Helen Lehndorf

Author: helenlehndorf

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #10

    (Above: F and I like to have fires in the backyard, whatever the weather. A recent violet dusk.)

    Does it feel to you like the weeks are whizzing by? Friday seems to come around faster and faster lately. Here we are again!

    I’ve had some lovely feedback for these Slow-Small Media digests. Thanks to everyone who has been in touch. I’m so glad you’re enjoying them. I really enjoy ‘foraging’ for things to share with you. 

    A ‘corny’ song

    This week’s addition to the slow-growing Slow-Small Media playlist, is ‘Close My Eyes’ by Arthur Russell. 

    I was new to Arthur Russell until I recently watched this fascinating documentary about him. (I love music documentaries even if I don’t know the subject. I find a lot of new-to-me music this way.) 

    If you’ve been reading these Friday digests since the beginning, you’ll probably know by now that I love nature-based songs, or songs that reference growing food and tending gardens. This beautiful soft song references a corn field: 

    ‘Will the corn be growing a little tonight

    As I wait in the fields for you

    Who knows what grows in the morning light

    When we can feel the watery dew.’

    (I add one carefully-considered song per week. You can find the whole playlist here. It’s nice to listen to on a weekend morning.)

    An ‘Eat the Weeds’ Pesto

    I am a massive Nicola Galloway fan so it meant a lot to me that she gave ‘A Forager’s Life’ a little shout-out in this column in ‘Life and Leisure’ magazine. 

    In the article she shares a delicious version of a foraged weeds pesto.

    Pesto is one of the best ways to ‘sneak’ weeds into your family’s diet if they are weed-resistant. They’ll never know once it’s all blended up and on pasta or some crackers. (Other good ways are soups, smoothies and quiches.) 

    Something to watch: a fascinating wild honey bee conservationist making beautiful hives from wood and rushes

    In the UK, Wild honey bee conservationist and carpenter, Matt Somerville, has designed a beautiful, natural, handmade hive habitat and over the last 14 years has installed 800 (!) for the wild bees. No honey is ever harvested from these hives – they are installed just to support wild honey bee biodiversity. 

    This beautiful 12 minute film about Matt’s work is inspiring in terms of how much of a difference one person with a big passion can make. I so appreciate that he wanted the hives to look appealing as well as being beneficial. 

    Some sweet, sweet cakes that are food for the eyes only: 

    Artist Heather Rios makes delightful cakes from polymer clay and embroidery.

    A feast for the eyes and oddly uplifting to regard, I found.  

     (Above: photograph borrowed from FrogsbyGigi.) 

    Affordable Art: 

    Felt Shop artist Gigi handknits frogs and dresses them in tiny jerseys or overalls.

    They come in under the $50 budge for affordable art and although you might argue they are toys not art, I’ll bet most of them are purchased by adults and then perched on bookshelves and desks…which means they are qualify as works of art. 😉 

    Aren’t they adorable?

    ‘This is the best domestic perfume: an ode to the humble onion

    I like how in this week’s poem William Matthews elevates the humble onion to it’s rightful place as the beginning of many things good in the kitchen. 

    This poem reminds me how good poems are all about looking at things, even humble things, very closely and being curious about what’s to be found there. Over the years, I have written poems about garlic, pasta sauce, my bicycle, and many other tangible things.

    An Anarchist Gardener’s Club on Substack!

    I think I know who the writer is behind this fabulous ‘Anarchist Gardener’s Club’ on Substack…

    …enjoy their call for collective green-fingered mischief!

    “We will cultivate whatever we can.
    We will grow flowers in the cracks.
    We will seed bomb every desolate corner of the scrub land.
    We will enjoy a brew and a biscuit as we do it.”

    Count me in!

    *

    I’m always overly-ambitious for how much I can fit into a weekend.

    Here’s my ‘might-do’ list for this weekend.

    -make kimchi. We got a beautiful cabbage in our CSA box and it’s calling to become kimchi, I think.

    -plant the dahlia bulbs I dug up and divided two weekends ago

    -work on my poetry manuscript some more

    -do some food prep ahead of the week -mostly washing and chopping vegetables- so we are more likely to eat them in salads and stir-fries

    -finish reading this wonderful book by Nadine Hura 

    I think that’s enough of a list, hey? If I even get a couple of those things done I will feel content. 

