Archive
Categories
Full Post List
Apr 25, 2025: friendly stranger //
Apr 24, 2025: Aristotle on techne ἡ μὲν οὖν τέχνη ὥσπερ εἴρηται ἕξις τις μετὰ λόγου ἀληθοῦς ποιητική ἐστιν ἡ δ᾽ ἀτεχνία τοὐναντίον μετὰ λόγου ψευδοῦς ποιητικὴ ἕξις περὶ τὸ ἐνδεχόμενον …
Apr 23, 2025: ælizabeth is (for a new about page) moonchild mother of cats mask-maker’s wife wholly enthused by gift of life dust weeper and dabbler in girlish games waggle …
Apr 22, 2025: the inky i dream of an intruder in the house and i wake up screaming when they turn their face to me. but if awake and i imagine an intruder in the house, my …
Apr 21, 2025: dog asleep dog asleep in the middle of the street i slow the car unsure who i feel sorry for homeless undisturbed territorial tired thinking will demand no less …
Apr 19, 2025: atmospheric passage //
Apr 18, 2025: if leisure if leisure in the morning then spare me a glance if leaf-buds are forming then we have a chance if dew-drops are adorning then the roses free if …
Apr 17, 2025: Æ.2 ok computer whereto and from dragging chains against the sun the name of both is Æ (orthœpy in play) and ælizabeth is setting honey traps for dragons …
Apr 16, 2025: Æ.1 we visited your grave the other day how’s that thought for you? Æ went there to kiss the sky because a chariot is life’s emancipation of …
Apr 15, 2025: salt on skin //
Apr 14, 2025: Writing about “hereness” // “If not in America, maybe it’s a little alright. But if in America, it’s not alright at …
Apr 13, 2025: a chariot is reply to Isthmian I, via Phaedrus 227β // a chariot is artifact entombed beneath packed sediment an imprint on the earth of acts not of the earth …
Apr 12, 2025: no cats here // (Lalah under batik)
Apr 11, 2025: 3 cats // Lalah loves nothing better than to get her cat smell all over a freshly laundered human and then go and scratch some wood // meanwhile Ismail is …
Apr 10, 2025: body’s most wondrous lesson was turning raw wounds into desire as ripening longing to be eaten as eyes longing to see and be open //
Apr 9, 2025: broken machine of tentacles and teeth war is what monsters are and what they do monsters are monsters at war with monsters useless becomes another …
Apr 8, 2025: marigolds what a week to take vacation some time to recompose to get back from the deadness questions that i never chose my instrument is alien my hands …
Apr 1, 2025: a dream a dream swimming diving under taking a deep breath to do it not knowing when i would be coming up for air or knowing it was never //
Mar 31, 2025: our exercise as exorcism of time — the oddly-staggered rhyme leaves bruises on buds stringently-steeped, the undisclosed grays of grass groped in dark …
Mar 30, 2025: Is it power //
Mar 28, 2025: The result of all this “intelligence” // (A rant) In these final days of the holy month of Ramadan, I am publishing this …
Mar 27, 2025: Empty glass.
Mar 26, 2025: Ironically(?), when I write about fascism, my voice goes into führer mode. Take a deep breath, I say to my heart. Peace is every l — e — t — t — e — …
Mar 25, 2025: It’s the middle of the night, I walk into the bathroom and there is a golden frog sitting outside the window looking in at me. It is glittering gold. …
Mar 24, 2025: Contextualizing TESCREAL (a sketch) // in phenomenology as dialectical dismemberment: (A) –> post-logos –> post-politics –> …
Mar 23, 2025: The anti-gospel (of TESCREAL + “AI”) // I’ve been trying to write something about the “TESCREAL bundle” but it’s …
Mar 22, 2025: Dogways. //
Mar 20, 2025: Crone wonder. // For most of my adolescence, it was my dream to study the ocean, and life in the ocean, as a marine biologist. I was obsessed with …
Mar 19, 2025: Eve’s ultimatum. // Do you see yourself (in his mirror) as The summarized insanity of Adam? Your heart is his gateway to the garden. Be probable, or …
Mar 18, 2025: Notes on techne. // There is no eros in technology. (Technology is anti-erotic, Ending in the endlessness of desire.) Techne is the technology of …
Mar 16, 2025: her place, her body,
Mar 15, 2025: her ecosystem the things you took are empty, cast-off and abandoned spells, porcelain and wooden shells, remnants of oceans past and absent wonder — tombs wherein …
Mar 13, 2025: Ismail It looked like neon green beans, to my eyes, The sorry viper he’d regurgitated at My feet, when I bent lower to examine The finger-lengths of …
Mar 10, 2025: Of time. // This was, in fact The creation Of the human — The first ape who took A swing and Hacked off a piece of God. (It was As always A piece of …
Mar 8, 2025: The thing that I’m most afraid of is dying in anger.
Mar 7, 2025: I noticed the smell of burning plastic garbage as I was in savasana today. The sickly sweet sticks in the back of my throat and leads to headache. …
Mar 5, 2025: As if (walking along the beach) to pick up something alive and then letting it be alive in me.
Mar 4, 2025: Blue hunger tide.
Mar 3, 2025: Ramadan vibes. // Cozy, calibrating, sedating. Feelings of sahoor. Being awake and only half-alert during the darkest, the quietest, the coldest hours …
Mar 2, 2025: (And all I want to say about this — His treatment of women will be his treatment of the world.)
Mar 2, 2025: (Hand-holding is still a big deal here, too)
Mar 1, 2025: Skin soft and worn like igneous sand into Her open psalm, they one lunation spent As sounding bodies, soldiering the fast. Blessed Ramadan to those …
Feb 28, 2025: We see now // the tools of tyranny falling happily, giddily into the laps of tyrants. These it turns out were not just our toys, but the dark …
Feb 27, 2025: If the language model told you the truth, every answer would be “I do not know” or “I cannot tell you the answer.”
Feb 26, 2025: Was in emotion.
Feb 25, 2025: (“Sub-tweeting” Babylon.) // “There’s no education here. There’s no geometry, no music, no reading or translation of any …
Feb 24, 2025: I am not full of outrage.
Feb 23, 2025: On conservation as (eva)nascence. // Comment on the first part of the shahada. // Prelude to the incoherence. // The error of so-called conservatism …
Feb 22, 2025: Of course we come by different paths. Just because we’re all recognizable doesn’t mean we’re all the same.
Feb 21, 2025: Elements and locutions.
Feb 21, 2025: If you can’t imagine that as a serious possibility, (and I wonder what world you see when you look out your window?), then you haven’t been paying …
Feb 20, 2025: Kendrick Lamar 2026. // I was busy on the night of, but I’ve since watched Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show more than a few times. It is …
Feb 19, 2025: Threads woven between pretenses. // A test I give myself, as I consider interacting with anything at all, but especially on the internet. I ask …
Feb 15, 2025: Moonrise III. Moonrise II. Moonrise I. // Seeking correspondence. (Purnama, Feb. 2025.)
