Julie Wong - BLOG -

summer

A hawk just ate a mouse in my backyard.  In the middle of the city.  I watched it pick flesh off of tiny bones.  Then it sat on my fence and looked at me (directly at me) before it flew off.

Today I also dyed one of my favorite running socks pink.  I knew the moment I put the red blanket in the washing machine it wasn't a good idea. 

But I did it anyway. 

Do you think that one white sock and one pink sock will help me run faster??  White, pink, white, pink....

The confused socks are sort of representative of the mental gymnastics I've been performing recently just to put a coherent thought together. 

I could sit in the sun, lie in the grass, watch the world going by, for HOURS on end without knowing how to channel this flat, sticky contentment into any kind of recognizable productivity.

I've been scatted, unfocused lately.  Millions of reasons I guess.

I don't understand any of them.

At some point I chose to surrender to 'what is'.

So far.  I'm happy.  It's been a good summer.

RITUAL

Bialetti Moka Express 

My sister bought me a cinnamon bun yesterday.  I've been saving it until now.  It's in a pink box, and I don't know, somehow pink makes it taste better. 

Rain outside - again...

A latte to wash it down.  So much more than just washing it down, though.  It's ritual.. .

measuring out the beans with a shiny, perfect stainless steel scoop, four rounds in the grinder.  Assembling the silver pot, water, coffee, top screwed on TIGHT.  Gas to exactly '5' on the stove, blue flame, carefully listening for any unwarranted gurgling.  Shaking the carton of soy milk until it comes out bubbly.  Heating, stirring, heating, stirring in the pot with the copper bottom (with that wood thing with the flat edge and the 3 holes)

I remember, a few years ago, in someone else's kitchen, drinking my first ever home made latte.  It was a total revelation to discover that you can make your own latte.  How could I not have known??

Whatever the reason, with that first bitter-sweet sip something inside just settles.

If you don't already have the iconically-fabulous-Italian-espresso-pot, you should get one immediately and experience the thrill of the NOT-$4.83-but-just-as-good-latte.

Soon you won't remember life without Moka Express...

* If you can find it, try Kicking Horse Coffee, based in Invermere, BC, Canada (a beautiful place, incidentally, with a very cool family-owned hot glass studio!)  Organic, fair-trade, shade-grown coffee from a company with nice business practices and nice values.  Nothing tastes better than that...

GREEN TEA

Yesterday morning on my way to the studio I stopped in at a café around the corner to get some green tea.  Somewhere I've picked up the belief that green tea is good for everything.  Brisk winter mornings.  A nasty cold.  Delusions of weight loss.  Etc.

I opened the packet.  Fragrant, leafy green tea.  Sewn up in an organza-like pouch, edged in unbleached ivory thread.  Surprised, I spent several moments smelling the tea and watching it diffuse into my mug.

Moments I'd never have spent on an ordinary tea bag.

Wouldn't it be great if there were more beautiful things in the world that made us actually stop to experience.

* Read more about the company that makes this amazing organic, corn-based, GMO-free tea bag here: Mighty Leaf Tea

So yesterday while I was working, a flying piece of molten glass burned a hole in my favorite bra.  Although I recognize and appreciate the fact that generous padding in said bra probably saved me from a more noteworthy incident, why, oh why couldn't it have happened on a bad bra day?

THE SURPRISING THING

horned melon

It's a strange, pointy orange thing.  I almost gasped when I cut it open - beautiful in a way I did not expect. This is what you get when you choose adventure in the produce aisle.  Some beautiful thing that you don't know what to do with.

Not that yummy, I have to say.

Tastes like a blobby cucumber with pithier seeds.

Like the surprising fruit/vegetable thing, a juicy and unexpected wave of creativity has hit, finally.  It's been a dry summer.

THE CARAGANA BUSH

caragana bush, around the corner from where I live

In the summer heat, tinder-dry pods snap in time to the beat of the sun.  Staccato rhythm.  Snap.  snap snap.... snap.

With sweat decorating my forehead, I peer between the clumps of leaves, swaying in a whisper of a breeze.

If I was very small, I could pass between the branches and walk forever in the cool, green, shady depths of the caragana bush.