    What’s on your ‘might do’ list for the weekend?

    Try not to do too much, hey? And always factor in some fun.

  • A new poem and an older, previously unpublished one

    Last week, a new poem I wrote, ‘hemmed in like a boar between archers’, was published on The Spinoff’s weekly column ‘The Friday Poem’.

    I’m grateful to The Spinoff and editor, Hera, for selecting the poem. It was great fun for me to see it on The Spinoff on Friday and to see what image they had selected to go with the poem.

    I wrote the poem last summer. I had a good spell with poetry over the summer and, after a while of feeling like I was wringing out a dry rag when trying to write poetry, suddenly a whole lot of poems tumbled out in a rush. It was a good (and relatively rare) feeling.

    It meant that a poetry manuscript I’ve been fiddling with for over ten years (!) is much closer to completion now.

    I was able to ditch some poems I wasn’t 100% happy with (I call them ‘the weaklings’) and replace them with some of the stronger, new ones.

    (Above: bush canopy in the Rangawahia Reserve.)

    I also wanted to share an older but previously unpublished poem.

    This was commissioned years ago for an anthology about New Zealand’s endangered species. Each poet was assigned a topic. My assigned subject was the Manoao Tree (Silver Pine).

    Sadly, the book project didn’t eventuate so I thought I’d share the poem here:

    Manoao

    Small, sensitive,
    the cleanest of the grassy greens
    of the understory
    single leader, forest pine

    too many years
    of mistaken identity
    growing in the shadow of all
    that a Kauri can be

    rainforest supporter
    prone to sudden collapse
    like all things humble,
    misidentified, or hard to see

    human desire-lines
    walk wide past
    the subtle glow
    in long rows
    of gloaming extroverts

    If we were better, we’d
    take the time
    to thread the eyes.
    of this graceful relict.

    *

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #9

    (Above: low winter sun through some crops gone to seed at the Awapuni Community Garden.)

    Hi lovelies,

    Jeez, another week of scary news in a world gone mad. I hope you are faring okay and doing plenty of sensory, nature-based things off screens to give your nervous systems a chance to recover.

    Winter calls for an encounter with ‘a Wild God’

    Long a favourite poem of mine, I went looking for a shareable version of ‘Sometimes a Wild God‘ by Tom Hirons and saw, to my delight, that you can both read it and listen to it being read by the author here. There’s something about listening to poems read by their authors which is really special.

    This poem speaks to that longing inside us to connect with nature’s raw wildness…how that raw wildness is no joke…and it also has such a great ending. A modern classic, I think.

    Song for the week

    This week’s song is gentle, evocative and sounds a bit like Nick Drake. It’s ‘Crow’ by English ‘folktronica’ band, Tuung.

    As a poet, I can’t fall 100% in love with a song unless the lyrics are thoughtful and interesting. The chorus for this song are so good:

    ‘And we bide our time
    And we shed our skins
    And we shake our bones
    And we sink like stone
    And we crawl through mud
    Til we reach the sky
    And we bide our time.’

    (Listen the full playlist of Slow-Small Media songs here on Youtube.)

    Sally Wise’s ‘Apple Day‘

    Nothing warms my heart like friends and communities getting together to work on food harvests and processing together. (If you didn’t catch it already, here’s an article about some friends and I doing just this with green tomatoes.)

    Australian food writer Sally Wise just wrote about her annual ‘apple day’ here.

    I especially like the photographs. What great seasonal fun.

    Make a liver-cleansing, iron-boosting tonic from a much-maligned weed

    Most people I talk to are unaware that yellow dock, a plant loathed by many, is a powerful medicinal plant.

    When I did a live-cooking event at the Womad Festival last year, one of the things I made was some wild seedy crackers which had yellow dock seed in them which I foraged.

    Dock root is rich in iron, minerals and vitamins. Check out this recipe for an Iron Rich Liver-Cleansing Support Oxymel from one of my favourite New Zealand food writers, Anna Valentine.

    Lot’s of weeds are a bit of a pain, it’s true (hello, tradescantia, hello, convolvulus) …but so many weeds are edible or medicinal. I feel like re-learning all of the offerings of local weeds will be an important passtime for the coming years.