Feb 14, 2025: “Luckily we thlop-thlopped,” // or, And then there was the drive home. I preface this to say we made it back safely. Also to warn you that …
Feb 12, 2025: Two year anniversary ♥️
Feb 11, 2025: I am the difficult daughter; // I am also a grateful wife. Not just moving to the other side of the world, (and converting to Islam, from a …
Feb 10, 2025: Arrived safely to a moody mother. Well, she’s swallowed most of the beach. No place left for early morning boys. Unusual winds. Churning, charging …
Feb 10, 2025: Anticipating ocean. // Speaking of water, we’re off to the seaside today. For the first time the app calculates the northern route will be faster (I …
Feb 8, 2025: And then we were darkness comprised of crickets, Resident textures of stars, witness to Unbound interiors, and delivered by The same face-dispersing …
Feb 7, 2025: Our watery roots.
Feb 6, 2025: Y’all were louder than the chickens today — But no hard feelings. Just measured words, and patient Preening to wax away the feathered nerve. …
Feb 5, 2025: Half-light sheds taste on full insanity; Pale lemon slice atop smoked opium tea. 🌓
Feb 4, 2025: Early V-day celebration, here. // Relief and relief and more relief, now ready for rest and (rest-enforcement and) healing. With no artful way to say …
Feb 3, 2025: The apps forecasted silence, now tonight The sky brings thunder. Hurricane or drought, Sheer element’s beyond us, but not quite: To make it …
Feb 2, 2025: These complaints that barely taste displeasure Are precious and I hope to remember them.
Feb 1, 2025: Like 90% of the words I’ve learned in Javanese I’m not allowed to say. (The solution to the aforementioned was to bring out the ukulele.)
Feb 1, 2025: “Why won’t you sing me a song? I miss your voice.” (I love your voice.) “Everyone else’s voice is a cartoon Compared to yours.” // “Why …
Jan 31, 2025: Temple clearing.
Jan 30, 2025: Students in submission. // A difficult conversation, a revelation. So much (of reading this book) depends on acknowledging, wrestling, reconciling, …
Jan 29, 2025: Tonight, as begins a new lunar year. I see there is beauty (also) in your invisibility. Alhamdulillahirabbilalamin. 🌘🌑🌒
Jan 28, 2025: Xenia on the Internet Another way to think about this is as being a good guest. For example. I am a stranger and a guest in Indonesia, the country where I live, so I am …
Jan 27, 2025: Looking around the neighborhood, // as witness to the wreckage. A place where a hurricane has just passed through. The shock of sudden emptiness. The …
Jan 26, 2025: Sky from home (11).
Jan 25, 2025: Unsafe Spaces and the Privilege of Peace // Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. I do not know you. Neither do I know myself. My desire is to be honest, and to welcome you here. I espouse neither hatred …
Jan 22, 2025: Black hen, her shining Shadow, sleeps in tangled grass. At home in hiding.
Jan 21, 2025: The opposite of repetition. // Unresolved opposites permit no focus today. These times when it seems impossible to win, (to do even/just one single …
Jan 20, 2025: Interiors (4).
Jan 19, 2025: A festival of purgation. // “Being sick” is also a negotiation between myself and the world, I was thinking yesterday. As we kept …
Jan 17, 2025: Lifestyle tip. The best hairstyle (for long hair) for being sick in bed is braids. The extra effort is worth it. Easier to keep out of the way, in …
Jan 15, 2025: One beautiful day.🌈
Jan 14, 2025: Where-from? Chickens’ Edition I’m celebrating, because after two days living on coconut water and white bread, I graduated today to whole wheat bread. You see, I have the flu. Or, …
Jan 11, 2025: Funeral for a Chicken It became obvious that Grace was grieving the loss of her chick. She remained close to the nest, puttering, looking here and there or inside the nest …
Jan 10, 2025: Video is everywhere of Los Angeles burning, still visible when we close our eyes. My heart is with everyone suffering unimaginable loss and …
Jan 9, 2025: I’m sad to share that nu baby was lethargic and weak today, didn’t come out of the nest, rarely cheeping. E held out hope while I braced …
Jan 8, 2025: Nu baby. // So… life, uh, found a way. We tried (admittedly have been a little distracted) to steal all of Grace’s eggs but she tricked …
Jan 7, 2025: It’s gone. Doc said it might take a few months but I can’t wait to see how crazy I’m not. Whee.
Jan 5, 2025: I finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars // maybe a week ago. I really liked it but I think it took me the whole year to finish. (Spoilers …
Jan 4, 2025: Chillin’.
Jan 3, 2025: Hormonal IUD side effects Something a little different, today. I wondered for about thirty seconds whether this was “too much information” for my blog but well, …
Jan 1, 2025: Product misplacement. // Happy new year!
Dec 31, 2024: With relief. // Does this seem right? It’s neither the power nor the responsibility of a child to forgive a parent. To forgive, as to judge, is …
Dec 30, 2024: Chanced upon Bob’s 2017 Nobel lecture, which made me realize a few things. 1. Being a folk singer isn’t too different from blogging. 2. I …
Dec 29, 2024: The first lesson of the chariot is maybe not to put the chariot in front of the horses.
Dec 27, 2024: Goodnight, chickens. // I spend a lot of energy worrying about waste. I dislike waste. Unambiguous waste strikes me as unambiguously bad. Sometimes …
Dec 25, 2024: Mawar Natal.
Dec 24, 2024: Daughters of Typhon // Phaedrus 227β // Isthmian 1 It felt good to translate Isthmian 1, like eating a nourishing bowl of food, with green and purple vegetables, roast …
Dec 23, 2024: How to sweep the floor on a windy day?
Dec 22, 2024: Tropical Christmas // wonderful news, everything is less empty than advertised, triple-checking our double-Christ by the crossroads, the unborn child …
Dec 21, 2024: Peace, love, and a blessed darkest and lightest to all including the swingier parts of the globe. Our longest day is around 12.5 hours, tempered by …
Dec 20, 2024: Just under two days without rain, bright and blustery days, enough to wash and dry two loads of sheets, towels and blankets plus a full load of …
Dec 19, 2024: Just playin', again. // Although we can’t actually listen to this album, because when we do, we just cry, As one who is broken. I am primarily …
Dec 18, 2024: Pure sensation.
Dec 17, 2024: Just playin’ some Bob // Phaedrus 227β Σωκράτης: ὦ φίλε Φαῖδρε, ποῖ δὴ καὶ πόθεν; Socrates: Beloved Phaedrus, where to and where from? (…) Φαῖδρος: πεύσῃ, εἴ σοι …
Dec 15, 2024: To fertile Phthia. // There’s a Plato dialogue for every mood when you’re living through the dying days of a democracy. I revisited the …
Dec 14, 2024: People who write about “Western civilization” as if it is one thing boggle my mind. Don’t trust anybody who writes about “the …
Dec 13, 2024: Play-dreaming.
Dec 11, 2024: Hujan angin. // (Windy rain.) I’m inventing a new word, psycheic. From psyche + -ic, three syllables pronounced sai-kay-ik. An English-language …
Dec 10, 2024: True news is rigorously neither bad nor good, but always on the edge of your ability. Do not smile at things that would otherwise make you gag. It …
Dec 9, 2024: The young is transparent and cute, the old is cute and obscure. A cuteness metric.
