feel alone.

‘If you’re a kid and no one will play with you / stick it out, stay tough! and you’ll turn out super-cool.’

-Kimya Dawson

Today we gaze at our navels. Tomorrow, we work.

the god-shaped hole

April 23, 2012

i am a dork, impermanence, plus-sized yoga, reading, spirit

23 Comments

One of my favourite writers, Anne Lamott writes often about ‘the god-shaped hole’ inside us – the abyss inside us which yearns for spiritual connection or deep acceptance but which we will fill with almost anything else….drugs, drink, food, social media, hoarding stuff, being too busy, seeking peer or parental approval, hollow ambition, procrastination….we throw all manner of things into the ‘god-shaped hole’ but none of it fills us up.

This idea stems from an earlier notion posed by the philosopher Pascal:

‘What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.’

While in the 21st Century, many people do not believe in ‘God’ in the sense which Pascal meant it (a monotheistic parental god) – I think people still yearn for spiritual fufilment, although they might have different names for it (i.e. acceptance, contentment, happiness, connection…) and still often look in the wrong places for these things.

There is a similar notion in Buddhism of ‘the hungry ghost’ – the idea being that there is a ghost inside us who is always hungry and no matter how much we feed it, it always needs more, leaches away our energy…it is insatiable, animalistic…it haunts us. It is a paradox, because how can a ghost be hungry? A ghost is ephemeral, dead…but that represents the negative and repititive mental patterns we have which are illusory, not based in reality, and yet we can’t help repeating…like a stuck record.

Where is all this metaphysical musing headed?

I have been thinking a lot about the ‘god-shaped hole’ and ‘the hungry ghost’ in my own life. I have been thinking about what I fill myself up with…and I wrote a little bit the other day about social media. I also fill it with other ‘junk’ in many forms.

This is not about being a puritan, though because…

the god-shaped hole is a tricky thing – sometimes I get tricked into thinking ‘positive’ things will fill it. I thought that finally publishing a book might fill it – it didn’t. I thought teaching yoga might fill it – it hasn’t. In fact, teaching yoga has put me right in the path of an avalanche of self-doubt and all that I battle with in myself. The god-shaped-hole does not get filled with external achievements or with other people.

Therein lies the conundrum of the hungry ghost, the god-shaped hole. To quiet the hungry ghost, I have to stop feeding it. To fill my own god-shaped hole, I have to sit, really sit, BE with, see and accept all that is ‘wrong’ and messy and difficult and tricky about myself. I have to stare down the abyss at it and find a way to be okay with it. Only when I accept the frayed bits of my character will I be able to co-exist with them, without seeking to achieve them away, or numb them out, or seek external approval which will never seep in, until I can give myself the acceptance I seek from others.

I think all my life I have been invested in a notion of the future me – the future me is a better me, a more evolved me, a new me who has left awkward difficult me behind. Of course this is ridiculous – as the old hippy saying goes ‘where ever you go, there you are’. I am trying to fully accept messy, tricky old me. I am trying to let go of a notion that being me will get easier, somehow. I am trying to get clear about what I am doing in my life for the real, integral me…and what I am doing in my life for the god-shaped-hole, the hungry ghost.

Does any of this make sense?

Do I sound crazy? (It’s ok, you can tell me…)

What do you feed your hungry ghost? & What do you throw into your god-shaped hole?

—helenlehndorf

'Only connect.' -E.M.Forster

warm autumn