The Girl Who Married A Bear

The Red Queen

2012-01-30T04:41:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends, welcome to a frivolous monday. Downstairs my blond little sister is cooking a chicken, plying C. with mugs of coffee, blasting Bowerbirds, a favorite band of all of ours.

The whole weekend we've felt like a bunch of teenagers playing house, wandering aimlessly, djing from our ipods, dancing at other people's grown up homes, falling asleep to the sound of a torrential downpour in the back of our car, crashing at the house my sis is caretaking, complete with a bathtub and two cats; playing games, reading astrology books, celebrating, drinking mimosas. We have no plans, no responsibilities, no money, but endless time. Everything seems easy, every day a party.

And so I have nothing deep or meaningful to say, so content I am in this moment, getting ready to watch movies, leaf through books, waiting more friends to arrive. On these long nights of this bright midwinter, I sometimes feel like in a dream.

Instead of words, I offer you these images, eerie and dream-like themselves, from this little shop by an Olympia girl. There is something so Scandinavian about them, they remind me of my own childhood somehow, when the world was very young and there was still magic in it.

(I bought this cardigan here for Brigit last summer.)

Sweet dreams.

Snow falling on cedars

2012-01-24T16:25:00.000-08:00

...and everything else. That's to say we've been snowed in for the better part of last week. No driving, no internet, just the quiet woods and us sitting by the fire.

I don't know whether ya'll have missed me, but I sure as heck have missed you guys. It's fun to come back to slew of beauteous postings and fun surprises, but a little intimidating too. I got to get on this getting my computer fixed thing.

The snow days just kind of illustrated this perfectly. I felt a little cut off from the world. Not just my friends and neighbors, all hunkered up in their homes, but also the wider world of news and weather, of faraway friends and online pen pals.

As much as I love reading and scribbling notes and writing my journal, this blog has become an important outlet for my ideas, my obsessions and my connections to some of the most wonderful womyn I know.

As I go about my daily routine about a million ideas for posts wander in and out of my mind, serious and frivolous, but without an outlet to type them up, they wither and vanish into wherever it is that ideas go when you don't use them. The same goes for my endless notebooks for story ideas, that simply don't translate in my awkward long-hand. And while other endeavors have flourished in this time, kitted hats and mufflers, exciting collaborations, I honestly feel off balance without writing and publishing things every few days.

I used to think that I kept this log just for my own little self, but now I find that I miss the written exchange of thoughts it provides.

And where at first I was curious to see what a little brake from computers might do, especially the positive changes it might offer, I'm now purely frustrated by how its hampering my creativity. Living and learning, I guess.

In the absence of such Universal Touring Machines, we have however whiled away the idle hours with keeping the homefires burning, making infusions, doing crafts, sledding and marveling at how different our little world looks under a light dusting of snow. Oh magical, glorious snow.

As a matter of fact, C. and I used some of our idle time in calculating how many snowdays a kid from this area might have in his or her whole childhood on average and came up with less than twenty.

Now where I'm from you have an average of at least three full months of snow, so about a 100 days a year when there's snow on the ground. So between the ages of two and twelve (which we approximated to be the ages when you can really enjoy all goodness of snow, from being only semi in charge of your limbs to when you become an uppity teenager.) an average Finnish kid gets about a thousand snow days!

For all the frosty forests and endless snowdrifts I've experienced in my North Country life, I've hardly known how joyous a little snow can be when you live without it most of the year.

And I don't ever remember school being canceled because there was snow. Even when I had to dig my way through drifts higher than my knees to get there. If it snowed a lot over night, the city would only get to plowing the streets by the time I had to get to school, in effect piling snow onto the sidewalk, making kids crawl over high piles of it to cross the streets, all the while lugging skies and poles, with skates hanging from their shoulders to balance their school bags.

That's right, folks, in Finland in the winter ice skating and skiing are pretty much the only options for gym class. No cozy indoor sports like basketball and balancing on a beam. Instead, we got to ski over the frozen lake on a Friday afternoon class and if you didn't make it back by the time school was over, well, that was your own damn fault.

Now, never having been an athletic child, I already hated everything about school sports, but the winter just about killed me. For years I remember just drudging along on my skis, my fingers numb with cold and my nose constantly running. Ice skating was another nightmare, imagine a sport where your lack of grace instantly gets you broken tailbone, or in the very list frost bite on your toes.

Even if the rumor did have it that if it got colder than -22 degrees Fahrenheit, you didn't have to go skating during phys.ed. none of my sadist gym teachers ever acknowledged such limitations to the human endurance.

Now I keep praying the Weather Gods for a long enough cold snap to form thick enough ice to test out our "new" Goodwill skates. Out here in the land of near perpetual precipitation my few pitiful skating moves make a winter athlete well above the curve. Time's they are a changin'...

I'm not alone in my snow bliss, not by a long shot. Everyone loves it: the kids who get to miss school, the parents who get to miss work, the animals that get to frolic in it and sample it, stare at the altered landscape in wonder.

It is the rare opportunity to bust out your sleds and skis and...boats and hurtle down abandoned hillsides, or even roads now devoid of the offending automobiles.

Snow gives our surroundings a strange, otherworldly sheen, accentuating some features, while erasing others. There's a sense of newness and cleanness about it.

The most fun though, we figured, is following animal tracks, finding where the otters come out of the water, or where the raccoons wander at night, or what patterns we ourselves leave in our wake.

Sometimes you can track a big lumbering animal for a while.

And if you thought snow just a nuisance to practicality, think again.

As generations of Scandahuvian womyn well know, it makes for the most excellent alternative to washing your rugs.

And without a computer, what better things I have to do, eh?

You see, I am alive. I am alive.

2012-01-05T16:50:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, friends! The time of resolutions, promises to better the self, sometimes empty, sometimes so fulfilling. Not one for making them for the fear of braking them, I did declare some continuous goals to work on last year and I'm happy to say that most of them fell into practice; we worked at self-sufficiency and simplicity, with varying degrees of success (and lots of lessons learned), strived for being more satisfied with what we have, bought fewer things and helped others and volunteered when we could.

(My favorite picture from last year!)

Had I known this time last year what the future had in store for us all I might have witheld even these small goals and simply woved to survive the best I could, but thankfully you gotta live life to see it unfold.

I can't say that I'm sad to leave behind that year of turmoil, pain, animosity, disasters, upheaval, shake-ups and brake-ups, but I also believe that these events, however painful at the time, are necessary for our growthl. For every earth shaking quake and nuclear disaster there is an Arab Spring and an American Autumn, it seems. The flipside of the fear and madness of this world is all the beauty, the connection, love, nourishing, will to change, revolution, be it personal, or political or both.

Blogs and blogging often gets blamed (and sometimes for good reason!) for sugar-coating the gritty painfulness of reality, showing only the good and leaving out the bad, but I like to think that by sharing the good, sweet things in our everyday lives we can learn to appreciate them more ourselves.

So I've gathered here some of my favorite images and times from last year-and-lo-and-behold if it hasn't been a truly magical one, in spite all the darkness and hardships.

From epic birthdays to epic roadtrips...

To all my Moon Sisters.

Spring greens, summer bounty, and animal friends...

Faraway friends and favorite bands...

Island adventures and slow travel...

Dancing all night and walking all day...

There's this prayer that I learned somewhere in a book once, that I like to say to myself in moments of doubt and said often in this last year:

You see, I am connected to the earth,

You see, I am connected to the sky,

You see, I am connected to the people,

You see, I am alive.

I am alive.

Looking at these pictures reminds of that. What I thought of as a though time, is now just happy memories.

To a brand new year of memories, my dears!

Solstice

2011-12-21T12:46:00.000-08:00

Spirits of The North,

I call you in on this,

the longest night of the year

You circle the Earth
connecting all of this hemisphere
From Tuvalumiut, to Kallaalit Nunnaat, to Kautokeino, Murmansk,
The Bering Sea, to Nunavak and Kodiak
Who connect us to the first People
who came to this land over a bridge of ice
And remind us of their wisdom
and all the wisdom of our elders
As we turn inward tonight
You remind us that even in the coldest places there is warmth under the snow
and new life waiting to emerge
That even in the darkest places have their own mysterious light
To begin this long night, to usher in your season
I light for you this small fire

Warm Solstice Blessings, everyone! I'll be thinking of you on this long night. And the winner of the giveaway is Jenny Day (email me your details and I'll put our order in.)!

You went in for a winter hat and came out with the Height Street Headband...

2011-12-14T08:32:00.000-08:00

...or maybe that was me. Ever since I first "met" this lovely lady through Wardrobe Remix, I've been gazing longingly at her beautiful crotchet pieces, which she herself models with such flare. For literally years I've dreamed of owning a Softspoken Bubble Beret.

And what's stopping me exactly, with the totally affordable prices and endless color selections that Rachael offers with her beautiful handmade wares? Just the latter.

Is it wrong for me to want to own a beret in every color?

I think not. It is however, entirely unacceptable that I have not been able to make up my damn mind for three whole years. It's just that all the colors are so amazing that it is way too hard to decide whether one should get theirs in a practical, gorgeously subdued charcoal, or a bright, dazzling sunshine yellow, which would make me smile, but might not go with every outfit ever. So you can see where my difficulty in buying a piece I've actually wanted for aeons might stem from.

But darn it, if it isn't cold, what with the winter truly beginning on Solstice and my head needs to be stylishly covered.

So that's where you come in, folks. Benefit from my utter indecisiveness! Support an awesome artisan! If you help me pick a color, I'll get you one too. It's a Solstice Giveaway!

All you need to enter is pick out your favorite Bubble Beret and post your choice in the comments. The winner will be drawn and announced on Solstice Eve (12.21.11) and the beret will arrive on your doorstep whenever Rachael has the time to take the hook in her nimble fingers, probably after the new year.

While we're not doing much Holiday-giftage this year (instead, we're renting a house here on the Island for the whole family to be together in), were I in need of gifts to buy, I would look no further than my favorite etsy shops. I love holiday craftfairs, but I usually need to leave them after browsing just a few booths, lest I succumb to total overstimulation of the senses.

Whether it be online or in your neighborhood, supporting crafty entrepreneurs like Rachael, is to me just putting your money where your mouth is, getting those things we need, or want (I'm not so deluded as to claim that all my fancies are needs), from independent businesses, rather than big box stores.

Buying goods from small businesses is all part of that micro-economy, where we keep our limited funds circulating amongst our own. My feeling is that what we can't make ourselves, or don't want to do without, we should get from those who can fulfill our needs with beauty and passion, give us inspiration along with our purchases.

Personally I can't think of a better hat-maker to receive my money, than a girl who shares my love of Richard Brautigan, has a rocking personal style, a delightfully dark sense of humor and activist opinions to boot, not to mention a shop full of amazing goodies.

And yes, I've already decided to purchase a Height Street Headband in red for next summer, for no practical reason, other than that I'm in awe of its design.

What strikes your gift getting/giving fancy this season? Are you making your own, visiting craftfairs, or shopping online?

Gifts

2011-12-12T13:48:00.000-08:00

It never seizes to amaze me that I now live somewhere where there's daylight in December, even sunshine and not an inch of snow on the ground. Where there can be T-shirt days in midwinter. I know that down here winter is only supposed to begin at Solstice, but I cannot help but think it the season's midpoint, the moment when we're halfway to spring.

Speaking of amazing things, the generosity of folks who've never even met me in person, always brings tears of utter joy to my eyes. Last month when I wrote that I was ill, a lovely reader, gypsy vintage seller and woman of the woods, Sheri, offered me a remedy in the form of a medicinal mushroom, Chaga, which grows on birch trees in her Northwoods, much like in my native land. In Finland, it is known as Pakurikääpä, an ancient folk remedy.

Upon receiving my contact details, she then promptly shipped me not only the dried Chaga, but an array of other lovely goodies, mushroom-themed clothes, two lovely mushroom mugs and this gorgeous paisley skirt among them. Receiving this her package was a medicinal treat in and of itself.

Wondering what those magical looking winter fruit hanging behind me in the tree are? Custard fruits. Apparently you let them go to where they seem almost rotten, soft and gooey and they taste like custard. I can't wait to try mine.

Togehter, these little blessings and surprises make me smile.

After gathering such fruit and relishing Sheri's healing tea, I came home to yet another gift, from these shores this time.

Smelt! A tasty little fish that a friend has been gifting us with. Like most little fish, best rolled in rye flour, white pepper and salt and fried in butter, then gobbled whole, bones, tails and all.

Without a computer to record my thoughts on, I've been doing a lot of silent meditation, painstaking writing on paper and revitalizing my typewriter skills. I try to look on these too as a gift, though I feel my creativity a little impeaded by this lack.
For a few weeks I was able to journal and meditate in this lovely space, new to me, though close to my own home. A beautiful, mysterious piece of land that will soon belong to some young next door neighbors, who might just be open to bees in their orchard. Having them around feels like a gift too.

Though there are plenty of young folks on the Islands now, a big change from when I first came here, not many live in our immediate neighborhood and we're looking forward to spending more time with them at their magical digs.

Their property is bathed in light, its beautiful cob-structures inspiring dreams of one's own little cob house someday, artistic, inexpensive and gorgeous.

As we enter the Solstice/Christmas/Birthday season, I cherish these last quiet fall days, time to observe and experience deeply, to craft and ponder.

The unexpected gift of the moon's sickle, or a flock of Junkos in the field...

Happy December!

Candy Girl

2011-11-30T19:10:00.000-08:00

This is a love story. If you don't possess a strong stomach for girl-crush, or are some sort of cynical, skeptical person, please stop reading now.

You all know, I'm sure, how you sometimes meet someone, another girl and are instantly smitten with them. In kindergarten you wanted to emulate them; wear the same pigtails, the same corduroy dress, eat your Oreos the same way, and sometimes sadly, when rejected by them pretend to scorn them, even as you secretly admired them from beneath your bangs.

In high school you wanted to be in their posse, go to their parties and sleep-overs and take their dares from dyeing your hair green to hijacking the school radio.

Even now, every once in a while you're overcome by the heady feeling of meeting a girl you click with instantly, whether it's in a classroom where she just put the lecturer to the spot with her witty opinion, or seeing here across the room at a party, dressed in that perfect hippie dress dancing like a loon to the sweet sounds of the Smiths.

When I first laid eyes on Missa of Thrift Candy, in the murky, quirky, pigeon-toed depths of Wardrobe Remix I experienced that moment of "oh-my-gosh-she's-so-cool-I-totally-want-be-her friend-I-wonder-if-she'll-like-me!". Needless to say fell for her hard and fast. Having always been the odd duck out dressing-wise wherever I went, it was a kind of a revelation to find such a kindred spirit.

From that day on Missa's photostream became my very own street-style website, a place where inspiration comes easy.

Lucky for me, the feeling appeared to be mutual, and after an embarrassingly giddy exchange of comments, we proceeded to email, packages, letters and finally meeting in person. Now, three and a half years later, I count her among my dearest friends.

Though physically (tall-blond-skinny and short-plump-dark) and personality wise (Missa's quiet, a little shy and thoughtful and I'm...well kind of a obnoxious loudmouth.) we're actually quite opposite, the instant kinship I felt to her turned out to be totally real.

As I've mentioned before, if there's one thing this blog adventure has proven to me, it's that the clothes we wear can be a window into our personality; beneath those mutually admired frocks there might be a girl who loves the same 90s bands, recommends you the best books and to whom you can tell your troubles like the big sister you never had.

To me, these pictures of some of my favorite Missa-outfits are proof of just that.