Dec 7, 2024: A principle of psychedelic science. // Am I crazy or does Kendrick Lamar’s latest album share moments with Isthmian 1? (“Manifest excellence boldly …
Dec 6, 2024: Sky from home (10).
Dec 5, 2024: Isthmian 1 // This translation of Pindar’s first Isthmian ode is part of ongoing work on Plato’s Phaedrus, and undertaken with that dialogue in mind, …
Dec 4, 2024: I missed the obvious, it could (will) be a pharmakon. …It’s heavy mushroom season here, these days.
Dec 3, 2024: How many honored fathers can the motherland bear? // “When your guru sends you to study with another guru for a while, and you don’t know them, and …
Dec 1, 2024: Sri Rejeki with laron. // Selamat tilem🌑
Nov 30, 2024: With (sensitive) obscurity of allusion, the poet makes a reading go wild.
Nov 29, 2024: Nothing useful to say, but my sympathies go out to all those who had a sh-t Thanksgiving. Here’s a poem that might help. (Philip Larkin’s “This Be The …
Nov 28, 2024: On American Thanksgiving // War on (the outside, war on) the inside, And (choose) from the flavors of (Babylon), To (be the change), to (bring good …
Nov 27, 2024: (Can Phaedrus tell the difference between those two things?) The worship of beauty (Love) begins on the outside a book of monster. (Translation as …
Nov 26, 2024: Diatripse // Phaedrus 227β Φαῖδρος: (…) συχνὸν γὰρ ἐκεῖ διέτριψα χρόνον καθήμενος ἐξ ἑωθινοῦ. (…) Phaedrus: (…) For I spent a long time …
Nov 24, 2024: Interiors (3) feat. Lalah.
Nov 23, 2024: There is VERY IMPORTANT chicken news // that I’ve been trying to squeeze in “here” for a few days. (Sometimes one lets the horses …
Nov 22, 2024: Modern science may be better understood as an extension of modern politics, than as a descendant of (ancient natural) philosophy. One is born from …
Nov 20, 2024: (Morning was enough.) // As abrupt muffling shadow, It slightly thrills me, when The sky grows dark around 1 pm. A daily eclipse, the rain is Welcome …
Nov 19, 2024: Trying to focus on leisure, // to put it as a question. What exactly is it, where does it begin and end in my life? Why are its edges so blurry? Also, …
Nov 18, 2024: Sitting for a passport photo // trying to figure out who I’m looking at. I’ve never been good at smiling (or not smiling, or what) for a …
Nov 17, 2024: Romantic view (2).
Nov 16, 2024: On Introspection and Ideology // One Year on “Micro.blog” As prologue. I’ve been thinking about what Denny wrote here the last few days, and I wanted to thank him for putting it in such stark terms. I …
Nov 15, 2024: Veganism is the “indie web” of food.
Nov 13, 2024: Water spinach/kangkung.
Nov 12, 2024: My head is buzzing with village gossip, // or the tone and cadence of it, understanding a fraction of the words, still overwhelmed by the density of …
Nov 11, 2024: One of Lalah’s favorite things is to use the litter box when I’m taking a shower. So when I am finished, all fresh and clean, I am greeted …
Nov 10, 2024: (Does this mean we’re all antifa now?) // There are two words for we/us in Indonesian, one that includes you (as in, we live on earth) and the …
Nov 9, 2024: La sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la Lalah,
Nov 8, 2024: School Days in Athens // Phaedrus, 227β Φαῖδρος: ναί, παρ᾽ Ἐπικράτει, ἐν τῇδε τῇ πλησίον τοῦ Ὀλυμπίου οἰκίᾳ τῇ Μορυχίᾳ. Phaedrus: Yes, at Epicrates', in the house of …
Nov 7, 2024: Condolences 🕊️
Nov 6, 2024: Interiors (2).
Nov 5, 2024: Good luck, U.S.A.
Nov 4, 2024: On Vulnerability as a Key to Everything This post was inspired by the #weblogpomoama challenge, from Annie, which prompted another Annie’s question and response, which prompted the …
Nov 3, 2024: A metaphor for the parts and a different metaphor for the whole, is a human being. // That old triple goddess, the zoon logon echon. Or like …
Nov 2, 2024: I’m wearing a ruched tie-dye tube top, I’m self-actualizing✨
Nov 1, 2024: Interiors (1).
Oct 31, 2024: (There were certain things that you kept from me.) // Rainy days lately, and buggy, with small flying termites swarming frosted lightbulbs, at nights, …
Oct 29, 2024: One might feel alone, or imagine oneself joining a chorus of the unheard. Every song about war is longing in its heart to be a song about peace. (The …
Oct 28, 2024: Experiments in self-compost.
Oct 27, 2024: Fruits, flowers, and one active choice. // I watched my husband turn the spray-bottle (for “cat discipline”) on Frankie, which was utterly …
Oct 26, 2024: Groundworks, bare.
Oct 25, 2024: Beautiful flowers // grow out of chicken shit. Sometimes the work is to see chicken shit and imagine flowers, sometimes to see flowers and imagine …
Oct 24, 2024: This may be obvious, // but as everybody knows, obviousness is relative. When the thing that would make you happy has been planned out of your …
Oct 22, 2024: Romantic view.
Oct 21, 2024: Three yolks, two pulsas, no home. // Last night we ran out of two kinds of pulsa at once, it was just bad luck, but our reward was to spend a night …
Oct 19, 2024: Most people who believe or feel like they’ve disavowed God have more accurately disavowed an idol, which I believe is a perfectly fine and …
Oct 18, 2024: The (only) answers are in mirrors.
Oct 17, 2024: “Guide of the perplexed sea witch”. // Certain ancestors were about to be angry if she didn’t make that joke. Circe polypharmakos at …
Oct 16, 2024: Sky from home (9). // Selamat purnama🖤
Oct 15, 2024: I said to a friend that she doesn’t have to read my blog, at all, because she has a better version of it, which is me. Now stuck in this thought …
Oct 14, 2024: Something about orchids. // A mistake on a small road is easier to fix than a mistake on a big road. If I only knew how and could do absolutely …
Oct 13, 2024: Fire blue as glass.
Oct 12, 2024: View from the caldera. // So we’ve returned, after a trip that was at the last minute extended, twice, and an exhausting drive back, that …
Sep 30, 2024: Poetry is… the solidarity of the unseen with the vanishingly quiet. // Salam to all.🌒
Sep 28, 2024: (Lalah is known in the family for being “a little bitchy”. It’s just the way she is. But she’s also sweet and lovely. And none of us wants to put …
Sep 28, 2024: Lalah makes you jealous.
Sep 27, 2024: On grass. // One “touches grass” to better understand Homer. One reads Homer to better understand grass, and to meet its myriad …
Sep 26, 2024: Living with water. // Distant thunder, constant but low, and the atmospheric awareness of a storm. Not here yet, the rain, and it may not come, but …
Sep 25, 2024: The air is heavy with rain that didn’t come. // Galungan today. Canang on the bedside table, one also on the floor. A brown egg, small scoops of …
Sep 24, 2024: Waterways.
Sep 23, 2024: This is a blog. blog (n.) “online journal,” 1998, short for weblog (attested from 1993, in the sense “file containing a detailed record of each …
Sep 22, 2024: (omg what did you just read?) // or, (omg what did you just write?) Every blog is a re-invention of blogging, or at least it could be. If one had to …
Sep 21, 2024: Saw too much, today. Soaking a washcloth to place on eyes. Assalamualaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh.