    Here’s to the humble dock plant: mineral-retriever with it’s deep taproot, generous-seed-offerer, cleanser of livers and booster of blood.

    This week’s affordable art: Whakangā

    This week’s affordable art is not wall art, but an artful object, a meditation tool, a little something perfect for the wintery months. This would make a beautiful gift.

    (Above: photo borrowed from the Creative Hive NZ website.)

    It’s a little beeswax candle set from the Creative Hive NZ. Whakangā means in Māori to take a breath, catch your breath, rest, relax or inhale.

    From their website: ‘This beautiful Whakangā set is the perfect addition to your wellbeing with 21 small beeswax candles and an exquisite artisan ceramic kawakawa leaf holder.’

    I think it qualifies as ‘art’ and is very reasonable at just $35.00 for the set.

    This is such a thoughtful product. The tiny candles are made to burn for twenty minutes; just long enough to take a break or meditate. A friend of mine has a set and the candles are so very small and sweet.

    How to make a Wild Food Map of your neighbourhood

    This is a great article from Milkwood Permaculture on how to make a wild food map of your neighbourhood. I haven’t done this but I’d love to. If you have younger kids, it could be a fun activity to get them involved in over the school holidays?

    As well as great instructions on this project, this article has a handy list of links for online community food maps at the end, like Falling Fruit a global map of crowd-sourced information about public fruit trees. It’s very fun to type your address into it and see what’s within walking distance of your house. You can add your local knowledge to it, too.

    Something chill to watch: a Brixton folk artist’s beautiful house and studio

    This short (9min) clip featuring folk artist Abe Odedina on the World of Interiors YT channel is a good time.

    He’s a vibe, and I loved seeing his house and studio. His house is beautiful as is his art. I also appreciated how much he talks about loving being at home. I think since the pandemic, many of us feel the same way, hey?

    (I lived in Brixton a zillion years ago when I was on my travels. I found it such a vibrant, exciting suburb of London.)

    A Manifesto for Stubborn Optimists

    From the Montague Workshop (Brad and Kristi Montague), a Manifesto for Stubborn Optimists:

    ‘We believe that care is courageous.

    Joy is rebellious.

    Wonder is defiance.

    We believe in the builders,

    teachers, growers, healers,

    quiet ones making room at the table,

    the messy middle, the long haul, and

    in the overlooked beauty of a slow repair.’

    This manifesto gave me some solace this week. I love manifestos. I think most things I write end up being thinly disguised manifestos; I can’t help it.

    I’m going to print it out and stick it on my fridge.

    This weekend my oldest ‘baby’ turns 25. Quarter of a century!

    (Above: the oldest baby when he was 4. A favourite pic.)

    I spent my 25th birthday dancing at Duckie London – a queer club night that’s still going! But I started off the night straddled across one of the bronze lions of Trafalger Square in London, drinking straight from a 1.5 litre bottle of Absolut vodka. Classy, aye? (I wasn’t always the quiet homebody I am now.)

    It’s funny, because I remember clearly thinking back then ‘I’m going to climb up here and get on one of the lions…because then I will always remember what I did on my 25th birthday’ …and it worked, I do!

    Anyway, there will be birthday celebrations this weekend and no doubt F and I will have a tipple of whisky and contemplate the bizarre passage of time.

    Hope there are sweet, calm things in your weekend, too. x

  • Matariki: the public holiday we all needed

    (Above: our Matariki mandala this year.)

    I think Matariki is my new favourite holiday. Long before it was made a public holiday, I used to grizzle that New Zealand needed another public holiday in winter as it was a long stretch from (then) Queen’s Birthday in June until Labour Day in October.

    & because, as a pākeha, it is a new holiday, I’m really enjoying that we (my family) are creating our own celebrations for it: inviting friends to share kai and reflections, and focusing on rest.

    I was hoping for a cold, wet weekend so I could be lazy and give some attention to my teetering pile of delicious library books…alas, (hello, climate change?) our winter here in the Manawatū seems to come later every year. Spring is the season I brace for…here our springs are mizzling, windy (we have a phenomena known as ‘the November gales’) and cold. So the weekend, while chilly, was also sunny…which meant I had to get out into the garden.

