Reasons why.

Although generally they are very supportive, one of my good friends was incredulous when she heard that I had decided to hike the PCT. "Why?" She asked. "You were miserable on the last hike. You hated it!" This was a logical conclusion for her to make since I tended to make phone calls to her when I was extraordinarily bored and/or miserable. There was a monumental struggle with ennui on the Appalachian Trail and I'm curious to see how I cope with it on my second attempt at a long distance hike.

I should call friends and family more often when the amazing aspects of hiking occur so that I can convey the reasons why I feel this love and longing towards hiking... but when you're in the woods you don't usually want to whip out your phone at these moments.

So for those of you to whom I perpetually complained about boredom and filth here is an apology and just a few of many moments that I should really should have shared, instead of complaining for the umpteenth time that I smelled bad. I can't wait to discover the many reasons why the Pacific Crest Trail will be far more wonderful than it is terrible. These pictures only convey the smallest fraction of the joy and freedom you get to experience while living life on a long distance trail.

Mesmerizing.

Watch wind carve patterns here.

Ps: Exactly 2 weeks until the big adventure begins!

A brief respite.

I may have a lot of things on my mind right now but listen: when viewing from on high gusts of wind as they sweep across a lake and swirl water into tiny feathers of direction even I can't help but relax a little. (Before proceeding for the 4th time in less than 3 weeks to drive in the wrong direction as I attempted to make my way home - AHHHH.).


20 days until the hike begins. Far too many unchecked boxes on my to-do list, still. Mind is clearly not here, located instead somewhere in the vicinity of the Mexican border... only briefly returning to New Hampshire for a lunch break on a ledge.

Andrew Wyeth

The color palette of Andrew Wyeth's work is subdued, as is his imagery... and his work has been dismissed by critics as sentimental, provincial and illustrative.

But what I see is a man whose translation of the everyday imbues a sort of magic realism to the ordinary. “By means of art we are sometimes sent dimly, briefly, revelations unattainable by reason, like that little mirror in fairy tales. Look into it and you will see not yourself but for a moment, that which passes understanding, a realm to which no man can ride or fly and for which the soul begins to ache.” 

Occasionally I feel a slight tug deep inside of me, as if my heart is being squeezed, and there's a flash of gratitude and love for something so much bigger than me. It can be triggered by almost anything outside: a puddle, mountains, clouds, a raven hanging above me on a summit, a circle of lichen on a tree, the scent of sun-warmed dirt and pine needles, a silhouette of weeds; I don't even need to be hiking for this to happen, sometimes it's just while driving and catching a brief glimpse of the surrounding environment as it flashes past. It's something profoundly simple, beautiful and evocative. Something that makes my soul ache.

In other words, what I am trying to tell you is that while by society's standards I may be hopelessly single... I realized recently that I am in the best goddamn relationship of my life and it's with dirt and rocks and trees and sky. Thank you Andrew Wyeth, for your visual reminder of the visceral reaction that even ordinary surroundings can evoke... if you love them enough.

  
Trodden Weed, The Carry and Ice Pool by Andrew Wyeth. Images sourced here and here. Solzhenitsyn quote sourced from an excellent blog post about Wyeth found here.

Snow melt somberness.

MAGIC.

This made me temporarily forget the irritating doldrums of cabin fever. It sent a shiver of pure, electric happiness through me. If you installed me in a tiny cabin in the middle of nowhere with this going on around me, I'd probably never leave.

Time lapse photography of fireflies by Tsuneaki Hiramatsu via but does it float.

I have no words.

Ok, fine. I actually do. I need to move to northern Finland ASAP. From November onward, there are three mid-winter months that have no sun, allowing the lights to paint the skies astonishingly clearly at night. The killer case of seasonal depression would be completely worth it. Flatlight Films via Travelette. I pretty much held my breath watching this, it was that magical.

You say dystopia, I say utopia.

 I've been on a dystopian future literature kick lately: rereading The Road, revisiting Margaret Atwood's books the Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake, and finally getting around to reading America Pacifica. There is something incredibly fascinating in thinking about how nature will eventually reclaim our dwellings and erase the scars we've left on the landscape.