Sep 19, 2024: Mulberry harvest.
Sep 18, 2024: It’s like being a teenager again but this time learning to drive on the other side of the road.
Sep 17, 2024: Uncertainty Principle. // Always a new example, of me, discovering (through self-depletion) how resource-intensive my old life was, and the immensity …
Sep 16, 2024: (Pleased to introduce the crone category to my blog.)
Sep 16, 2024: Me, on me. // Feelings are like the wind and you have to adjust the sails to catch them in the right way. And maybe you have to adjust the boat …
Sep 15, 2024: Mask/flame earth.
Sep 14, 2024: Cold damp dark of night ascends, is parted, penetrated by light like swords of angels stabbing through the atmosphere. The remainder is patched parts …
Sep 13, 2024: Meditation on plastic. // Morning sun brightens bare arms, damp grass touches feet, my body aches as I stoop to the ground. No need to move, so much …
Sep 9, 2024: Orchid and Traveller // Lost selves-of-sand resolve as empty time. As moon that disappeared, or star that failed to be itself, forging light like iron …
Sep 8, 2024: Body/passage earth.
Sep 7, 2024: Earthquakes, atonalities, and rice porridge. // We (here) had a pretty big earthquake just now, the ceiling and frame of the house rattled and shook. …
Sep 5, 2024: So that peace shall be our constant and only purpose.
Sep 3, 2024: artifact // (this jagged) wish (edge of words) lonely, and a craving for being alone (came out) why am I even (somewhat involuntarily) finished, here …
Sep 2, 2024: Sky from home (8).
Sep 1, 2024: Anger, which is of love and loss, is a dragon (dangerous and dialectical) that you tame, and then ride, through cloud tops scattering rainbows in …
Aug 31, 2024: To the alien, from another side. // Earth used to be the most beautiful place. You could go running, under-leaf, through waist-deep tangled-grass …
Aug 30, 2024: The cloud is not a cloud. Apple is not an apple. AI is not intelligence. (Examples of using nature to build trust and sell technology.)
Aug 29, 2024: Shadow/surface earth.
Aug 28, 2024: Verses of chickens, cats, crones. // We get her to the vet’s clinic and I swear Lalah jumps out of the carrier, nose glowing pink, and exclaims, …
Aug 27, 2024: I love being an animal. // As I sit down to write, in the bedroom, there begins an intensifying chip-chip, bok-bok from outside the front door… …
Aug 26, 2024: Grace and chicks.
Aug 25, 2024: Reversal spells, mulberry stains, and mixed substance. // Trying to understand everything as (part of) a “natural cycle”. I send a text to …
Aug 24, 2024: Margaret Spoon // Peace is everything (but it makes her laugh), like rain showers that come and go, and come again, and the cozy sweeping shush, like …
Aug 24, 2024: Light, whiskers, wood.
Aug 23, 2024: E. says I look like a baby dinosaur when I sleep. I don’t know what that means. I used to have recurring nightmares about a t-rex, though.
Aug 22, 2024: Witch’s mane and chaos truffles. // I don’t look at the sky today. It’s too bright. A discussion about zucchini, which isn’t …
Aug 20, 2024: Full moon, sudah matang, tomato consommé, incandescent orb with eggplant-magenta smudged-charcoal setting, moving through air just chill enough to …
Aug 19, 2024: Honeyed wafer set lightly into smoked amethyst sky. Grace’s nine eggs hatched into nine tiny black puffballs. Nine infant roosters, cheeping-cheeping… …
Aug 18, 2024: Grace, sitting.
Aug 17, 2024: But, Lysias // Phaedrus 227β Σωκράτης: καλῶς γάρ, ὦ ἑταῖρε, λέγει. ἀτὰρ Λυσίας ἦν, ὡς ἔοικεν, ἐν ἄστει. Socrates: Beautifully said, fellow. But Lysias was, as it …
Aug 14, 2024: Sri Rejeki in silhouette.
Aug 13, 2024: More chicken news. // Grace got up to stretch her legs, today, and I counted nine eggs. I bring Frankie fresh water. He drinks it. I talk to him. He …
Aug 12, 2024: Waking, as thinking, what we do with time. // Spending or wasting, as of fixed amount, and therefore an imperative, to put to good use. (Better wake …
Aug 11, 2024: We found your footprints in the snow. We brushed them all away. // Chilly night here, the forecast says low of 63f/17c. My fingers and nose definitely …
Aug 10, 2024: Sky from home (7).
Aug 9, 2024: “Being Balinese // is so much upacara. From being born, until you die, Mas!" is what he said. With a surprised grin on his wrinkled, …
Aug 8, 2024: Living light captures, listening to “Soldier of Love” (by Sade), sight. From the corner of my eye, a flame, on wood panel near bed. Scent …
Aug 7, 2024: Little earthquakes can be reassuring. If it doesn’t little-earthquake for a while, there’s a chance the next earthquake will be really …
Aug 6, 2024: There is nothing in this world that is actually straight. (Isn’t that right?) (One still loves the geometry of Euclid, which manages somehow to …
Aug 5, 2024: Lalah glamour.
Aug 4, 2024: Unexpected summons to a banjar celebration (part of Odalan) this morning, brief if frantic search through storage boxes for the traditional regalia, …
Aug 3, 2024: Emoji dictionary. // Sometimes I feel a wave of visceral dislike for emojis. I use them to express feelings with almost everybody in my life, and I …
Aug 2, 2024: Sounds of campur sari (a genre of music, translates to “mixed substance”, combining a core of keyboard-synthesized gamelan, the rhythm of …
Aug 1, 2024: Grace laid eggs.
Jul 31, 2024: Peacock blue of eyeshadow on the painted face of a legong dancer in an advertisement on the grimy side of a bus, turning at exhaust-choked crossroads, …
Jul 31, 2024: Gift-bearing.
Jul 30, 2024: Deeply-stacked blanket of grey on the horizon and a prodigal son for coffee. Lunchtime leisure, (this is nongkrong), slow discussion of organization …
Jul 30, 2024: Bob Dylan says, I need a steam shovel mama to keep away the dead I need a dump truck mama to unload my head (from “In a Buick 6”). And this seems to …
Jul 29, 2024: Laundry day and questionable behavior. // Midnight, distant crowing, and the helicopter sound from the living room of wings beating before Frankie …
Jul 28, 2024: Close hangers.
Jul 27, 2024: μουσικὴν ποίει καὶ ἐργάζου. // Mousiken poiei kai ergazou. // Make music and work at it. (This message comes to Socrates repeatedly in his dreams, as …
Jul 27, 2024: The Poem // Phaedrus 227α ὦ φίλε Φαῖδρε, ποῖ δὴ καὶ πόθεν; Beloved Phaedrus, where to and where from? // Holding (with love, and so gently) dear Phaedrus (my …
Jul 25, 2024: Tenang Sri Rejeki.
