A Night Of Collective Effervescensce and The Northern Lights, in a zine

I made a zine about watching the Northern Lights on Mother’s Day Weekend:

A magic night

Creative Practices that keep on giving

At the beginning of November I drove to California for a beloved cousin’s wedding—he got married surrounded by friends, family, and beautiful big redwood trees—and I took the wedding as an excuse to fill up with awe in the wilds of Northern CA and Southern OR.

We got to be hobbits one night

Besides seeing redwood trees and the ocean, I stayed in a Hobbit House Air B&B, A treehouse, A caboose, a log cabin, and an airstream trailer. What a fun adventure!

This treehouse is called the “Majestree”

My younger son (who was with me for the whole trip) and I made a journal as we went, we painted and drew everyday, and we even printed out pics for our book using a Selphy portable printer every night.

Pages from our journal

Journaling is my longest standing and most consistently active creative practice—I love how playful I can be in my journals, how they help me remember things, how the very act of journaling makes me somehow seek out doing things that are interesting and worth writing down, and how they often make me feel like I experience the joy of adventure twice (once while living it, and once while recording it). I realized lately the obvious—that journals are kind of the glue that holds all my other creative work together. And my travel journals are about my favorite.

While we made the pages as we went, I finished the cover of this book over Thanksgiving weekend. In my family, we call the day after Thanksgiving Craft Friday—we spend the day (and then the entire weekend) making crafts and laughing and eating lots of good food.

Our finished travel journal

So this past weekend I not only finished the travel journal I’d started earlier in the month, I actually made several handmade books including a happy fat new regular journal with colorful pages.

My new journal, ready to start filling!

And so here I am. With one journal just finished (actually several because this was just a travel journal, my regular journal is just about finished too), and a new one sitting, with lots of big empty pages waiting to be filled.

And I suppose here is where I hopefully can be helpful to anyone else who journals who stumbles across this. When I’ve talked journaling with people, I notice a lot of people are intimidated—what if they mess up a nice journal, what if they don’t have anything interesting to say, what if they draw something and it’s ugly.

And I guess my response is who cares? I mean, yes, what if? What if I do any or all of those things? Who cares? What if I do any or all of those things but in the meanwhile I have jumped in and started playing with my creativity. What a delight!

A journal is one of the easiest places to lower the stakes with my creative work. Because it’s just for me. A journal is a place where I can set aside any worries that anything is perfect and instead just play. Like a kid just having fun and not worrying about the outcome. It’s a yes space. Where anything goes. And because anything goes, in my journal I learn to open up and unlock blank pages. Through practice. Because when you practice something you get better at it. So by practicing my creative work with low stakes, I get better at my creative work. And Ironically then it becomes more interesting to actually share.

Anyway, those are my random thoughts that I thought I’d share in my public journal as I dive into my new private journal. If you stumble upon this and have a journaling practice or regularly keep travel journals, drop me a line or leave a comment. I’d love to hear about your time with journaling too.

Spine Poems

A few poems I posted on Twitter lately that I made using the spines of picture books. Enjoy!

Dear diary,

I want to be the night gardener,

outside,

finding wild sidewalk flowers

stuck over and under the snow,

just because.

Wherever you go

Please bring balloons

Just in case you want to fly

Up, down, and around—In the sky

At nighttime

Like a dandelion Under the lemon moon

Imagine if you had a jetpack—

Whoosh!

Higher! Higher!

Faster! Faster!

Yes, let’s run wild reaching for the

moon,

stars,

life on mars—

The most magnificent thing.

Like Miss Rumphius

Last spring when I was giving away extra dahlia tubers a friend told me I reminded her of Miss Rumphius.

Best compliment ever! And coincidentally, or maybe not, that book is one of my favorite books of all time. “You must do something to make the world more beautiful,” reads a line in the book. And Miss Rumphius does.

I set aside my Very Important Work this past week to play. To work through some anxious feelings of uncertainty. I made this art piece. And it helped. But still, this is just how life is with the pandemic: lots of uncomfortable uncertainty.

My dahlia garden

Yet, I realized, here’ a certain thing: I am someone who does what I can to make the world more beautiful. I always have been. I’m certain I always will be. Maybe you are too? If so, Hi! During this very uncertain time, I’m leaning on this small certain beautiful practice of mine. And it’s helping. Maybe you can too.

Home sweet home

Also, flowers make everything better.

Happy World Elephant Day!

Happy World Elephant Day! This is a picture from many years ago of of me and my son Oscar in Sri Lanka at an elephant orphanage. We lived in SE Asia for a few years when he was small, we traveled a lot, and to keep him engaged I sought out lots of experiences that would delight a kid. So we had a lot of elephant adventures. This is mostly how I fell in love with elephants and came to write my book, THE ELEPHANTS’ GUIDE TO HIDE-AND-SEEK. 

During this particular adventure in Sri Lanka, we learned that elephant dung is great for paper-making! Seeing as I’ve made lots of paper in my lifetime and even often use my own handmade paper in my art, this was particularly interesting to me. The reason elephant dung is great for paper making is that it’s full of munched up fibers—kinda like the elephant’s digestive system acts as a pulp beater.  Gross, but cool! 

The photo album in these pictures is one of my handmade travel journals, I used a batik I bought in Sri Lanka for the cover, and a lot of the papers inside are elephant dung papers I bought there. Also that cute little elephant stuffie is one I bought at a fiber store in Columbo. 

I also wrote a blog post about elephant dung paper-making way back when I went to Sri Lanka. Here’s the link.

Pachyderm Egg Hunts—Elephant Hide-And-Seek taken to new levels!

Check out this Easter “egg” my cousin made (okay it’s a painted rock—but that works!) 💛🐘 After reading THE ELEPHANTS’ GUIDE TO HIDE-AND-SEEK, this guy is ready for a hide-and-seek egg hunt. LOVE IT.

⠀Thanks for sharing this happy egg-rock, Laura ! It brought a welcome smile to my face.⠀

Also, turns out there is an entire genre of youtube videos with Elephant Easter Egg hunts. Who knew? Think the Elephant Hobby And Sport League (in THE ELEPHANTS’ GUIDE TO HIDE-AND-SEEK) would approve. Pachyderm hide-and-seek at all-new levels! For your watching pleasure, here's one:

I also made a playlist in case you want more.

Happy Easter to all who celebrate and happy spring too. It may not feel like a time worthy of celebrating much, but I welcome the tiny flower buds popping up just now—reminders that life persists.

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🌈🐘🌷⠀