Even still, it's kind of a trip to explain to other people how exactly I met this mysterious "Missa" character (as well as well all the rest of our California girls, or for that matter our girls from all around the world). The unfortunate folks who don't have internet friends, blog-friends, penpals, or Moon Sisters, can't quite fathom how it is possible to be good pals with someone you've never met, or even only met a handful of times.

I try to tell them that ours is an old-fashioned kind of relationship: we "write letters", we share packages, we "exchange" pictures. Though unable to spend physical time together, we share our little everyday moments, thoughts, book recommendations and small insights online. Sometimes I feel that I'm more deeply entrenched in the lives of Missa and my other blog-friends, than those of people I've known much longer, but who don't blog.

Since I live on the other side of the world from many of my friends or family, I know full well that physical presence is no measurement of affection, understanding, or involvement. Actually, I often wish that all of my faraway friends blogged, so that I could follow their lives and thoughts more closely and intimately.

In this world of constant, instant communication, most people seem to have lost the ability to write about their lives to others in a cohesive manner. Instead of epistolary explanations, I often catch only the shortest facebook snippets of my friend's lives, receive only the most cursory descriptions of their emotions, hardships and triumphs in bi-yearly emails.

Sometimes I find I know more about Missa's day-to-day existence than some of my best friends back home and though this makes me a little sad for those friendships, it also makes me remember that I have to strive to keep those connections vital and lively, part of the every day reality of both parties.

All I have to say is that thank goodness for these world-wide-webs for bringing us and our "frivolous" habits together.

I feel very blessed by Missa's friendship and consider our meeting nothing short of serendipitous, an unlikely event that has added so much to my life, as well as a whole, ever-widening circle of other wonderful, powerful, thoughtful women.

Time for girl crush confessions ya'll!

Ps./PSA: Because of the nature of my computer sitch right now, there's not going to be a lot of outfit/photo posts, since I gotta figure out where to unload my photos. Also I know we skipped a "Serious Friday post" and since those take quite a bit of research I can't I'll actually be able to post them every Friday until I get my computer back from the shoppe, so just bear with me now. All my girl-crushy love,
Milla

...of impermanance and pain.

2011-11-23T17:25:00.001-08:00

Remember how my computer died a few weeks ago? Traveled to oblivion for no apparent reason? Yeah, well I'm starting to believe that A**** has some sort of a planned obsolescence chip implanted in its wares, because shortly after I scheduled my last post, C's computer also took a leap off the digital cliff, albeit in the form of something called "a kernel panic".

That's right, even though I obviously have access to one, I am currently without a computer of my own and all that this implies.

"Well, good." Was C's rather Zen response. He is of the opinion that we don't really need those damn things for anything anyway, that they're worse than TV and anything we do on them could be done better with something else. Check the weather with a barometer. Read a newspaper. Play music. Write a letter.

In principle I agree with this, of course. We are of the generation that lived without these Universal Turing Machines for more of our lives than with them. We know people who barely touch them. I myself have been using them less frivolously (well, I guess that depends on your definition of the word) lately. All the music in the world is not my *tunes. My memories are not on *photo. My friendships are not my email. I'm not my facepoke (as anyone who's friends with me on facepoke can plainly tell, since I never use the damn thing anymore). These truths are simple and self-evident.

And no. A computer is not an essential. One could argue that it's not even that useful. Not as useful as a wood stove-heated iron, or a shed roof, a hammer, a kettle, a saw, a whisk, a fern leaf, a small porous mushroom...

And yet. I'd be lying if I told you I took this second computer calamity with an equal calm.

Never mind the fact that said machine crapped out on me in the middle of a newly started short story, which at twenty minutes and two pages in, I had not had time to back-up yet, or that I lost some glorious shots of my cat, possibly for forever.

The somewhat epic freak-out had little to do with the million and one things I could easily think up as reasons for screaming "But! I! Need! A! Computer!". I mean, I need one to keep in touch with my family and friends, scattered across the globe. I need it to write. And yes C., I do need it to blog. These are all good reasons.

I need a computer, obviously not to survive, or even get through an average day, but because it has become a useful tool for me to relate to the world, to arrange my thoughts about what is going on around me. Seriously.

When I was little, my mother always had a typewriter. First the regular kind and then, the more fleeting kind, an electric one. I remember luxuriant feeling of typing with the electric typewriter. How smoothly it moved, how it was empowering to know that I could erase things, unmake words as well as make them. Still, it did not move at the speed of thought.

In eight grade I took the first computer science class ever offered at my school. The lesson plan consisted of teaching us how to learn programming on a language long since obsolete. The goal of the class was to code ones and zeroes into making a owl sitting in tree wink. This took all semester.

Luckily for me this surprisingly arduous task was to be completed in pairs. Since I was completely uninterested with ones and zeroes I let my then best friend who was good at math, do the coding while I dicked around on the computer next to her. Mostly I used the innovative application created by the Soviet computer scientist Alexey Pajitnov. That's Tetris folks.

Then one day I discovered another game, which called for the player to type certain words and sentences at an ever increasing speed. Your fingers were supposed to do this in a particular configuration with each one assigned with particular keys of its own.

Over the semester I got quite good at this game and after a while I found that using those keys and all of my fingers, rather than just two, I was able to type as fast as I could think. This discovery sort of blew my mind. It made writing out your thoughts, observations and emotions infinitely more satisfying. That's right. Being able to type totally changed my life.

I relate to the world the first and foremost through words. Reading and writing to me are the highest from of communication. Spoken words as beautiful and passionate as they may be, so often fly out carelessly, inarticulately, filled with makeshift information and ill-remembered facts.

Perhaps because of this, I particularly cherish these relationships I have that are so dependent on typed words, both of frivolity and careful thought, peppered with images and hyperlinks and snippets of music, at the mercy of the fickle filaments of the internet.

For all the supposed disconnect this machine supposedly offers, I have found a correlating connection. For every wasted hour on the internet, there's a horde of words I want to hold onto, or a crucial piece of information unearthed.

For instance, in what now seems a rather ironic twist of fate, I found this uncollected Gary Snyder poem that rather more eloquently explains my feelings on my "need" for a computer.

Why I take good care of my Macintosh computer

Because it broods under its hood like a perched falcon,
Because it jumps like a skittish horse and sometimes throws me,
Because it is poky when cold,
Because plastic is a sad, strong material that is charming to rodents,
Because it is flighty,
Because my mind flies into it through my fingers,
Because it leaps forward and backward, is an endless sniffer and searcher,
Because its keys click like hail on a boulder,
And it winks when it goes out,
And puts word-heaps in hoards for me, dozens of pockets of gold under boulders in streambeds, identical seedpods strong on a vine, or it stores bins of bolts;
And I lose them and find them,
Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly laid out and then highlighted and vanish in a flash at “delete,” so it teaches of impermanence and pain;
And because my computer and me are both brief in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates,
Because I have let it move in with me right inside the tent,
And it goes with me out every morning;
We fill up our baskets, get back home,
Feel rich, relax, I throw it a scrap and it hums.

-Gary Snyder-

I need a computer to type. I need it to stay connected.

What do you need yours for? Would you be willing to do without?

A letter from the kid himself

2011-11-18T21:39:00.000-08:00

The Sundance Kid that is. As you may know, I'm quite moved by letters from my favorite activist causes and I got to say, it does tickle my vanity a bit when none other than the infamous outlaw calls me "Dear Friend". All jokes aside though, what Robert Redford really wanted to talk to me about was the sadly NOT infamous Pebble Mine. And since he might not have your address (God only knows how he has mine...) I'm here to tell you all about it.

The odds are that unless you are on an environmental causes mailing list, have seen the excellent documentary Red Gold, or have a small-time fisherman friend you may not have heard about Pebble Mine. Though it's a cause celebrity, it's not exactly a cause celebre. Yet.

The proposed Pebble gold and copper mine would be one of the biggest (if not the biggest!) open pit mines in the world. Its proposed location lays on top of the watershed of the salmon rivers that lead into Bristol Bay, possible the last place on earth where the salmon run remains pristine. It is, by and large, an intact eco-system, where people are, mostly, just one more mammal part of the natural order of things.

Pebble would require massive industrial infrastructure, including but not limited to, five damns to retain its waste water, bigger in scale than China's Three Gorges Dam. In addition to this, the waste water pools and the damns that would hold them would be located in an area prone to earthquakes.

Now does this sound like a good idea?

Right. So why is the EPA letting this project go ahead? Aren't they here to protect us, the American People, and the natural resources we jointly hold from exploitation by large corporations with dubious motives? Yes. The italics do stand for sarcasm. The EPA might, for all its interest and efficiency in protecting the environment, stand for The Environmental Plundering Agency, just as BLM should really be an acronym for The Bureau of Land Mismanagement and DNR The Department of Nature Rape.

As Red Gold rather eloquently points out, it would be an entirely different thing if the mining industry had a damn near spotless record, or even a good record for managing the catastrophes it incurs. Perhaps then it would be fair to consider Northern Dynasty's (the multi-national corporation planning the mine) pleas for an unbiased review of their plans. The environmental impact of previous open pit mining projects and the utter lack of interest in cleaning up the messes they've collectively created, don't exactly reassure one of their good intentions. For all its history, mining has been a dirty business in one way or another, but recently these companies have only ramped up the scale of their indifference to the environment.

Red Gold follows the lives of a variety of folk connected to the watershed, but also lets the industry and its representatives have their say. In fact some of the more succinct reasons to oppose the mine come from the mouths of the company's employees, most notably a mining engineer giggling to himself about how really the mine is a rich gold deposit, but the company is ostensibly using the excuse of mining copper, more important for instance, to all of our every day electronics, as a reason to open Pebble.

While the movie covers a lot of the ground and presents different viewpoints, it is sponsored by fishing interests and must be taken in with a grain of salt. That grain of salt however, does not negate the films central premise of the compromised motives of the EPA, the absolute foolishness of putting the fate of our collective lands in the hands of multinational corporations.

I heartily recommend the film to anyone, not just because of the information it deposits about the proposed mine, but also for its uplifting portrayal of the lives of folk who oppose it, a diverse collection of people from Native fishermen, to newcomers from the lower 48. It is a beautiful film, both in spirit and cinematography and in spite its serious topic, it manages to elate rather than depress the viewer.

Though Pebble may appear a problem on a smaller scale than, say the Keystone XL-pipeline (Yippee! We Won! Something good can happen when good people get together and believe in it!), perhaps a problem concerning only Bristol Bay, Alaska, or the Northwest (we know and love a lot of fishermen down here), it is fundamentally part of the same attack that large corporations are mounting against communities, city governments, public lands, freedom and safety of private citizens and fundamentally, our society as a function of representative democracy.

On a spiritual plain, Pebble is just another facet of the same battle that we're fighting against the Tar Sands Pipeline, or West Virginia mountain top removal mining. Here is a decision we, the people, and our representatives have to make right here, right now. It isn't one of those environmental, human or spiritual atrocities that we can lament in retrospect. It is happening at this very moment and unlike the past calamities, so clear now with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, we can stop it.

So if you can, watch the film, check out the information and then just sign here, here or write a letter to your representative. (We here in Washington have certainly been proud of the work State Senator Maria Cantwell has done on the issue.)

Though I know that they are not always you guys' favorites (judging from the amount of comments)I'm planning to post about some serious topic such as this each friday from here on out; be it simplicity (I finally made headway on my food post while I was ill), environmental causes, or musings on some social topic. These posts could take the form of reviews on documentaries we've watched, book recommendations, or discussions like we did with the first simplicity post.

These ideas and the actions that they inspire are just as much part of my view on life as everything else you see on this log, and to be able to share them here with you is important to me.

Thoughts, questions, comments?

Hot and heavy pumpkin pie, chocolate candy, Jesus Christ, ain't nothing pleased me more than you...

2011-11-13T22:41:00.000-08:00

Being confined to the house can be awfully boring and intellectually stimulating in turns, but the upside is that there's tons of fun little things to do that we've had a hard time getting to when not ill. And the best part for sure is the license to drop everything to take an unscheduled nap.

In addition to nodding off regularly, I've written a few short pieces, chipped a little away at a big piece and even finished a couple of my 20 odd lingering blog posts. Don't be surprised if posting pace suddenly doubles. Then again don't be surprised if it doesn't.

First in the long line of "things I've been meaning to post about" is of course Mary's beautiful creation, The First Annual Terralectualism Bioregional Swap.

When we got home from the Fair three (!) weeks ago, what was waiting in our package-sized mailbox if not a treasure trove from Elizabeth. As excited as I was for the swap in general, my excitement was only compounded upon finding that she was to be my swap partner. Since she found my log and started commenting on it, I'd been wanting to get to know her a little better and what more perfect opportunity than this swap.

As a side note, I have to add that, man, it feels good to wear something other than bed-clothes. My philosophy has always been that if you have to wear clothes, might as well wear ones that reflect your personality and artistic temperament. Or to put it in plainer words: if you have to wear tights, they might as well be yellow. But you don't want to hear about that. You just want to know what was in that package.

Behold the multi-bioregional cat-en-tat!

No but seriously, M and Elizabeth did not send me a cat. They sent me hand-dyed yearn, home-made toffee and plum jam, Irish heather (the sage of the heath?), earrings, an angel for my christmas branch, pictures, art and cards, a beautiful dress and a scarf that C. promptly put to use...oh endless treasures!

The box was equal parts scrap book, a little museum, the perfect market stand...it had most everything I could have dreamed off and many things I never would have thought of.

My favorite has got to be this portrait of us by little M. I look forward to framing it and a bunch of other swap art from little girls and boys around our circle and hanging it on my walls. My own small gallery.

There was also another very special piece (very special among such special things) in the package that I'm waiting to show you when the occasion arises.

Thank you so much little M and Elizabeth! And, of course our fairy godmother Mary. If you want to see what I gave Elizabeth and M, here's a link to her post about the swap. If you haven't visited her blog before, you're in for a treat, her art is dreamy and her posts very thoughtful and inspiring.

While I've been ill, I've received so many blessings and such kindness from near and far, that it's been damn near impossible to even pity my poor sick self. Packages from friends and family, juice from my co-workers and two jars of chicken soup from my friend Julie, who is so kind you can taste it in her soup.

With friends like these, it's almost worth it to get really sick. Also, the cat really approves of this lazy, do nothing all day lifestyle.

I did manage to complete a couple of food-preservation projects during this time. First, there was the all-night adventure of bake-apple-sauce, which is just apple sauce baked in the oven.

Canning projects always take way longer than I think they're going to, so that what was going to be a few hours ends with you trying to learn ukulele cords, or finger-knitting around midnight while you wait for the last batch to come out of the canning pot.

The sauce turned out good, but I accidentally put a little too much sugar into the last batch. I have a very low tolerance for sugar and I like the taste and tartness of the fruits themselves, so that was a little disappointing. The actual baking of your apples first though, I highly recommend.

My second project was a kind of a fluke. I had a few leftover tomatoes that had been slowly ripening, and Mary's lacto-fermented ketchup inspired me to try making this American staple myself. Sadly mine's not fermented, but it turned out shockingly good, if a little spicy. (I accidentally used hot peppers instead of sweet. I'm having a lot of cooking-related accidents it seems. I blame it on that cough syrup...)

I've always thought of ketchup as one of those consumer goods not worth making yourself, since we hardly ever use it, but it was so easy and fun, not to mention a welcome change to the grind of canning salsa and pasta sauce, that I think I'll definitely do it again.

