emily grace

Wal-Mart CEO makes more in an hour than most employees make in a year: 

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/walmart-ceo-pay-hour-workers-year/story?id=11067470#.UVz7yqtLWfM

In America, on minimum wage, you have to work between 63 and 138 hours per week to afford an apartment. 

http://www.upworthy.com/how-many-minimum-wage-work-hours-does-it-take-to-afford-a-2-bdrm-apartment-in-yo

Children who’s parents have time/ambition to be involved in their lives get better grades. 

http://www.familyfacts.org/briefs/40/parental-involvement-and-childrens-well-being

House Committee votes to freeze welfare benefits to families where children are getting bad grades. 

http://www.nashvillescene.com/pitw/archives/2013/04/03/house-committee-votes-to-starve-welfare-kids-for-making-bad-grades

Lake Bunyonyi, Uganda. 

Emily Esfahani Smith for the Atlantic: There’s More to Life Than Being Happy

“Nearly a quarter of Americans do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful.”

James A. Pearson for the Ember Arts blog: Get Excited in 2013

“This sort of reasonless love mixed with deep belief makes passion. Or for the mathematically minded: Passion = Belief + Love. The overlap of belief and love, I think, is where we find the sort of sustaining passion that will keep us excited about our lives day after week after month after year.”

Seth Fischer for the Rumpus: That’s Life

“Lately, for unspeakable reasons, everyone has been talking about how everything in the world is terribly wrong. People are blaming guns and poor mental health services, but I get the sense that these are not the only things wrong, that there is something more.

It goes beyond this problem of “the stigmatization of mental illness.” Sure, that scares me, but there’s a thing that runs deeper. I can’t name it, exactly, and I certainly don’t know what to do about it, but I think it has to do with how we think about compassion and empathy and cruelty and survival.”

Nature has a formula that tells us when it’s time to die? 

Census Dot Map. Everyone in the U.S. and Canada. By Brandon Martin-Anderson. 

Uganda cloudscape.

“Riding bikes everywhere? Using recyclable diapers? Carpooling? We’ve been doing that in Eritrea for decades. Where’s our reward for saving the Earth? Why aren’t we plastered all over Time magazine? If we lived in the same disgusting, gluttonous fashion that Americans lived, this planet would no longer be able to sustain the human race. But yet, they blame the world’s environmental ills on “overpopulation” (code: poor brown people existing) and then usurp our lifestyle habits, trademark it as their own and pat themselves on the back for doing the bare minimum.

How convenient of such a narcissistic nation.”

Source

Taken with Instagram at Crawfordsville, IN

Taken with Instagram

Just in case you’re not tired of this yet. (Taken with Instagram at Make Good)

Kevin Kelly’s ‘One Minute Vacation,’ a tour of Asia in 90 seconds.

Ryokan, a Zen Buddhist monk and poet

eighteenth-century Japan

Monitor in the alley. (Taken with Instagram)

Produce in the alley. (Taken with Instagram)

Half a pair of shoes in the alley. (Taken with Instagram)

A stop motion video directed by Vincent Pianina and Lorenzo Papace The song, Østersøen was also written, composed, and recorded by Papace for his band Ödland.

Nava Lubelski. Thread and canvas. Too much good stuff. More here:

http://www.navalubelski.com/artworks.html

Ack! This is the best. Thanks for posting this, Sprinkle Lab. 

Not sure how this guy got onto the INside of the window screen… They always do.

Last Friday, I went with a group of friends to meet Ruganzu Bruno, a local artist who has turned his creative attentions to building playground equipment for children. There will be more on that later, but here are some kids enjoying the climbing equipment made out of recycled tires.

Shortly after I arrived, the new order shipped out. The executive leadership team of the co-op checks every piece of jewelry to make sure it meets quality control standards. This is Alice, measuring short multi-color necklaces. 

Sometimes, you get fantastic layovers. 

I set a goal to post something EVERY day of the trip. But I did not follow through. I have a few things to write about, so those might get thrown in later. But probably not, because I’m sitting in LAX, waiting to fly to Uganda. On to the next adventure. Goal unmet. C’est la vie. 

Instead of going back to recreate posts for the days I missed, I’m just going to post this link, so you can see all of the pictures.  

I had the privilege of crashing the Drummond Island Senior Lunch three times in the week I was there. My grandpa goes in 2.5 hours early each week to help set up. They make him lift the heavy stuff…

I just loved the folks that work in the kitchen. They put in a lot of work and hours for little reward, and they also sneak my Grandpa some of the leftovers.