    I did some satisfying chores that I only get to when the urgent business of harvest season is over: I tidied my junky heap of garden pots and paraphernalia into virgo-level neatness again. I cleared out the greenhouse, pruned and fed the fruit trees, planted more comfrey around their bases, dug up the dahlia bulbs. It was satisfying work that called for an afternoon tea of cinnamon pinwheels and a big pot of homemade masala chai (none of that syrupy nonsense.)

    (Above: just the Edmonds date scone mixture but rolled out, spread with fruit mince and sliced into pinwheels instead of dates.)

    Gardeners are always thinking a season (or more!) ahead. My winter food garden is all planted now…not too much to do. (Having said that I planted rockets seed and more broad beans on the weekend.) So now I’m dreaming ahead to summer flower/herb beds, by digging up clumps of perennial herbs and flowers and dividing them. I’ve been getting very inspired by urban rewilding books I’ve been reading (more on that in another post) so I’m eyeballing the little bits of lawn we still have and wondering if I might turn them into weedy spaces full of self-maintaining weeds and ‘wild’ flowers …for the pollinators and birds.

    It takes a leap deeper into wildness and unruliness which can have a mixed response in an urban setting…and yet is so important for urban biodiversity as central city housing gets denser and more and more gardens are lost.

    So, I ended up not being as lazy as I’d hoped for Matariki/Winter Solstice weekend…but it all felt good, a healthy-busy…not a pushing-hustle. Dreaming into summer is a kind of rest, I think.

    & I know we’ll get plenty of stormy, frigid days in spring.

    I get Koanga Garden’s newsletter and in the latest one, I like this, from founder Kay Baxter:

    ‘This is how regeneration works: a little effort now, in rhythm with nature, pays forward in resilience, nourishment and beauty.’

    Tell me what you’re up to in your gardens. x

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #8

    (Above: a wintery table top and typical scene in our whare.)

    Mānawatia a Matariki!

    I hope you have a restful, peaceful day ahead for this special holiday. Today’s digest is Matariki themed. I have some friends coming over for a huge pot of soup and some sharing from the heart.

    A ‘Matariki banger’

    To get us rolling, here’s a sweet short (4mins) documentary about the making of a new Matariki song:

    ‘When Professor Rangi Matamua, Rob Ruha, Troy Kingi and Kaylee Bell link up — we get a Matariki banger.’

    (For northern hemisphere readers, Matariki is the Māori New Year in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It happens around the winter solstice when the the Matariki star cluster, known in English as the Pleiades or Seven Sisters, is brightest in the sky. The names o the stars in Māori are:  Matariki, Pōhutukawa, Waitī, Waitā, Waipuna-ā-rangi, Tupuānuku, Tupuārangi, Ururangi, and Hiwa-i-te-rangi.)

    A beautiful essay about brief but strong connections, grief and lessons from a marae kitchen

    I’m part-way through Nadine Hura’s wonderful collection of essays, ‘Slowing the Sun’. I have to keep pausing because it is powerful writing. So much grief, so much truth, so much beauty.

    This week she published this essay. I loved how she conveys the fun but tough environment of the marae kitchen.

    I’ve done a bit of time in marae kitchens myself and you learn fast to keep your head down, get on with any work assigned to you and stay outta the way! It’s also where all the good stories and gossip are…and the place to be, really.

    A couple of recipes

    Given it’s Matariki, here’s one for traditional Māori Fry Bread

    It’s kind of like a doughnut…but it can be served savoury or sweet.

    The marae I had the privilege to eat at sometimes as a kid used to serve it piping hot, drizzled with golden syrup and fresh runny cream.

    Can you imagine the decadence?

    & for a hearty dish which uses a native plant, here’s a stunning recipe from Dunedin food writer Alby Hailes, Turmeric roast potatoes with crispy kawakawa & brown butter whip I haven’t tried this one yet…but it’s on my want-to-try list.

    I’m intrigued to try the crispy kawakawa. Frying sage leaves in butter is an extraordinary thing so I imagine the kawakawa would develop a similar spicy umami.

    The delight of hearing Hone Tuwhare reading his poem Papa-Tu-A-Nuku

    National treasure Hone Tuwhare died back in 2008. He read his work aloud with such spice, intensity, joy.