Home-made it seems, is always tastier, no exception for junk food.

And breakfast is the most important meal of the day. You didn't think I was going to stop posting pictures of my cat?

After all that downtime indoors, it's been amazing to have our strength back, going on little strolls, harvesting the last bounty of Fall. This has been a good year for Madrone Fruit, the trees are simply laden with it.

As much as I love eating local produce, growing food, learning about farming and striving slowly towards more self-sufficiency trough homesteading, I'm even more drawn to learning to make use of nature's wild bounty.

It's not only fun to gather this profusion of wild edibles, but also to figure out how to eat it, what recipes to incorporate it in, how to process it and how to enjoy its unexpected flavors.

The Northwest is so abundant with wild foods that one can hardly resist the urge to gather them. Almost any time of year, there's something to fill a jar or just your pocket with. The shortest stroll turns into an expedition for edibles.

Though a little tart and dry, I like the flavor of Madrone Fruit fresh off the tree and some food hipsters even seem to think it's a superfood. Whatever. I'd like to try preserving it like rosehip and mountain ash berries, a jelly with the seeds still in it. I'm also trying a bunch for tea.

The day of this particular gathering trip was very stormy, the wind chasing the clouds so fast they did not have time to rain on us and the weather changing from moment to moment.

We wandered around the park aimlessly, just feeling happy to be together, alive, on this blessed piece of earth.

There's so much perspective one can gain from illness and hardship, a clarity that really makes you appreciate that which is right there in front of you each moment; a mushroom, a mountain top tugging at a cloud, a cluster of red berries.

As Sheri so gently reminded me in a message she wrote in response to my sick post, music can heal the soul and the soul is needed the heal the body. So I took her advice and put on some of my favorite good time jams, most notably Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros.

I dare you not to smile and get that warm, fuzzy loving feeling inside. And possibly flail your arms around like a loon.

A few weeks ago, Heather wrote about that ridiculous, giddy feeling of still having a crush on your own husband and how wonderful that is. I think I know just how she feels.

The best part of this whole miserably being-sick- together-extravaganza has been for us having lots of quiet snuggly movie watching, cat-loving bed-time together.

Being married can be hard sometimes, butting heads over the same small things time and time again, but damn if it isn't the most awesome thing in this life too. To me Home embodies that feeling.

I also love how filled with pure, naive, uncynical happiness the song is. It makes me wish people, myself included, could let go of their hang-ups and burdens more often, and just be well, happy.

If there's anyone I've met that knows the art of doing so, it is definitely Heather herself.

Happy Birthday Love!

Rainbow Dream Family Faire

2011-11-07T22:34:00.000-08:00

Friends, travelers, Moon Sisters, thank you all for your kind suggestions, remedies and well-wishes on my last post. In addition to the outpouring of loving kindness here several awesome ladies have also sent me lengthy emails about their wellness tips. Needless to say, I'm quite overwhelmed with gratitude. (And will reply to those emails in my wholly untimely manner;)

I'd also like to sooth the minds of those of you who were worried that in the spirit of some cultish resistance to modern medicine I was wholly abandoning the very idea that antibiotics might be what the doctor ordered (Pun. Intended.).

Fret not. Though I've been very sick, I have quite a good sense of my body and my intuition says I can clear up this mess without them. And just to prove my non-aversion to "traditional" medicine I'm totally downing a ton of controlled substance strength high fructose corn syrup cough medicine, which is doing a marvelous job at what no herbal cough remedy could.

All these amazing responses have got me thinking that we should have a whole conversation on wellness and illness and I will start assembling my notes for such a post. Sounds like you all have much to share on these topics. It's been so uplifting to read how thoughtfully and fiercely you regard health. Thank you. Again. So much.

But for now, I want to whisk you off to a magical, wondrous land, far far away from these earthly troubles, also known as: BARTER FAIR!

(I apologize in advance for the insane amount of pictures associated. If your internets is slow like mine, go ahead and make a cup of tea while this madness loads. Seriously...)

This strange cocooned time after blissed out Barter Fair days, has left me in a pensive mood. Usually my fair posts are just collections of images, but this time I wanted to share some thoughts on why it is that our little band of merry pranksters travels some 250 miles once a year to a little mountain top valley in the Okanagan.

The first, and sometimes the foremost part of any travel is the journey itself and the crossing from Western to Eastern Washington, is breathtaking; not only for the altitudes one much reach, but for the rapid changes in climate, flora and terrain once one crosses the Cascades.

This year C. and I traveled in different posses, I with four girlfriends and he with two awesome brothers (he kinda got adopted by the end). Us girls left a day early to camp in the North Cascades for a rainy night and were rewarded for our troubles with a leisurely morning cup of coffee and great conversation on the shores of Diablo lake and five or six rainbows reaching over valleys as the sun began it's ascent just as we descended through the pass.

High on sisterhood and mountain air, some of the rainbows looked like bridges between unseen realms.

There's so much beautiful country between the pass and the Fair, but sadly there's never anytime to stop to admire the eerie splendor of the Okanagan national forest, who's recently burned up trees loom on the side of the road invitingly.

Next year C. and I have grand plans to go camping for a few days on the way there, maybe visit some farms and simply take more time rather than speeding trough the mountains like demons, which was the how this trip went.

Getting to the Fair each year is like coming to a familiar, if seasonal camp might be for a bunch of nomads; the same sweet Eastern Washington faces, the same campsite at the far corner of the valley, the layout of the camp even, is often entirely the same. After long hours of driving, it's a welcome sight.

There are many things I love about the Fair, but chief among them, is the sense that one is among like-minded people.

While our little community up here on the Islands, is comfortably alternative, and we know that there's a mycelium of such alternative communities all over these United States and even the world, those peoples are always separated by the more "mainstream" society.

The Fair, on the other hand is more like a manifestation of such a community; thousands of people in the same mindset strolling straw roads, sharing food, bartering for goods and setting their little ones to play at the community organized daycare/play areas called Youthtopias.

The oddest sense of dress, or undress, raises no eyebrows, but delights your fellow travelers. At any moment a troupe of jugglers, people dressed in medieval or fairy costumes(?), or mountain man buckskins, or fur bikinis, might suddenly appear and you would not be the least bit surprised. It's like you're camped out in a huge, eclectic, ragtag gypsy encampment.

Everywhere you look there are people working, playing music, making food, sharing conversations, like this were a settlement more temporary than a few days. There's a real sense of community and you would not much hesitate to stop for chat or simply to warm up your hands at anyone's fire.

Each year you meet a lot of the same folks, vendors and fair-goers and this further adds to the community feel. These folks are like your friends from camp as a kid, sure you didn't see them all year, but now that you're together again, it's time to trade tales.

These two lovelies, for instance, Maria and Laura, I've traded with every year that I've gone to fair, and this year they had upgraded from a cute little van a to a full on certified kitchen restaurant in a bus! Jupiter Jane Traveling Cafe had delicious food, warm apple cider and lovely ladies galore.

These Sand Point, Idaho gals, are so stylish and sassy I can't wait to see what they come up with next year.

Each year, it seems I end up trading with the same folk and shopping at the same stands. There's about three girls who I tried for clothes with, a lady I've gotten garlic seed from every time, a honey vendor, and my all time favorite: Last Word bookstore, the radical bookstore from Olympia, that each year brings it's choicest offerings out to the wilderness of Okanagan.

This year I stocked up on "Christmas gift" patches, vintage zines, political pamphlets and even a couple of books. Surprise.

I actually had a book in mind, one that is rather hard to find, but when I got there the gentleman in charge told me that sadly he had just sold his copy of it to someone else. Someone else? I repeated, a little incredulously. I'd been after the book for months. I have a knack for finding just what I need in bookstores. I had known that they would have a copy. For me. And now that guy had gone and sold it to someone else?

They were really happy about it though, he pointed out seeing my obvious disappointment and with those words I got over it. Obviously whoever had bought the book had been looking for it even longer or wanted it even more than me. (Can you tell that I'm very superstitious about books.)

And since Last Word is a totally epic bookstore I shrugged and looked into the box of books closest to me to seek for some other book I would love to have.

What did I find in that box, you ask? A copy of the book I was looking for. When I held it up to the guy, he was even more surprised than I. "I have no idea where that came from.", were his exact words.

That's because The Fair, my friends, is magic like that. Sometimes it really feels that way. You are outside from sunrise to way past sunset, walking, talking, snacking admiring, trading and connecting with countless people.

The hours I spent with the book merchant's girlfriend Hanna, pulling treasures from her piles and chatting, seemed that way, the long talk I had with an elder about the emotional, ideological and physical differences between the 60s and today, the time I spent reading a storybook to kids at the Youthtopia, all magic.

Firelight dances at the end of the day, magic. Climbing up the hill we were camped against and watching the clouds roll over the backs of her sister hills, magic.

There is an aesthetic about The Fair that is cohesive, sets you at ease. Everything seems homemade, homegrown and slightly ancient.

There's a bus that plays Yellow Submarine every night in its little outdoor theatre. There are hand-painted signs everywhere, not simply directing people to the free-store, or the common kitchen, but also proclaiming love and peace and other universal good things. There are folks on horseback patrolling the grounds.

There are prayer flags, healing crystals, tarot readings, animal spirits, healing workshops and peace circles everywhere and sure, perhaps it is too hippie for its own good, but really it's nice to be in a place where most of the participants still feel those good vibes.

Of course, partly because of its sheer size, there's also a very different side to the event. There are the drugs, more than just the herbal varieties, that so dominate the some of the surrounding countryside. There are the tacky stands and elephant ear vendors and the same mass-produced plastic nick-knacks that you'd see at any fair. There are even some white supremacists present and occasionally, if you venture to the "wrong" side of town you'll be just as likely to see a confederate flag than an earth flag. But regardless of all this, the overall feel of the event is safe and friendly.

We barely make contact with The Fair's small underbelly though, sticking each night to our own little nook, not only because, as we like to joke, we take this vacation each year with thirty or so of our closest friends, but because our party scene is simply the best.

Part of what makes Barter Fair so special too is, the very idea of bartering, that money simply won't always do for an exchange.

This year I bartered my customary hair barrettes and little bags of nettle tea, which were quite a success, especially with other folks who had herbs. Carrying them in my little suitcase I felt like an olden-time-y traveling salesman, or tinker, unveiling my wares and bargaining with them.

There is no better way to get to talking to folks than bartering

And it's so much more satisfying to get the things you need (or sometimes don't need) from actual people whom you get to visit with in the process.

Sometimes when you don't have what the person who's things you want would barter for, or they're simply not into bartering because they have to cover their costs, you're still buying something hand-hewn, grown with love, or fermented in a home kitchen.

Or as my lovely husband put it when he dropped a cool 6o bucks (and fifty cents for the peepshow to boot) at the stand of these buckskin-clad, island dwelling homesteaders: "Who else are we gonna give our money to if not these people?!?! Some corporation? Besides, they're bad-ass!"

True dat, homie, true dat.

It often happens to me that I get worn out by people and too much stimulation and at The Fair, I usually need time to process all that I've experienced. There's nothing better for this feeling, than hiking one of the surrounding hills and watching the mayhem from a bird's perspective for a bit.

Climbing the hills, one gets the sense of how expansive Eastern Washington is. The little mountains go on forever and you get hit by this wanderlust to simply get on horseback and ride on over the next ridge and the next.

There's so much beautiful natural flora there: wild sage and mullein and countless interesting, dry prickly friends you want to stay and name. Next year, we promised we would certainly come early, or perhaps stay late, and wander a while.

At night there were times when it seemed to me that I was traveling with a early 1900s carnival. An impromptu band would form around the fire-pit between Ian's big gray bus and our friend Summer's chai tent, seat itself on the hay bales and start playing the most amazing folk tunes, at times three accordions strong, then suddenly a group of fire jugglers would appear on the roof of the bus, or a completely different impromptu band would form a few feet over and you would wander around between them dancing and drinking whiskey a little uncertain where and when you were.

All in all, I think we love The Fair because it is an adventure, a different paradigm, and not a vacation from reality like some seemed to think. It simply seems that for a few days each year, people make it a place that's closer to their ideal, without the distractions and demands of modern America.

Or in the words of the anarchist bookseller, Sky: "I don't know what that is out there, but this is the real world."

What do ya think? A bunch of deluded hippies, or a little piece of Utopia?

All my peace and love either way,

Milla

Ps. Brigit, not a single head-dressed hipster. I don't think I even saw a single actual hipster. Just hippies. Maybe they don't have them in Eastern Washington?!?!?!

Bedridden

2011-11-05T21:10:00.000-07:00

Greetings and salutations! How was your Halloween? Mine gave me pneumonia. And while we have much to discuss (The Fair, cultural appropriation, the fact that Americans must be a nation of giant children as it is impossible to find cough medicine above natural remedy strength that isn't laden with high fructose corn syrup...), but for now I'd just like to ask a few health-related questions from ya'll.

As some of you may remember, last spring I suffered from a number of unexplained and ephemeral health problems, at first seemingly unrelated; ranging from constant colds, to infections, to some more disturbing affliction, one after another.

Since at the time we had neither money, nor health insurance, I made do with books and home remedies, as well as little (a lot of, actually) help from our friends, mostly in the form of massage, Jin Shin and herbal tonics.

For each ailment, I found a remedy. The individual problems though, appeared part of a bigger whole; as soon as one was extinguished, another appeared. In addition to all the different sicknesses I was constantly exhausted for no apparent reason.

Eventually I figured that most likely my immune system was weakened by an excess of candida, something I have a propensity towards, as well as some good old-fashioned stress. I took more time to meditate and exercise, gave up all sugar, white flour and caffeine and adhered to my otherwise already healthy food habits. For a time the symptoms all but disappeared. 'Till now that is.

I know, I know, thanks to the miracle of my husband's fancy new medical insurance there's a diagnosis this time: pneumonia, right? But I'm not convinced. I'm not doubting that I have it, but in addition to it, I have a bunch of other issues attacking my body. First I had something like the common cold, passed onto me by C., only when he got better, I got worse. Much, much worse.

In addition to lung and respiratory troubles, have an eye-infection in both eyes, an outbreak of eczema up and down my arms, and six cold sores in and around my mouth. "Not to worry." the doctor said, "The antibiotics will take care of all that."

Antibiotics, however, are one of the greatest promoters of yeast in the body. In addition to killing whatever bacteria is causing what ails you, they have a nasty habit of destroying all the friendly bacteria as well, after which yeast is free to roam. And while they would take care of the pneumonia, they would not take care of how I got the pneumonia in the first place. In fact, they would leave my already compromised immune system even more susceptible to bacteria and viruses.

So, my question for you (in case you were wondering what all this was leading towards) is whether you guys have any ideas for strengthening one's immune system? Tried and true remedies? Insights on fighting candida? How do you keep healthy? And most importantly: how the hell do you get rid of cold sores?!?!? I don't ever remember having them for more than a few days, or more than one at a time.

I can tell you though, that the best remedy (in the absence of breast milk, apparently) for an eye infection is ordinary black tea, diluted and used like eye drops.

And not to worry, "traditional" medicine enthusiasts, if worst comes to worst, I'll totally down those antibiotics. I can scarcely take another week of the boredom that is laying in bed, mentally dull and dripping with snot. In the mean time, I'm off to pretend vitamin C pills are Halloween candies and get messed up on controlled substances also known as cough syrup.

I hope to return with a more riveting and less self-involved topic and look forward to any and all health-related advice you have to give. At the very least you should have the decency to entertain me with heart-wrenching tales about your own sickbed adventures.

