Cast in white

December 21, 2016

my first memories

were

cast in white

as the glean

hot sun on peeling paint

blinded me

Featured

Jul 29, 2018

questioning maps and names

Jul 29, 2018

We use lines and maps to our advantage. And sometimes to our detriment. Sometimes we use them to make sure people we don't like stay 'out' or don't get to 'have' what we feel entitled to have, like the right to drill for oil on native lands, or the right to have thousands of acres to herd cattle. Or the right to have access to wild space, or the right to live on the side of the city with more real estate value.

Jul 29, 2018

Jul 20, 2018

Citrus : A plant profile

Jul 20, 2018

I remember the daily glass of Orange or Grapefruit juice I used to have with breakfast growing up. The sweetened and concentrated juices got poured in cold glass jars with ice. My mom would feed my sister and I half a Grapefruit each for breakfast sometimes, covered in sugar to mask the bitter flavor and paired with a special spoon that cuts around in-between the fruit and the white inner skin. Around Christmastime, Orange and Grapefruit would ripen in Florida, and the fruits would make their way up through the South and into local stores. It was common to get an orange in your Christmas stocking, a welcome fresh source of Vitamin C in the depths of winter. I also remember religiously coating my already straw-blonde hair with fresh lemon juice in the summer, sometimes leaving dried pulp in the strands in order to speed up the summer sun's lightening process. Often this left my then long strands snow white by August.

Jul 20, 2018

Jul 5, 2018

Joshua Tree photo diary + Sun Ritual + sheepskin tanning

Jul 5, 2018

I visited Joshua Tree for a couple of reasons. I was headed to take a sheepskin tanning class with a friend, Maya Beth. Though I have tanned sheepskins before, so honestly I was needing time with other skills folks, women, and doing something with my hands, with others. Its a part of my soul that hasn't felt as fulfilled these past few years as the road brings you to concentrated times of this work, when my life used to just be working on projects living in community all the time. I've home based some out of Nevada County, CA, but I haven't found many folks to do this kind of work with together. I find myself driving hours and hours chasing that precious time and usually it is pretty worth it.

Jul 5, 2018

Jun 28, 2018

Utah photo diary + Sundial Medicinals' Apothecary

Jun 28, 2018

month earlier this year, which proved beneficial for a lone traveler in the desert. The weather was perfect, it even included a few rainstorms during the journey. If you read my post last year from the same trek, you'll see that I traveled through a heat wave and even got a flat tire out in Canyonlands. During this event I was aided by an elderly experienced boon-docking nudist couple (they weren't nude when they helped me, but they run a nudist campground in Arizona).

Jun 28, 2018

Jun 13, 2018

Creosote Bush, Larrea tridentata: A plant profile

Jun 13, 2018

Larrea is also incredibly efficient at reserving water for itself due to harsh temperatures and long periods without rainfall in the desert. As with other plants that have resinous leaves, Larrea's are adapted to retain precious water for its photosynthetic needs. The resins protect the plant from the harsh environment, and it is these concentrated powerful resins that give the plant its greatest medicinal qualities. Mature plants are extremely tolerant of drought. Rising temperatures and recent droughts in the Southwest have actually increased its populations because of this plant's adaptability. When it does rain, the plant takes as much opportunity as it can to absorb the moisture, and the leaves and new branches almost feel succulent to the touch. When it is hot out and hasn't rained for awhile, you can approach one of these bushes and think that it is practically dead- even the newest of branches will break off with clear tree-limb like 'snap.'

Jun 13, 2018

May 20, 2018

Rose Family Plants: A Plant Profile pt. 1, featuring Multiflora Rose, Rugosa Rose and Blackberry

May 20, 2018

Apr 11, 2018

'The Cottonwoods,' Populus : A plant profile

Apr 11, 2018

I am unusually drawn to Cottonwood. The smell of the sticky golden resin that can be found on its buds, petioles, and sometimes leaves is one of my favorites that exist in our world. This love is so great that I wear a perfume made with Cottonwood resin as a base. I rub the salves I make from this plant on my skin and face just to feel what I feel when I smell it. Its a scent, like all scents, that ignites the bypassing of language and goes directly to that primal place of ancestral connection beyond just our human kin. Maybe I love it for that, for that immediate place it takes me, that kind of forget the small talk and the everyday menial sense of things and be in this feeling that our bodies are one part of a greater whole in time and space.

Apr 11, 2018

Apr 1, 2018

Oil and Rust V: My Grandmothers Gave Me Plants

Apr 1, 2018

Listening to Elizabeth Cotten on repeat the past two days has me missing home, the south, the swampy weather, the spring ephemerals, the smells of a freshly warming greenhouse in spring. I don't think I'll ever not long for home the way my body does for this place, where my ancestors have tended land in different ways for many generations. It really is in my blood. My family has passed on the love of plants generation after generation and the 'green thumb' seems to run in our genes. I just don't feel right not tending plants in some way. There's something to be said about people inheriting the good and bad things our ancestors did into our own bodies.

Apr 1, 2018

Mar 15, 2018

Self-care on the Road #2: Practicalities & a note on churning

Mar 15, 2018

There are giant gas rigs in between America’s ‘fruit basket’ groves, pumping away, with political signs every few miles noting that farming was NOT the cause of water shortages. It's all an immense overwhelming facade of extraction, taking all the water, taking all the topsoil, taking all the gas deep down in the earth. The hunger for churning, for turning over, for turning time into an energy that can be used to propel forward, progressing towards something we do not know what. Propelling is life, but as a species in a culture of excess, we aren't encouraged to use this propelling force we churn wisely or carefully.

Mar 15, 2018