the beauty that is everywhere

In the garden

Lisa Jones Crowley — Thu, 17 May 2012 11:53:07 +0000

Radish harvest morning. Also bunny spotting. Also gloriously beautiful. Also camera batteries passing out. Also astonishing growth from the plants in the recent night rain. Also a voice in me that says: receive.

Breathe in. Receive. There is nothing to get, even as I ricochet, even as I list-make, even as I figure out, forage.

There are bunnies, radishes, flowers. There is a woman in a robe drinking coffee, going back in the house for fresh cameras. There is morning traffic.

the beauty that is everywhere - my love notes to the world

Untitled

Lisa Jones Crowley — Tue, 15 May 2012 11:36:14 +0000

What
did we do
before Mad Men,
when we needed to say, oh,
that
was so very Mad Men,
knowing Joan Hollaway was
gazing over at us with her all
knowing gaze, ready to burst out
laughing
at the hilarious
universe with its stream of what must be
hilarious
practical
jokes
which have seemed
to last
for centuries.

the beauty that is everywhere - my love notes to the world

Stories

Lisa Jones Crowley — Sat, 12 May 2012 12:46:06 +0000

I have things to tell you, you know. It won’t take long. Or it may take a hundred years. And I will be listening, because you have things to say, too. We have stories to put together like bubbles, bumping lazily into each other, fusing, popping, suddenly boundaryless, suddenly all the stories ever told. And we will keep telling.

Because we are sayers. And seers. And smellers. And breathers. We shop at Price Club. We grow our own food. We scream at the television. We become empassioned about a candidate, about a seed company, about a troubadour, about our hair.

We are stories, my love. Telling and being told. Dressed in pretty colors. Lighting the darkness. Darking the light.

the beauty that is everywhere - my love notes to the world

Sprouts

Lisa Jones Crowley — Wed, 09 May 2012 12:03:05 +0000

There’s a garden that grows in the backyard, sprouts coming up from seeds. Every morning, more loveliness. I wake, and walk out into the yard to see what the night rain has brought me.

There are radishes and onion and beets and carrots and edamame and cukes and squash and zucchini and peas that have grown from seed, first delightful little sprouts, then plants that take their place in the garden bed. Also, in the way of herbs, there is burdock and echinacea from seed, and milk thistle, lovage, borage, basil, dill, parsley, cilantro, tarragon, thyme and mint from the herb sale at Maymont a couple of weeks ago. Perhaps still to come are some fennel, oregano and marjoram.

I’ve been studying up on organic gardening as I plant and — do you know — it is the soil that feeds the plants. The plant takes from the soil what it needs in the way of nutrients and minerals and is thus healthy and filled with life. And color. And delight.

This garden belongs to me in the general way, in that my hands mixed the soil and planted the seeds, but in the truer sense, I belong to this garden, to this little microcosm of this beautiful earth.

the beauty that is everywhere - my love notes to the world

Soap

Lisa Jones Crowley — Mon, 07 May 2012 13:26:33 +0000

I wash my glass in Palmolive dish soap in the kitchen at work and it very sweetly catapults me back 28 years to where my babies are babies and I am washing dishes very sweetly in the kitchen in upstate New York. Any moment one of them might come around the corner, all filled up with light, and the business of toys, and being-ness, and I will pick them up with my soap bubble hands, and smile at them and let them tell me everything.

the beauty that is everywhere - my love notes to the world

How about awesome?

Lisa Jones Crowley — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:16:44 +0000

Awesome people hanging out together: an awesome Tumblr blog. This will cheer you up if you need cheering. Which I do.

Image of Elton John, Lady Gaga and Sting by http://awesomepeoplehangingouttogether.tumblr.com/

the beauty that is everywhere - my love notes to the world

Clean

Lisa Jones Crowley — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:37:56 +0000

So, here’s what happened with the cleanse. I suppose it’s still happening. The first week, which was the elimination diet week, where you don’t eat sugar, dairy, corn, eggs, red meat, wheat or nightshades, felt a bit…fragile…, and I seemed to want a lot of rest. The juices and the clean food, along with the fact that I wasn’t eating foods that were apparently inducing an allergic response, were doing their magic.

According to the book, after the first week, you move into eating a liquid breakfast, regular (clean) lunch and liquid dinner, eating the same foods you were eating during elimination week. I decided to stay with what I was doing, since I was already eating a liquid breakfast and it was all seeming pretty manageable. So that’s what I did, and I’m not sure when it was exactly that I realized I felt better. And I mean, better than I can ever remember feeling. I had Martha-Stuart-like levels of energy and suddenly a great deal of compassion for people who wake at 3:00 a.m. and start to design the labels for their new spice jar system. It has taken a bit of practice to manage it all.

But I can see that this is a new way of life. It requires a bit of planning because it is not so easy to go out to eat anymore as most restaurants menu items in this [part of the] country seem to offer a choice between wheat or corn, plus dairy. Oy. When I eat something like that, just to be sociable, I can feel the Debbie Downer plunge that happens in my body. Thus, the menu planning. Thus, the search for others who are eating this way.

If you are thinking about doing this cleanse, I would read through the whole book and take notes, download the free forms they have on the site, make sure you understand it all. I spent about a week planning and gathering the ingredients. The one thing I may have missed is the fact that you are taking in and putting out a lot of water and your electrolytes can become imbalanced. So maybe have some fresh coconuts on hand so you can crack one open and drink the water to restore them if you feel weak. (And you know this isn’t medical advice, right? It’s the other kind of advice, I suppose.)

