Rainbows and Unicorns

It was a rough week.  When I read other people's blogs, especially people with new babies, and their blogs are always upbeat and positive and full of rainbows and unicorns, and I think, is that how it really is for them?  Doesn't their baby keep them up at night?  Isn't this new job of being a parent hard??  Am I the only one pulling my hair out?  I know the answer.  I know it's hard for everyone, and that some people just deal better than I do, or maybe they choose to keep their blogs full of only positive things, because I guess a lot of people don't want to read Debbie Downer blogs, and that's cool.  I personally like a mix.  I guess I like the real reality, not just the gift wrapped version.  Lately, I just want a dose of reality, other people's realities, not just the pretty picture that is put forth on one's blog.  Boy am I a Debby Downer today huh?
So for the sake of keeping it real, it's been a really rough week here.  Whew, super hard.  Don't I look super happy in that photo above?  If I just posted that photo and wrote about the lovely gallery visits made during that trip, one would think it's all peachy.  That smile is hiding some stress and that baby in the photo is sleeping during the day, which is not something that happens often here.  Instagram has a way of making everything look better anyways doesn't it? 

I am trying to keep things in perspective.  The most horrific things are happening to people all over the world right this minute.  I understand this and I know I am so very lucky and all that matters is that the people I love are happy and healthy,  but sometimes things just get hard.  I think exhaustion can also make things feel worse than they are.   
I write a lot of posts at once and schedule them, so it's funny how to an outsider reading my blog, they have no idea I'm actually almost losing it when I have previously scheduled posts about cute things I found on Etsy or inspiring lines from books. 
That being said, I'm trying to keep my head up, things are not all unicorns and rainbows this week.  Maybe they will be that way next week.  Sometimes all we have is hope.  And Schnoodles.  The end.

Freedom and Love and France

 I was just dreaming about the trip to France we took a few years ago.  We walked the streets of Paris, drank cappucinos and went to museums.  We floated down to Provence where we were surrounded by red poppies and fields of olives and lavender and there was a bed by the pool.  We stayed in a stone mansion, and woke up to baskets of pastries and ate out of perfect dishes and coffee cups with ceramic lids.   There was cheese, oh the cheese.  And love and freedom.  Freedom and love and France.

Faces of Summer

The perfect summer tank.
made by Leah Goren

Carvings

Maskull Lasserre's sculptures are incredible!
via Etsy's twitter feed

Friday Music Muse

Vito's Ordination Song
by Sufjan Stevens

I always knew you
in your mothers arms
i have called your name
i have an idea
placed in your mind
to be a better man
ive made a crown for you
put it in your room
and when the bride groom comes
there will be noise
there will be glad
and a perfect bed
and when you write a poem
i know the words
i know the sounds
before you write it down
only wear your clothes
i wear them too
i wear your shoes
and your jacket too
i always knew you
in your mothers arms
i have called you son
ive made amends
between father and son
or if you havent one
rest in my arms
sleep in my bed
there is a design
to what i did and said

**photo by the always amazing Desiree Dolron

What's in a name?

Infinite Patience should be his middle name.  I don't know what I would do without this man.

Underlined: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would by the flowers herself."

Oh, Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham, The Hours.  This book is a gift, and the fact that from this book came another great book, The Hours by Michael Cunningham, and just when you would think it could not get any better, since books made into movies are almost always a disaster, this glorious book about a book was turned into a most glorious movie about a book, about a book, and one of my favorites-- total perfection.  This is another book that I filled with lines, so it was hard to choose just one.  This was my pick:

The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent's Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained--at last!--the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence--the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light. 

 A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again), at the age of fifty-three, one scarcely needed people any more.  Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent's Park, was enough.  Too much, indeed.  A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning; which both were so much more solid than they used to be, so much less personal.  It was impossible that he should ever suffer again as Clarissa had made him suffer. p. 87

*image from here

Beautiful

This gorgeous Hydrangea Lamp created by Etsian Sarah Foote would provide beautiful, dramatic lighting to any room, don't you think?