    Here you can hear him read his short and lovely poem, Papa-Tu-A-Nuku (earth mother.)

    ‘We are massaging the ricked

    back of the land

    with our sore but ever loving feet’

    It’s worth listening to for his ‘aaah’ before ‘we love her’ which doesn’t appear in the printed version of the poem.

    A beautiful story about a Kapiti teacher who guided his students to hand build a Free Kai Cafe for their local community

    Teacher, Adi Leason wanted to engage his teenaged students in something meaningful; hands-on learning that would result in a community asset. Here’s the story of their project.

    & Here’s a short Te Ao Māori News clip about the cafe.

    (I visited the Leason family permaculture garden some years back. Check out that post here.)

    Affordable art: the Matariki edition

    Here’s three Matariki-themed things for your walls. (As always, to be deemed ‘affordable art’ it has to be less than NZD $50.)

    A Matariki wall tile from Raglan pottery, Monster Company. ($46)

    Ceramic Matariki stars by Borrowed Earth ($28 each.)

    A poster of the Matariki Constellation ($30)

    Or, for no money at all, here’s a handy YouTube clip on how to fold a Matariki star from two leaves of harakeke.

    A song and video to melt your heart

    This song, Polytunnel, by UK folk singer Richard Dawson, is so spare, simple and sweet…with his vulnerable, slightly off-key singing. It’s all about the joys of gardening an allotment and community spirit.

    And the video! Oh! The video.

    Please take the time to watch the video. It stars various members of his allotment and is a sheer joy to see all these happy, connected gardeners. I hope you love it as much as I do.

    (Listen to the whole slow-growing Slow-Small playlist here. It grows at the rate of one song per week and will keep growing for as long as I write these digests.)

    (Above: kumara soup + feta, smoked trout cream cheese dip with carrot sticks and nuts.)

    Keep warm, beauties.

    Eat soup, find your gratitude, take some time to reflect on how you’re doing at this mid-point of a fast-moving, nerve-rattling year. x

  • Sometimes reaching out to your heroes works out

    (Above: Morag Gamble + my book! *squeals with delight* Image borrowed from Morag’s website. I love this photograph. I look at it when I’m having low moments to do with writing stuff and it cheers me up.)

    Today I’m returning to an occasional series of sharing anecdotes from my experiences after publishing A Forager’s Life . This is a story about how I reached out to some writing or permaculture heroes, people I respect and look up to, and how it panned out.

    I have an amazing publicist at Harper Collins, Sandra Noakes, without whom I would not have had such good reach with the book or opportunities like feature articles in national publications, appearances at literary festivals and featuring on the bill at WOMAD.

    Any writer worth their salt, however, will do their best to get word out on their own steam as well. If you believe in your work enough to publish it…you have to keep backing it beyond publication. Publication isn’t the finish line. In some ways, it’s just the start line of phase two. Reaching out to people can be an excruciating experience. You have to steel yourself for plenty of ‘thanks but no thanks’ or, worse, silence. (*cue the sound of crickets chirping.*)

    Just after the book came out, I wrote to a dozen people (nature writers, permaculture heroes, eco-podcast hosts) introducing myself, explaining why I thought they might be interested in the book and offering to send them a copy. Out of that dozen – two said yes.

    Out of the two who said yes please to me sending a book…one worked out wonderfully well. The other person ghosted me. Being real with you, it’s hard not to take it personally…but for my mental health I’m choosing to believe that they were in a place of overwhelm with life and my book was one of the things that could fall off their ‘to-do’ list with minimal consequences …rather than: they just didn’t like the book.

    I share these details with you, not for sympathy, but to demonstrate how thick-skinned you have to be in the writing. business (and I’m not particularly…I bruise fairly easy). Take my recent lovely news about the Verb Home Based Writer’s Residency. I’m still so over the moon about this. What people don’t see, though, is the manifold rejections from other opportunities that I have thrown my hat in the ring for. The writing life takes tenacity…the amount of tenacity demanded can be wearing and I have definitely had fallow years where I just couldn’t find the grit to keep on trying. Or when the responsibilities of my life precluded space for creative pursuits.

