alive

purple orchid, Farmer's Market, Canon Digital Rebel

"When we are not sure, we are alive."
-Graham Greene

orchid oracle

spotted orchid, Farmer's Market, Canon Digital Rebel

I left the beloved Mission this morning! and went to the Farmer's Market at the Ferry Building. This is one of the most beautiful (and expensive) farmer's markets around, and is so full of sensory pleasures. There are landscapes of tulips and romanesque broccoli, dried kiwis and giant beets, artisan cheeses and lavender salt... it's yummy there. We walked for hours tasting oranges and asian pears.

We also spoke to Dirk the orchid man who pointed to one of his most beautiful orchids and noted, "This one smells like rotting meat." One of the things I love most about my friend Sasha is her curiosity. She immediately said, "Ew! can I smell?" and confirmed that it in fact smelled like salami.

And I couldn't help but share a detail of this photo. Do you see the tiny little monk of a man with the long white beard standing at the center bud? Don't you want to ask him the secret of life?

The orchid oracle, Farmer's Market, Canon Digital Rebel

"Little spotted orchid man, What does it all mean?"

St. Francis Soda Fountain

St.Francis Soda Fountain, Canon Digital Rebel

The St. Francis Soda Fountain {on the corner of 24th St. and York} has been around since 1918. Here you can find burgers, sandwiches and other great food, but their specialties are ice cream and malted milkshakes. I hear that they also make homemade root beer, old fashioned egg creams, and their own hot fudge and marshmallows.

The inside looks like it hasn't changed in all these years, complete with booths and a candy counter. You will feel transported to another time...

826 Valencia, aka. The Pirate Store

pirate supplies, Canon Digital Rebel

826 Valencia, also known as the pirate supply store is one of my favorite spots in the neighborhood. It is a writing workshop and tutorial center for youth that was started by the author Dave Eggers and is also the home of the publishing house, McSweeney's.

In addition to offering incredible writing workshops for kids and adults, they also sell lard, eye patches, mops, shackles, and my friend Sasha's very beautiful (and tiny) book entitled Your New Glass Eye which is now in its second {limited} edition. Go Squash!

Pirate store window, Canon Digital Rebel

and just down the street...

Ripley, Canon Digital Rebel

And this is Ripley, the hairless Sphinx. She lives at the science fiction bookstore on Valencia St. only doors away from the pirate store. Go visit her! She is very friendly and sweet despite her sinister eyebrow configuration.

I love San Francisco.

18th & Guerrero

Anna's Danish Cookies, Canon Digital Rebel

Only days after I took this shot, the awning and everything was gone. {Even the mattress was gone! can you believe it?} Looks like the old Danish cookie parlor has seen its last days. For years there was a huge sign in the window that said, "Diabetic cookies sold here!" and I always wondered if they were laundering money in there or if people actually ate diabetic cookies.

This street is now the uber-gentrified gastronomic capital of the Mission. The most wonderful cafe/bakery called Tartine rests on the corner of 18th and Guerrero. They have gorgeous breads and french pastries and a hearth table where you can drink your cappuccino. {Strangely, my favorite thing there is the muesli and yogurt. They must put crack in it or something. I could eat it every day for the rest of my life}

The rest of the block is lined with fantastic restaurants, a wonderful cafe, and ends with the most beautiful park in the neighborhood- Dolores Park.

....
In other Mission news, my husband Matt built quite a beautiful web site for his desert library project and future projects. Check it out! And don't miss The Hidden Agenda... {subterranean conference center}

Saveway

corner of Guerrero and 19th St., Canon Digital Rebel

One of my favorite online newsletters is from I Used to Believe. Here are some excerpts from the most recent one:

"My uncle convinced me that the morning fog looming over the Smoky Mountains was caused by thousands of beavers making steaming cups of coffee."
Donnie

"Once, when I was 8, I told my Mom about this weird experience I had where the exact same thing happened to me twice. She explained that it hadn't happened twice, but that I had deja vu. The next day at school, I told all of my friends that I had this weird French disease that made me get stuck in time and repeat things I'd already done."
Annie

gas station art

21st and Valencia, Canon Digital Rebel

The old Shell station on this corner has slowly but surely been completely taken over by graffiti (some of which is quite beautiful) political posters, and other various stickering and artmaking.

