Miracles In A Straight-Lined World

One of my favourite pictures overall-the ceiling in casa battlo’s morning room

flower pots on wall

There is an odd, asymmetrical pattern to Antoni Gaudi’s works that I find enchanting. The glaze on one tile will be duplicated in darker or lighter shades on opposite sides of Barcelona, on two structures that couldn’t be more different from one another, and you just stand there going “….how did…..” And then shake your head and just accept all the imperfect geniuses of the world.

  I remember when an elder man in my town proudly showed me pictures of one of his great loves-Casa Battlo-and I just sat there trying not to cry. It was that beautiful. And I thought, if I ever get to see this, my life will be complete.

Now I have seen it.

And it’s not.

Because of course I want follow-up. To sit for hours and sketch and observe and watch the light play over the walls and curves and tiles. Feel the textures; trace the shell-like spiral on a column, the roughness of the stones, the smooth arm of a chair (little known fact that before Gaudi’s architecture career kicked off he designed beautiful, ridiculously comfortable furniture).

  And then there’s the Sagrada Familia, which, dare I say, is almost too much for little human brains to look at all at once and simultaneously appreciate. That takes time, attention to detail, staying in a place for a day, a week, years…..

Gaudi arch

Stairway to heaven 

Casa Battlo, House of Masks

luminous hallway

the dragon's spine atop the roof

Parc Guell-As though a deep fissure had opened, streaming sunlight down, and we were able to descend and wander about in Hell’s anteroom, a Dante’s Inferno-esque landscape of twisting pillars and craggy angels and jagged stalactite jaws. Also I just felt like a Middle Earth dwarf. 

 We also took a stroll (with our stellar, bottomless-wells-of-kindness hosts) through a textile community that Gaudi helped design, “Colonia Guell.”

World's longest bench

looks like a ship deck
Sometimes I feel as though we bumbled our way through this trip-not planning anything, not googling the best sights here, the best restaurants there.

And other times I feel as though what we ended up doing by chance-stumbling across things and into famous squares or along main streets-was perfect. Just the thing to do. Why 
explore cities any other way?

Of course you have to tailor your preferences and needs according to your location and all, but it was nice not to feel tied down by reservations.

  I felt- in order not to panic and think about all the things we wouldn’t get to see-I just had to let go, walk around, live the situation, and accept that yes, right this moment we could be doing this or this, but we’re not, we’re here. Look nearby and see what there is, etc.

There were times when we made special trips to things-like La Ramblas, the Sagrada Familia, or the train stations for departures and arrivals, but other than that we came upon most of my favourite memories by accident. Simply rounding a corner, and oh look, there’s the local market or the Picasso museum or Santa Maria del Mar or….

Cluuuurthes

In today's society, where little is made to last (even L.L. Bean)....I just don't see the point of buying brand spanking new, expensive clothes. There is so much clothing circulating or stuck in the backrooms of thrift stores everywhere, yet factories keep pumping out more and more, with labels that read: made in China, India, Bangladesh, Taiwan...
  It's rather disheartening. Imagine if everyone wore thrift store finds! The mish-mash styles would be much more interesting than current trends of unimaginative conformity.
being in Europe was really eye-opening for me fashion-wise. Everyone is wearing what they want. And it's all different. Where I live, nearly everything seems to be Hollister and Aeropostale, etc etc. That's not to say at all that if people don't genuinely like those brands they shouldn't wear them, but I do wonder how much of it is fitting in and, perhaps unconsciously, feeling the need to demonstrate wealth through appearance.

Human

I think it's sometimes very easy to separate the environment from ourselves. We always think of it as that thing, over there, that we all have to chip in to save. It turns into a chore, a fad, some kind of charity group for a distant unfortunate lifeforce that we feel guilty and worry about in the 'oh right, I need to see to that' sort of way.  No. It's us. We are what we're trying to save. We are the environment, that huge unknowable, mysteriously working thing, breathing that air, drinking that water, soaking up that sun.
  It needs to be impressed upon us in a very real sense, impressed upon us on every possible front-the news, the papers, the internet, everyday conversation-that each change we make is a change that affects our very core. It does not necessarily affect a Siberian tiger or a chimpanzee in Africa (though hopefully these too). Because we need to know that in addition to helping others, we are helping to cement our very own, real, personal survivals. Let's face it, humans are (and have been for the past 200,000 years) a tad selfish in nature. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
  A belief needs to be deep. Before it's, to use the stale, oft-used term, "too late," survival instinct has to be re-kindled into one of the focal points of our moral code, into our DNA. We're all too comfy. We can adjust air conditioning and turn on warmth and flip a switch for light and heat foods in 30 seconds and it is weird and we need to understand that it is.
  I need to stop taking things for granted. Everyone does.

