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Planning the Color Garden
Energised by spring’s return, I’m starting to plan the hatake for 2025 and beyond. Having been told that monkeys, boars, and deer are likely to eat any vegetables I might plant, I am pivoting to my interest in botanical color. I will create a color garden that produces plants I can turn into dyes and…
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Camera roll
It’s time for some random photos of things around here over the past little few weeks. None are worthy of posts in themselves, but I’m hoping to keep the memories. First, some cats. Two new strays have been visiting. I think grey tabby is from next door, but “orange fluff” is a complete unknown. He…
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Forest fire?
Yesterday afternoon, I thought I heard the crunch-crunch of a cat eating a mouse downstairs. But nobody had a mouse. The cracking sound was coming from outside. Maybe Kawasaki-san was doing some brushcutting? I opened the door for a better listen. No…this sounded more organic. A fire popping and cracking. Bamboo burning. I trotted down…
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From branches to paint
[Apricot colors, part 2] Yesterday I reached one of my long-standing goals. I made paint from raw ingredients. Artists have been doing this since art started but I have mostly purchased supplies ready made. I love knowing how things are made from start-to-finish and making pigment from apricot branches, then binding the pigment into a…
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Apricot Colors, part 1
A few weeks back, I noticed a big pile of branches trimmed off the trees at Oyama Senmaida. The next day, I coincidentally read about extracting pink colors from cherry trees. So of course, I had to go ask Kaori Ishida, my local botanical color expert and the dye master at Oyama Senmaida, about the…
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85, but not
Today would have been Mom’s 85th birthday. It’s been five and a half years since her body finished its life here. I’ve mourned. I’ve remembered and memorialised. I know that she is always here with me – quite literally as half of my DNA and also in the way I move, think, and express myself.…
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Empress Kristen
In my mid-30s, I had political ambitions. I didn’t like the way the world was headed. In the late 90s there was corruption and conflict and too many politicians clinging to power. Those things don’t go anywhere good. A shake-up would improve the situation. I decided that if I were elected president of the US,…
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Well-met in Art & Nature
Saturday’s retreat was a rousing success. Four people participated in a day of creativity, nature, and enjoying one another’s company. I was delighted to meet two new faces from Tokyo and to welcome two old friends to my dining room turned classroom. Everyone got on so nicely that it was hard to interrupt the conversation…
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The Little Things
If you aren’t happy now, you might never be and I know why.* You are missing out on the pleasure of the little things in your daily life. A joyful life is a series of small events, micro-moments, little tickles of happiness brought about by acute awareness of each moment that passes. Many of us…
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Running a Retreat
After 18 months at 555, I am finally ready to open the space to the public for a Drawing Meditations retreat. Won’t you take this as a great excuse to visit? These times definitely call for some quiet and self-care. With everything going on in the world and in your life specifically, give yourself a…
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