When my Grandma was alive, she was part of the Drummond Island Digger’s Club, a gardening club. They recently placed, in memory of her, an angel statue in one of the gardens they maintain.

My uncle works at a sawmill, transforming giant logs into usable lumber. 

And creating quite a bit of sawdust in the process:

Grandpa is also in the Detour Area Community Choir. I went a practice and two performances. There’s a handful of seniors that carpool from Drummond Island across the ferry to practice, and really enjoyed the commentary in the car. 

Of an obnoxious driver: 

“What an idiot!” *pause* “I’m sorry, that wasn’t very kind… But I guess you better say what you’re thinking, the good Lord knows it anyway!”

One of the women and her husband help run the Detour Reef Lighthouse Preservation Society, and live on an island off the coast of Drummond. In warm weather they take a boat across to the larger island. In the winter they ski across the ice. And in the in between, they sit in a canoe and drag it across the frozen ice with ski poles, switching to oars when they break through thin ice to water. 

Practice in Detour Village. 

First performance at the Lutheran Church on Drummond Island.

This year, my patio container garden produced a modest harvest of one radish, one tomato, a couple handfuls of swiss chard, two flavorless strawberries, and some herbs. This is more like what a garden should be:

Checking for broccoli after picking a bucket of green beans for supper.

These are my favorite kind of beans: they turn green when you cook them!

Rows of plants, squash on the left; beans, lettuce, celery, and radishes on the right.

Green tomatoes.

A winter onion, going to seed.

Cabbage beginnings.

Broccoli.

Rhubarb! My summer favorite. It was a little late in the season, but I made a rhubarb sauce. 

Dill.

Squash beginnings.

Squash vines.

Flowering pole beans.

My Grandpa, my Dad’s Dad, lives in the woods on an island off the coast of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Between limited well water, just three hours a day of generator electricity, and miles of sleepy forest between him and the town, there is really no choice but to slow down and relax. 

Somehow, at nearly 88, he manages not to, and is still busy with chores, hikes, and activities.

About five years ago, he sold 30 of his 40 acres, and re-built the driveway to his house. This little road is paved with flat stones.

Years ago, Grandpa built this log and stone addition to the trailer. It’s now a big living room with a piano, walls of bookshelves, and a wood-burning stove to heat the house in the winter. 

The flowers in the windowsill were started from clippings he took from a larger plant in the laundromat. He stopped taking clippings once a sign appeared asking customers to please leave the plant alone. 

Both my Dad and my Grandpa have extensive collections of tools, and there’s always something magical to me about standing in a room full of them. The separate garage/workshop smells of gasoline and sawdust.

More garage.

This is a patio area that my Grandpa built behind the house. The brown bench in the back used to be a porch swing, but after the posts gave out he turned it into a bench.

These are carvings my Grandpa made. If you look back at the house you’ll notice there’s one decorating the supports of the roof.

This he made, in his words, for a joke. It’s an old handle attached to a very round log. A “roller.”

An old trailer set aside in the woods.

My uncle Alan also lives on the property, in a little log cabin. In front of it is a big pile of wood, chopped for the winter.

Here are some of the woods that surround the house.

My grandpa also keeps a fairly large vegetable garden, walled in to protect the food from marauding deer. 

After a visit with my aunt and cousin in the Holland, MI area, I took a bus up to St. Ignace, MI. We got in at midnight, so I stayed in a hotel for the night, and my Grandpa picked me up the next day. 

The first thing we did was drive back south across the Mackinac Bridge to visit historical Ft. Michilimackinac, an 18th century French and later British trading post which is still undergoing restoration after its abandonment in 1783.

From Arizona, I took a train headed east…

Arizona.

New Mexico. Approximately here, I overheard a fellow passenger give the following spectacular monologue to no one in particular:

God bless those motherf***ers who made this trip with horse and buggy. By the time they got where they going they had a couple of kids and everything. ‘Where was you born, child?’ ‘In the desert, on the way here.’

Albuquerque.

Colorado. 

Colorado.

Mississippi River.

Illinois.

Chicago.

The trip to Arizona, though long and too dark to see anything through the windows, ended up being pretty interesting. I was fortunate to get a friendly, interesting seat-mate to chat with, and even managed a couple of naps. Coach travel isn’t too shabby. The seats recline and have fold-out leg rests, there’s a dining car, a cafe car, an observation deck, and wake-up service for those with stops in the middle of the night.

