Shel Graves' Sensorium

Taste: espresso cupcake, black forest cake Sight: blue hydrangeas, pink roses; sweetpeas; the summer evening light falls through the leaves   Sound: theremin; squealing dryer Touch: peripatetic Smell: unscented flowers, light rose   Extra: Lady Astronaut of Mars ; ad astra per apera; the psychological horror of holidays; dread Grateful for: walking; ideas

Taste: Campfire Stout, High Water Brewing, marshmallow and chocolate, "S'mores" Sight: green strawberry, daisy, a rat, a bumblebee; blue hydrangeas pink peonies Sound: 'This chair belongs to me."; feet walking - step, step, step; sad, jazz singer Lana Del Rey Ultraviolence Touch: feet on pavement, feet on grass; posture upright, open Smell: toast Extra: suicidal family; porn, cigarettes and pulled pork; "I wish that I could put up yesterday's evening sky for all posterity, could preserve a night of love, the sound of a mountain stream, a realization as it sets my mind afire, a dance, a day of harmony, ten thousand glorious days of clouds that will instead vanish and never be seen again, line them up in jars where they might be admired in the interim and tasted again as needed." — The Faraway Nearby , Rebecca Solnit   Grateful for: books

I have a lot of reading to do. I may need to take a book-cation (go somewhere beautiful to read) just to catch up. At the beginning of Rebecca Solnit's talk, "Other Ways of Telling: Stories that Make and Break Our Lives," this month at Seattle Arts & Lectures , I purchased: The Faraway Nearby , Men Explain Things to Me , and Wanderlust: A History of Walking . Hat tip to The Elliott Bay Book Company . Wanderlust had been on my to-read list for a long time (walking and reading being two of my favorite things), and then I just had to pick up the other two. Before the lecture I had only read, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster . I felt a great affinity for that book, but I hadn't thought I needed to read so many of Rebecca Solnit's books. Her ouevre covers a wide range of topics. Either you are interested in one or the other or not, so I had thought. Before she began speaking, I even mused that I might regret my p...

Taste: bitter hops; bitter coffee Sight: still life skulls and flowers - vanitas paintings Sound: the silence of an empty office; sighing Touch: drooping eyelids, heavy chest, slowness of movement - exhaustion Smell: Vampire Blood Extra: rage, exhaustion, stress, prolonged suffering; When will these stories ever get written? Grateful for: solar sails for space - the Sunjammer Project

Taste: sweet red local strawberries Sight: deep red local strawberries; vampire blood incense; modern horse shoes Sound: " Crying FREEDOM! "; Born to Die ; gunfire on the trail; din at dinner Touch: sun, earth, sky Smell: fried dead animals; horseshit  Extra: arbejdsglæde = “happiness at work”; the fat child asks for dessert, the screens surround us, the beleaguered vegan server at the restaurant named for body parts and everyone's Father's Day in the psychiatric ward; What do you do with these experiences? Grateful for: Kuan Yin

Taste: apple cider vinegar Sight: she brushes back her long blonde hair Sound: voices - soft, gravely, lyrical, deep; reading aloud Touch: being held Smell: petunias Extra: "Books do change the world from time to time." — Rebecca Solnit "Something wonderful happens to you and you instantly look back over your life and see it as a series of fortunate events stretching off into the distance like mountain peaks. Something terrible happens and your life has always been a litany of woe. The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because life isn’t a story; it’s a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out the constellations from it to fit who and where we are." — The Faraway Nearby , p246, Rebecca Solnit Grateful for: aging well and gracefully ; Inspectors of Broad Slow Social Change; slow utopia