Longest Picture Post Ever to ensue. This is a small selection of pictures from the cameras of Niki's parents, my parents, ours and Hang's. Anyone else who has pictures, please send them. If you want more, tell me and we'll get pictures burned. I know I'll get more from some friends and from the professional photographer that will give us everything after the portraits tomorrow.

( The happiest day of my life and more. )

Ok so I decided that since I’ve been lurking around here for a very long time that I finally share what I made.

This is the first book that I ever made (probably about 2 years ago) as my friends birthday present. At the time she had just gotten a bartending job so I decided I would make her a book to put her cocktail recipes in. I actually got the idea for it from one of faeryshaman 's books posted here years ago...

( Read more )



( More pics )

Many moons have waxed and waned since my last post. My life is changing, and I am changing along with it. A good friend recently put a great deal of wisdom in an email. Something to the effect of:

Our attachment to our past selves makes us uncertain of our present.
Our attachment to our present selves makes us fear our future.

I think less lately. Some of this is an inevitable result of having to "do" more. I have to fit more activities in the span of a day than before. Some of those activities involve the incredible and magical enjoyment of my child. One cannot realize, except through direct experience, what magical creatures are babies, and how sublime the chords they can strike in your mind and in your soul.

I am wonderstruck by my daily experiences in beauty and innocence. Sometimes it's all I can do to take it all in and of course do the work that garnishes the experience.

I find myself with more maturity and more perspective on many things, including people. This has helped a great deal with work, which has been extraordinarily difficult. Were it not for my new role as a mother, and the beauty and power K has smothered my life with, I would have found it easy to have lost perspective and have wandered into some of the darkest days of my work life. K's presence and the related balances that I am forced to find has afforded me the layer of insulation that I am grateful to not have had to struggle to obtain.

I find that I knew more about having a child and being a mother than I would have ever allowed myself to believe before doing so, and I'm glad to note what I did already know and how that is playing out. I find myself more secure and more confident than ever before, allowing me great freedom from a variety of negative things - other people's pettiness, issues, hang ups etc. The beauty, innocence and radiance that has come with the baby's smile were accompanied by positive energies and spiritual growth in several senses.

I feel stable and grateful for my darling husband, and our very new sense of expanded family. We are thinking anew, thinking together, what we want to do with our lives. What we want to give to the world, or whether it is adequate to focus on ourselves and our family to turn our values, and all that we can bequeath, inwards.

I feel older. In a positive, stable, secure, grounded and wholesome way. Youth has given way and new balances must be found. Indeed, it is time for a renewal of many kinds. Work, play, friends, people, relationships. The time has come.

Awesome Christmas gifts. Finally my very own copies of Iris Murdoh's The Sea, The Sea, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Herman Melville's Moby Dick or The Whale. I could reread them over and over again. Blissful end to a decade and a hopeful beginnings through one might anticipate of the turbulent teenage years of the twenty first century.

A snowflake shaped journal I just made:







I made it by cutting out a snowflake out of decorative paper, gluing it to a binder board, cutting the snowflake in half and stitching a journal out of it.

( more journals here )

It's a good thing the kids get their presents from me after christmas, because Aunt Honey nearly dropped the ball on this one.

Book I made for my nephew:


Hope he likes it..

Some books that I made this past year:





( some more )

the excellent Rope at the Almeida, reviewed for Culture Wars here.

MS told me, in a momentous though quiet and unfussy meeting of far-flung friendships forged through LJ, some months ago that he was attracted to my stubbornness for insisting on employing the written word in my livejournal (these days, blog would have become the de rigeur terminology) and never have once used a photograph to illustrate my thoughts or daily experiences. This is primarily because I am lazy and have very little inclination to picture my life visually despite cultivating a rigorous taste for the visual art as the years go by.

On the other hand, I think I was just as intrigued by a principally anecdotal tale of how the French daily Le Mondewas able to resist publishing photographs alongside their news and editorials. I have no way of finding out how true this is, for it is clearly not so today. But I thought, back then, living in a deluge of the visual that often leaves us very little room for imagination, let alone aneasthetises, through its reproducibility and repetition, our ability to empathise with the sufferings of another or react to horror - I thought it heroic.

What does it matter now. This project began at the very beginning of the decade when the world was much smaller than it is now. In the careless sort of way the topic is brought about over drinks one night, we dug into the decade as asked for cultural significance and achievement. Colleagues and friends, older than I am, were not convinced that there was anything new nor original with which the past ten years could be summarily framed within. The answer was quite obvious, the internet changed us, even as this platform is receding towards irrelevance.

Someone said, I guess I hadn't notice because these things didn't really impact on me. For the rest of us, who grew up with the internet, have our world expanded by the possibilities of its endless horizon, it is a terrifying fontier-like landscape verging on sublimity. To look back and see when wikipedia became a daily bread, youtube for staple entertainment, facebook for communication, and then consider the magnificent ruin that is livejournal, sitting today at the precipice, when it was once close to the epicentre of our cultural life in the early years of the Noughties.

I write less now. I write less for pleasure, for reflection. Little did I know that the style I was keen on developing in my journal would have an august precedence - the Chinese literary genre of shan wen, or short, concise, excursive essays that meander and observe. Yet, writing less, writing in a space that has become irrelevant, I am afforded some freedom once more, ironically - free from the constraints of testing words against readers.

I never write for myself. Umberto Eco once wrote quite delightfully that those who believe so are atheists. Rightly so. But there is a part in journal keeping that is aimed towards self-cultivation. They are like the little strings knotted on one's pinky, serving as a reminder that one's personhood can be magnified by writing. When we write, we transcend. We become a bigger person, a much more magnanimous person. Our writings tell us that we have the ability to absorb and see the world in much more ways than where we stand in our current position. Our present smallness is compensated with this rich and complex entity that we can become aware of in our writing - our own personal complexity that make us full and rich and perhaps, meaningful.

I think Susan Sontag wrote something to that effect. When we encounter our own writing, we see ourselves as being capable of so much more. This, then, partially explains my endeavour.

In a week or so, the decade closes. We look for clues, events, cues that would on the long run come to explain what the beginning of the 21st century is. Nothing much has changed to be honest. Great ideas ran out of steam by the eighties at least. We just take it all in and throw it out to the further reaches of the earth, opening the floodgates, granting access to the inaccessible, so that somethings may return in the future at some importune moment when we need them - a poem, a video, a sonnet, a photograph, a passage, a song - and they may be some source of endless strength. Proliferated, endlessly.

off to ireland.

bit of blue tonight.

Commission I'm still waiting to get paid for:


Has 100 (200) black pages. I accidentally wrinkled the back endpaper, which i am still kicking myself for. The client sent the picture for the cover.