Jul 25, 2024: Pan // (Is it) the shiver that passes through your body (to endings from beginning) when you make the connection (from ending to beginnings) and then …
Jul 24, 2024: News of the cold and the iridescent. // At night, Frankie sleeps in a jepun tree in front of our family room. Tonight (for the first time) I looked …
Jul 24, 2024: Sometimes, to get back on the right path, you have to circumnavigate the globe.
Jul 23, 2024: As time persists in circularity, I wonder (again) what makes this morning different from the last. There are two spider bites on my leg. (Each one two …
Jul 22, 2024: Sky from home (6).
Jul 21, 2024: Full moon, icy white, concavity of clouds like a light-womb, and a visit from Blih. Unexpected pleasure in the familiar and reassuring how happy he is …
Jul 21, 2024: Birthday poem. // (A fool, having no knowledge of debt, does not choose their sacrifice. Nonetheless it is chosen, discovered by time and un-made into …
Jul 20, 2024: (But not like this.) // Every choice feels hard, these days. None of it is easy. Even thinking is heavy. I wish I could put more levity on my blog, …
Jul 19, 2024: Light-caught.
Jul 18, 2024: Notes at the limit of politics. Winning is never the most important thing. In a political context, the most important thing is justice. Justice is the only source of political …
Jul 18, 2024: After purple salad.
Jul 17, 2024: Tropical winter. Reluctant to leave the insulation of blankets, but I go out. I place my feet in a shape of warmth as the rising sun enters, by …
Jul 16, 2024: Dogs bark at a passing stranger, out by the main road. Some distance from here, but the sound travels easily over ricefields on a chilly night, socks …
Jul 15, 2024: On a bright and fresh morning, with the sun rising-chasing chill shadows away, the sky is not yet blue. Frankie is crowing (with echoes of crowings …
Jul 14, 2024: In progress. (pandan)
Jul 13, 2024: Speaking of exits. A heartwarming way to spend this Saturday morning was (virtually) to watch my dear friend A. as Inez in Sartre’s No Exit. She and …
Jul 12, 2024: Anxiety is a small crisis of faith happening constantly under everything. Like lava running under a thin crust of earth, always about to break into …
Jul 11, 2024: Ha-ha, you fool. You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. Of putting too much detergent in the washing machine. Frankie the rooster, offended …
Jul 9, 2024: On the motorbike today. It’s nice to drive into the traffic, and then drive out of the traffic, to go back home, instead of living full-time in the …
Jul 9, 2024: Sometimes my writing gets redirected into my signal chat with my mom. Lately there’s a lot of family and house stuff, and even more, highly specific …
Jul 7, 2024: Oh my, the pleasure of organizing your underwear drawer. And then the pleasure of realizing you have much more room in it than you thought.
Jul 7, 2024: Velvet boy.
Jul 6, 2024: Things from Today. // Frankie and Grace (rooster and hen) ate lunch with me and E. today. It was a double date, Frankie purred. In the afternoon Ibuk …
Jul 6, 2024: Tired and raggedy-of-nerve in the car ride going home so I took charge and put on Suzanne Vega’s self-titled album. Nostalgic, soothing, one of my …
Jul 6, 2024: Sky from home (5).
Jul 5, 2024: Or is it my country? Being a stranger, at home. (Bule di rumah.) Surrounded, protected, as by a wall, by recognition, but correspondence is at the …
Jul 4, 2024: Slanted sunlight breaks through steam. Limns wet edge of concrete, scatters in leftover droplets, catches ochre fur of hovering fly. Filters through …
Jul 4, 2024: Last night in Penestanan. // Gamelan strikes bronze and sounds of competition, jumping (on) and fending (off) the night time, momentum tops the …
Jul 3, 2024: Still raining, still dark, still soaked to the point of saturation. May the rain bring the world back from the loudly unspeakable, back from …
Jul 3, 2024: (I almost put two contact lenses into the same eye, this morning.)
Jul 2, 2024: It’s a lot.
Jul 2, 2024: Chaotic maneuvers this morning after certain equipment, which had been broken for a long time, finally became unusable last night, ok I will tell you, …
Jul 1, 2024: For us. // A dark day, cold and rainy and the atmosphere got funereal for a minute, which it does here, now and again. My mother-in-law is passing …
Jul 1, 2024: Wijaya kusuma (7). // Clarity.
Jul 1, 2024: Showering. A spider came dangling down from the ceiling, right in front of my face. A smooth spiderwoman drop, front legs raised in fearless poise. …
Jun 30, 2024: Music is artificial intelligence. (Anyone who says differently is selling something.) (Or are themselves being sold.)
Jun 30, 2024: Beat on the kul-kul summons people to the pura this morning and gamelan starts for the ceremony. Incense smoking, offerings aloft, village is alert, …
Jun 29, 2024: Beginning again with a tentative rhythm. Afternoon sun, slanted, partial, and hot, with persimmons on the kitchen counter. Irregular spheres, some …
Jun 29, 2024: Wijaya kusuma (6). // Indecision.
Jun 29, 2024: I found the Margaret spoon when I was packing the wardrobe, I mentioned it to my mother and she was reminiscing about her grandmother (Margaret). How …
Jun 28, 2024: Under rain again. Big grey above, sucking sponge beneath, birdcall from all corners. Everyone wants to speak. (Good morning, Frankie.) Knowledge and …
Jun 28, 2024: Emptying the wardrobe. // (Finally.) Piece by piece sorting clothes (and other things) into (commandeered from cats) cardboard boxes. Items that …
Jun 28, 2024: Wijaya kusuma (5). // Not yet.
Jun 27, 2024: Paranormal. // Beady black ants, small and matte and anonymous-looking, crowd around some coconut water spilled on the kitchen counter, dropped crumbs …
Jun 26, 2024: An interesting thing, about (poetry, and) prayer, is how it can’t be reverse engineered. (Pretty sure, and as always, Aristotle points out …
Jun 26, 2024: Waking up back in the old, time-wise upside-down, and a sense that all observations will be observations of discomfort. In the midst of transition …
Jun 25, 2024: Wijaya kusuma (4).
Jun 25, 2024: Through it all, he promises to wait. The storm has passed. He opens, and she puts her face against the fragile thing. Knowledge is there, of the …
Jun 24, 2024: Every metaphor about the moon (is) also a metaphor about the sun. And a metaphor about a star. (And about ocean, and about )…( the crab who …
Jun 24, 2024: )…(
Jun 23, 2024: Night in cloud. With sounds of water surrounding, an evolution from gerimis (drizzle) to soft patter to steady downfall, with drips following …
Jun 22, 2024: Sun Salutation. // Grey morning with here and there spots of rain, where shaded distances contour the horizon, making clear certain things that need …
Jun 22, 2024: Star-crushed velvet of night song. A dog barking, distant concern. Chilly, under blanket, eardrums dilated. Everything slows. And an airplane, holding …
Jun 21, 2024: Sky from home (4).
Jun 21, 2024: Moving house starts today, according to the island gods. Ceremony this morning, awake before dawn to comb through the details, mentally then …
Jun 20, 2024: Thoughts fallen into all the wrong places, as if settled into gutters, now stuck there glaring back with soapy sachets of synthetic perfume, no …
Jun 19, 2024: Battlegrounds at borders, clashing signs, // have me wondering this morning, are we artworks or alive? And the conflicts between us, what they say. …
Jun 18, 2024: And everything remains equally important.