A-choo,

Milla

Death Becomes Her

2011-10-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

I have always, always loved costume parties, the opportunity to become someone, something else for a day or night; the way costumed affairs cast a fanciful light onto even the most mundane times and places, from middle school cafeterias, to office parties with plastic cups balancing on the copier machine and bars lit dimly only to hide their prosaic features.

No matter how uninspired the event or the place or even its bearer, a true costume always lends some strange magic to them. A true costume, of course discounts "sexy nurses", "sexy firemen", "sexy air stewardesses" and "sexy garbage truck drivers", as well as giant alien heads, cheap, plastic presidents and werewolves, and most anything that smacks of store-bought packaged costumes. Only children have the transformative powers to make a plastic Darth Vader mask the terrifying presence of the Dark Lord himself. A true costume, you see, is a transformation. You put it on, piece by piece, and suddenly, inside that cardboard and facepaint, or even the cheap plastic mask, you are someone else.

Perhaps it is only because I was raised in a theater, but I truly believe in the power of metamorphosis as an ancient tool of self-knowledge. We no longer perform rites that require our transformation into deities and demons, our own ancestors and animal spirits. There are no sacred costumes, secret identities we get to assume yearly. We are not transported from ourselves, joined into the larger order of the universe or the chain of our predecessors, by a bit of painted clay or wood, a swishing reed skirt, or a heavy crown resting on our brow. Instead, we are our mundane, everyday selves 365 carefully meted out days a year.

(I do have to add that I actually happen to live in a community where masked rituals do take place as a part of our celebrations.)

The power of our chosen costumed affair, All Hallow's Eve, Halloween then, is actually quite significant. Far from just putting on your cardboard contraption and taking a child off to gather sweets from friends and neighbors for the empty threat of tricks, there is an air of genuine mischief about the celebration.

A nation as prim and "family-valued" as this, for a short season adorns it's front stoops and store windows with ghastly images, reminders of ancient terrors and the very modern fear of death itself. It dresses its' children up and lets them loose on their own tiny Bacchanalia, an orgy of refined sugar and corn syrup (surely every parent's nightmare). Its' grown-ups don ridiculous get-ups and mask their identities.

Covering your face affords you certain liberties, whether they are real or imagined. Masked affairs can easily lead to masked affairs, debauchery, property destruction, over-indulgence. They enable behaviors considered deviant, to become socially acceptable, if even for a night. Cross-dressing, explicit sexuality and morbidity abound.

Often our choice of costume reflects some facet of our personality, perhaps the way we wish to be seen, or a deeper subconscious part that we are free exhibit only through a frivolous activity, such as a character we inhabit for a masquerade.

There are the afore-mentioned sex-kitten costumes, telling perhaps of only our need to be pretty and accepted, rather than wild and dangerous, at all times. Then there are the humorous and ironic costumes, a lighter side of these darkening days, a need to not take ourselves seriously, or perhaps an inability to do so. And finally, the grotesque characters, the mutilated bodies, the zombies, the skeletons of our subconscious closets.

The American Halloween is but a variation of the Day of the Dead celebrations the world over. Where I'm from All Saint's Day is for remembrance of the dead, when cemeteries all over the country are lit up with hundreds of thousands of candles, illuminating this dark time of year. In Great Britain, remnants old of pagan traditions hold, the veil between the worlds thins on Shamhain, which may have also been a remnant of a Celtic new year's celebration, a time of harvest, cleansing and new beginnings. Dia de los Muertos, is in Mexican tradition, a twist on the catholic remembrance of dead loved ones and saints, as well a raucous celebration of life by acknowledging that which follows it.

It is from the latter tradition that I will borrow my costume from tomorrow night, going as a Calavera Catrina, or perhaps Mictecacihuatl, an elegant skull, a Lady of The Dead. Not content to with pretty finery (though being able to dress like a Mexican christmas tree is certainly part of the attraction), I look forward to adding some disquiet to the mix. I imagine the skeleton woman silent, smiling, having for a night transcended that which this holiday represents: The endless circle of life. Each death a new beginning.

And who or what are you going to swap your skin for this dark and stormy night? Happy Halloween!

It's Fair-ly Obvious...

2011-10-20T07:33:00.000-07:00

...where I am.

See you next week!

Ink

2011-10-19T07:02:00.000-07:00

I got my first and only tattoo for my 20th birthday. In London. In a fairly sketchy basement in Camden. In 1999, the year when hundreds of thousands of girls everywhere where getting inked with what were essentially characters from Chinese take-out menus and claiming that the signs they could not themselves decipher meant "serenity" and "inner strength" and "hot sexy mama". The year that the word "tribal" took on a whole new meaning. The year "tramp stamps" were still the epitome of cool. So I could have done a lot worse for myself than I did. A lot, a lot.

Not that this is some sort of paean to my own impeccable taste. Far, far from it. You should see some of the s*** I was wearing in those days (if I can find some photo evidence, maybe I'll share it some day). But I did get lucky on the tattoo department, if only because I'd been planning it for at least three years.

My one and only tattoo is an equal mix of snowflake, nordic compass, medicine wheel and pictogram and I had designed it myself with a shaky hand on the margins of my notebooks over hours and hours of high school boredom. It held then, and now, multiple layers of symbolism for me, ideas that I'm happy to carry around for the rest of my days. Like I said, this was mostly luck, a little bit of good taste and good sense buried in layers of black hair and nose ring and next-to-non-existant eyebrows.

As my twenties drew to a close, I had grand ideas for a tattoo to mark my third decade: two birds of a particular kind (not swallows!) on my shoulders where anatomically speaking one's wings might be, over my scapulas, the wing-bones so to speak.

I wanted my husband to draw these spirit birds for me, but we could never quite materialize the design and I took that as a sign that I should keep looking.

Around then, I also thought of getting a single owl feather, in white and brown and other natural tones on my forearm, but a balked as feather tattoos suddenly became the trendy thing to have and I felt as though I couldn't be absolutely sure of my own motives. Did I really want this thing for its symbolic value, or was I being influenced by those demon-headed hipsters of popular culture? I suppose if you have to ask such questions, it's best to leave the ever-lasting jewellery to others.

Drawing on human skin holds a lot of power in my mind.

Judging from how wide-spread tattoos are in all cultures, it is fair to speculate that skin art has been a part of humanity's adornment since the dawn of man. Their meanings certainly have varied from culture to culture, ranging from signifying rank, to being part coming-of-age ritual, to simple vanity.

As we entered the 21st century the tattoo had risen from relative obscurity and secrecy to a very common place adornment. They are now perhaps more prevalent in mainstream, Western society, than they have ever been and like so many things co-opted by us, the masses, their original connotations have been greatly diluted.

Inking your skin has left behind its former outlaw status, as a preoccupation of criminals, sailors and fancy ladies and tattoos now adorn the arms and chests of investment bankers, teeny-bobbers and well, your mom.

Any cultural significance the tattoo has, is now simply held in the eye of its beholder, the person who chooses what they wear on their skin.

For the reasons stated above I don't consider getting inked lightly. As you may know by now, I'm kind of hellbent on making sure that my decisions are thoroughly meditated. However, I also don't subscribe to the popular notion that you will inevitably live to regret your ink when you're a grandmother of 12, embarrassed by the wrinkled Sea Shepherd-logo on your bicep. Hecks no you won't if you're a person of any integrity to begin with! You'll be proud to tell them all about the time you stink-bombed a Japanese whaling ship and saved a pod of minke whales in the process. A tattoo can be a reminder of how one sees oneself, who you are, or who you aspire to be, or who you once were.

It is true that we constantly change and grow and sometimes wish we could shed our entire skin in the process, but I feel that the person that you were is what you build the person you become on.

So when I gave up on my previous ideas for a tattoo, as too vague and perhaps too superficial, I simply kept on looking for others. For a long time I've been intrigued by the idea of tattooing a special word, perhaps a whole sentence, a quote from a favorite poem, or a few meaningful syllables on myself.

It's surprising how hard it seems to find the word(s) that I would want to carry with me always.

Words have come and poems have gone and thought I still wonder if I'll ever find the right

one(s), I now see that it hardly matters whether the word I chose were just a passing fancy.

The right words will come, or perhaps, in hindsight, the wrong ones.

In the meantime, I've finally settled on the images I want.

I now know that I want a particular plant of significance, personal meaning, to grow on my forearm, as well as a representation of the celestial world, some small moon I can always carry with me. Perhaps even just a circle representing a moon. A tangible rendition of some small piece of the whole universe, loaded with multiple meanings.

Sometimes I feel like almost any beautiful image could serve as a reminder of all the glory that one can experience at any moment.

We carry tattoos like we carry all our choices, good and bad, with us forever, and then suddenly, we cease to exists, and so do they. There are no mistakes, only choices.

Whatever they may have been : A moon, a yew tree, a perfect circle...

Got it? Want it? Abhor it? Why?

All images from the Tattoologist, except the last one, which belongs to Lost Boys And Lovers.

What's green and blue and purple all over?

2011-10-16T21:50:00.000-07:00

No. It's not the small winter bed I finally weeded today.

Though there are purple radishes and red Russian kale, which is basically purple, green fava beans and spinach and chard.

In the spirit of "and now for something completely different", I'd like to divert your thoughts from protests and patriotism to...well, my hair.

It's green! It's purple! It's blue! Need I mention that this is going to be a very frivolous posting?

About ten years ago, I decided, somewhat on a whim to dye my hair firetruck red a la Sibyl Buck (I was living in London after all...). Three bleach bottles later, I was a true red-head with eye-brows to match. I sported the hair for about a year (and solicited a compliment for it from one Gael Garcia Bernal in the mean time), until I traded it for a more natural-looking red and kept that for another couple of years. It was quite the hassle to keep touching it up and after I returned my hair to its natural color, I never thought I'd dye it again.

And then I did. And I dyed it green. And I love it.

The best part is that it doesn't even look that radical or strange, partly because of the awesome dye job Willow did and partly because it's actually very little hair. If you discount the fact that I look a tiny bit like a teenage goth, it's actually quite demure. Green hair for the former Riot Grrrls in their thirties...

The best part is that it makes me feel completely unserious about myself. I mean, how am I gonna win an argument? My hair is green.

In other news, we've spent our days getting ready for the fair and our nights partying away. Today I finally caught up on some house chores and spent some time wild-crafting around a newly developed section of the park. It is somehow eerie there, lots of light and open space where the used to be a dark swampy area. While I'm not excited about the development itself, there are some lovely little plants there to harvest and it's fun to walk around the wide roads with nothing by them, like an invisible city in the woods.

The sun has been coming out regularly and we have high hopes that she will do the same East of the mountains.

Now I better get my canning on. There's green tomato salsa to be made.

How's your protest, canning, or most importantly, hair doing?

In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple; by the relief office, I've seen my people

2011-10-10T09:09:00.000-07:00

The rest of the oft omitted lyrics to Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" go something (as with most folk songs, there are a number of versions) like this:

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking

Is this land made for you and me?

Guthrie wrote the lyrics of "This Land" as a response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" which he saw as too sugar-coated and indifferent to the actual American reality of most. By the time the song gained popularity among 60s folk singers and even the general public, the last two verses had been omitted from popular memory, yet they, and not the manifest-destiny echoing first verses, truly capture the spirit of a very American dilemma; how to be patriotic, when your country is a mere shadow of what it claims to stand for?

One of the biggest problems I, and many Europeans have with America, is how complacent its population by-and-large seems. In a country with a written, accepted mainstream history so short and full of upheaval, one might think that Americans would be a nation ready to embrace protest in the manner of say the French (the government does anything but anything and the whole country shuts down ;); as well as being well aware of its riotous past.

After all, some of the greatest moments of this nation, the ones its kids proudly read in their history books, were acts of protest, civil disobedience, or even plainly against the rule of law. The Boston Tea Party? The Underground Railroad? Property damage and theft. Vote for women? A series of peaceful protests and acts of civil disobedience. The abolishment of child labor, the creation of the 40 hour work-week and the weekend ("Socialists-the folks who brought you the weekend";), as well as many other worker's rights? Civil disobedience and "unpatriotic" revolutionary activity (A hundred years ago the Seattle shipwrights union sparked the first and only successful general strike in America over an industry attempt to divide the union by offering skilled labour a raise, while stagnating the wages of unskilled labour. This capitalist technic failed miserable when all the union members walked out, then called all of their comrades in the IWW to join them. During this time the unions basically ran the city-feeding its people, policing the streets and organizing infrastructure). The civil rights movement? Women's liberation? Peaceful protest, civil disobedience, outright revolutionary activities.

Perhaps, one could speculate, the American individualist is not as likely to join a mass movement as the more communally connected Europeans. The self-sufficient homesteaders and self-contained suburbanites they begat, often seem more concerned with the well-being of "me-and-mine", than the well-being of the Nation, its collective values.

And, of course, the powers-that-be play into this wide spread disinterest in rebellion. Even as other Western nations have come to view peaceful protest as a fundamental right of the people, as well as a way to keep the public discourse diverse, America has never truly embraced its citizen's right to protests. Especially if those who protest happen to have leftist agenda, or a radically different view of the direction the country should be taking. The American establishment's antagonistic policies towards protesters hark back to a much earlier and less enlightened era.

In the face of the institutional brutality that so often makes an appearance in an American protest rally, it seems no wonder the American people don't take to the streets more often.

Nowhere else in the "first world" have I ever felt such a oppressive police presence than in the land of the free and I can't say that I don't sympathize with its people's fear of standing up to "the man". Being a recent immigrant, I certainly feel vulnerable at the thought of being arrested at a protest. Or heck, even writing about this.

However an ideal nation represents what's best and bravest of its people. Their resilience, their moral and physical courage, their willingness to admit their short comings. These are also traits I believe each individual person should try to embody in their actions.

Which is why I'm writing this post. Because finally, in this year of turmoil in the Middle East and Greece and other old European nations, it seems America is waking from its slumber. Instead of investing our hopes in one man battling the corporate establishment for us, it seems we are realizing our own powers.

What I'm trying to say is, that in a Drop Dead Gorgeous -small-town-beauty-pageant-contestant-kinda-way Occupy Wall Street makes me proud to be a future Finnish-American.

Thousands of ordinary folk from all over the country joining in a peaceful protest, speaking for themselves and those who cannot speak for themselves in a powerful voice, demanding that justice and common sense prevail, while organizing their own, utopian society (with a very nice library, mind!) in a city park, to me represents what is truly great about this nation.

This is the America I believe in and want to belong to. And though I can't be there in person, there are other ways to participate. I'm hoping to check out the scene at Occupy Seattle, or the protest in Bellingham, soon, and in the meantime will be sending care packages to both Occupy Seattle and Occupy Wall Street.

The folks on Wall Street say they're currently running low on food and will take canned and dry goods of any kind. They also need scarves, blankets, hats and mittens and all kinds of items to warm the growing number of bodies. I think some organic soap, toothpaste and hand-sanitizer might be nice too, as well as something for the library. Perhaps a little Kerouac, some Jack London and a that extra copy of Civil Disobedience that's been kicking around.

It's the least I can do in exchange for some social change.

(Perhaps this is why we've been honing those care package sending skills. A few none-protest-related just took off today ;)

This is a year of turmoil and all these different protests, to me, represent a positive force, something to believe in, a gathering of kindred spirits.

What do you think about the rise of the new American protest movement? Got stories from the trenches or past glories? What would you be willing to fight or sleep out in the cold for?