During the fall, one artist took bright green and reddish leaves and wove them into the chain link fence around the old gas station. She created a beautiful thick pattern {a la Andy Goldsworthy} that made everyone's jaw drop as they passed. It only lasted a few days {I somehow didn't make it with my camera until they dried} but their skeletons are still there. Little bits of brittle leaf stuck in the metal.

doorways

buddhist temple, 21st and Capp St., Canon Digital Rebel

These are the doors of the new Buddhist Temple in the neighborhood. My friend Kim, her 2 year old son Liam, and I wandered in one day to take a peek. There were monks in orange robes all seated in meditation in front of the most enormous Buddha we had ever seen {outside of Bangkok that is}. There were offerings placed at the foot of the statue: orchids, cakes, oranges, brilliantly colored flowers. It was a beautiful sight.

Liam surprised the woman who showed us the room by saying with enormous eyes, "Big buddha!"
......
"The nature of the mind of beings is like a big pearl that falls into the water. The water is muddy so the pearl becomes hidden. When the water is pure, the pearl is revealed."
-The Nirvana Sutra

The Mission

corner of Harrison and 20th St., Canon Digital Rebel

I've decided to do a photo series this week of my neighbhorhood: The Mission District in San Francisco.

The Mission is a colorful neighborhood chock full of bookstores, incredible taquerias, hipsters in funky clothes, murals lining the walls of alleys, Mexican bakeries, and restaurants with food from all over the world.

I'm happy to offer up a little window into my favorite neighborhood in SF.

grapefruit

grapefruit, Canon Digital Rebel

"Life is this simple: We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent
and the Divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable. It is true."
-Thomas Merton

I have been reading some wonderful books these days:
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. {I'm also very excited about reading his newest book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking}

And I have been thoroughly enjoying Vendela Vida's first novel And Now You Can Go

*I just noticed when I made this link that Amazon has a special if you order Vendela's book and Julie Orringer's How to Breathe Underwater. Two of my favorites!

John Nieto

John Nieto, Canon Digital Rebel

John is one of my favorite people in the world. He is a talented painter, photographer, haircutter, musician and lover of life. Spending a day with him is like breathing in new air. He is pure life.

I don't know anyone who doesn't have a crush on John.

Sometimes I marvel at the cuteness and goodness of my friends.

waiting

waiting, Canon Digital Rebel

I've noticed lately that my life is like waiting for a bus in San Francisco.

There are new bus shelters here that have a readout above the Muni map and those funny little black seats that revolve. It's a small, rectangular LED screen that says “9 minutes until the next Fillmore 22” and I always think, 'Great!' and I sit down, get comfortable, read a book and watch the people go by.

I'm fine.
I'm happy.
The bus comes 9 minutes later.
All is well.

But when the bus shelter doesn't have that readout and I have NO IDEA when the bus will come, I get all fidgety and agitated. I step off the curb looking for the bus in the distance. I pace, I can't see it. I wonder if it will EVER come, I consider finding another bus, I consider taking a cab, I get really irritable and that same 9 minutes is like torture.

If someone could give me a readout, could tell me, 'in 6 months or 12 months {or whatever amount of time really} you'll be pregnant and have a healthy baby' I'd say, “Halle-freakin-lujah!” And I'd probably write a book, and go on lots of trips, and do all sorts of wonderful things.

I imagine that I would enjoy this time so much more.

But instead I keep craning my neck out, watching and waiting and wondering if it will ever come.
……..

And I share this because sometimes it's hard to wait and it's painful, and maybe you are waiting for something too. And maybe its comforting to know that we are waiting together.

How Shall I Hold You

bird, Canon Digital Rebel

If you're still in the mood for love, my friend Sasha Wizansky and Joshua Poertner are doing a wonderful project called How Shall I Hold You. It is a collaborative study of the love letter, specifically concerned with love letters from a specific type of relationship: lovers who do not share the same native tongue.

You can find more info here on how to submit. Send them your love letters!

Happy Valentine's Day!

heart shell, Los Angeles, Canon Digital Rebel

"I am so small. How can this great love be inside of me?"
-Rumi

The judges have made their selections! {Thank you Matt Passmore, SARK, Maya Stein and Laurie Wagner

There were so many wonderful crush stories, we had a terrible time choosing only three winners. We were crushed out on so many of them! Thank you to everyone who entered.

Our favorites {in no particular order} were:
"Sending Signals" by Tony
"Mr. Walker" by Lisa Myers
"Lost and Found in the Negev" by Alexandra Saperstein-Galyuk

You can read them here

May your day be full of love in whatever form that takes.

.....

FREE SHIPPING
Today is the last day to get free shipping for Valentine's Day!