Jun 18, 2024: Coconut tree near concrete.
Jun 18, 2024: Blustery when I enter the bale today, trees tossed and swaying arhythmically down through their trunks. Some sprung tension in the spoken words, plans …
Jun 17, 2024: Bismillah Hir Rahman Nir Rahim. Blessed Eid to all who observe. // Today (here) Muslims celebrate Eid al-Adha, a holiday in memory of Ibrahim’s …
Jun 17, 2024: Less traffic and an overall hush in the neighborhood today. A thick ceiling of clouds holds the light down and keeps sound muffled. Doves curr-curr as …
Jun 16, 2024: Ismail, ready-Ish.
Jun 16, 2024: Awake, not yet twilight, cats causing chaos. I cover eyes, determined to go back. (Wow, it worked.) Hours later, waking as digging out from under …
Jun 15, 2024: Blood on the Tracks is the sun of my Bob Dylan universe. Desire is the moon. (Welcome to Bob Dylan astrology, by me.) I consider myself to be Earth. …
Jun 15, 2024: Given the Anthropocene, a weather report in its accuracy becomes a poem. Instead of saying “It will rain,” or “It will not …
Jun 15, 2024: Lalah easily wins the pretty prize but/and as a model she is very tummy-forward.
Jun 15, 2024: Lalah, ready to go.
Jun 15, 2024: Indeterminate clear, nice day for a Saturday morning, a modest tower, safe, from which to see. Last night. A past-hyped art piece (ha) that turned …
Jun 14, 2024: It’s like this: being of your body, and sensing (with) the ghost of past body, and sensing (with) the ghost of possible body, there is a constant …
Jun 14, 2024: Woken by earthquake. Between clean sheets, a brief interval of (probably insufficient) alertness. Light rattle of windowpane. Being moved. …
Jun 13, 2024: Now is the time of the lunar month when I start having (noticing) the darker feelings. (Also. Random waking, trouble sleeping, heightened sensitivity …
Jun 13, 2024: Sky from home (3).
Jun 12, 2024: Last night, beneath a sky full of stars. Crickets and tongaret and frogs of a hundred voices, night bird from the jungle with a wistful lilt. Full …
Jun 11, 2024: Aspiring to harmlessness.
Jun 11, 2024: Wijaya kusuma (3).
Jun 10, 2024: Amber citrine on midnight velvet smiling surprised me above the tree line as we left to see what the house (electric installation) looks like by …
Jun 10, 2024: Repetitive, slow single bangs from a place behind, across the small concrete waterway, that delivers rain and runoff down land. As chopping wood? The …
Jun 9, 2024: Sometimes the scent of a pale peach rose is the cool feeling on your cheek of the breeze blowing from the west through the rice fields in central Bali …
Jun 8, 2024: Offering for fish.
Jun 8, 2024: Intensification and a crushing-in by sound that triggers claustrophobia. Awake in dark. Loudness outside everywhere pressing in on our small room. An …
Jun 7, 2024: Finally, all are home. Precipitation never stopped. Heavy mood of endless rain, (which oddly doesn’t appear on any radar map), shadowless medium fades …
Jun 7, 2024: Morning of puddles, drips, gurgles, the persistent lap and blur of water on glass, glossy leaves nodding under plonks of rain, tucking in noses and …
Jun 6, 2024: Bat at sunset.
Jun 6, 2024: Sound of rain, to look up, and admit that morning’s reverie is over. The incense of an offering, long since out. The fact of having eaten, (or …
Jun 6, 2024: Blue is the moon in her transparency, And dark the sky, when she looks to the star Without whom we would all be rock. We would Be third person, …
Jun 6, 2024: Sky from home (2).
Jun 5, 2024: (To be clear, the witch does not advocate cooking kittens. She means cats, metaphorically.)
Jun 5, 2024: Stirring the cauldron. // Today is the last day of the waning crescent and it seems I am borrowing her shape, words keep surfacing these last few days …
Jun 4, 2024: Spider practice. // Not just the weaving of her web, a trap and a home and a cosmos and a sort of destiny. But also, the way it (daily) breaks, and …
Jun 3, 2024: Wijaya kusuma (2).
Jun 3, 2024: That was a little witchy, wasn’t it.
Jun 3, 2024: But cats are only ever half-tame and you’re never sure which half is in play, which one aflame. Familiar look, at any moment liable to anger (or just …
Jun 3, 2024: I guess I live now in a world of rain. Always about to rain, and sometimes does, and if I wash dishes, my face beads with moisture, from me or from …
Jun 2, 2024: From one perspective, by falling back asleep this morning, after feeding the cats, I wasted half the day; but from another, death is what we see when …
Jun 2, 2024: Wijaya kusuma (1).
Jun 1, 2024: It started with the ants. The ants are being pesky today, (small beady black ones), doing this thing they sometimes do when it rains: they come out of …
Jun 1, 2024: Easy gloom, gentle periods of rain, and barely a transition from sleep. Or at all. Water, earth, air, at an even temperature. The wet doesn’t dry, the …
May 31, 2024: A funny thing is when a meow turns into a yawn.
May 31, 2024: As I was a girl in school, and a lover of astronomy, I did a library research project on black holes, and the method of their making. Supernova. A …
May 30, 2024: Learning to discern between hunger that’s sick and hunger that’s healthy. (Patho-logical and… logical? auto-logical? dia-logical?) In cat care, …
May 30, 2024: Unusual calm this morning, absence of demand. (Explained later by the fact, which I missed, I was sleeping, that somebody else took care of jobs that …
May 30, 2024: A day spent adjusting between conflicted places and moods. Driving through Denpasar in Sweet Orange, windows down, concrete heat. Hair stuck to my …
May 29, 2024: Anger in writing becomes virulent. It never tires and lacks feeling for when to stop. Rage without responsibility does damage unmeasured, unintended, …
May 28, 2024: There’s something I have to write about but it’s giving me a hard time. It feels like this writhing thing inside of me that wants to get …
May 27, 2024: So cloudy this morning that the air gets darker as the sun rises. Everything outside is dripping wet, water-heavy, steamy muffle. Good for frogs, …
May 26, 2024: I imagine extra-terrestrial aliens wouldn’t really get a lot of Earth-based humor, but I do think they would enjoy Charlie Chaplin, at least his …
May 26, 2024: Seedling rice.
May 26, 2024: Blood on my hands at the start of the day, nothing to worry, just small cat drama, but the flood of sensation (in the webbing of the left thumb) wakes …
May 23, 2024: Considering alternate forms of “community”. Community of the silent, of the invisible, of the unknowing. Community of grief. Secret …
May 23, 2024: Wayang kulit/shadow puppet.
