Helen Lehndorf

Tag: Slow-Small Media for the Weekend

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #3

    (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 

    Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye.

    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.

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #2

    (Above:These pears got turned into a pear/ginger/feijoa chutney. On the right are nettles drying. Autumn has been so warm…my nettle patch just keeps going and going.)

    When I posted the first ‘Slow-small Media for Weekend’ last week, I asked F if he got the wordplay in the title…? and he said, no, he didn’t–I can always count on him to be honest. I meant it as a play on ‘social media’…but the fact I’ve had to explain it means it doesn’t really scan, I guess. Never mind…I’m sticking with it.  

    A useful resource for reducing food waste in your kitchen

    F and I run a very low-waste, frugal (and yet abundant and colourful) kitchen. I feel I am pretty savvy about not wasting food however I learned things (or had my inspiration refreshed) from this great video by Immy Lucas. where she offers 100 ways to reduce food waste. 

    She has a practical and grounded approach that I really like. 

    & I appreciated that she included reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer as one of the 100 things; a book that has opened many hearts and minds to being more grateful and reciprocal towards the earth. 

    An affordable artwork 

    I think everyone should be able to have beautiful art work on their walls and yet so much art is beyond the budget of many …so when I see beautiful art works available for purchase for under $50 New Zealand I will share them with you. Here’s one for this week:

    This graceful fern teatowel from New Zealand maker I feel Natty would make a lovely piece of affordable art, pinned up on a wall, I reckon. It has a calm-inducing quality about it.

    A (secular) prayer

    I immediately loved this earthy version of an ‘our lady’ by Sylvia Linsteadt and loved her invitation to add your own as things occur to you…to keep growing it as an ongoing appreciation of the earth. 

    & Here’s an addition to it from me: 

    Our lady of the slow autumn morning, the crackling fire, the bubbling porridge

    Our lady full of microscopic life, bringing the bubbles to our ferments

    Our lady of a friend’s handwriting on a homemade seed packet

    Our lady of the finch who sits in the open window, looks inside a moment then flits away

    (Above: the sweetest thing about garden/kitchen gifts from friends is their handwriting on the labels.)

    A song

    I’m new to this artist, Sun Kil Moon. Some of his songs sound like lost songs from Neil Young’s Harvest record. The music has a soft, dreamy, lugubrious style that is perfect for autumn/winter listening. 

    Another thing I really like about his work is that he often writes with careful specificity about geographical places, rivers, forests, cities. I guess because I’m a writer, I study and the appreciate lyrics as much as sounds of music. I’m particularly obsessed with this song ‘Carry me, Ohio’. 

    A commenter beneath the song remarked ‘This is the most depressing uplifting song in existence’ which made me laugh and is accurate. This song seems to be very gloomy, and yet it does something upwards to my heart. 

    There’s an apology in the lyrics, verses begin ‘sorry that…’. Is he apologising to a specific person? To a place? To his past self? It’s unclear…and that’s what makes the song so intriguing and beautiful. His music has a hypnotic quality, gloomy lullabies.

    An introduction to Eco-Dyeing

    I dabble in eco-dyeing. I’d like to get much better at it. Sometimes when I start something new I can be quite mean to myself about how janky my early attempts are.

    I have eco-dyed some papers for making cards and for using in my journal. I’ve eco-dyed some of my clothing, too. I didn’t get the lovely, clear leaf prints more experienced people do but still I was excited by the patterns the eucaplytus made on my linen tunic.

    Founder of eco-dyeing and one of my art-heroes, India Flint, writes evocatively about how eco-dyed fabrics take on on the scents of the plant materials and (if you do your dyeing over an outdoor fire, as I do) also woodsmoke. This is true! My eco-dyed tunic, despite many launders, still smells like eucalyptus and woodsmoke…both scents I love.

    If you’re new to eco-dying, here’s a simple introduction .

    & India Flint’s books are wonderful and inspirational. They can be hard to find but most libraries have them.

    I’ve decided to start a creative process journal for my eco-dyeing. I will share a bit of that along the way.

    A new Youtube channel

    I seem to watch more Youtube than any other subscription service these days. I have an endless appetite for watching people who have filmed themselves doing interesting things and sharing their quiet, fascinating lives. This year I’ve been paying for Youtube Premium and if you watch a lot of Youtube, I can’t stress enough how much it improves the experience to not have to deal with the ads. 

    I happened on Black Girl in the Woods somehow (thank you, algorithm) when she was just a couple of videos in. Now her channel is growing fast! 

    She has bought a small piece of land in the USA (mortgage-free) with a pond and some trees. Her videos are honest, gentle reflections on why she did that, her vision for her life and her little plot and some footage of projects on the go. I admire her courage and I appreciate her world-view. 

