The Tao of Summer

travel stories

Sunday 15 Jan 2012 by ~summer~ | No Comments
Filed under: go play!

Apple tea, hummus, the echo of call to prayer, so many men trying to sell me carpets, silk scarves and burkas, very old things, restaurants with big kilim pillows instead of chairs, the best white beans ever, evil eyes, bialys street vendors, golden mosaics, windy ferry rides, lights reflecting on the Straits of Bosphorus, a bus ride to the beach, toes in the Aegean, bulk olives ordered in pantomime, nutella for breakfast, weird money, fish markets, afternoon backgammon and beer, tulips, ancient ruins, a little winery village, churches and mosques, salt-of-the-earth restaurant proprietors, so much history, oh so beautiful.

I’m a little daydreamy about traveling today. I’d go back for more wandering time in Turkey in a heartbeat.

tell me about some place beautiful that you’ve been?

to hope to be extraordinary

Saturday 14 Jan 2012 by ~summer~ | 1 Comment
Filed under: my life, poetry and prose

Some weeks are just weeks. They fall into that category of ordinary, which is the same as not extraordinary, except they are indeed extraordinary in the fact of our mere mortal existence. This was one of those weeks, just a week, a work list so mundane it need not be archived with words. The highlight of the evenings was Ken and our conversations, too late past bedtime, I love him so.

I once read some passages from my great grandmother's bound journals, kept at a time when she still lived at home. Day after day she wrote about the mundanity of it all: laundry, grocery shopping, shoveling snow. Somewhere in there, buried behind pages of curly, hard-to-read handwriting, surely there must be some profound observation or meaningful thought, something bigger to life than chores? She was no Iowan Dorothy Parker.

Tomorrow I am headed into the City to pick up a canvas print of that photo I took of Ken and the boys. It's the first photo of mine that has ever been printed on canvas (or bigger than 5x7, really). It's 24x36 or some such and will have a wall to itself. This all pleases me, makes me proud.

Ken got me the Vivian Maier book for Jesus was Born Day and I love it. There are photos in there that give me the chills. There are moments that the photos make me think I've never taken a good photograph in my life. There are many pages where the work is technically inspiring and eye-opening.

There's something about the story of Vivian Maier that haunts. That she lived her life collecting these images, honing her skills, diving so deep into this singular passion and yet no one really knew. That we even know of her work is serendipity. But there are something like 7 billion +/- such stories, right? Everyone living their lives, the depths of their untold stories, the boldness of their actions, fleeting aromatic memories, mental slideshows come and gone, so many feelings and never enough time to understand or share them all. Ah, the human condition is a strange one. And so we love and write and make art, to be in the moment, to share, and to hope to be extraordinary. Perhaps.

But for now, enough philosophyishness, I have clean sheets and tired eyes. Goodnight moon.

crossposted from my tumblr

the question

Sunday 1 Jan 2012 by ~summer~ | 1 Comment
Filed under: none! Tags: small stones

The wall on Telegraph was full of deliberately busted plates. The collection was obviously thrifted, and I thought of standing for hours in musty smelling second hand stores, sorting through piles of plates, looking for 70s gems such as giant mushrooms and golden flowers. Riley stated that the question was, "where are the plates going to break when you hit them?" I thought the question was, "where I can I find a set of those whale plates?"

day 1 small stones

12 Months of 2011

Sunday 1 Jan 2012 by ~summer~ | No Comments
Filed under: my life, photography

1. star detail - fence at Arlington Natl. Cemetary, 2. three heads six arms, 3. colorful pot and cactus sculpture, 4. time, 5. sparkle, 6. Smokey, 7. in the mirror, 8. emigrant wilderness flowers, 9. berries, 10. MLK Memorial at Boston University, 11. November Mums, 12. little angels

then, now

Thursday 29 Dec 2011 by ~summer~ | No Comments
Filed under: my life

Remember when year-end just meant that you had to find a loud place to go and you had to devise a drinking plan, because drinking without a plan is a plan to end up spinning drunk inside your head, and you also had to think about which unergonomic shoes would hurt you the least and if you had a jacket to go with a dress? But now year-end means invoices and booking all of the revenues and performance reviews and that annual report that you’ve been doing since 2004 and just two glass of wine, please, and which ergonomic shoes will I wear and of course I have several jackets now.

Yesterday afternoon I met up with Erin and we went to the wine bar that we always go to and we had wine yes we did. With cheeses. She told me that she and her man set a wedding date and therefore we are going to Kauai in September fuckyeah snorkling.

After the wine bar I went to the grocery store. Not the economical megastore, but rather the little, overpriced, family-owned store that smells like dead fish. I walked in and I saw a guy double-take me. So it goes. In the produce section I was picking a pepper when the same guy says, from behind me, “excuse me!”. I spun around and the stranger was holding out a bumpy and black avocado and he said, “is this ripe?!” My first impulse was to check the avocado for ripeness. My second impulse was to retort, “dude, you’re in your 40s, if you don’t know how to pick out a ripe avocado by now, there ain’t nothin’ I can do to help ya.” That was also my third impulse. I went with my fourth impulse, which was to shrug my shoulders and say, “I don’t know!” and then I turned back around to the wall of mushrooms. I do not touch stranger’s avocados.

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