The Gates

Cinder cone, Mt. LassenCanon Digital Rebel

Has anyone seen Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Gates yet?
Below are some links to other Christo pieces. I wish I had been around to see some of them in person.

Trees
Oil barrels
A gorgeous website of landscape art.
A collection of his work

"Swallow the stars until you are one with the universe, with all-pervading universal life."
-Soen Nakagawa

Photo Friday: Luscious

my little cousin Olivia, Canon Digital Rebel

Photo Friday's theme this week is "Luscious." Those little cheeks are good enough to eat.

I want to congratulate the ever talented and amazing Gayla on her new book entitled You Grow Girl. She might be the one who finally inspires me to start a garden!

Some photos that you will take you on a ride:
This Week in Pictures

Soft Serve Girl's chronicle of her brave journey: Living with Breast Cancer

sweeter

Sasha is my fotomodella, Canon Digital Rebel

The crush stories are in!
A huge thank you for everyone who participated. We will announce the winners on Valentine's Day.

The best thing that happened to me yesterday was chatting with my UPS man. Now, I don't know how many of you have a crush on your UPS driver (come one, admit it!) but I can safely say, my entire neighborhood is totally crushed out on ours. Rodney. We all talk about him.

He told me an incredible story about recently driving in the Oakland hills very late at night, swerving to miss a deer and driving off a cliff. The car was smashed to bits, totalled, but he was fine. He climbed out with literally one tiny scratch. He called his wife to pick him up and went home to sleep.

The next day at the accident site, the police were incredulous. "You were in there?" they asked, "That's not possible!" As I looked at Rodney's kind face, I could only imagine that angels were holding onto him, one on each arm, carrying him safely down the hill and placing him gently back in the car.

When I asked him if the experience had changed him, he paused for a minute and replied with a smile, "Things taste better now."

....

As I walked away, I tried to borrow a little bit of this perspective. To feel the weight of my feet on the pavement, to taste my earl grey tea as it went down, the warmth, the orange-iness. Why do we only get these glimpses, these little windows into our real experience, when something really horrible happens to us? or when someone we know gets hurt? Somehow through pain we gain access to the truth about our lives.

So I offer that to you today. The taste of sweet toffee on your lips, the coolness of the air in your lungs, the feeling of being alive and having everything taste a little bit better.

Some great pieces of writing:
Coming Clean a poem from my friend Maya on her new wonderful blog.

And a piece that brought me to tears: Fag by Catelin {via Jen in Ohio}

"How often have you been willing to look at your face in the mirror, without being embarrassed? How many times have you tried to shield yourself by reading the newspaper, watching television, or just spacing out? That is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: how much have you connected with yourself at all in your whole life?"
-Chogyam Trungpa

couch fringe

couch edge, Canon Digital Rebel

This is the coolest toilet ever. It's made of mirrored glass but you can see out from the inside. A bit unsettling but kind of exciting!

...
Another interesting project:
Over 3000 visitors to a Washington DC arts festival picked up postcards inviting them to share a secret anonymously. During "Artomatic", dozens of PostSecret cards with secrets written and/or illustrated on the back were received through the mail.

You can view them here.

We shall overcome

Union Square, San Francisco, tweeked slightly in photoshop for that vintage postcard lookCanon Digital Rebel

Back in 1993, a few months before I was to move to New Orleans, I went to see a psychic at a Spiritualist Church in Santa Barbara. It was called the Spiritualist Church of the Comforter and when my friend told me about it, I imagined a cozy place, with pews made of down, walls like egg crate mattresses and a floor made of sheepskin.

The first thing I noticed when we arrived were that the walls were covered in sunflowers. Murals, painstakingly rendered in jubilant yellows and greens and oranges. It was a joyous little space and I felt at ease there. I wondered what they preached.

But Wednesday nights, the night we were there, was reserved for readings, {channelings actually} by a woman who charged only five dollars a question. We went for kicks really, a fun little diversion, a little adventure in our evening. What's five bucks? She instructed us to write a question down on a piece of paper, place it in a small envelope and wait until our number was called.

When I sat down with the channeler she immediately closed her eyes, "The song, We Shall Overcome is ringing in my ears right now." And then she opened her eyes and looked straight into mine, "But we shall overcome ourselves and not others." At that, I felt a lump form in my throat. It was like she saw a secret part of me and I was a little embarrassed. At that time in my life, I had been taking self-empowerment courses and was very enthusiastic about them. I imagined how wonderful it would be if my friends and family did them too and probably asked them one too many times if they were interested in joining me.