    A recipe (or two) 

    I’m in the middle of making this fermented hot sauce. It is fizzing away in my fermentation station and by the end of this week, I will bottle it. 

    Do you sometimes get in a rut with salad dressings? I do. Recently, I decided I want to use miso paste more in dressings because we’ve done that thing we’re we’ve triple-bought miso paste and now have too much. So I’ve been trying different miso-based dressings and I’ve been really enjoying the combination of miso with lime and ginger…these three ingredients really sing and zing together. 

    *

    I hope you’re enjoying these digests–let me know in the comments. 

    This weekend I am very excited to be going to see Marlon Williams. 

    & There’s a stamp and postcard convention happening in town. I’m not a stamp collector but I do have a passion for old postcards, particularly Victorian ones…so I will be going along to be that annoying person who flips slowly through boxes of postcards before musing over a large selection and then paring it down to a treasured handful to buy. 

    I am slow-hand-stitching a scarf with scraps of fabric my friend cyanotype-printed for me (I will show it to you when it’s finished) so I’m hoping there will be some time to sit down and work on that for a while. 

    Have a lovely weekend, beauties! 

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend

    Introducing … Slow-Small Media for the Weekend, a weekly digest of things which have caught my eye lately. My hope for these digests is that you can curl up with with a cup of tea over the weekend and enjoy these things as an antidote to the overstimulation of social media. 

    A read

    I’ve been enjoying Kirsten Bradley’s new art/writing project about moon literacy and garden tending.  If you like thoughtful writing about land tending and community care coupled with an art practice (cyanoptye) and folk herbalism…this is for you.

    Her article about progressive pickles and caring for her child particularly resonated with me. I, too, have had to let go of a lot of ideas about what loving family routines ‘should’ look like. I have a family member who dislikes eating with us. He eats his meals alone out on the porch.

    Kirsten writes: 

    ‘I have learned that insisting that we do things in the Family Way (…) was something I needed to let go of. (…) 

    Care can look like learning to pay close attention to what is actually doable for this kid, this day, rather than assuming I know better and pushing them too far.’ 

    Read the full essay here. 

    If you have time, read her other essays, too. All rich, contemplative stuff about nature and art and care. 

    A song

    When I find a song I love, I listen to it over and over and over. It feels like spending time with a friend. This has been my song of early autumn: ‘Time to Bide’ by New Zealand artist, Monty Bevins. It’s a whole journey in one song and a great example of song as storytelling.

    I love the spaciousness of the beginning. The song begins in Māori and then switches to English. Then just as you think you have a handle on what the song is going to be… changes pace. It is a song which demands close-listening. 

    + It’s a song that references cold weather and fires so it is a beautiful one to play loudly beside the fire. 

    Read more about Monty here. 

    A zine

    The Theme Zine is a project which brings together an international cohort of artists and writers to collaborate on zines based around set themes. Their latest issue’s theme is ‘Nature as Sanctuary. It’s beautiful short read (and best read on a laptop so you can enjoy the art). 

    An artist crush

    I love the work of American artist Chelsea Granger. I have her plant oracle deck The Dirt Gems and it is just stunning. Her work is so beautiful, humane, colourful, intimate. It feels like steeping into another world…a better one. If you tap the first tile on the top left, you can then view all her art as a slideshow. Trust me, it’s worth it. You’ll feel better about the world afterwards. 

    A watch 

    I found this short (12 minute) film about the ARK (Acts of Restorative Kindness)rewilding movement so soothing and nourishing for my nervous system, I’ve rewatched it four times over the last week.

    It’s got me thinking about where in my small garden I can intervene even less and ‘rewild’ small pockets for all the other creatures I share this little patch of land with. We (humans) like to try to be in charge of our gardens…it takes some real reprogramming (deprogramming?) to let go of control and let nature do what it is so good at, romping greenly. 

    Read more about the ARK movement.

    + I recommend Mary’s two books, also. I’ve read both and they are beautiful and inspiring. 

    A recipe

    If you were too busy in late summer to make a tomato kusundi, Nicola Galloway has a fantastic version made from feijoas.  If you like Indian flavours and haven’t tried kusundi before you will love this spicy, aromatic pickle. It’s a great thing to have around to liven up winter sandwiches. 

    Or if you are in the northern hemisphere, where spring weeds are springing…here’s a great recipe for wild weed pesto with a guide to some suitable weeds. 

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    This weekend I’m planning on sharing a morning tea with friends, making Nicola’s kusundi with our feijoa abundance, painting a new sign for the sharing shelf (the orange one in this post got stolen) and digging up some of my abundant strawberry and yarrow plants to share. 

    Tell me what you’re getting up to in the comments. Happy weekend, friends!