For you, from me, with love

Lattice credit Kirsten Akens 2015

A blend of old and new offerings around and about that I've been dipping into this week.

Enjoy!

Learn: "The Art of Daily Ritual," by the amazing Courtney Martin for On Being (read the whole piece here): "Even washing the dishes can be a kind of ritual if you treat it as such. It’s about pace and intention, the senses and the symbols. It’s about the meaning you imbue into an object or an act, rather than a script you inherit. It’s about noticing."

Participate: Just a little more time to get in on this cool portable aromatherapy Kickstarter. (It's guaranteed to be funded!)

Read: Alice's Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts, by author-friend of mine DeAnna Knippling.

Watch: Dogs and pigs. Equally awesome. (From Mercy for Animals and ChooseVeg.com.)

Eat: Really want to give these Turmeric Cashews a try.

Insight: Death By Chrysalis — I saw this poem come through in a Goodreads newsletter this morning, fell in love, and went out seeking the poet, Danny Earl Simmons. I'll be adding his site to my Feedly because it's a wealth of good poetry, his and others'. "Death By Chrysalis" was originally published in the Fall/Winter 2011 issue of Pirene's Fountain.

Not everything that dies becomes a moldering rot like the sticky black ooze of the weeds of ancient seas.

Take that wooly mammoth, for instance, found in a block of ice on the edge of the middle of some frozen nowhere, flowers half-chewed in its mouth. What luck to be unlucky in such a way – in a cold flash just after a little dinner-salad – so that, all these centuries later, heads wag in disbelief and grunt smirks at the shaggy once was of him.

And what of the death by chrysalis of the caterpillar – a voracious, needy, earthy thing that dies from cramp and forced revision only to be resurrected with two thin surprises connected lightly to the same center of it all?