1.
Being in The Woods — artwork by Tallulah Pomeroy
From the Community
Being in the woods
I sit and wait.
The day's words soak into soil.
I become compost.
When I am dissolved,
slowly
things come alive,
late sunlight on smooth
hazel bark, each leaf
dancing, each and all
together dancing with
my decomposing self.
Now I am
the water, the light surface of
the water, looking at the leaves
each and every dancing leaf
with the late sunlight
on smooth hazel bark
and who I was, just
a moment ago,
still waiting
on the bank.
- Tallulah Pomeroy
Tallulah’s illustrations and poetry often express both the levity as well the depth and sobriety of what it is to be human. She is best known for ‘A Girl’s Guide to Personal Hygiene’ (I MAY be featured in this… free gift to everyone who works out which illustration!) - you couldn’t get closer to humanity’s earth than that.
2.
Untitled - a collection of monoprints by Naotsugo Hashimoto
From the Internet
While I came across an abundance of images of Nautsugo Hashimoto’s work, it wasn’t so easy to find information.
I used Google Translate to read the blurb from the artist’s Pinterest account, and it gave me this:
“There is a "mystery" in the works that attract interest, and it is easy to understand and difficult to understand. I think that is an important entrance.”
— Nautsugo Hashimoto
Japanese Text:
興味を引く作品には「謎」があり、わかりやすく、わかりにくい作品です。それは重要な入り口だと思います。
Given my experience of searching for this artist thus far, ‘mystery’ seems rather apt.
3.
On Mystery, and Being in the Woods — a quote from Henry David Thoreau.
From the internet
“We need the tonic of wildness... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
PROMPT FOR YOU
This week’s creative prompt is simple, and not at all very mysterious:
Go into the woods, and enjoy!
The poem reminds me of something George Saunders wrote recently:
“Doing this work [cleaning out his home preparing to downsize], I keep encountering traces of my former self (in photos and letters and books I bought) and am struck by two things: 1) There really is no solid self. Who was that guy? Who is this one?...”
(https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/office-hours-1a1?r=5apie&utm_medium=ios)
How wonderful that there really is no solid self!