Junebug Dance

It's humid here. Unnaturally humid. So humid, in fact, that, like weird city-dwellers trying to crawl off the pavement, we were forced yesterday to stay in the shade until evening, and today-well today it was 86 and too hot to do anything except loll around inside, sip water, and moan.
86 may not sound hot, but we're Mainers, and it's jungle-like. Were it a dry heat, instead of a muggy, oppressive one, no one would mind much. But it's the kind that brings the blackflies (our state bird) hatching up out of their fetid pond sludge to attach themselves inside your ears and nostrils and eyelids.
   I don't remember it being this hot in Spain. It must have been at some point. I do remember one day when the thin shadow along a low fence was enough to excite one quite beyond reason. And then you'd run over and bask in it for a moment, before trudging back out again and up the next dusty rise. It was always on the city outskirts, with the radiating cement and the pounding feet and the unattractive buildings sending up waves of heat in the distance. There was one endless sidewalk......7 miles long.....
Anyway. Back to what I was saying.
  Every once in a while a blessed breeze twitches through the trees and rolls sluggishly across the grounds, but other than that...Well, it's blooming awful. Speaking of blooming-the apple trees are! All bursting at once. Today we had petals tripping in through the front door.
  As a sort of miserably macabre end-of-May farewell, our beautiful goat caught a raging infection and passed on today. We tried to give her a chance to recover (turns out not such a good idea; would have been best to let her go out earlier but she wasn't really in pain then....It's so difficult to tell with animals). I was fairly torn up about it, but a good friend (who's had much experience with this sort of thing) put on a bracing demeanor and, giving a solemn cyber-space back pat, said "sometimes being a farmer sucks."
  Ah well. The goat had a good life, eating all our trees and leaping up on cars and butting the donkey and generally being cute and sassy.
  Spring is definitely here though, and with it, as it should be, gardening.
We've put in plant-sale romaine and oak leaf lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, all of which may even survive, if the now-grown skunk from yesteryear ceases his nighttime buffet trips.

We've even got some parsleys and leeks; tiny little things, but they'll pull through. One of my favourite things about plants is their resilience. You stick the seedlings in the ground looking bedraggled, and the next day, after a bit of water, sun and acclimation, there they are, straight up and perky.
  The Junebugs appeared the other night. We weren't on our toes about shutting the doors in time, so they all pelted about in dizzying circles, bouncing off the lamps and the 11-foot ceiling, with me chasing after them swooping a yoghurt container through the air. They seemed to prefer latching onto my hands with their persistently clingy, spiney little legs, which had me a bit squeamish at first, having actively perpetuated the idea of escaping scrabbling Scarab beetles with my colleague as (smaller) children thanks to The Mummy. (The two do look a bit alike though!)
http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/resources/identification/animals/bug-id/alphabetic-list-of-bugs/scarab-beetles 
http://stlouispestcontrolblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/june-bug-.jpg

The cats, of course, hadn't had such fun since the Christmas Tree Ornament Massacre of a couple years ago. (Tinsel everywhere, angels missing wings. Awful business.) Moxie kept pinning the whizzing beetles to the carpet and I'd have to rush over and cup them up and let them buzz off into the dark outside.
  Despite the heat, I am glad summer's here: I love watering and listening to the ground thirstily soak it all up. Standing in the soft night and listening to all those sounds which you never hear in wintertime (Cause the party don't stop at sunset round here). Lying in tree shadows reading.

Tricks for making cleaning more interesting

• Be a Downton Abbey maid
• Wear leather gloves and pretend to be a thief looking for diamonds and whatnot (but leaving things tidier)
• Listen to the Micmacs soundtrack. All that fast accordion works a wonder on boring jobs.

Observing the World Round Here

I love the details that make up a person. The way they say certain words, how they wear their hair or  put on a jacket. The stories from which they are sculpted and the dreams that fuel their journeys.

Fellow Writers, Please Explain

I see a lot of pretty people. Everywhere: in magazines, on the telly, on polyvore, in films. But I'm thinking. Pretty, when you really come down to it, means looking in a mirror and liking the PERSONALITY, the individual, un-copyable style reflected there. I've always silently hated it in books when all the characters are described as good looking (in different collections of words, but the message beams through). Why the hell does it matter what people look like? I'm certainly guilty of this in my own writing. This is partly why Charlotte Bronte is brilliant: In a time when beauty and status meant more than anything, she was writing Jane Eyre, removing looks from the equation, and focusing solely on the protagonist's MIND. She purposely repeats again and again that the two main characters (both of whom I liked very much) are "plain" and "ordinary", the man being hawk nosed and unattractive, and Jane having no sense of finery about her. And by golly, it all works out fine and they get their relatively fairytale ending. I would like to see more books with statistically probable main characters; average people, people like us. Writers try, they do, but apart from certain categories, modern writing is just....it's really hard to find normal people. And also, if the people are described as plain and simple, when book is turned into film, gorgeous actors and actresses are inevitably cast.