(Above: dawn in the Otaki Gorge…from a trip there recently.)
Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #3
Make a cup of tea, snuggle up with your laptop if you have one (for a nicer reading experience than squinting at your phone) and enjoy some nourishing longer reads and beautiful things.
In these digests, I am not looking for things to share that are new, fresh, hot off the press (although sometimes they might be)…I want them to feel like an antidote to the speed and brain-addling endless novelty of social media so I am slow-mooching around the internet looking for quality over novelty.
A remarkable interview with a beekeeper who turned a wall of her house into a natural beehive so she could live with her bees
If you have any interest in bees, you must read this interview with beecharmer Susan Chernak. She turned part of a wall in her house into a natural bee hive! open to the outside so that she could live with her bees.
Living with her bees, she observed that bees sing to each other, they cry, they take naps.
Reading this made me love bees even more.
A Song
This week’s song has been one of my favourites for many years now: Riptide by Laura Viers. If you’ve ever been knocked sideways by life, you might find this song comforting. Laura is also a visual artist.
In the lyrics the narrator gets dragged out to sea by a riptide, asks the stars for help to get back to shore…then kind of gives up and makes peace with her surroundings. A song about surrender, I guess. Gosh that sounds depressing…but it’s not. It’s a beautiful, gentle and soothing song. Here’s an excerpt from the lyrics.
‘Left with essence
Of the moon and stars and night
There’s no other route
I cannot take self to flight
I’ll float here with the shrimp and brine
And on my cheeks and hair
The salt will always shine
And with this phosphorescence map
A sailor’s chart, a mermaid’s hand…
Something I’ll find.’
An affordable art work
When I can’t quite afford a print or painting by an artist I admire, I often buy their greeting cards or postcards and just frame those. That’s what I did a few years back with these two works by Australian artist, Lucy Pierce when I desperately wanted some of Lucy’s art on my walls but was too skint to even buy a print.
(Above: Two of Lucy’s framed greeting cards on my kitchen wall. The image above them of the golden offering hands is by my friend, artist and writer Carly Thomas.)
Lucy’s work is of the earth, of ancestry, of deep time. I find it warm and nourishing work. I hope to buy one of her amazing clay terraphim for my altar…I just can’t decide which one calls to me loudest. Lucy also writes on Substack here.
I find this mandala of women ‘Belonging’ to be an inspiring piece about deep time…time as a spiral.
A solace poem
These opening lines get straight to it:
‘Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.’
But please go and read the whole poem.
+ Do you want to know a poet’s trick for absorbing the full beauty of a poem?
Read it out loud to yourself, slowly, with short pauses at the end of each line to let the words really sink in. Then, if you like the poem, read it out loud to someone else in the house.
A recipe…or two
Now that the weather is getting colder, this Mushroom and Lentil Cottage Pie is a hearty and vegetable-dense vegetarian version of a cold-weather classic.
& for dessert, here’s a simple dessert recipe that is a must-add-to-your-recipe-file. In my household, we make Melissa’s ‘Any Kind of Fruit Tart’ so often that there is a copy of the recipe stuck to the inside of the baking cupboard. If you’re bored of crumbles but feeling too lazy to cream butter and sugar to make something cake-y, this recipe is your friend. (I see that she originally posted the recipe in 2011. So I guess that means we’ve been cooking it for fourteen years!)
Melissa is one of my original blogging friends from back in the early 2000s. She never stopped blogging so has much delicious content to delve into if you feel like spending some time in her calm and mindful world.
A calm and inspiring short film
(Above: Twig poet and forest rewilder, Maria Westerberg.)
Do you ever rewatch things you enjoy? I do. If something gives me a wash of calm or soothes like a balm or boosts my creative energy …I will rewatch it over and over.
I’ve done that with this short (twenty minute) film about a ‘A Twig Poet’s Rewilding Journey’.
I particularly like her ‘Face Books’.
What is a twig poet?
Watch and find out and immerse yourself in her mossy, quiet world.
A mini-meditation
This beautiful video of sunflowers unfurling is two minutes long, very compelling, very soothing. (Warning: it may send you down a Youtube wormhole of timelapse flower unfurling videos.)
*
I hope you enjoyed some of that. This weekend I will be pulling out the very last summer stragglers: a long tenacious cherry tomato, the green beans have finally given up producing, a chilli plant is starting to look unhappy with the cold evenings.
& I have a list of people I want to send snail mail to…overdue replies to beautiful missives that came my way last year. Now somehow it is May already and I haven’t written back yet. This weekend I will finally get to that. Do you still write snail mail?
I hope your weekend is good…and if it’s a busy one, make sure you fit in a short nap at some point…because the busier you are, the more important it is to take a nap.
Helen Lehndorf 