Bottles

I miss drinking (lots of) wine on the balcony on hot summer nights. 

MCA

Yesterday Shine and I walked over to the MCA and we saw two incredible shows.  The art therapist in me loved Marc Bradford's paintings, and I fell in love with the Joseph Cornell exhibit.  We sat on a bench in the dark and I nursed my babe in the middle of a Boltanski installation, which was the highlight of my day.  I left feeling rejuvenated and inspired.

 

Tuesday Poetry Post

Sunflower Sutra

by Allen Ginsberg

 

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and

sat down under the huge shade of a Southern

Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the

box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron

pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts

of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,

surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of

machinery.

The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun

sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that

stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves

rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums

on the riverbank, tired and wily.

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray

shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting

dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--

--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,

memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem

and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes

Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black

treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the

poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel

knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck

and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the

past--

and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,

crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog

and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like

a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,

soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays

obliterated on its hairy head like a dried

wire spiderweb,

leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures

from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster

fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O

my soul, I loved you then!

The grime was no man's grime but death and human

locomotives,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad

skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black

mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance

of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--

modern--all that civilization spotting your

crazy golden crown--

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless

eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the

home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar

bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards

of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely

tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what

more could I name, the smoked ashes of some

cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the

milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs

& sphincters of dynamos--all these

entangled in your mummied roots--and you there

standing before me in the sunset, all your glory

in your form!

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent

lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye

to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited

grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden

monthly breeze!

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your

grime, while you cursed the heavens of the

railroad and your flower soul?

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a

flower? when did you look at your skin and

decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?

the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and

shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a

sunflower!

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me

not!

So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck

it at my side like a scepter,

and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul

too, and anyone who'll listen,

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread

bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all

beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed

by our own seed & golden hairy naked

accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black

formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our

eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive

riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening

sitdown vision.

Allen Ginsberg Berkeley, 1955

*image from here

Weekend

Our weekend included, in no particular order,  a grown up dinner at our friend's new house, (where baby girl was perfect the entire time)  a drive to Michigan, a hellish and thankfully highly unusual Friday night which took us five hours to get our babe to sleep,  and a dinner at GT Fish and Oyster where once again, Shine just chilled out like the cool kitten she is.

Schnoodles

Can my little man get any cuter?  Nope.

Color Code

Having some fun with my necklaces.

Breastfeeding Bars

After I had the baby my sister-in-law flew in from California to help me out.  She brought the most delicious power bars she made herself that I quickly became addicted to.  I started calling them breastfeeding bars because I would eat one (or two) every two hours when I was waking up in the middle of the night to feed my little one.  They are super delicious and healthy.  She sent me the recipe and I've been making them ever since.

Power Bars

1 tablespoon coconut oil (or regular butter)


1 1/4 cup toasted nuts (pecans, walnuts or almonds) chopped


2/3 cup (unsweetened) shredded coconut


1 1/4 cups rolled oats


½ cup oat bran

1 1/2 cups unsweetened crisp brown rice cereal

1 ½ cups dried fruit (blueberries, mango, cherries..) chopped 


1 cup brown rice syrup


¼ cup almond or peanut butter

1/4 cup natural cane sugar


1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

½ teaspoon sea salt

Grease a baking pan with the coconut oil. If you like thick power bars, opt for an 8 by 8-inch pan; for thinner bars, use a 9 by 13-inch pan.

Mix the oats, oat bran, toasted nuts, coconut, dried fruit and the cereal, together in a large bowl and set aside.

Combine the rice syrup, nut butter, sugar, salt, and vanilla in a small saucepan over medium heat and stir constantly as it comes to a boil and thickens just a bit, about 4 minutes. Pour the syrup over the oat mixture and stir until it is evenly incorporated.

Spread into the prepared pan and cool to room temperature before cutting into whatever size bars you desire.

Makes 16 to 24 bars.

Adapted from Heidi Swanson, Super Natural Cooking