"the universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."
~eden phillpotts, "a shadow passes"
"even if it is true that there is nothing new under the sun, the new spirit does not refrain from discovering new profundities in all this that is not new under the sun. good sense is its guide, and this guide leads it into corners, if not new, at least unknown."
~guillaume appolinaire
i drive by the old niven nursery in larkspur on my way to work. the delapidated, decaying greenhouses and the teeming life of the weeds and wildflowers that have taken over the property compel me to no end. they remind me of the "time passes" chapter in "to the lighthouse."
i had to take these pictures through the chain link fence that surrounds the property. i tried to find out more about the original nursery but my google searches only led me to hard-to-decipher city proposals to develop the land sometime soon.
i was trying to figure out why i feel so drawn to this space. and i was thinking of how strange my relationship to marin county is. it is the place where i was born, and it is the place where i now work. my connection to it as a place in the interim has been zilch. and of all the places in marin, i find this abandoned nursery the place to which i have the most connection.
if i had to imagine my childhood as a physical structure, the broken down greenhouse might be just the thing. through which i bloomed late and anyway.
go here to read my contribution to the newly revamped website intowine.com. i'll be writing an article every month so stay tuned...
[image by google images]
"the art of memory"
"leggy"
"the tiger's stripes are not the tiger's cage"
as usual, just go to my favorites to get the lowdown on each photograph.
liz over at abstract the day has undertaken quite the project. she is making 1000 paper cranes to send to 1000 people. each person in turn is to take a photograph of the crane he/she receives, then send a print of it back to liz. many of these photos can already be seen on the paper cranes project pool on flickr.
according to wikipedia, "The Thousand Origami Cranes has become a symbol of peace through the story of Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who contracted leukemia as a result of radiation from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during World War II. Her story is told in the the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes."
traditionally, any one thousand origami paper cranes are held together by strings. here too, liz's project is demonstrating a different kind of stringing together. i loved receiving my little blue crane in the envelope from brighton, ma, and following the written directions for pulling on the wings to assemble it. a tangible thing addressed to me from a location i've never seen, from someone i've never met. such a small thing, but how exhilarating!
i didn't take the picture until a few days after receiving my crane. it needed to be just right. then i was listening to the decemberists' "crane wife" album, and i got the idea to put it on my lady figure. it just so happened i was wearing the shirt with the birds, and that isabel came over to lay down in that very spot just a moment before (she gets jealous when i take pictures of other things, i swear).
now i will send the picture, along with a book of stamps and a few pieces of origami paper, as i'm sure they'll come in handy.
if you would like to receive a crane too, just write liz a note...
add them to the list of things that comfort me. write them under "tapioca" and "coming home".
tonight at work a customer found an inchworm on one of her salad leaves and had to go to the ladies' room to throw up. it was a huge scene and the table ended up getting about eighty dollars taken off their bill.
i mean, i'd understand if it was half a worm, or even just a big obese and grubby worm, but this was such a sprightly, jaunty little inchworm, i couldn't help but take his side.
i just think that people get so that they forget where food actually comes from.
image from here