So that’s about it. Except just a couple of pieces of the other kind of advice: eat food. Real food.

the beauty that is everywhere - my love notes to the world

Little Portals

Lisa Jones Crowley — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 11:03:08 +0000

Sometimes I want to give you everything. Yes, you, reading this now. I sit in the morning darkened by the rain, listening to the tea pot work up to a whistle, making precise Morse code clicks on my iPad keyboard as I type this. I have just read this morning’s Garrison Keillor; first a cathedral of a poem you can walk through, smelling the beeswax candles, then stories of writers and the lives that seeped from them such WORDS that must be written, such COLOR that must be read years later. 200 years, 20, or right now, 5 minutes ago. We are calling out into the void with our pens, our keyboards, our voices, our guitars, our IBM Selectrics. We are inside this moment, and it is everything, and we want you there too.

Image is “Type Love” by Samantha Hahn

the beauty that is everywhere - my love notes to the world

Pretty Food and Electronic Geekery

Lisa Jones Crowley — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 12:20:07 +0000

You know, don’t you, what it’s like to want to eat pretty colors? This Fennel, Beet and Citrus Salad from BrooklynSupper.net is literally the prettiest food I’ve ever seen. No geekery there! Just pretty food — Elizabeth Stark is a gifted photographer as well as a gifted cook.

Pretty food has color to it. And color is a sign of nutrients. When a plant is grown in mineral-rich soil, it absorbs those nutrients, and is hardy and far less susceptible to insects and fungus so it doesn’t need pesticides. And it’s got the energy to bust out some serious color.

So, we know we want pretty food. And keeping pretty food ready at hand takes some planning and some work what with managing ripeness for things like avocados and mangos, and wanting to eat the kale while it’s still filled with qi.

Now for the geekery. I was in the midst of this planning when it occurred to me that perhaps by now someone has come along with a program that does what I’ve been wanting for years: recipe database with grocery lists and menu planning. I googled and voila: Paprika iPad app for $3. And it’s the bomb. Really, I would go so far as to say it’s iTunes for your recipes.

It runs clean, lean and beautifully. It does what you want it to do without too much thinking or work. You can click a button to add a recipe from Epicurious or Whole Foods or whatnot, replete with luscious photo and recipe source. Here’s what it looks like:

And, my favorite feature: you can add all of your own categories and cross-reference to your heart’s content. Here are some of mine: crockpot, gluten-free, family recipes, holiday foods, retro-fancy, appetizers & snacks, beverages, salads, soups, superfoods, breakfast, gifts, picnic, health, medicinal & reference. Etc. Etc. I also have a category for each kind of vegetable, meat, grain, plus various cuisines, plus seasons. To me, it’s wondrous. Here’s what the salad category looks like:

Now, back up just a second and read the category called “health, medicinal and reference.” Do you see what just happened? This thing is not limited to recipes. You can copy an article about a certain food or nutrient in and categorize it however you’d like. So, if you’d seen something about beets being amazing for you, you can categorize it as “beets” and “reference,” and whatever. Then you click on the “beets” category and there you have the article AND some recipes containing beets. Helpful!

Now, how about some menu planning? From within the recipe itself, you click on the meal planning/calendar icon and then pick the day from the calendar that you’d like to have that recipe. Need the ingredients? Click on the grocery cart icon and add some or all of the ingredients to your grocery list. Then all your groceries are compiled for you and yes, you can print or email the list. Or just have your iPad with you at the grocery store and check things off as you go.

Can you email people recipes from within the app? Yes. Click on the envelope/email icon. And, if they have the app, they can import it right in. I’ve added all of the family recipes, like my Nana’s hot milk cake and my grandfather’s spaghetti sauce so if my sisters are very clever they will get the app and have me email them the recipes. They are not such uber-geeks as I, but they certainly have potential.

Okay, out to plant some beet seeds in the garden. All this talk of beets.

Pretty Salad Image Source: brooklynsupper.net via Elizabeth on Pinterest

the beauty that is everywhere - my love notes to the world

Yesterday On the River

Lisa Jones Crowley — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:43:19 +0000

My darling son Kenny was in town this weekend and we went to the James River, by way of what’s known in these parts as Texas Beach. You depart ordinary reality slowly, via a path from a park near Maymont which seems initially rather ordinary. This is, as I’m sure you know, often true of portals. You walk down a dirt path, cross over the railroad tracks via a weirdly God-awful footbridge and set of stairs down to the path on the other side, over and past the still waters of the inland channels. Keep going. Past baby snakes, past the people gathered in the lagoon, past stagnant water, poison ivy, tree roots, all being lovely, all being love. Keep going in to the river, into the fall line. Over the rocks and the current. To where you are in the center of everything and you are river. You are the huge rock with water moving past. You are the sun shining on everything. You are the beautiful planet that is recreating itself before our very eyes. You are the railroad bridge. You are the girl hoola-hooping just upriver. You are creating and being created, and it is a little bit astonishing, a little bit reassuring, but mostly, you are breathing in, breathing out, and you feel the river-tree-sky-beauty breathing with you.

Image of me by Kenny Crowley, taken at Big Sur last year. We didn’t bring any cameras to the river this time. Just ourselves.

the beauty that is everywhere - my love notes to the world