For more info:

Occupy Wall Street

Mother Jones Magazine

Find your local protest

Be Part Of The 99%

And Happy Anti-Columbus Day, too!

Please enjoy it with this awesome post from Nicole.

Yours in dissent,

Milla

Digital Ash In A Digital Urn

2011-10-08T13:44:00.000-07:00

In spite evidence to the contrary (in blogland) I am alive. My computer, however, is not. If you're a A☠✄✄✖-user, you may have heard of "the white screen of death", a very metaphysical state, which forces you to consider the fundamental questions of modern life.

It manifests as a foggy, never-ending white start-up screen, accompanied by an unmusical clicking sound, and what it means is that your hard drive has shook its mortal coil, shedding all of your files in its wake and perhaps, you hope, reached Nirvana.

You wish you had done some back up copying between this moment and two weeks in the past, but you haven't.

The well-meaning people at A♠✝✷☠ Corp. help-line will point out to you that your recently deceased computer is four years old and the money spent on fixing it would be better used in buying a new product from them. You will want to make some sort of a cutting remark, but remember that they are currently in a corporate state of mourning themselves and that they didn't actually twist your arm until you bought into the planned obsolescence economy of their uberhip designs, or tell you to pour so many songs, memories and stories into the little white plastic cask now functioning as a convenient doorstop.

So you go out and harvest seaweed and watch the birds as the fog lifts off your shore.

If you happen to live on a seashore, you'll be pleased to know that seaweed makes for a wonderful mulch, or compost element. Or so I'm told. For the past few months we've been trying to get a bucket a day when the low tide brings it in.

Fall days have been foggy in the morning, and more often than not, warm in the afternoon.

There is something primordially satisfying about fog. Staring into it is like staring into the past, or perhaps The Great Void, a nothingness full of, well, everything...

When the fog gets particularly thick, I like to sit on the shore and imagine this island as it once was, a hundred, two hundred years ago.

Lately, thanks to the fall and the succumbing of my main writing tool and distraction to a white, foggy fugue state of its own, I've had even more time to sit still and watch things drift by; otters, weather, interesting pieces of wood.

I feel like fall to me is about noticing, seeing, interspersed with frantic activity, the squirreling away of food, the gathering of warmth.

Fall cleaning is to me much more essential than spring cleaning. Nesting, building, making, spinning and weaving.

Maybe its because of the ingrained calendar of school years in all of us, or some other, more ephemeral reason, but a fall seems like a new beginning. There is death and renewal. No wonder this season marked the beginning of a new year for many ancient people.

With all this introspection and new suggestion in the air, I feel hopeful and excited and full of ideas, and in spite my recent digital disaster, I hope to translate some of them into blogs-posts in the coming days. I'm setting myself up for a little challenge of polishing off and publishing some of the posts I've been hoarding. So stay tuned if you will.

And how is your fall going? What feelings, expectations, ideas does the season bring out in you?

Happy harvest, one and all,

Milla

Now that it's over

2011-09-18T21:58:00.000-07:00

On the last night of the summer, we slept under laden apple trees with fairy-lights strung between them.

A friend's brother from another Island threw a party to raise money for fixing his 150-year old house.

My friend Anna and I rode borrowed bikes to the end of the street and swam in the channel as the sun set.

I admired the sparse beauty and good taste of Anna's geo-dome home.

We ate our fill of wood-fired pizza and yummy brews, caught up with friends and met new, awesome strangers and danced to our hearts content.

Ian's parties seem to always be legendary, whether they involve his revamped school bus, house parties, or IDing people at the beer tent in Doe Bay. They guy is not just the life of the party, he is the party-good times seem to follow him and his endless aura energy field, or whatever the heck it might be (though it's definitely some kind of phenomenon)(reminds me of Heather, that way). All the three brothers are hella cool and have impeccable taste in women to boot. One of them built the Tesla Coil mentioned in this post and another plays the accordion. What's not to like?

It was nice to get some time with my best girls. All summer long we've only seen each other in passing, lamenting over how we miss each other.

The draw of the evening was "three guys-four bands", the variety of endeavours of the members of Hillstomp, another Island favorite. Whenever this Portland band shows up at our local bar it's pandemonium. Their tour schedule often reads something like "Los Angeles CA, San Francisco CA, Portland OR, Seattle WA, Some Island WA..." It's probably the Zeppelin-treatment we give 'em here. Screaming girls and all.

It was the perfect summer night. I slept under that apple tree in the grass and when I woke up it was still dark and a few people were gathered around the fire listening to a friend singing "Your Rocky Spine."

In the morning we hitched a ride town with our kind host, who was as enthusiastic as ever (in spite the complete lack of sleep), in his decked out double-decker school bus, and after breakfast headed out to the lakes.

We walked around the lake in silence, just happy to be together.

I wore my awesome Lost Boys & Lovers vintage bathing suit and lolled in the water to my heart's content, while my honey caught up on his sleep. The cotton skirt bears the decidedly un-tropical birds and pine trees and little cabins-motif, gifted to me by Missa on a wintry California morning, but it's been a summer staple in all its lightness and rainbow colors.

The air was calm and warm, full of swooping dragonflies, like the last hot sigh of the summer. Sitting on a cliff looking down into the clear water, I felt like a kid, with nothing but time, the afternoon stretching on forever.

And then, as the air started to cool night air began to settle in, we headed for the ferry and rode home in the dusk and just like that, summer was over. The next morning I woke to a chill mist on the water and the familiar scent of autumn, the smell of wood smoke and rotting leaves and apples.

I can't say that I'm sorry to see this summer go. It has been a strange and lovely time, with visits and parties and animal friends, but I'm ready for a new season, a change. The shorter days and longer nights seem so much more filled with promise of time than the long summer evenings. I'm excited to hunker down, pick up all my neglected crafts, ship out packages laying in wait, revise what I've managed to write over summer, finish filling my pantry with canned goods, visit with friends, and finally post here a little more often and about things beyond my own, often mundane existence.

I'm ready for fall, how about you?

Indian Summer Nights

2011-09-10T11:30:00.000-07:00

If you've read this blog for any length of time, you know it's been a very challenging year for us in many ways. There has been illness, financial strain, death, emotional stress and unexpected shifts. There have been countless smaller distresses;things braking, negative energy, people behaving irrationally, Mercury in retrograde.

I know that we have not been alone in all this.

In fact, it seems to me as thought the whole world, from our community and circle of friends to the wider, global community, even the planet itself, is going through a hard, strange time.

This is not to say that things are somehow terrible. They are, in fact, getting better everyday at least in our small world. Not because the worries and accidents and illnesses are diminishing, but because our perceptions of them are shifting. We're learning to bend so as we don't brake.

Last month, when these things reaching another miserable pinnacle, I decided to make sure not to waste what little precious energy we had, not to do anything we weren't sure we could do. We said no to things. No to parties and family and friends and opportunities and in my case, the internet.

Don't get me wrong, I love the connections this medium affords me and find it essential in keeping in touch with far-flung friends and family, but lately there has been hard to keep up with it. Maybe that's because there has been a need in my own life for some quieting, a slower pace, something the internet isn't conducive to.

I've simply felt too bogged down to be creative, to drawn in to share my thoughts with the wider world, too tired to communicate. The chaos in my life has extended onto this blog, making me wonder what I want it to be, how serious or frivolous it's expected to be, how much I want to invest into the quality of its content, images and words.

But as I adjust to the changed expectations, to new ideas of what I want to devote my energies to, so I guess will this little endeavor. So I will not promise more posts, or more serious content, or anything really. But I promise to be here and want all of you to know that I've been really grateful to know that all of you are here too.

Just say NO...to pipelines

2011-09-02T21:59:00.000-07:00

First, thank you all so much for your heartfelt condolences on the passing of C.'s grandpa Gil. There's much I want to share with on the musings we've had on life and death in the process of his family saying goodbye to him, but that's going to have be another post, because right now, in the land of the living, there's something I need you to do. If you haven't already.

Sign this petition. Right now.

Why? Because, for one thing, building this pipeline is likely to push us further towards a climate change tipping point. A point that is where our climate is so irrevocably altered that lowering our emissions is not going to reverse the process.

Having followed the Tar Sands Saga - a sordid tale of environmental destruction, unsustainable environmental practises and rogue capitalism- from the get-go (thanks Mother Jones!), I was grateful to be alerted to this crucial decision the president and, by proxy, this country has to make.

This post by Mary of Terralectualism, (or Our Lady Of The Green Heart as I like to call her ;) is an excellent introduction to this hair-raising subject and offers empowerment and inspiration, like only her posts can.

Tomorrow is the last day of the protests in Washington, so add your voice of dissent by signing the petition, spreading the word, or simply sending good vibes to those willing to risk arrest to stop this atrocity from happening.

And most importantly: conserve some energy. That's what this all boils down to.

With love and outrage,

Milla

A journey

2011-08-31T11:00:00.000-07:00

C. grandparents were married for 65 years. His grandfather Gil, served in the Second World War as pilot, after deciding that he was getting off too easy by teaching skiing to the troops in the home front. The family lore has it that he flew over Germany 27 times, a feat not many pilots succeeded in and returned home safe and sound.

After the war Bonnie and Gil moved to remote Kodiak Island in Alaska, had five kids and raised them in a shack with blankets for windows and very few amenities. He was a bush pilot, a teller of tales, a man of many talents, part of a family of fiddlers from Kaustinen, a town in Finland known for its folk musicians. Together he and Bonnie built a life that required the kind of resilience and adventurous spirit us younger generations can only be in awe of.

Last Tuesday morning he passed away, lighting out for his final adventure and today we travel to Seattle to say our farewells. I hope to hear lots of good stories.

These are the places you will always find me

2011-08-28T23:50:00.000-07:00

I disappeared for a while, huh? Packed up my suitcase, went on to Dear Bay, switched off the internets and didn't return for a week and a half.

I mean, obviously I came back from Whale Island after three long, sun-drenched days, relaxed and tanned, but those three days totally weaned me off, not just the internet, but most social contact.

In the middle of summer we get so bogged down with work, harvesting, putting stuff up, that Islanders start finishing their farewells with "See you in the Fall!" After spending all day smiling in the face of overwhelming lines of customers and chit-chatting about how quaint it is and how you really do live here year-round, the last thing I felt like in the evenings was more social interaction.

More than any off-Island sojourn, or vacation, this disconnect has been the most relaxing trip I could have taken. From here on out I plan to mete out my time online more carefully and have frequent technology-fasts. It is however, good to be home and wonderful to see all your beautiful faces. . But before we fasten ourselves too firmly to the present, let me take you on a little adventure.

Now what can I say about the Doe Bay Fest? (I can't full well hide the actual name of the festival, as into as I am not letting everyone know where on God's green earth we live. There are videos with the name on this damn post. Ah, well. Hello potential stalking weirdos!)

Like I've mentioned before, the place is pure magic; a rustic resort with camping, yurts and cabins on a magnificent Salish Sea bay that's misty in the morning and sunny through the day. There's a cafe that serves wonderful, local and wild-crafted foods, hosts shows and movie-nights, lawn games, yoga, a garden where food for the restaurant is grown and even a little spa complete with a sauna and hot tubs. a garden where food for the restaurant is grown.

So the location alone, is pretty epic, but add to it hundreds of young PNW-ites and up-and-coming (or down-and-out ;) bands with a fervor and energy for their music and a full August Moon spotlighting it all from the sky and you've got something pretty darn special.

Witness this first night spontaneous sing-along on the bluff in front of the Otter Cove Stage. All amplified outdoor music at Doe Bay seizes at the very agreeable time of 10 PM, thanks to the super-tight noise ordinance in our dear, geriatric county, so in addition to the late night sessions at the yoga studio and the cafe, there was much impromptu music from the many musicians milling around. I loved this one and stayed for a few Bob Marley tunes, as well as a gut-wrenching rendition of Mad World from the ur-soundtrack of the 20-something generation. Kids these days.

The first official festival day unfolded in a glorious shroud of fog, as I rose at dawn, a bad habit I can't shake when camping. It did afford me a spectacular view and first dibs on the hot showers, sauna and breakfast at the cafe.

The grounds looked beautiful and a little desolate that first dawn, but soon enough the bands started tuning their instruments and sleepy-eyed revelers emerged from their tents, possibly lured out by the smell of ever-flowing coffee at the Cafe.

It took a long time for the fog to lift and while we waited for the first act of the day, Damien Jurado, to come on, we watched this young woman paddle around the bay.

Against the looming hump of the next mountain, she looked like a visitor from another time.

Speaking of travellers from the past, that there on the side of the road is not a pair of the most ironic hipster-Amishers in town, but actually musician Frank Fairfield, a man who doesn't just emulate the olden days, but rather seems to live in them.

And since we're on the topic of hipsters, let's get something out of the way; Doe Bay Fest is a painfully hip event that kewl kids flock to from all over the West Coast. The crowd was young, impeccably dressed and often hard-achingly pretentious.

On the whole though, most people are good people, if you give them the benefit of a doubt, no matter how immaculate their white denim overalls. Sure, there were some kids that were simply too cool for school or to talk to you, but most of folks were happy to recommend bands in the line for coffee, join you for impromptu breakfast at the empty seat in your table, invite you to do yoga at their tent encampment and let you sit on their 200 dollar picnic blanket.

Even the most pretentious hipster often has an unironic heart of gold and even the rest of them were perfectly tolerable. Well, except the ones who's poncho took on as much importance as their music.

And the ones who, instead of dancing, stand and nod with their arms crossed. Thankfully as the festival wore on, the totem gods of hipsterhood relaxed a little and even exuded genuine enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is, in my opinion, the true essence of youth.

And man, were they a beautiful bunch when they finally gave into it. People watching and trend-spotting ranked high among the pleasures of this festival for me. I tried to be vigilant and even catch a few pervasive trends on camera:

The current cutting edge styles include, but are not limited to maxi dresses for ladies, in teal and turquoise especially. No inconvenient leg-shaving necessary and it's like wearing a nightie around, perfect for partying all night...

Tom's and Saltwater sandals are the shoes of the moment along with those awkward lumberjack boots for the gents. Tom's might be the new Converse of the hipster universe. Which is likely to collapse in on itself at any given moment from sheer density.

Anything floral, lacy and flowing was passable for the ladies, but when in doubt, go for a hipster classic: cut-off jean shorts, some sort of feminine top and red lipstick.

Native-inspired cardigans and super giant sweaters were all the rage. Especially the kind of giant ugly homeless grandpa sweaters that you can buy for a dime and a song from Value Villages everywhere. And ponchos. So. Many. Ponchos. Man ponchos. Woman ponchos. Small child ponchos.

Guys dressed either like lumberjacks, the Amish, crew members on the Calypso, or 50s hustlers after a night out (no dinner jackets). Or oddly enough, hipsters from 2006. That's right, my friends, The Trucker Cap is back. In fact any kind of head-wear is in. If you're not wearing a hat you might as well be naked.

Ugly things like mom shorts and ironic clothing are still very in. In fact the height of fashion might be an ironic poncho. With a trucker cap. I don't know. I think I might be too old.

Luckily I'm exactly the right age for the cutest accessory of the season: a kid. Apparently the hipster generation is multiplying and their kids were adorable. Just look at these little skinny-jeaned raggamuffins.

One of the many awesome things about Doe Bay Fest is the fact that it's super family friendly. I mean, you can rent an actual cabin with a bunch of other families, the kids can roam with each other and the parents sip IPAs while the keep one eye on their tykes and another on the band. Quiet hour for all is around 10 PM.