SWEET BLACK TEA & HONEY BREAD

lantern, Calgary Folk Music Festival main stage field

They wound through the crowd, bundled up in rain coats and hoodies, carrying lanterns on bamboo poles, as Ani DiFranco commanded the stage with her big small presence:

"i don't need anyone to hold me

i can hold my own

i got highways for stretchmarks

see where i've grown"

and as I stood along the side of the crowd, hugging my sweater around myself against the cool night air, I thought about growth and strength and how it's really true that the beauty is in the scars, the places we've hurt and healed and hurt again.

and I felt strong, and proud of these wounds, that wandering, those rememberings.

there were so many great moments during the folk festival weekend - hearing my favorite band-of-the-moment (Jay Crocker & The Electric Apes) perform a sizzling set, hearing Stew's funny song about Ken doll realizing he's gay - eating tabbouleh and cookies and baklava dripping with honey and salad with sunflower seeds drenched in sour vinaigrette dressing and spolumbo sausage and barbequed hamburgers. dancing to african rhythms at the north gate, as I performed my 'Production Security' volunteer duties, checking for passes, with the wind whipping through the trees, freezing my butt off. 

A cute photographer passed by and took pity on me, lending me his old, grey hoodie with the holes in the cuffs.  Epiphany: realizing that a major bonus of being single is that I can have these random crushes on strangers and know {in an alternate universe where I wasn't so shy and not nearly so busy} that if i wanted to, I could actually do something about it... ah.

There was warm soy chai and kettle corn and twinkling lights and earthy, funky jewelry, and so many great words, great songs.

"Rage against coffee machines, go ahead
I’ll take that sweet black tea
And honey bread

Cause you know,
Sadness is so fucking common
It’s not worth a song
So let’s sing of happy happy happy things
Happy things the whole night long..."

-STEW,

in a song about a café in baghdad performed during the All Mod Cons workshop on Sunterra Stage 5

MOODLING

caffè artigiano, vancouver

"The imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.  These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: 'I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget.'  But they have no slow, big ideas.  And the fewer the consoling, noble, shining, free, jovial, magnanimous ideas that come, the more nervously and desperately they rush and run from office to office and up and down stairs, thinking by action at last to make life have some warmth and meaning.

If you write, good ideas must come welling up into you so that you have something to write.  If good ideas do not come at once, or for a long time, do not be troubled at all.  Wait for them.  Meanwhile, put down the little ideas however insignificant they are.

Ideas come with the dreamy idleness that children have, and idleness when you walk along for a long, long time, or take a long, dreamy time at dressing, or lie in bed at night and thoughts come and go, or dig in a garden, or drive a car for many hours alone; or an idleness - and this is what I want you to do - where you sit with a pencil and paper or before a typewriter quietly putting down what you happen to be thinking, that is creative idleness.  With all my heart I tell you and reassure you: at such times you are being slowly filled and recharged with warm imagination, with wonderful, living thoughts."

- BRENDA UELAND

HOME

   
cracked paint, bowness

I'll admit that at first it was difficult to stay away from the studio.  A couple of weeks ago, my oxygen concentrator (the machine that delivers oxygen to my torch so that it burns hot) died, and I'm waiting... patiently.... for a replacement to arrive.

The first week or so, I was antsy, distracted, irritable.  No evening trips to the studio to relax and unwind and create.

uggggh.

But then I started to think about what else in my life needed doing, what else had been neglected in favor of those evenings at the studio.

The thing that came to stand out most was that my living space had become a place to sleep, a place to store food, a place to shower.  Unpacked boxes and disorganized piles of stuff everywhere!  No art on the walls, no table to sit at for a meal.  Not exactly the sanctuary I imagine when I think of my ideal home.

I've always thought about how I might change things, if I had a bigger apartment, if I bought a house, if... if... if...  And I started to think about how in so many other ways, I'm learning to be present in THIS moment, to stop putting it off.  Work to be happy now.  A simple idea - but so hard to practice.

So I started to sweep, mop, move, rearrange, recycle, pack, unpack, fluff, cook, sit....

And let me tell you - it's nice to be home.

"To live spiritually, is to live in the present moment."
-BKS Iyengar

an inconvenient truth

It is imperative that we see this film, and convince as many people as we can, to see this film.  Please go.

For more information, log on to http://www.climatecrisis.net/.