 

I find a lot of beauty in decay and I hate most commercial architecture so I find it particularly soothing to envision it abandoned and overrun with vines and brush. I'm secretly cultivating a strident anti-consumerism stance (and a healthy dose of self-loathing for my role in perpetuating the cycle) and the thought of civilizations crumbling is no longer a depressing prospect but just an inevitable reality given our current trajectory. (Take note: apparently this blog is about to start documenting my transformation into a misanthropic hermit. I was definitely born in the wrong era for this, but I'll do my best to make it work.)

I really enjoy Alex Lucas's work for the reasons noted above. Frankly, I'd be way happier picking through briar bushes in a spray-painted shell of a Walmart than I would be digging through the sale racks of one in its current state. I especially like the fact that the top piece is acrylic and silk screen on book pages. Neat. His work reminds me of something else that I've already posted about: the 100 Abandoned Houses project. Also neat (albeit slightly depressing if you care about the economic health of the US).

Always a sucker...

Yosemite HD from Project Yosemite on Vimeo.

for a good time lapse video. Yosemite, I'll be seeing you this summer. And I cannot wait!

Pieces of the sky.

Never fails to soothe me. And after this weekend of work, do I ever need soothing.

Top image is Tim Frank Schmitt via I'M REVOLTING, second via a now defunct tumblr, last two images are mine... squirrelled away from the fall as tiny scraps of emergency peace of mind.

I'll return to my regular 7 am posting schedule tomorrow... rough start to the morning today!

Foraged: Mullein

Verbascum Thapsis is quite possibly the best plant, ever. It is incredibly soft and fuzzy and is a pleasure to touch. First-year plants form a rosette of large, velvety leaves that are up to 1 foot long and in the second year a velvety flower spike grows as much as 8 feet tall. (You can differentiate this plant from Lamb's Ear by the fact that it grows in a rosette and Lamb's Ear just grows in clumps.)

In the 19th century Mullein had dozens of (awesome) names: "Hare's Beard", "Jupitor's Staff", "Feltwort", "Ice Leaf", "Beggar's Blanket"... to name a few. “Candlewick plant” refers to the practice of using dried mullein leaves and stems to make lamp wicks (the use of Mullein as torches dates back to Roman times, if not even earlier). There is also the intriguing name “Hag Taper.” In the midwestern United States, Mullein is more pithily known as "Cowboy Toilet Paper".

Mullein is a plant with a long and varied history of use (Pliny the Elder describes it in Naturalis Historia) and it is still often available in health and herbal stores. Both the leaves and flowers contain mucilage, which is soothing to irritated membranes, and saponins, which make coughs more productive. “Quaker rouge” refers to the practice of reddening cheeks by rubbing them with a mullein leaf, and a yellow dye extracted from the flowers has been used since Roman times as a hair rinse as well as to dye cloth. (I totally tried the whole Quaker rouge thing before I even learned that phrase just because they looked so cozy... a little scratchy, but also kind of pleasant. You just can't help it. This plant's leaves are like a snuggly blanket.)

All-time, hands-down favorite.

Andy Goldsworthy. "Each work grows, stays, decays – integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its heights, marking the moment when the work is most alive." Learn more here. See more (incredible work) here. 

I'll be posting more of my own artwork (and adventures!) with this coming new year. Looking forward to sharing with you soon!

Bruised knees and brisk weather.

Yesterday I went for a walk, picked up sticks, gathered wintergreen to make tea, and admired waterfalls running through miniature canyons of ice. It was a good day. At least, it was good until I slammed my knee against a rock, bloodying it through a layer of clothing. Ouch. But even that couldn't really put a damper on the bright sun, frosty air, and crisp frozen leaves littering the ground. 

I haven't been spending too much time outdoors lately, using the two fairly valid excuses of illness and attempting to be productive artistically. But if I'm going to be honest, I tend to avoid being active outside when loneliness turns sour on me. Loneliness has been an occupational hazard of mine for over a year now. It's usually something I enjoy; some of my best moments outdoors have been times where I felt completely alone and reveled in it. But every now and then it turns on you; slowly but surely the solitude starts to hurt and it becomes harder and harder to motivate yourself to do the activities you love, just because you're so caught up in wishing someone else was there to participate alongside you. There's a way to defeat these feelings of inertia and misery though, and it's actually quite simple. You just start walking. So yesterday, I walked. And it was good (aside from the bloody knee).