In the list of major festival trends, noise protection earmuffs for kiddos definitely rated pretty high.

With so many hipsters around, it got to be hard to take anything or anyone seriously. Take this girl-scout for instance: I totally thought that she was a super-ironic hipster with her shirt and ill-fitting jeans and un-hipstery glasses, until I discovered that she was actually making a sign for baked goods. Being surrounded by young, cool people can kinda skew your grasp on reality, it seems.

There was no doubt in my mind however who the coolest style icon was. I bet this girl's parents were wondering why I kept trying to take her picture. One awesome ensemble after another, she twirled around with complete lack of self-awareness wearing daisy-shaped fairy wings, giant bows, polka-dots and flowers, always happy and smiling. Now that is freakin' HIP!

Beyond the people watching, the two stages filled with bands, as well as the cafe and a yoga studio transformed into a super-sweaty club, there tons of other fun things to do.

A tour of the gardens, complete with chickens.

Massages from wonderful body workers like my friend Ana. I kinda wish she hadn't been so popular so that I could have spent more time with her.

A personal favorite, the busking station, where every morning around eight this young fella put on his best show, belting out everything from Johnny Cash, to Bob Dylan and back. I wish my computer was strong enough to post the video I took of him, 'cos I'm pretty sure we'll be hearing more from him in the not too distant future.

Oh the hot tubs. Nothing like watching the cold mists retreat from the warmth of a bubbling bath and no greater equalizer between people than a "clothing optional" bath and the love a hot shower on the third day of the festival.

A creek runs right past the terrace where the hot tubs are, cascading in a little waterwal to the perfect swimming below.

Can you imagine my surprise when I came upon this scene as I walked out of the tubs? Some strange guy floating in the creek like a murder victim or a newly baptized acolyte. I had to ask him to lay back into the freezing water so that I could take this picture and he actually obliged.

Turns out he grew up in the Islands and played base in Sera Cahoone's band, a totally nice guy, just like you'd expect and Island son to be. As we parted ways I promised to go check out the show.

Not before I made and offering to the Bath Deity, of course.

As it turned out, Sera Cahoone's was one of my favorite shows of the whole festival. The talented Seattle singer, had a powerful but gentle voice and a remarkable presence, in spite minor mishaps like, oh you know, a broken string.

Can you tell that just moments earlier the guy in the nerd glasses and trucker hat was peacefully bathing in a creek? I know, right?

The Maldives took the main stage next and we thoroughly enjoyed seeing their awesome girl drummer in action. Two drummers is even better than one drummer, in my humble opinion.

The main stage area, had this absolutely divine light, sieved trough the forest. In its glow the field took on a totally ethereal look, with kids running around, endless blankets like colorful grass sprouting (blankets are very hip;) and dancing bodies making the scene like a shifting kaleidoscope.

Of all the seemingly infinite, incredibly varied acts, my favorite discovery was the afore-mentioned Frank Fairfield, something of a man of mystery, who plays acoustic guitar, banjo and old-fashioned fiddle acoustically and all by his lonesome.

The 25-year-old wunderkind, actually had not a shred of pretention, but appeared wise beyond his years in every way, or perhaps old beyond this age.

The songs he plays don't just predate this current era of folk, but they begat it and are, in a way, essential to understanding where we are now. Far from being a mere anachronism though, Fairfield has a fearsome, almost possessed stage presence well-worth experiencing in person, if you get the chance.

We got to see him twice actually and the first time when he played the cafe, he more or less just walked in, set up his stuff and started playing, first gently and then more fiercely, with virtuous dexterity, banging his foot for rhythm until everyone in the room stood in stunned silence.

He even had the lucidity of mind to discuss how some of the songs he sang from the reconstruction era were written by "Yankees who wrote fistful anthems about the South they had never seen. Most of these people were from the city, but they felt they needed to tap into something more real, places were folks still had connection to the land." Touche?

Seriously, make a point of going to see young Frank next time he's in town.

Like I mentioned before, once the initial stiffness wore off, the young folks were quite raptured by the music and mood and magic and seemed to throw themselves into it whole-heartedly, shaken their tushes and clapping their hands ecstatically. If you're in a band by the way, I can tell you that hand-claps and tambourines are very in. Just witness the Pickwick show below.

None enraptured the crowds like Pickwick, a Seattle band that proclaimed that playing the main stage at Dear Bay had been their goal for this year and proceeded to play the most smile-inducing set of music I saw at the whole festival.

When we first heard Pickwick at the Cafe, I was not convinced at all, in spite the excitement of those in the know, I mean motown with hipsters, really? But after their main stage set, it was impossible not to join the hand-claps.

This revival atmosphere could only be topped of by the headliners The Head And The Heart, a band I always thought was rather mediocre on record, but turned out to be phenomenal live.

A band that a mere year ago had played the tiny yoga studio, now took the main stage only to hear their songs sung back to them by a thousand admiring fans and you could tell how that felt for them.

You can totally see me in this video, taken from the opposite side of the stage, standing next to the tall guy, behind the lady with a baby on her back. I mean, you have to pretty much be me to know which of the blurs I am, but I'm there I swear...

It was a show for the ages, not just because the two-year-old in the backpack in front of me kept clapping together her glow-stick bracelets to the beat (not mention gifting me with one) and the moon lit up all the merry faces like sea anemones turning to the light, but because it was the perfect ending to the weekend.

So meet me here, next summer? And bring a tambourine.

I'm going here!

2011-08-12T08:59:00.000-07:00

Here, is a music festival at Dear Bay, the very special resort I keep mentioning (I've been there every month in the last four for one reason or another!). Here is going to be awesome. The sun, the fog and woods, the Bay, the bands! Tickets for the event sold out in (count 'em) three minutes, but I'm lucky to have friends in high places and excited to hang out with with them. It's always cool to hear the opinions of someone who knows a lot about good bands. Yayay!

Ravenna Woods, Damie Jurado, Builders and Butchers, Campfire Ok, The Head and the Heart, oh my!

In my teens and twenties, music festivals were a big part of summer, glorious nightless nights spent in sweaty crowds swaying ecstatically to the hum and beat and wailing guitars. I still remember waking up on a field, no tent of course, and walking down to the river to swim last night's songs still playing in my head. The band in question was none other than Smashing Pumpkins. Oh the glorious folly of youth!

I haven't been to one in years and I'm so so excited, not only for the afore-mentioned reasons, but simply to have a few days off the Island, in this, the busiest of months and the feeling of freedom that imbues me with.

Bring on the tents, yurts and little cabins, bring on the August sun, warm days and chilly nights and swimming in the Sound and the sounds, bring on the dancing beautiful people, the meteor showers, the Pleiades!

Here I go.

When I return I hope to hear your favorite festival memories. Do spill.

Stings

2011-08-10T10:27:00.000-07:00

Every Sunday night, or Monday morning, I swear, swear to myself that this is the week I'm going to get my internet affairs in order, attend to the list of emails awaiting for reply, finish half-written blog-posts and maybe even publish them, read and comment on my favorite logs, set-up skype dates...and then? I let my gaze wonder to the pile of dishes, the over-flowing laundry basket, the answering machine's red eye blinking with unattended messages.

The whole summer, been playing catch-up in the sun and here I am again, leaving behind just another short digital note, painfully aware of research work and bee frames that need to be done and made.

Speaking of bee-frames: this has been a summer of stings, myself receiving four, though only one from the bees in my care, and a really good friend, last Sunday, going into shock from the bite of an angry hornet.

A creature this small, a dangerous being, commands an awful lot respect.

They love hanging out in the borage that accompanies my squash.

I'll never get tired of observing their single-minded toil. It is so inspiring, they have no trouble getting to all the things to make and do.

I'm quite proud of the first and last image. Like chickens, bees are hard creatures to capture. By hand or on camera.

They were quite attracted to the floral colors of this dress Missa gave me last spring. Not without good reason, of course.

The whole world's abloom and buzz, and I often feel like I'm just standing still.

Time once more to gather all of one's energy and muster through another day of work and cooking and cleaning and writing and harvesting.

I guess fall for emails and blog posts and serious thoughts and August for dancing all night and braiding garlic and summer dreams caught and contained in memory for the cold seasons.

See you soon, I hope.

Extra Ordinary

2011-08-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

As you may know by now, I'm hellbent on disabusing anyone and everyone of the notion that I spend my days traipsing around the woods in some enchanted ensemble, even when that actually is the case.

This isn't just for your sake, dear reader, but for my own as well, lest I start believing my own fairy-tale hype.

But, at the same time, even though this last week hasn't been quite so magical as the one before it, sometimes I pause to look at my ordinary life in awe and gratitude. There are so many wonderful people in my life, so much love and generosity, so many adventures and mysteries, birds and big trees and garden snakes. So much dance. So many packages filled with flowery fabric love.

Into a wholly ordinary day of digging out potatoes, doing dishes, planting, weeding, come an amazing package from Teeny, filled with hand-made and hand-picked goodies to send my heart a-flutter.

As for traipsing around in those fairty-tale garments, sometimes that's exactly how potatoes get pulled out of the ground.

Even if nothing more spectacular happens, every chore is exponentially better dressed in my favorite garments, from my best girls.

Lace-y cardigan from Sadie, crystalline necklace from Nicole, top and gorgeous hand-made bag from Teeny. A seemingly ordinary outfit, that feels so very perfect.

I got new mocs from etsy to eventually replace my blue-suede ones because I've worn them to the bone.

Nothing compares to made-for-you packages, so please take part in this celebration of Lugnahsad and swap seeds, crafts, feathers, pressed plants, hand-made things, the whole spectrum of this glorious harvest of life here at Mary's amazing, thoughtful blog. Her blog is one of my biggest inspirations right now.

Even more uplifting than packages of love, you see, are words kind, spiritual, loving. Like the kind I received from Missa last night. So much love sister.

A perfect extra ordinary day. How was yours?

Gentle as the feathery down of dandelion seed

2011-07-31T11:57:00.000-07:00

It sure has been quiet around here for a while. I've been busy living my life, pressing my cheek against the sun.

As Heather posted a few days ago, it's been a weird, freaky year so far, both personally and globally. There have been cataclysmic events. T errible political decisions have been made. Doomsday cults have spread a sense of unease. The weather has been crazy everywhere. Draughts and tornadoes (check out our friend Brian's piece on visiting his old hometown devastated by a tornado) have roamed the land. All around us smaller, more intimate events have occurred; hard personal epiphanies, illnesses, sadness, brake-ups, near-death experiences and strange behavior.

And this week, we've had to come to terms with an act of unspeakable malice in a country so small that the number of victims is comparable to thousands of Americans dying in a similar way.

As a general rule, I don't follow the news media if I can avoid it, simply because I don't feel that the immediate knowledge of so many calamities and sadness is necessary for me in order to understand the shifting physical and emotional realities of this world. The current climate of quote-unquote "news" reporting is very much focused on negative, fear-mongering headlines, rather than actual information.

Most of the events and stories featured in mainstream media, tragic as they may be to the individuals they directly touch, bear little significance to immediate lives of the rest of us. The only real impact of murder stories from Alabama, or recession news from South East Asia have on us is that of compounding the anxiety that's already so prevalent in this fast-paced world of ours.

Even when stories of absolute universal importance, such as the Gulf oil spill, the people's uprisings in The Middle East or the Nuclear emergency Fukushima Daiichi get coverage, it is so superficial and fleeting, that it often ends up trivializing the issue rather than doing justice to the complexity and breadth of the these events.

Instead, I prefer to get my "news" through the filter of time, to determine not only their signigance to my own existence, but their importance to the wider world as well. But that's another post all together.

Last sunday when the news of Norway's day of terror started filtering to me the way all news was once carried, through the grapevine, I initially refused to actually look up the facts. I could tell this was yet another thing that I could only grieve over and fear.

Instead of news, I stumbled on other people's reactions to the events, as many of us blog-readers do.

The phrase that really stuck, from some random Finnish blog I don't even remember now, so simply put and so life-affirming that I jotted it down on a note and stuck it to the window in front of my desk and now, glance at it every so often:

"What else can you do but to be the counter force? To love like hell."

This, I think applies to all the madness, maliciousness and sadness of the world.

So, what I have to share from my week of wonders is not so deep as the sea, but full enough of love and sunshine, that I feel it's worth sharing. A small countering force.

My friend Iris, whom I've known since high-school visited us on the final week of her month-and-a-half tour of the U.S. The weather was less than ideal, but on her last day here, the sun came out in all her glory, just to see us bask in her warmth on Whale Island, the big hilly piece of an entirely different geographical chain, like the furry back of some ancient animal emerging from the primeval ocean.

We left early just so that we could have breakfast at Dear Bay, at really groovy un-resort-y resort comprised of small cabins, yurts, geo-domes and tents. Their cafe serves local, organic food, good music and movie nights, with a young, hippie wait-staff always ready with a generous smile and a refill on your nettle-tea.

We ate well, relaxed, drank our tea and coffee while marveling at the sun chasing the mists away.

I have been the surprisingly often in the last few months, pulled in by the good energy and the magical scenery.

Dear Bay is a special place willed with flora and fauna, strange yellow wasps, glittering king fishers and scavenging hobo sparrows.

We'll return for it's old-time charm and the hot tubs for sure. Oh and a very special event that you're sure to hear about soon.

Mt. Sound, is another special place, the highest point in this archipelago, with a sweeping view of everything on this small piece of creation; from island to island, mountains to the east and west and even the sleeping giant of a volcano in the distance.

We no longer have to take these portraits for immigration, but we can still take them for us.

On the hillside I spied a creature that Teeny told me the antipodeans call the "wishing flower"; a giant kin of the common dandelion in the fluffy state, ready to spread to the four winds.

How was I to refuse her my help?

Whatever wishes I might have made had I know I could have wished upon her, could not have made the day any more perfect.

We swam in the little lakes on the mountain, ran into some special friends from far off places, a traveling band dipping in the waters.

Bought beautiful frocks and coats and finery and Mexican-style ice cream right after having some popsicles. Because, for one day, we were on holiday. We ordered six mojitos in the fifteen minutes before happy hour ended. We said goodbye.

And then, as I told you before, the traveling band had dried itself off and we danced the night away under the little faux stars.

Until it was time to sail home in the light of the moon.

That same week we had already ventured to my friend Callie's little house in the woods, where Iris and I were her lovely assistants in teaching a course in dream-catcher making, a trade I was so so happy to learn myself, for Callie makes the most magical dream catchers.

Her house itself is more than a little enchanted, a place of warmth and beauty.

The students were eight marvelous, chatty girls, who talked and traded opinions and ideas and giggled like any womyn will around their handy-crafts. Callie fed them strawberries and peas from her garden and salmonberries from the woods.

First she took us to her woods to gather materials and give the kids a little impromptu lessons about trees and spirits and natural being.

One of her two cats followed along eagerly.

You could tell the kids had a great time and so did we.

Along with the usual sights, Iris lucked out on one of the more spectacular sunsets I've seen this summer, in the land of spectacular sunsets. We were on our way to a community contra-dance, all decked out and standing on the shore in awe of this light.

We took pictures and laughed and goofed around.

And then, later that night we spun and twirled and do-si-do-ed 'till we were hot and dizzy in the head.

We had fun while she was here.

And then it was another night of Elephant Revival, another beautiful experience, with kids and elders and everyone in between dancing and clapping and filling the room with energy.

I hope these guys were able to take some of the energy with them to the road. It's not an easy life zig-zagging across the country, all your belongings in a bag, sleeping in the bus and eating peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches for days on end. We feel so blessed to see these folks time and time again.

