The Glorious Illustrations of Alexandra Boiger

Alexandra's illustrations are perfectly sumptuous...and her tribute to her sister is beyond beautiful...

Alexandra Boiger Illustration: FOR ULRIKE

Salt: Soup, Attitude, and the Meaning of Life

Have just connected this to linkedin, and--on the very off chance that anyone scrolls this far down, clicks, and finds themselves looking at this blog--I humbly request your patience. This is all rather new to me: I hope to be adding a few bells and whistles (but not too many) in the near future, but I'm still learning.

That being said, the long-term goal of this little blog is to create something worth coming back to--some "thing" that is visually appealing, some words that are worth your time...some idea that sticks, whether it's for your home or your life or your next two and a half minutes.

In a nutshell:

I believe that life is wonderful and good and grand, but it is not easy. All that "wonderful and good and grand" is salted with moments (and sometimes months or years) of difficulty. I find myself (again, for it seems to be a recurring theme in anything I write) comparing life to soup. Tasty soup almost always has salt in it, doesn't it? In life, the salt may be of tears or sweat or the ocean behind our little house in Haliewa (circa 1961).

Salted with difficulty, life is not easier, but--if we allow it to be--it is tastier.

It would be quite nice to deliver, in this blog, good "soup" as often as possible. Yummy, worth waiting for; sweet, salty, memorable...worth coming back for. Blog soup that might add--even if in the most infinitesimal way--a little more meaning to life.

On that note...

Have been reading Viktor Frankl's book, "Man's Search for Meaning," again. In one chapter, he writes of a young woman--a fellow prisoner at the concentration camp--and the meaning she found, during her last days, in the lone branch of a chestnut tree outside her window. The entire section (entire book, really) is wonderful...a bit of it follows:

"An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature.

But there is also purpose to that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces...

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails...gives him ample opportunity...to add a deeper meaning to his life. {One} may remain brave, dignified and unselfish...man {has the chance to} either make use of or forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him."

What of the chestnut tree?

On the lone branch--the one thing the young woman could see through her window--were two blossoms. She often conversed with the tree--"the only friend I have in my loneliness." Frankl, anxious for her, and concerned that she was hallucinating, asked her if the tree talked back to her.

"Yes."

It is in the tree's answer that I find hope: brave, dignified, unselfish hope.

The salt from tears. The ocean in our backyard. Two blossoms on a chestnut tree. A good bowl of soup. Hope.

The answer from the chestnut tree? "I am here--I am here--I am life..."

Vedana - Eric Case's Weblog: Steve Jobs Inspiration Roundup

Vedana - Eric Case's Weblog: Steve Jobs Inspiration Roundup

The Art of Making Home

There was a moment, today, when I finally realized what it really was about the design of interiors that fascinated me for so long: making homes.

Homes that support children and parents and friends and a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush. Home where someone cares, someone who loves you best of all.

Home is not a cardboard cut-out replicated from a glossy catalog.

It's a place that reflects the souls who live within. It's not staged or perfect or spotless or empty. A home is a place you can walk into and feel loved.

That is what fascinates me. How do we create this place, maintain it, allow it to grow; how do we make a home that feeds and helps fulfill the longings of the souls within?

There are houses I walk into that immediately feel like home. They are never spotless, but often tidy. There is a warmth that pervades the atmosphere.

"Here," I think, "people are loved and cared for and welcome."

That is making home. It fascinates me still. I love this, and I love the art of it.

LIFE LIKE TALES: Dream Like Choreography

Brilliant.

At UCDAVIS, through this weekend, Mainstage...some of the best theater you'll ever see. Honest; guaranteed, or your money back.

Choreographer of our dreams: Vivian Thorne.

A Firefly in a Mason Jar

A good little story might be like that; it should, for a moment, light up a life like a firefly caught, fleetingly, in a jelly jar on a soft summer night.

There are holes in the lid, of course: we all need to breathe.

Holes in the lid. Light. The dwindling dusk of a summer night, perhaps in a small town in Ohio? A firefly and a little girl and two eager hands clutching the mason jar...a grandmother smiling on the porch, summer night clouds scudding across a deepening sky.

A short, sweet story to light up the night.

"But at my back I always hear/Time's winged chariot hurrying near"

To become attached to something or somebody: this is always a curious state.

Today, I listened to three older women fight for their right to sunlit yellow walls, 'though they seemed curiously unaware that the true sun had been blocked, utterly (with flattened cardboard boxes, at that!), from the windows above them. The yellow walls the ladies prepared to do battle for were a weak stand-in for the sun, but they were the stand-in that had become an accustomed, unrealized sun-substitute.

"You cannot paint the wall gray! It will be dismal and unhappy and perfectly awful on a cloudy day!" said the older ladies as they practically stomped their feet on the floor.

In truth, the gray in question was actually a lovely bluish, green-tinged, hazy sort of floating cloud color, and the yellow they were fighting for was a sad, dilapidated faux-Tuscan romp. But it was a yellow to which they had become attached, and for which they felt such strong admiration and longing that they practically yelled, in the quiet coffee shop, that this was simply not to be accepted.

The color these three sweet ladies believed they saw was sunny and brilliant (and it might once have been, but that once was long since past). It was the color they had clearly come to expect each day while drinking their quite-decent cup of espresso. For twenty minutes each morning, the lovely ladies felt they owned a little bit of real estate on the main street of an insistently charming little town in California surrounded by hills and real sunshine and happy jogging people, or people who were dressed as happy jogging people.

They owned the yellow walls, too, for those twenty minutes. Perhaps they felt they had found, finally, a way to make their sun stand still...but I am with Andrew Marvell, and believe we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make it run.

Eventually, the sweet hazy green-tinged-blue cloud gray will suit them just fine, I think. It will just take a bit of getting used to it, and several dozen espresso-flavored mornings spent pondering the sky.

I think we will give them just a bit of a spicy clean clear yellow, too, so that their sun does not turn to dust.