May 23, 2024: Wanted: a good-faith, non-circular definition for “artificial intelligence”. A fantastical term commandeered by propaganda (marketing) …
May 22, 2024: I went shopping today. // Complex decisions involving many moving parts, external limiting factors, (or “budgets”), changing possibilities …
May 21, 2024: My hair looks really fantastic today. Sometimes in sunlight it appears almost pink. Cornhusk and rose, golden waves, softly shining. Unwashed and …
May 21, 2024: Therefore, the weight of Ish on my legs. (Still full belly from the night before?) The gentle snore of somebody I love. The chatter of Blih, passing …
May 21, 2024: Awake before wanting to be awake, noticing the untenable. Eyes dry, in the dark, fingers sore from a bite. Blankets and sheets that don’t fit, …
May 20, 2024: Parable of the Cage // G. brought a songbird over from Java, (a murai batu/white-rumped shama), named Nobita, to keep at the house. Nobita is at our …
May 19, 2024: There are no computers in Sweet Orange, G.’s truck, I noticed as I climbed in today. It could be 1975 in here. This will be useful in case of …
May 18, 2024: Clouds from home (1).
May 18, 2024: Sun falling, light lengthens, sounds of tongaret (cicada) sawing away in hedgerows. The big sky in painterly patterns of grey and peach and pale, on …
May 17, 2024: …this, to the extent that when colonizers came to the island and saw someone speaking with a mountain, they called it animism. By which they meant, …
May 17, 2024: …many I’ve spoken with over the years (students, family, colleagues, friends) have this very cartoony notion of god. Either god is this magical …
May 17, 2024: I was floating in emptiness, no light, only the sound of heavy rain. Body weightless, cocooned. It all almost fit inside itself. Then, the thought …
May 16, 2024: Related, from what I can observe, pesantren provide really good husband training. There’s a folk song about a boy who pretends to be a santri, (a …
May 16, 2024: Oh, there was a little anger left. I had a chat with A., who is one of my oldest friends, through no achievement of my own. I’ve been a jerk …
May 15, 2024: Woke up to terrible news about someone from my past. A trusted person was not to be trusted. (According to longstanding rumor, brought to harsh light …
May 14, 2024: A few days ago I lit an incense stick in the bathroom and as I shook out the flame a mosquito was drawn right into it, I think that’s what …
May 12, 2024: When I write “you”, I almost always mean myself, from 2 days ago. (Or 2 weeks ago. Or 2 years ago, or 2 thousand years ago.) (Or myself in a mirror.) …
May 12, 2024: Mentioned I wanted some roses for the “Moms’ garden” and E. comes back with twenty-three rose bushes. All different kinds, colors, patterns of rose.
May 11, 2024: Walking Through Walls (3/3) // Phaedrus 227α-β Poros (and Poiesis) and Socrates (and Student) Socrates is famous (then and now) for being without, (or against?), these two “things". Socrates …
May 10, 2024: I like Enya.
May 9, 2024: To understand the meaning of rain here, it’s useful to know that we live half outside. This is typical in Balinese villages. When it rains, that …
May 9, 2024: These dark, rainy mornings encourage prolonged sleep, retreating back to bed, the world outside loud water, the cloud, a weighted comfortor. Coffee …
May 8, 2024: Walking Through Walls (2/3) // Phaedrus 227α-β It isn’t trivial, from a human perspective, to translate words that are two-thousand years old. To carry meaning from past to present, (where to, …
May 8, 2024: Mid-day crossing.
May 8, 2024: Amateur comes from French and Latin words that mean “one who loves”, “lover”, and I wish everybody used amateur in that way, …
May 7, 2024: Walking Through Walls (1/3) // Phaedrus 227α-β Φαῖδρος: παρὰ Λυσίου, ὦ Σώκρατες, τοῦ Κεφάλου, πορεύομαι δὲ πρὸς περίπατον ἔξω τείχους: συχνὸν γὰρ ἐκεῖ διέτριψα χρόνον καθήμενος …
May 6, 2024: Fish pond.
May 4, 2024: My younger sister’s birthday was several days ago (same day I got stitches). She and I are okay, we don’t fight, but we also don’t …
May 3, 2024: These past few days, I’ve been on hiatus from yoga practice (twas a minor medical procedure requiring stitches). After three days of rest, (as …
May 2, 2024: Sri Rejeki, 3/2021. (unputdownable)
May 2, 2024: An unpleasant thing just happened. I put on some socks. I started having intense itching around my shins. It got worse, waves of intense itchiness …
May 2, 2024: I learned the other night that my husband never took a selfie before he took one for me. (There was a time, early on, we were stuck across oceans.) I …
May 1, 2024: Bubble(s).
May 1, 2024: At first I thought it wouldn’t bother me, but increasingly it does, that whenever I encounter the word (or prefix) “meta”, …
May 1, 2024: The cats are smothering me and literally making it impossible to type. They look at me like it’s my fault for bothering them!
Apr 30, 2024: Ayu’s strength. (Hometown)
Apr 30, 2024: E. says “I am from Pesantren” the way Mystique Summers said “I am from Chicago.” Declaring victory and throwing down a …
Apr 29, 2024: Drift.
Apr 29, 2024: On the road, memories of Java. Baluran a looming shadow on the left, Ijen somewhere to the right, cloaked in a grey day that fades to black, as grimy …
Apr 28, 2024: Community.
Apr 28, 2024: Substance, subject, surprise.
Apr 28, 2024: They were there for hours. Taking turns, back and forth, one posing while the other took a picture. I wandered off, looked for other images. Wandered …
Apr 26, 2024: Praying mantis. (critter)
Apr 26, 2024: Spine.
Apr 26, 2024: To the boy who grew up in a house of mirrors. Who learned from the start that you can’t see the truth. Your anger is real, because behind it, is …
Apr 25, 2024: Light on Tengger.
Apr 25, 2024: Maybe someday I will share the story of how H. saved my life. I otherwise don’t know how to describe him. He is a direct descendant of the first …
Apr 24, 2024: Here is an irony of anonymity, that anybody who knows you, will know that it’s you!
Apr 24, 2024: The beach is crowded with people, fully covered, women veiled. The waves are too strong to go in. The sky is indeterminate, a blinding bright grey, …
Apr 24, 2024: The morning after a big (for me!) family picnic at the beach. My mind is full of words that I don’t understand. They buzz around like bees …
Apr 23, 2024: Ocean dreamy.
Apr 23, 2024: Blue.
Apr 22, 2024: Leftover notes from yesterday, recorded with morning coffee today. // We met a guardian of the path at Ranu Pane, sitting on his sleeping mat, with a …
Apr 21, 2024: Orang gunung/mountain person.
Apr 21, 2024: We wake up at 3 to reach Tengger before sunrise. G. drives me and E. in his truck, called “Sweet Orange”. E. (my husband) is a former …
Apr 20, 2024: Es teler durian. (ice)
Apr 20, 2024: Birds singing in the garden to the sounds of Zuhr, the mid-day prayer, being sung from the mosque.
Apr 19, 2024: Birthday plans.
Apr 19, 2024: (Head spinning), after dark. Warm welcome, quiet children, fragrant oolong tea. This desire to collapse on the soft bed with the clean sheets in the …
Apr 19, 2024: Mid-morning, over water. Parked behind two coconut trucks. We get out and seek a shady spot. School girls in white jilbab, green skirts, cushy foam …
Apr 19, 2024: Travel day. Cotton candy sunrise. The whole back seat of the car to myself, that’s nice. Out the window, seen between jumbled warungs, a beach, west …
Apr 18, 2024: Jeki mood 2.