As intense, beautiful travel goes, consider paddling in an open canoe for down the coast of the Salish sea from Bella Coola to La Conner. Being on the open water among the elements and big boats, the wakes and the waves and wind.

We live on a beach on which people have fished and dwelled on for thousands of years, connected to each other and the water through beautiful, powerful, slender boats like this and last week, some of them came home.

For the first time in a hundred years this many canoes and First Nations people have been to this shore and standing on the beach watching them return it felt just right. Like the land and the sea remembered them. I often wonder about the land's memory, if the soil, or rock itself can contain the energy of people and events.

We felt very blessed too, by the visit, however brief by the many tribes on their way to their final gathering place for this summer's canoe journey.

That night it was comforting to go to sleep to the beating of the drums and songs who's words I didn't understand at all, but who's tone blended perfectly with the night air. Once, a heron, the one that lives in the tree across our house called back to them, perhaps too, remembering something.

Not all wonders were huge, swirling, emotional dances. Some were small, delectable pieces of every day life. Fresh raspberries gathered. A whole head of cauliflower with butter and salt and pepper (I got to eat it all. C. doesn't like cauliflower. Crazy.). Crepes from rye and fresh milk, I had milked the night before.

Small, fearless, careless creatures.

And an abundance of gifts. I can hardly believe the treasures Sadie and Nicole have sent me.

My heart thought it was going to burst with the generosity. I wish I could show you the most marvelous piece from Sadie's package, the one I've worn every day since then, but I'm too shy. You'll get to see everything else in good time. Thank you Sadie, I think of you every morning as I dunk myself in these cold, tidal waters.

In Nicole's package was, among other treasures, the dress of my dreams. No literally. I thought I was gonna pass out when I saw it. I swear I've wanted a dress of soft cotton and clouds and pockets for all of my small life and here it was, utterly perfect. And what's more: made in Finland! I didn't get a picture of the tag yet, but you won't believe you eyes.

Thank you so so much Nicole. From the bottom of my bursting, fluttery heart.

And as if all this wasn't enough, the night of the Elephant revival show, my friend Ana gifter me with these gorgeous flicker-feather earrings. Flickers are a protector birds of women in local native lore.

With them, my birthday amulet from Sadie and this row of incandescent crystals from Nicole's Flaming Hag Folkwear jewels I feel like I have all the protection I could ask for. I hope you do too.

I'd like to dedicate this song I captured from the show here on our little Island to all the small people, the Clovers and Mycies, and little Ferns, counter forces and sources of light.

Just a few wild horses to tame...

2011-07-20T09:42:00.000-07:00

These days it seems like every time I write something here, I'm about to rush off to somewhere else and so, by necessity, suddenly these posts are short and shallow, just like I suppose, North country summers.

A stock of adventures awaits for the telling, but I must rush off to be a somewhat inadequate farmhand and then a passable stagehand.

I was hoping to have a moment to share with another visit from a faraway friend, some sunny days, and a most beauteous song from one Bonnie Paine of a certain Elephant Revival, but heck, I suppose you'll excuse me for running of to see a second show from them in as many days.

Wish you were here and there and all dancing around me.

When I return, I hope to have beautiful music and dresses and the magic and communion of dancing and singing.

Hope there's angels dancing wherever you are too.

One Earth

2011-07-17T01:26:00.000-07:00

Thank you so much for all your amazing, thoughtful comments on my last post. It was a total pleasure to read your thoughts on consumerism, vanity and blogging.

While some commentators worried that I was being too hard on myself, fret not, I want to assure you that I do think that sharing my love of clothes with like-minded friends is mostly a wholly innocuous hobby and simply wanted, as always, to examine my own motives further. I am grateful to have such marvelous bellwethers and am certain you will always keep me on the right track with your honesty, beauty and good humor.

So without further ado, here's a wholly frivolous post about the recent haps around here. I'm still cooking up some bee-posts, an upcoming Simplicity-post and some other bits and bobs of actual substance, but until then, I'm here to show you what I've worn and done.

The weather's cooled of quite a bit in the last week, doing that temperate rain forest thing again and I've had to dress accordingly. That's a good thing.

Never entirely comfortable with hot-hot heat dressing, I'm more than happy to bust out my old army jacket and some tights.

It's a lot more fun to marvel at this earth when you're warm and cozy and the woods, fields and gardens certainly enjoyed the rain.

I'm loving my Dump-found and altered dress and belt with a pretty 90s tunic Kristiina brought for me from Finland and my trusty moccasins to boot (A pun! I made a pun!).

This, by the way, is one of my favorite pins of all time. It's such a good reminder of the perils of development and razing the old and replacing it with new. If you've ever watched Real World: Seattle, you know Pike Place market is a local landmark. Can you believe it could be condos galore?!

Speaking of Pike Place Market, guess who had a relaxing mini-vacation in Seattle a week ago? C. and I don't usually do these kind of things, go off-Island (as we islanders refer to it) just for fun, but since we were dropping my friends off at the airport, we decided to take full advantage of being in the city : hang out at some markets, eat lots of food, get beers in bars where we don't know everyone, go see a movie...

We had a blast doing tourist-y things like fingering knick-knacks and watching the fish-throwers at Pike Place, as well as...well, experiencing...the great Gumwall.

One of the funnest things about cities, is the feeling of being surrounded by a kaleidoscope of culture, its endless possibilities in music, movies, art shows and poetry readings unfolding infront of you. Whether it be a world-class opera, or some street musicians, there's always something new to hear. There are new flavors, new scents, new people around every corner.

The City is all about the unexpected. New things to see, sudden surprises awaiting... There's only so much of it I can take, trust me, the endless stimulation is not my cup of strong, hot coffee anymore, but periodically it is rather fun to experience.

Oh and in the city, I'm totally under-dressed. Women in the cities have pedicures. They have new shoes. They wear lipstick. They, apparently, wear rolled up khakis and parachute skirst. Cities are crazy like that.

Not what one wears when climbing mountains, weeding gardens, getting sweaty and dirty and sunburnt.

Mali and my friend Iris, whom I've known since high school have been visiting.

The garden is suddenly bursting out with swan-necked garlic scapes.

We've been playing around with my childhood hand puppets that Timo and Kristiina brought along with them from Finland. They're even more awesome and surreal than I remembered.

I got them when I was around three-years-old from one of my mom's commie friends who went to Czechoslovakia and returned with these hand-made Soviet-era puppets. (I had a pretty weird childhood, tell you what...)

And while my cat was engaged in its usual activities, I celebrated America's birthday in style. Each year our little town, puts on a very-home-made-parade and every year the hippie contingent does their own twist on the theme.

Can you tell this year's theme was something like "under the rockets red glare"?

All in all, July has been pretty awesome in my little corner of this Earth.

Chickens are growing, trees are swaying and a certain band we love is making their way to these shores once more.

More adventures await, just around the bend.

We need to talk...

2011-07-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been a little bothered by my own few non-serious clothes posts. You know the kind that just display an outfit, and a few words, best described, as commentator once so succinctly put (when gratulation yours truly on NOT doing so-the irony) "just some sort of meditative blogger haiku stuff".

The lovely Waves wrote recently a very thought-provoking post about the relationship of consumerism and blogging, specifically style-blogging, and though I don't usually post my outfit details anymore (Unless their origin has some special meaning to me: a swap gift, a fun find, or kudos to a etsy shop I really liked-which obviously falls into the category of inspiring consumerism, however alternative it may be), it really got me thinking about proliferating an image.

As she points out, there's a fine line between inspiration and encouraging meaningless shopping impulses for whatever image the source of the inspiration has been trying to convey. As my own blogging years go by, I find that I'm more and more concerned with painting a somewhat realistic picture of my life, as dreamy as it may sometimes seem to someone else.

To me this means a balance, I suppose, between an inspired fairy-tale and a down-to-earth portrayal of oneself, because who wants to read about the exact mundane details of your life, or worse yet, see them in picture form...

But even more than that, it got me thinking about my own relationship with clothes, the impact the way one looks has on one's self-image. And the impact of clothes-blogging on one's own perception of oneself.

This was never intended to be a clothes-blog, but a log about things that catch my attention, ideas I'm interested in, art that moves me. Notice the copious use of pronouns. Blogs are always, by definition very much about the person behind the blog, a modern day mix of a journal, a diary, a scrap book, a zine, an electric mirror for the Narcissus in all of us.

Now one of the many things that I'm interested in is clothes. I make no bones about it. I like clothes. A lot. I'm into them. I wear them. I think about them. I make them. I hunt for them in thriftstores and etsy shoppes. The clothes I like, may not be mainstream fair (though sometimes they totally are), a little over the top, a little costume-y.

It has been a great relief to discover so many sisters trough the internets who are not only like-minded dressers, but in turn like-minded spirits. The exchange of ideas, as well as outfits, seems equally important to our relationships.

At the same time, I refuse to be chastised (by myself or others) for loving clothes. For so long, fancy dress has been treated as a age old sin of women; frivolity, vanity, self-absorption. For me it's only a facet of one's personality, not a determining factor alone, but a part of mapping out the vast universe of a person.

So in the spirit of full disclosure once more, I'll tell you that I have, for most of my life perceived my clothes to be a reflection of my self-hood.

One of the reasons I do not post an outfit every day, or even every other day, is that for practical reasons I spend a big part of my week dressed in unremarkable clothes. Whether it's Carhartts for farm work, or boring stain-proofed ensembles for the restaurant, or my Elephant Revival Yoga pants and an old sweatshirt for working from home, I do not always wear clothes interesting in the sense of wanting to display them.

The other day as I was slogging along a row of kale pulling out endless thistles, stained and rubber-booted and two days un-showered I suddenly had a tiny epiphany. This realization, however small, was rather profound for me: I was comfortable. Feeling like oneself in ugly, practical wares marks for me a personal transition. It doesn't mean I'm gonna go through life from here-on-out in sweatpants, but rather, that though clothes are a form of inter-personal communication and self-expression for me, they do not define who I am, or how comfortable or confident I feel.

Intellectually it's easy to take one's looks, clothes, body, as just the exterior, a house for one's true self, but emotionally, those things carry a lot of weight, and this realization, however small, came to me as a great relief, like letting go of the last vestiges of adolescent anxieties about my looks, my selfhood.

So here I am, in my Carhartts (and massive sunburn) and my hastily captured 70s teacher outfit, featuring my new (I got one in each color-but more about suddenly buying new, soon), beloved Velvet Leaf blouse, (which I'm advertising only because it's a great deal, beautiful item and supports a wonderful, conscientious designer and purveyor of goods), a decidedly 70s teacher-y vest from darling Missa and yes, an egg-carton for the kid's craft projects.

The above images are here to illustrate the unglamorousness of these rushed pictures, the odd angles, mishaps and crazy poses that come with the strange territory of being a part-time clothes blogger. Do they inspire you to go out an buy an embroidered vest or what?

Or, do they, as I hope in some self-absorbed recess of my black lightning-heart, that believes it can be a positive influence to others, inspire you to go out and be your own self, however over-dressed or under-dressed she may be?

Either way, my love to you from the bottom of my work-pants.

We interrupt our regular programming.

2011-07-03T23:28:00.001-07:00

In the summer there are no indoors, walls disappear, everything must be done outside. There is so much to keep up with, weeds grow in record time, our strawberries are finally ripe, successions must be planted. There are picnics and parties and baseball and visiting friends. The whole world's out there, suddenly right outside our door, shimmering in the hot air.

(Vest from Violet Folklore, top from Velvet Leaf, everything else free from The Dump;)

Everything is growing and blooming, from the weeds that make me sniffly, to my first zucchinis and even the nettles nodding in the back yard.

The bees themselves can barely keep up with the flowers.

Today we tasted our first honey from the bees, an unanticipated treat, a gift, it almost seemed, so willingly they gave up the few pieces of honey laden comb they had built between the supers. We ate the sticky nectar there and then, straight out of the wax.

What did it taste like? Like this landscape we love. The blooms that bend to the sun. Light as air, sweet as summer.

I'm going back where the salmonberries grow!

2011-06-28T23:14:00.000-07:00

June has been a month equal parts adventure and exhaustion for me and it seems I'm not the only one who's been a little absent from our online coven of lovely ladies. Absence. The word takes on a whole new meaning in the digital age. Time, as Einstein proved, is rather relative, and had he lived to see it, ol' Albert might have noted that it seems to travel at an accelerated speed on the internets. Here, a day becomes a week, a week, then, and a month a year, which might as well be an aeon.

In a place where everything is instant, there seems no room for respite, for pause. No point, it seems in commenting on blog posts from last week, replying to emails from last month, they are yesterday's news, water under the bridge.

When the breath-taking pace of the modern world threatens to swallow one whole, be it in the form of phone calls and emails unreturned, deadlines approaching, planned blog-posts gathering virtual dust, it's good to take a step back and remember this world is but an extension of the real world, not some alternate universe with its own laws of physics and magic.

True friends will wait patiently for phone calls and letters, the deadlines are not set in stone, but set by people and sometimes it's perfectly beauteous to switch it all off and wander out.

And then. After a while. It can be equally wonderful to wander on back in. I'm here.

(And so are Sadie and Amber after some wanderings. Oh and check out Violet Folklore's awesome new FB-page. Now here's something I don't mind being updated on hourly;)

And I'm so, so grateful for so many beautiful comments I've recently received and want to send some special love to Katherine on her journeys and Elishva, who's sunny blog I hope to visit more often in good time (as well as many other new-to-me blogs of commentators). My heartfelt gratitude to you all you wonderful girls for being in this circle of mutual inspiration.

You are here.

When The Sun Rules The Earth

2011-06-21T11:00:00.000-07:00

A traditional Finnish Solstice (juhannus) spell for kids (and grown-ups alike)

On the longest night of the year, you must gather seven different flowers from the fields in the light of the midnight sun.

Once you've broken off the first one, you cannot speak another word.

You must be silent the whole rest of the night, though you are allowed to laugh.

When you go to bed you must place the flowers under your pillow and in a dream you will see your one true love.

Do not worry too much about the "midnight sun". I think this might just be a convenient way to get the kids to go to bed/shut up and I don't ever recall anyone dreaming of anything significant (except when my cousin dreamt of her math teacher and was freaked out 'cos that for sure meant she'd have to marry him.), but it adds a little something to the celebrations, a special kind of magic. There are other spells that come to mind, but this one is very traditional.

Merry Solstice one and all!

An Island In The Sun

2011-06-15T11:07:00.000-07:00

I promised you I wasn't running away, didn't I? And most wherever I'm going you can come with me.

It is truly summer now, an unpredictable season laden with the hopes and expectations of many, especially after such a hard, rainy winter. Whatever sunshine we can get, we are just drinking it in right now. The salmonberries are fruiting like tiny ornaments hung on the branches, but I scarcely have a moment to gather them up in my mouth as I dash from one thing to the next.

Salmonberries, by the way, are a curious mix of sweet and tart to taste and crunchy with seeds. The Alaskan branch of C.'s family worships them.

Lately I'm wearing so many gifts that even having to put tights on can't dampen the mood: my favorite feather, a lovely skirt from Anne's package and a vest from my friend Kristiina who's visiting for three weeks. You heard me! Her and her boyfriend Timo have been hanging out with us for a week now and I think they like it here...

We certainly like having them around. Brigit (I think it was you Brigit?) once remarked that I seems to live on what looks like Heaven on Earth and though I agree from the very ventricules and sinews and blood-cells in my body that comprise the heart, I have to admit that sometimes it takes someone else's eyes to open one's own.