"You are very excited about something right now," she said, "even zealous about something. Just remember, we shall overcome ourselves and not others." {My friends, who were in earshot began to giggle and smile}

I heard that song again yesterday as I sat at Glide and that lesson welled up in my heart again. It reminded me that in any fight for civil rights or justice, we also have to look at what lives in our own hearts. We have to remember our own greed, our own meanness, our own prejudice. We have to acknowledge how far we have to go in our own lives and know that it is about overcoming that as well.

me and my trusty camera

another bathroom portrait, Canon Digital Rebel

More from the Los Angeles bathroom series...

My new favorite site! Flickr Blog There are some incredible links to photo series there.

one, one, one

what I do when I arrive in other people's bathrooms,Canon Digital Rebel

Keep your crush stories coming! We are thoroughly enjoying them...Final date for entries is February 8th.

"I never look at the masses of my responsibility; I look at the individual. I can only love one person at a time-just one, one, one. So you begin. I began-I picked up one person. Maybe if I didn't pick up that one person, I wouldn't have picked up forty-two thousand...The same thing goes for you, the same thing in your family, the same thing in your church, your community. Just begin-one, one, one.
-Mother Teresa

brisket night

The Briskettes,Canon Digital Rebel

It's an odd kind of feminism that I adopted as a teenager. I decided early on that I would never wear pantyhose, put on foundation, have a skin regimen (I stopped washing my face when I was 17), iron my clothing or wear any makeup besides the occasional lipstick. I refused to wear high heels and insisted on sporting very large bootlike doc-marteny things that weighed a ton.

Some of these promises have since fallen by the wayside.

I also decided that I didn't want to learn to cook or sew. (What was I thinking?!) I suppose I never wanted to be a homemaker in that traditional sense {or what my image of that was} and my theory was that if I was unqualified to do those things then maybe I would avoid that particular fate. I was good at math, had a degree in economics and loved to wield a paintbrush. I figured I was ready to make it in a man's world.

But in the last few years it hit me like a freight train, "I forgot to learn how to cook and sew!" and I imagined how wonderful it would be to cook a beautiful meal, to hem my own pants, or make cushions for the couch. As I grew to be more nesty, my desire to make my home rich with foods and fabrics grew as well. When I imagine having a family it includes feeding them! and I have noticed that I actually enjoy doing this more and more.

The subject came up with my friends and since none of us knew how to properly roast a chicken, make a great soup or homemade bolognese, we decided to start a cooking series. Every month or so we've decided to choose a particular recipe and slowly but surely we will have a mighty repertoire of foods we cook well. When I mentioned this to my friend Micki, she offered to be the guest chef for our first night-brisket night!

Micki happens to be the same age as my parents and it felt good and right that she would be passing this traditional recipe onto us. It was sweet last night in my kitchen, having so many of my favorite women in one place cooking and drinking wine.

While I still may never wear pantyhose or wear sensible shoes, I am so grateful to my friends who can cook like nobody's business. They will lead me gently into the future and Matt and I might just be fed well in the process.

Los Angeles

Venice Beach, Los Angeles,Canon Digital Rebel

My goodness, I've been so busy catching up and I really want to just sit down and tell you all the right things about my trip to Los Angeles because it was SO much fun and it was just the girls and that was so wonderful and I got to see some very dear friends and laugh a lot and see art and walk on the beach and see 3 crazy thermonuclear type sunsets (have you seen the sun set in L.A.?) and eat middle eastern food and mexican food and indian food and thrift for clothes and go to a square dance party (sadly we missed the square dancing) and watch a table full of women take photos of each other's cleavage. And then of course there were the HOURS of sitting in the car because it's L.A. but it didn't matter because I was with my sweet friends.

But I just don't quite know how to put it all into words.

So here are some highlights:
The bridal shower of a dear friend in Pacific Palisades. Fancy pants!

The Museum of Jurassic Technology
A weird little place full of strange and ironic curios, unexpected treasures, and really weird exhibits that were like a cross between the Exploratorium and McSweeney's pirate store. I was completely transported to another world.

My favorite thing I saw there was a line of microscopes with the tiniest paintings in the world on the slide beneath the lens. They were so detailed and beautiful, little birds and flowers made out of specks of dust.

Venice beach at sunset. It was like the carnival complete with circus side shows.

And finally, this gallery (and gallery owner) restored my faith in the art world and that there can still be playful, passionate, unpretentious work in these spaces.
........
Other new discoveries:
A new art magazine called Making Room {via the talented Gayla}

Jill Bliss paper products through Chronicle Books