    Anyway, this is a happy story, not a gloomy one!

    One of the permaculture heroes I approached was the indomitable, prolific, generous Morag Gamble. This name might not mean much to you if you aren’t active in the permaculture world but in permie-land, it means a lot.

    Morag is a permaculture teacher, mentor, writer who lives in Australia but works at a global scale. She has an excellent Youtube channel with dozens of helpful permaculture clips, she teaches permaculture teachers at the Permaculture Education Institute, and she runs a non-profit which gifts permaculture education to refugees in East Africa. She’s an incredible woman for whom I have a lot of admiration and respect.

    You can imagine my delight when she took me up on my offer to send her my book. I wrote a friendly letter and posted it off and then a while after that…she got back in touch to say that she’d read and really enjoyed the book (!!) and invited me to be a guest on her podcast! I was, and still am, thrilled.

    + Morag’s daughter also reviewed the book here.

    The podcast was conducted via Zoom. On the day, I was so nervous, my mouth kept going dry which is very annoying when you want to chat away and try to sound relaxed. I needn’t have worried, though, because Morag is just as warm and genuine as she seems in her videos and podcasts and talking to someone so aligned in values was an absolute dream.

    Here’s Morag’s description of our conversation: “As a published author of books like ‘A Forager’s Life‘, Helen has a beautiful way of emphasising humans’ reciprocal relationship with plants and the wisdom of plant tending. She also highlights the significance of hyperlocal food systems and the power of food commons and radical reciprocity.”

    You can listen to our conversation here.

    & while I didn’t have to tell you that I got the slot on Morag’s podcast because I chased it…I like to be honest about ‘behind the scenes’ things in the writing world in the hope it helps people get a sense of how things work and (maybe) to inspire you to keep going with whatever your dream is…even when things feel too huge or overwhelming.

    People will say no to you or they won’t respond at all…and that’s okay. Everyone is busy, often to the point of overwhelm, and I think one out of twelve is not too bad…especially given how delighted I was with the outcome. A more courageous writer than me would have sent out hundreds of emails…not just a dozen…but that was the maximum of what my nervous system could handle.

    I hope this story might have given you a little bit of inspiration to take the next step forward in working towards your aspirations. x

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #7

    (Above: Kitchen table vignette. The bowl was my grandmother’s.)

    Happy Friday 13th…lucky for some…let’s decide to claim it as lucky for us, hey?

    Winter is now truly here. We had our first frost this week. The fire is a fairly constant companion. I’ve had my first experiences of getting summer vegetables out of the freezer and feeling grateful that I preserved them: Luisa plums, cherry tomatoes, pesto.

    & Next weekend is Matariki & winter solstice already! That seems so strange…I’m having a subterranean-feeling year where I’m struggling to keep track of time.

    Here’s this week’s digest of things I’ve been digesting:

    A poem about strangers becoming fast friends because of a fig tree

    I love pretty much everything Ross Gay writes. This is one of my favourites, about communal joy and ripe figs.

    An indulgent way to get some Vitamin C:

    This year the mandarins on my mandarin tree are really small for some reason. It could be because it was a hot, dry autumn and I didn’t water it enough? Any thoughts?

    Anyway, they are fine for juicing and for this recipe for boiled mandarin cake. This makes a bright yellow and moist cake and it is relatively healthy…made with almond meal, eggs and no butter. The longest step is boiling the mandarins…maybe put them on to boil at breakfast time and then make the cake for afternoon tea?

    Something to watch:

    A beautiful film (40 minutes) about a UK folk singer Sam Lee who is in deep relationship with the threatened nightingale bird. He spends each spring living in the forest and making music for/with these vulnerable birds.

    It’s also about the old folk traditions of the UK. It’s is visually gorgeous, calming, the perfect weekend watch for rattled nerves.

    What pottering is… and isn’t:

    A little article about the gentle art of pottering:

    “It’s important that pottering activities aren’t taxing, time-sensitive or goal-oriented. Pottering isn’t jobs. It isn’t chores. It involves tasks that are so low down the priority scale that they don’t merit a mention on any to-do list…

    …Importantly – and this is good news for pottering’s greatest fans, prevaricators and procrastinators – pottering projects can be abandoned unfinished, to be re-continued in some as-yet unspecified future timeframe.”