In Williams, Arizona, the train literally stops on the side of a gravel road out in the middle of nowhere, where my parents had been waiting since 3:50 a.m. to collect me. 

After a brief nap, pancakes, and a church service, we headed to a fundraiser for some friends of theirs that have started a rescue home for neglected horses. Let me just say that for a small western town in the Arizona mountains, this event was exactly what I wanted it to be. It took place in a big elk and deer-head lined hall with pulled pork sandwiches (macaroni for me) and a country band playing covers of Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and the like. In the raffle, I also won a car wash (which went to my parents) and a gift certificate to one of the restaurants in town. 

In the evening, I went for a walk with my parents around their property out in rural Williams. It’s so quiet there that all you can hear are the sounds of birds chirping and the crunching of feet and gravel. 

This morning, we drove through the Kaibab National Forest to and underground lava river, where lava from a (now extinct) volcano flowed UP through a cave to reach the surface of the earth. 

It’s about a quarter mile long, and at 35 degrees, a nice contrast to the Arizona heat. 

These are our spelunking uniforms. 

The floor of the cave is cooled lava.

Family photo!

Almost there…

We emerge victorious. 

Also, here are some pictures of the various poultry that are roaming around my parent’s house these days:

Chicken number two.

Thanksgiving? 

This is Francine, the best chicken ever. The turkey sat on her head when she was a baby and turned it permanently sideways, but she is a survivor. 

Chicken number three. The friendly one. 

Saturday was absolutely NOT a busy day. 

First I waited around here:

I spent most of the journey to LA staring out the window at the ocean and the passing hillsides. Then I got a brief tour of downtown LA via my friend Ad’s motorcycle, and a handful of lazy Saturday conversations with an assortment of interesting people. Next some reading at Olvera St., and a little more waiting here:

 Next, ten hours of waiting on board the train from LA to Williams, Arizona. I’ll skip the details there.

Don’t worry… there are more thrilling things to come.

But there’s something magnificent about that moment when you sit down on a train (or plane, or bus, etc.), with a hundred things left to do, and realize that you can’t possibly finish anything. And something lets go. 

A friend of mine just posted this article about being busy, which is quite an appropriate read to kick off the first few days of my trip. The last few months of my life have been so busy that I’ve barely had time to think. Yes, think. Part of this trip, other than the parts about adventure and visiting family and friends, is about escaping from the things that have kept me so busy these last few months. I’m hoping I can make some well thought out decisions about which are the things that I can truly contribute to and benefit from, and which might be better served by somebody else. There are also several things that have flown across my path in the last few months, and I’ve bookmarked them to ponder “later.” Later has arrived.

Here is my list of things to think about so far:

-This Commencement Speech, by my friend James who is a spectacular and insightful writer.

-This brilliant book, Soul and Soul, by Alistair McIntosh.

-This upcoming exhibit (you can participate too!) by my friend Wes.

-Another extraordinary book, Ishmael (and it’s sequels/prequels) by Daniel Quinn

-This sentence that Max wrote.

-A secret creative project from my roommate Gaby. 

-A transition for my jewelry line that is much more in line with what actually interests me.

-Illustrations for the Manor House Quarterly.

With days and days of rest and forests and train travel ahead, I’m excited to dig through this list. 

What do you need to make time to think about? 

I woke up at 3:30 this morning because I’m pretty excited. Here’s the rough itinerary for the next six months of my life:

San Diego (train)—-> Los Angeles (train)—-> Arizona (train)—-> Michigan (automobile)—-> Indiana (automobile)—-> Chicago (automobile)—-> Colorado (train)—-> Sacramento (train)—-> San Francisco (train)—-> San Diego (train)—-> LAX (plane)—-> Germany (plane)—-> Ethiopia (plane)—-> Uganda (plane)—-> Los Angeles (plane)—-> San Diego (train)—-> Arizona (plane)—-> San Diego?

Here is a visual reference:

I’m still not the streamlined minimalist I hope to be, especially heading into this season of life, but in the last week I’ve given away about 75% of my “stuff” and 50% of my furniture.

What I’m hoping to get back is a little bit of brain space: some time to think and relax and really sort out what I want to be doing with myself. 

So here we go…

(and the worst part) of this next phase of life is going to be the upcoming two weeks, where I’m moving out of my house and getting rid of many many things. I’ll admit it… I am a craft & art supply hoarder. And a kitchen utensil hoarder. And a jewelry hoarder. I do alright in other areas of life, but these three are my Achilles heel. 

And this book may be the cure.