Foraged: Club Moss

Club moss (Lycopodiopsida) is very structurally similar to the earliest forms of plant life (primitive vascular plants); when I look at it, I like to pretend I'm roaming the same woods as the dinosaurs, only picture GIANT club mosses that grew hundreds of feet tall. Modern-day club moss hugs the ground but can produce a stem up to four feet tall. Despite its name, it is not an actual moss. Wikipedia alleges that "a powder known simply as lycopodium, consisting of dried spores of the common clubmoss, was used in Victorian theater to produce flame-effects. A blown cloud of spores burned rapidly and brightly, but with little heat. It was considered safe by the standards of the time." The spore also formed the basis of the flash powder in the earliest days of photography. Club moss spores were once used as a baby powder and even as an absorbent dusting powder in the early days of surgery... and it has a whole host of homeopathic uses that stem back hundreds of years. It also known as Clubfoot Moss, Common Club Moss,  Foxtail, Ground Pine, Lycopodium, Running Club Moss, Staghorn, Vegetable Sulphur and Wolf's Claw. I'm loving the name Wolf's Claw - picturing Club moss as its claws makes me think of a really creepy long and jagged-clawed mossy green monster.

On the same page.

Although I've seen Mari Andrews's work several times before, I never realized just how many other natural materials she was using besides stone. Her artist statement slays me. "I transform the materials used in these sculptural drawings to bring attention to fragile and often fugitive objects that might otherwise go unnoticed." Fragile and often fugitive objects... gets me every time. Also: "Time spent gathering, cleaning and storing of collected objects, whether they are man-made or natural, allows for a kind of wonder and intimacy with each object." YES. Her work and mine have a lot of similarities. As does our mindset.

Foraged: Goldthread

My co-caretaker harvested some Coptis groenlandica from our backyard to make a tincture (I made the bottle's label). Goldthread is also known as Canker root. These golden roots belong to an evergreen plant in the buttercup family, and can be harvested even in the winter under a blanket of snow. Native Americans chewed this root for medicinal purposes and also made tea. An effective treatment, it became a popular indigenous drug with the colonists as well. Goldthread traditionally is used to treat mouth sores and thrush but is also used with digestive problems. It is sometimes used in combination with or substituted for goldenseal. Both have berberine, a bitter alkaloid with strong antibacterial qualities. The easiest way to make a tincture is to use 100 proof vodka, cover the roots completely, seal for 6 weeks and then strain.

Can we be friends?

 

I have been obsessed with Jennifer Steen Booher's collections for ages. In fact, whenever I gaze longingly at her photographs of beach combing and woodland artifacts I think to myself, "This person should be my friend." (Kind of creepy, but true. We could collect items together!) So Jennifer, I don't expect you to read this... but I'm telling the rest of the world that we have a shared affinity for old buttons, vintage detritus, small pieces of nature, and smooth and mysterious pebbles (you know, the kind that are so worn that you find yourself inexplicably soothed when you rub them between your fingers). 

My love of collecting rocks, shells, bits of nature and antiques and ephemera stems back as far as I can remember. I can recall gazing longingly at my grandmother's old antique objects when I was little and the first time my father brought me to a flea market. I used to spend hours sitting alone in a patch of gravel, sifting through rocks to find ones that I liked. And sitting on my shelves, having traveled to four different homes, are fossils, sticks stripped smooth of bark, stones, small bits of dried flowers and leaves and other artifacts that I can't bear to let go of. I hoard these things the way another person collects jewelry. 

I think the reason why Jennifer's photos resonate so deeply with me is that you can tell that this is a person who reveres the subtle beauty found in small objects and bits of nature. Jennifer blogs, too. You can check it out here. All images above are by Jennifer Steen Booher. All images below are bits of my collections: wheat penny, crystal found in the woods on an island in Maine, acorns collected with my best friend years ago, dried flower fragment from Colorado, shard of shell wrapped with indigo dyed yarn that was a gift from a friend at a papermaking and dying workshop at Haystack School of Craft, half of an antique daguerreotype case, pebbles from various places, fragment of sand dollar found on a beach in Ghana... this is some of what I treasure. 

Needle ice.