    -Judy Rumbold

    I love it when I have the time to potter. Lately, I love any unscheduled time…calendar days without commitments…staying in on weekend nights…days where I don’t really need to know what time it is…

    This week’s affordable art:

    I love these murmuration prints from artist Lesley Ann’s series of paintings. (They are all beautiful…but in case anyone is shopping for me, I like number three the best, lol.)

    (Photo borrowed from Lesley Ann’s Felt Shop.)

    Monty Don being very opinionated about what to wear in the garden

    This very old (2005) article I like to re-read every so often, just because of how certain Monty seems that he’s right.

    I also like his particularities: trousers must be high-waisted, cashmere makes a good first winter layer (nice for some, Monty!), & jeans are ‘stupid’.

    How charming and precise is this?: “If you are uncertain about the required cut, (for trousers) check out photographs of agricultural labourers in summer (ie, jacketless) circa 1880-1914.”

    (Above: Of course I had to go and find such an image for you. Essex grain harvesters, early C20th.)

    A song about foraging:

    This week’s addition to the slow growing Slow Small Media playlist is a song about foraging…mushrooms to be precise…

    I love this British duo, Small Plant. All of their songs are so sweet and gentle…but of course I had to choose the foraging song to share with you.

    From the ‘Mushroom Walk‘ lyrics,

    ‘Slow Down…. and bring your awareness to the ground’.

    Indeed!

    *

    If you’re enjoying these weekend digests, please do share them with a friend.

    I hope you have some time to go slow and forget clock-time this weekend. Wishing you zingy cakes, drowsy afternoon naps and soothing short films aplenty.

    x Helen

  • Another morning, full of hope

    Do you ever have movies that you love so much you watch them over and over?

    I am an obsessive re-watcher, re-reader, re-listener. When I really love something, I want to take it in over and over again, enjoying it manifold times and, in the process, getting new things from it. I’m not someone that needs endless novelty.

    One of those films I love to re-watch is a wonderfully odd documentary from 2013 called ‘Cutie and the Boxer’.

    It’s about two Japanese artists, Ushio Shinohara and Noriko Shinohara, living in New York City. They are a married couple and they are startlingly honest with one another. Their creative paths have caused them all sorts of suffering and tensions…and yet they can’t help but live for their art despite art being ‘a demon that drags you along’ as Ushio says at one point.

    Whenever I’m feeling a bit gloomy about my creative life…feeling fatigued from the endless tenacity it takes to keep writing on top of the endless demands of family/community life…I like to rewatch this film and it always lifts me back up and re-invigorates my love for the creative life.

    Both Ushio and Noriko are very dry, very blunt and very funny (maybe it’s a Japanese quality? I don’t know enough Japanese people to know.) Even though there are very sad elements to their story (poverty, alcoholism, domestic inequalities) …ultimately the film is a testament to never giving up your creative aspirations.

    Do you have any movies you like to watch over and over when you need a lift? Films that feed your creativity? Tell me in the comments – I’d love some recommendations. I especially love documentaries.

    Here’s one of my favourite Ushio moments from the film (I captured these by taking photographs of my TV screen so excuse their bad quality):

    *mic drop*

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #6

    (Above: the sweet and tiny reading hut at the Red Bach, Turakina, where I recently had the good fortune to spend a weekend.)

    I lost most of this week to dental surgery recovery and felt quite sorry for myself…however, it has not prevented me from rambling the internet with my forager’s bag over my arm looking for good things for you to read.

    If you love me don’t feed me junk

    Those of us of a certain vintage *cough* possibly have a certain nostalgia for the wholefood health shops and cafes of the late 70s through the 80s. I really enjoyed reading this very personal, quirky and interesting research project by artist Faythe Levine about her parents involvement in health food education when she was a child. This research is presented in such an interesting way.

    It sparked a lot of nostagia in me of the health food cafes of the 1980s in Taranaki and the Manawatū which I would frequent as a punky teen getting interested in all things countercultural. I would gnaw down the sprouted lentil salads served in gritty pottery bowls, eat the earnest sugar-free carrot cakes with oily carob frosting and feel like I was really living on the edge.