As much as I love my Island home, and I really do (Enough love, for a whole other post in fact.), it is surprising how easy it is to get lost in the busyness of life, one's own frustrations and small things, rather being able to maintain the constant joy of just living. Which is why there needs to be adventure, celebrations, to jolt you out of your routine.

Celebrations like a friend's 70th birthday where kids climb trees, gypsy bands play and there's a Tesla Coil demonstration in the woodworking-shop. Yes I know. I live in a magical place, with magical people.

Roses in bloom.

A flowering of people.

Forest-homestead-party-attire: my new (actually NEW! Shocking, I can't for the life of me remember the last time I bought something New-new.) Velvet Leaf Lola top (Get One! Get Three! I love mine so much!), a gilt-edged vest from Kristiina and a festive fern-crown.

Like a lot of guests, we camped out for the night, so as to sit around the fire, take a steam, or just get to enjoy the night like it was never going to end. Should I live that long, I do hope that my own 70th birthday shindig is as joyous as this one, filled with friends and adventure, great music and good humor. Not to mention so raucous that the cops get called and after they make the band stop playing you wonder in the sauna what the heck is going on and decide to streak the scene. Yep. Now that's what I call growing old with dignity.

It was probably the perfect introduction into the community for my friends. Everyone was there, exhibiting all that is good and wonderful about living in a tight-knit, if idiosyncratic place.

The next morning the remaining guests enjoyed an almost miraculous breakfast with blueberry pancakes, so many melons and endless cups of coffee.

The post-breakfast lawn turned into a kind of circus/badminton court. Kristiina got to try the hula-hoop for the first time since childhood and figured out she was quite the pro at it. C. does good too.

With co-ordination like this, how hard could a hula-hoop be?

Around noon a bunch of us headed to a gorgeous, secret and sort of illicit little beach in the South End of the Island. We collected agates and cool stones and Ana and I swam out to a little beach and made dresses out of seaweeds. A tourist ship went by and someone said we should all take off all our clothes and wave spears.

And then real life? Well, I have to say that these pictures make it seem a tad more interesting and magical than it is in reality. Summer is a busy, stressful time for us and there isn't much beach lounging, but there are bees, and cows and boat trips to the sunset and kind friends who invite us over for a steam.

Islands in the summer may be stressful for those who live here, but they can also be very relaxing and calm. Our guests have been gracious enough to help out with digging and planting and cooking, in between naps and reading and bike trips. After seeing some of C.'s Native carving Timo has gotten intrigued by the idea of getting some carver's tools. Kristiina is determined to try every kind of organic ice cream our grocery store has to offer as well.

Kissa had her first birthday and celebrated it with fish and lazing around. Just like any other day then.

Kristiina whispers to horses.

In addition to country roads, ice cream and the glorious animal kingdom, the main tourist attraction has been the Dump, from which those guys made some wicked scores. Kristiina couldn't believe her luck in finding the perfect pair of 70s boots. She even found me this lovely dress.

She also got to find out first-hand how awkward posing for outfit-shots can be. Not as easy as one might think. It helps if you're wearing a hippie dress from the Height in San Francisco, bought back in the 90s during your exchange student days.

Most photos by Kristiina and Timo. Some photos by me. Thank you!

So that's it for what's been going on here. How are your endless Summer Days?

Oh and do not forget to enter lovely Amber's Violet Folklore giveaway! Summer is for summer frocks, folks.

A Preview of an Epic June

2011-06-11T00:34:00.000-07:00

I'm not running away, I'm just running around...We'll return to semi-regular posting (and commenting and email) schedule soon.

Here's to taking it easy

2011-06-03T11:30:00.000-07:00

Have I told you guys lately that I love you? If not here goes: I love you guys. Friends, family, "virtual" strangers, internet soul-sisters and fellow wanderers. You're amazing. Never did I expect to have so many folks reading this little log and leaving the sweetest, most insightful comments. So thanks for all your thoughts, ideas and good vibes.

Postings will continue to be short and sweet for the foreseeable future, since it's been a topsy-turvy mad-cap birthday week for many of our good friends here, and soon we'll pick up some well-traveled folk and head out for an Epic Island Birthday Shindig. But I'll at least try to keep you updated on the haps (to quote Heater), the awesome folk that you are.

Guess who else is awesome? My husband. He smokes a licorice pipes and is gifted cool Tees by lovely ladies (thanks Heather and Nicole) and makes tiny bouquets of blooms for my bike. He takes care of all the critters I amass and helps me hang pictures of chickens on the walls. He's kind and patient and puts up with my crazy schemes. These busy days I sometimes find myself missing him, even though he's right there, because we seem to be forever doing one thing or another, rather than just spending time.

Thankfully last Sunday, we finally took advantage of a few hours between taking care of the bees and dining with some friends and snuck out trough the maddening crowds of bicyclists and other Memorial Day tourists to a little beach that's quite secret to just hang out. Just the two of us.

While I waded in the water and marveled at feathers and rocks and read my companion planting book, C. took a nap on sun-warmed rock by a little creek that runs down from the woods.

The conifers are making new buds, from which I hope to make a bit of delicious syrup one of these days, as per a traditional Finnish recipe.

I scored a pretty aqua-marine top from The Dump, and though long sleeves were unnecessary in the sun, the night cooled down quite quickly. We talked and watched and mellowed out a little together.

There were all kinds of treasures to be found everywhere.

But the best ones were these two little houses someone had made on the beach. They reminded me of our own dwelling: two little houses by the sea and a forest at the foot of a big rock...

It is always warm and tranquil in this little cove, a perfect place for a moment of respite.

And now, with renewed energies, we forge on toward new adventures. But if you're in need of a moment of calm, feel free to look in trough this little window. And then go hug someone you love.

Love, inner peace and mid-afternoon naps,

Milla

At The Gates Of The Animal Kingdom

2011-05-29T09:45:00.000-07:00

Right now, time is so precious to me. Every minute from sun-up to sunset seems occupied by the Absolutely Necessary.

I'm not just neglecting this log, but emails and calls, letters and dates. So to anyone to whom I owe a reply of any kind, all apologies. All I have to offer right now, is this little post of odds and ends, a small window into my life.

There are presents and birthdays and parties. There's the never-ending list of packages to mail and things to make. Curtains to sew, lamps to fix, beds to dig, cupboards to paint, wild things to harvest, starts to plant, mulch to spread. Hoop houses and volunteering and more work than I can do, raspberries to dig, promises of poetry readings, summery days filled with frantic activity.

And yet, as a favorite literary character likes to say. And yet, there are also soft creatures on the side of the road. Children running in the orchard as I have my hands elbow deep in soapy water.

There are new interesting friends, and old, longed-for friends. There's even new life in a small cardboard box.

There's time if you take it. Small snatches of it here and there that can be had.

Morning rows and herons, some like Narcissus looking at himself in the water.

Some days I receive beautiful faraway mail, from inexplicably kind people who send you frocks and little hand painted recipes and cards of great significance for no reason other than that they thought you might like them.

I have a husband who picks blooms. Most often I would just leave them where they grow, but it makes me so happy when there's a bouquet on the table.

Our thoughts are going way out to Alaska to C.'s cousin's new little girl, hoping that she gets to go home from the hospital soon. And to the lovely Anne who has also given birth to a beautiful baby girl this spring.

I wear colorful gifts from Anne's package, mixed in with others from Heather, and my only craft in weeks has been this little Spirit Pouch to host one of them.

At night, as I sit in my study, trying to finish something or another, I look up and see this gorgeous, melancholy card of Johnny Cash and his progeny living the life of dreams, a gift from the lovely Andrea, who's artwork I hope to hang on my wall some day soon.

And as I type this, I listen to the lovely sounds of these little peeps.

How are things in your spring-world?

Guest Pass

2011-05-27T07:52:00.000-07:00

As you can tell the tangible world is holding some serious sway over me right now, but if you're in need of an extra Milla-fix (how I flatter myself) the amazing time-traveling Brigit gave me an opportunity to guest post on her log this week. In her absence Brigit has thoughtfully set her readers up with guest-posts on yummy recipes, 70s cinema and kid's book illustrations, all things I heartily approve. And if you're inclined to wander on over, my post has a wee (big-no seriously this book is pretty epic) book giveaway attached. Just leave a comment and I'll fish out a winner one of these days.

Hope it's not raining like a mofo at cultivation time in your neck of the woods. Imma gonna go and hunt me some slugs now, but I look forward to checking all your lovely logs and the posts that have accumulated in my absence. And there the next post on Simple Living is in the works.

All my love and bright skies,

Milla

In My Care

2011-05-22T23:16:00.000-07:00

Have you wondered where I've been in the last two weeks? The answer is: Here.

Here, is an apple orchard on the land of one very generous, amazing woman, who's not only letting me keep bees on her land, but giving me free access to the land, her old equipment, telling me to do whatever I need to. It is a beautiful place, perhaps one of the most beautiful on this Island where most everywhere is breath-taking.

I love going out there, watching the bees make their way to the orchard where the blooms are just opening, slowly, slowly. It has been the coldest, rainiest May and April here since record-keeping began in the 1890s. We all seem to have our faces turned to the sun the moment it appears, like desperate blooms, blinking in wonder, shedding winter skin. And then, just like that its gone again and the cold wind brings yet more rain from the mountains. It has been a pretty tough year so far.

No matter. It's what you've got that counts, right? And what we've got is a really awesome salmonberry year. And 30 000 or so bees. Those of you who've known me for a while may know that I have a long-standing obsession with honeybees. I can't really explain it, but I've always felt a special affinity to them and never been fearful of them.

A few years ago, driven by the urge to know more, to make real the idea that perhaps I could do it, became an apiarist, I took a beekeeping class in a very traditional (meaning the last 50 or so years of beekeeping) setting and immediately and instinctively felt in discord with it.

Though most of the books that I had read during my years of obsessing about Apis Mellifera also dealt in the same kind of beekeeping mentality: lots of interference and control, medicating, the smoke, the robbing of honey and then feeding trough the winter with an inferior food source (something that never sat right with me), essentially treating bees as livestock, seeing it in action really made me feel like something was amiss. I enjoyed the class, for the closeness to bees, the hands-on learning of basics, but at the same time felt very conflicted by some of what I was taught and having no concrete information to back-up my guttural instinct, all but gave up on the idea of keeping bees.

This was in 2006. Around that time Colony Collapse Disorder was sweeping the US and the topic of beekeeping suddenly in the limelight. The more I read the more obvious it became, even to a someone who knew very little of the actual science: if you treat these gentle, magical creatures poorly, they will abscond. Abscond in the most metaphysical sense of dying quietly from unknown causes.

From early on Colony Collapse Disorder felt to me like a combination of the many things we humans do to beekind. Be it from pesticides, breeding, monoculture, constant transportation, changing climates, drugs and pests growing resistant to those drugs, or the popular hippie explanation of cell phone towers being to blame; in my entirely layman's mind there is no one reason for CCD. Like most of our ills it is not simply one thing or another, but the tipping point of all the things that we have doing wrong.

One of the most shocking aspects of modern "beekeeping" to me, is that bees are routinely trucked on the interstate for hundreds of miles to pollinate one monocrop after another. The idea of a creature that plots it's course as far four miles from the hive through what is essentially a series of photographs in its mind being transported to a new orchard every few weeks, actually makes me cry. After all, this is an animal which, as E. Readicker-Henderson so perfectly put it in his book A Short History of The Honeybee, transforms landscape into taste.

Bees, like people, make their home in the place their hive is. The home is just not the hive, but everything that surrounds it. They get to know each nook and cranny of the land intimately travelling high in the treetops and low in the buttercups. There are places where drones have been known to gather for generations, and the worker bees (from here on out I'm going to start calling them the female bees as per this beautiful post) can fly miles to find and feed an another that's flown too far and is low on energy.

If for some reason you desire to move your beehive after you have introduced the colony to it you must either move it five miles (I've heard other, lower estimates, but several miles is the consensus.) or five inches a day, until it is in its desired location. Otherwise they will not recognize the hive, and will instead flock to the empty space where it used to be.

Once I moved to the country, I decided to take another look at the possibility of becoming a beekeeper and was delighted to find that there is indeed a growing alternative beekeeping movement. (There seems to be a burgeoning alternative movement in everything. These are the worst of days and the best.) Like most alternative movements there is a variety of opinion on how alternative you need to get.

All along as I planned how to furbish my hives it was clear to me that I would try to tread the invisible and blurry line of letting nature run its course, while giving the bees in my care as much as help as I could in this adverse climate. Most beekeepers out here discover quickly that it's very easy to let your hive perish from malnourishment in the first few seasons you have them. The advice of more seasoned beekeepers is certainly golden because most books will for instance tell you not to feed your bees except in dire emergencies. Well, the forage season here is sweet and short and does not always extend to times when its warm enough for the bees to fly, so you do need to feed them. Hopefully in the next few weeks they'll be able to fully feed themselves. They've certainly been eating less feed with each passing week.

As counter-intuitive as it may seem, bees prefer sugar syrup to honey in the spring, since honey is their emergency food. So don't ask me how much I've spent on organic suger in the last few weeks. The odd thing too is that it needs to be as refined as possible, for the bees to be able to digest it. Counter-intuitive indeed.

I also went for the traditional Langsroth Hives, for no other reason than that they were available to me and I did not have time or the expertise to figure out how to build a topbar hive. Next season, if my husband is still into this, I think we'll add one. In the meantime, I'm excited to read about this lovely lady's adventures in topbar hives and very natural beekeeping.

We've been slowly limbing the two lower branches of the tree (C. says he thinks the tree will understand) that shades them, which is unfortunate, but also provides rain cover and wind protection and I think we found another good spot on the property that is out of everyone's way, but big enough for either two more Langsroths or a topbar. But let's not get ahead of ourselves...

We do do some interference, simply to check on the health of the colony. So far we've only opened them once to make sure there was brood and that they were indeed collecting food. We don't smoke our bees as they are absolutely not aggressive (we do have a lavender mister on hand-another handy trick from awesome fellow beekeepers) and plan to do any medicating with natural alternatives. For my next supers I'm hoping to try out partial foundation so as to reduce the amount of interference further. (Organic beeswax foundation is almost impossible to find and regular foundation can contain anything from trace amounts of pesticides to antibiotics and can be produced in ways I consider unethical.)

We are also not looking to harvest any honey anytime soon. (Good thing too, because most beekeepers here don't get much honey at all in the beginning, if ever.) Honey, in fact, was never really part of the plan, or the object of my desire. Since I first had the idea, the inkling that being a apiarist was something I might want to do, that was the end goal. To keep bees. Almost like a calling. Keeping bees to me had this great spiritual aspect, of being part of something larger than oneself, a keeper of a community of women who act as a single entity, many bodies unified in one "mind".

Of great order and symmetry and equal mystery. They are a being who's way of life is almost diametrically opposite to ours, at least the way we live now, in small units, without much higher understanding of togetherness. Without each other a single entity can not exist. There is no bee without a colony.

The bees do everything for the colony. Literally. To contribute less than an eight of a teaspoon of honey to the hive in its life-span the female bee can fly a distance equivalent of to the moon and back.

Like all animals, the bees have an intellect, a mind, a consciousness entirely different from ours, one that is fascinating to observe. They are not tame, they are still wild and unlike most animals they choose to live with you. Or not. They can leave anytime. They are not yours. You are not really their keeper.

They are in your care of their own wild, free will.