    A song

    This week’s song is my one of my favourite bands, This is the Kit. I love this band so much. They sing about things familiar to me…like gardens, and cups of tea, staying in to cosy up, friendship heartbreak, and environmental angst.

    I thought I’d share this song ‘Empty No Teeth’ because I’ve been laid up with dental horrors this week…but also, because I love that the lyrics for this song mention ‘autumn…compost….leaf mulch’ …

    (I used to put compost in poems so often that my poet friend Jo banned me from using ‘the c word’ any more. It’s hard, though, because compost heaps are so full of life! and metaphor!

    *By the way, you can listen to the slow-growing playlist of Slow Small Media songs over on Youtube here. (I don’t do Spotify…because #payartists)*

    Affordable Art

    This week’s affordable art is a beautiful scene of a lakeside path meandering through trees. The artist, Gill Allen, writes that it is a scene from Mistletoe Bay in the Nelson region of NZ. I love the dappled light and it makes me think of my slow foraging walks. It offers such a peaceful feeling, I think.

    & you can buy an unframed A4 print for just $39!

    (By the way, if you are an artist who has affordable art to share…or you’re an art-appreciator who has some good leads for me, please share in the comments or email me.)

    A comforting dinner

    I’ve been eating soft foods this week because of dental pain…so here’s a soft and nourishing main dish which uses that handsome vegetable, Italian kale, Kale and Chickpea Ragu, served on polenta.

    Polenta is such a comforting rice/pasta alternative for the colder months…and so easy to whip up.

    Art to admire …surreal reading women

    I spotted these reading women by american artist, Rick Beerhorst on Lithub. I really like the way he captures something of the magic of being lost in a book by the way he paints hovering birds and the like in front of the women. He’s a contemporary artist but they feel like paintings from another age.

    Radical Neighbouring

    This is a new film by inspirational film production company, Campfire Stories, about a man who was gifted a farm (!) and grows food to give away. It’s a beautiful and inspiring story.

    A beautiful photo essay of some urban ‘neopeasants’

    If you’re a permaculture person, you might know of Artist As Family, an Australian family who have a poetic, creative approach to urban permaculture and ‘re-common-ing’ the ‘burbs.

    They just shared a beautiful photo essay (photos by Max Roux): ‘Max slung his camera over his shoulder as we forested, farmed, gardened, creeked, salvaged, ate, played, loved and listened to one another’… and I find it very earthy, heartening, inspiring.

    A tantric, non-dual poem expressing life’s ineffable beauty

    The Secret of Contentment

    By Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
     

    To be the seed and not
    wish to be the flower.
    Or to be the flower and
    not wish to be seed or rain.
    To be the rain and be grateful
    to be the rain. Which
    is to say, to be the self
    and delight in being the self.
    But when I say self, I mean
    to know the self as seed.
    As flower. As rain. When I
    say to know, I mean to
    ever be in wonder.

    *

    I hope there are good things in your weekend. I hope you still have moments in your life when you can ‘delight in yourself’. I hope someone buys you coffee/cake/wine/chocolate when you least expect it. I hope you have access to a cosy fire, a good book.

    See you in a whole new week

    x Helen

  • I’m (one of two) inaugural Verb Wellington Home Based Residency recipients!

    Today some news, rather than a musing…I’m very excited to share with you that…

    The other recipient is the wonderful Henrietta Bollinger.

    This residency is aimed at writers who can’t, for personal reasons, go away to multi-month/year-long residencies, or overseas residencies.

    I think it is so wonderful that Verb Wellington has created a residency with this kaupapa.

    Over the last couple of years, I’ve had raw and deep conversations with fellow-Taranaki writer Cassie Hart (who also finds it hard to get away from home) about how most residencies leave out writers who have health issues or care loads that prevent them from accessing the usual style of residency. We chatted about what our ideal residency would look like…and we agreed it would look like a financial stipend and no need to go anywhere!

    I thought about lobbying CNZ to try to make something like this happen but I never got around to it, because: care load …

    …and then Verb Wellington created one which looked just like what Cassie and I had talked about!

    It means SO MUCH to me to be selected for this residency. I have been writing poems and essays this year and the residency will assist in getting those closer to publication.

    Thank you so much, Verb Wellington!