Apr 18, 2024: Delayed departures and I notice Bali before leaving, or rather Balis, there being so many. The cocks crow from before sunrise and a pack of dogs barks …
Apr 17, 2024: The camera and the scarf are talismans, same as the polished carnelian I carry in my bag, the one that helped bring Jeki home. Talisman, from Greek …
Apr 17, 2024: Early morning boys (3/3). (transcendence)
Apr 17, 2024: There’s something wonderful even about terrible art projects!
Apr 17, 2024: Waking up to a day of preparation, packing, for a week of unpredictable travel and socializing… opportunities, obligations, the whole spectrum …
Apr 16, 2024: Flaneur-esque. (Ubud, 2019)
Apr 16, 2024: How I keep dipping my feet into rivers when I should be focusing on the name of Zeus.
Apr 16, 2024: I have never been a flaneur but a peripatetic, yes. Reading, and remembering the claustrophobia I would feel reading, Benjamin, under the eyes of …
Apr 15, 2024: Small.
Apr 15, 2024: A long day. Supporting E. through pukesmas visit (a minor but unexpectedly painful procedure) and then a grueling day 2 of yoga, like there were …
Apr 15, 2024: A trip to the local pukesmas (health center) reminds me what a privilege it is to have access e.g. to anaesthetic when somebody is cutting into you.
Apr 14, 2024: Cozy cactus.
Apr 14, 2024: Thought I might clarify, the reason I dislike filing taxes isn’t because I have a problem with paying taxes, but because the app I use to do it is …
Apr 14, 2024: From the inside, from the outside. // Caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror during yoga today. (The mirror is usually covered for yoga, this was …
Apr 14, 2024: A little Baudelaire in the morning to get you clean and contrary and ready for the day.
Apr 14, 2024: I wake. That small spirits of chaos have somewhat dis-ordered the room. Dirty clothes strewn, a painting collapsed, ant dirt sticks to the soles of my …
Apr 13, 2024: Halaman/page.
Apr 13, 2024: Saturday morning “rest day” but what is the right music for filing taxes, not-quite-numbness to abuse with aftertaste of anxiety? Does the completion …
Apr 12, 2024: (To be clear, we don’t live there yet, but hopefully in a month or two, and maybe the photo is a little spell to help us along✨)
Apr 12, 2024: Home (magic).
Apr 12, 2024: Riding on the motorbike today. Each ravine a separate pocket, a whoosh of cloud and passing rain on our faces as we descend and then rise up again. …
Apr 12, 2024: Just shook out my long sleeve shirt before putting it on and a giant earwig came out of it, so… glad I did that.
Apr 12, 2024: I keep getting ahead of myself and while that might be good for future me, it doesn’t really help present me at all…
Apr 12, 2024: Good morning to all who celebrate. I want to tell you that I do not like “fun facts”. I don’t like facts very much at all. In order of preference I …
Apr 11, 2024: Sayangku with sky.
Apr 11, 2024: Please find alternative ways to listen, don’t stream etc., because his catalogue is owned by Blackrock now and I’m not doing a commercial for that …
Apr 11, 2024: Soundtrack tonight is “Popular Problems” by Leonard Cohen. Didn’t like “Slow” when I first heard it but it’s grown on me, the song of an old man, but …
Apr 11, 2024: Ah, the ecstatic occupation of finding the words for you!
Apr 11, 2024: The indulgence of sleeping through breakfast, sleeping and not just napping, enough sleep turns the old day into the new without questions. Already …
Apr 10, 2024: Honey train.
Apr 10, 2024: Our mudik will be late this year, for “reasons”, we won’t go to Java until next week. A little sad to say “lahir dan batin” over video call. Like the …
Apr 10, 2024: Do not go to war against ants; you will never win.
Apr 10, 2024: Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Selamat hari raya Idul Fitri🌙 In Indonesia it’s time for Muslims to celebrate Lebaran, the accomplishment of the month-long …
Apr 9, 2024: Sri Rejeki with crispy leaf.
Apr 9, 2024: Past 8pm here and over 240 million Indonesian Muslims are still waiting to hear if they can eat tomorrow, this blows my mind. *edited to change from …
Apr 9, 2024: Finished third day of yoga (switched rest day to Eid), feeling strong, fed and watered myself, texted mom back about eclipse, enough. Clouds moving in …
Apr 9, 2024: Jeki plays with a huge bendo leaf (artocarpus elasticus) that came down in yesterday’s storm, jumps at the “crispy” sounds it makes. Delighted if …
Apr 9, 2024: Forget the fantasy of a universal clock. No announcement yet of Eid al-fitr, waiting for local communication of the ulama watching the moon. Google …
Apr 8, 2024: Precipitation prevention (from going out).
Apr 8, 2024: Large thud from outside. Voices of men yelling from corners of village. I run outside. A tree fell from all that wind and rain. Next to our place, on …
Apr 8, 2024: Big rain doesn’t stop the gamelan in the pura across the street, it summons the people, makes space for the god. There will be dark moon ceremony …
Apr 7, 2024: Well-being in concrete and rain.
Apr 7, 2024: Made an about page for Phaedrus replies. No wonder I was tired.
Apr 7, 2024: I’ve been informed I have to add diarrhea, muscle aches, and excess sweating to the list of possible symptoms of masuk angin. Upon reflection I think …
Apr 7, 2024: Got dragged by the undertow to a watery blue deep, surfaced after sundown but incomplete, sinking weight to movement and sluggish sensemaking because …
Apr 7, 2024: Up again at 3am for sahur, only two more days before Eid and I am so tired my eyes seem permanently puffy, but being surrounded by those who are …
Apr 6, 2024: Jangan masuk angin. Gunung Semeru, Jan. 2020. (windy)
Apr 6, 2024: Editing this photo of Semeru, I think of Angelina, by Bob Dylan, which I hear as a love song, an expression of vulnerability, bewilderment, …
Apr 6, 2024: The dialectic of posting a photo to the blog. // You can’t just post a photo to the blog. (Of course not.) Look at the image and be with it for …
Apr 6, 2024: I didn’t include in this post another autobiographical note, that my whole life used to be all about books, and then all of my books burned in a …
Apr 5, 2024: Serene Spathiphyllum.
Apr 5, 2024: Nothing is more satisfying than when pieces start fitting together. (This may not be true but it feels true in the moment!) That little rush of wonder …
Apr 5, 2024: On minimalism and a paradox of technology Five years ago, I left America. Now I live far away from universities and libraries and mega bookstores, outside the cheap shipping zones of online …
Apr 4, 2024: Is it foliage?
Apr 4, 2024: One really cool thing about an ashtanga vinyasa practice is that you can experience dynamic tipping points in your own body. Sometimes I feel like I …
Apr 4, 2024: Started reading Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚, my new favorite poet of the extra-terrestrial.
Apr 4, 2024: Up early for sahur. Fasting is a trial and a demonstration, and if Muslims don’t write very much about it, that might be because it’s such a consuming …
Apr 3, 2024: Card of destiny.
Apr 3, 2024: Finished Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree 📚 According to my mom, this one “is not as delightful as the last one.” I agree. And …
Apr 3, 2024: A dream about a friend from Seattle. She came to visit with a group of people. She had a lot of tattoos. I wanted to copy the tattoo of Chinese …
Apr 3, 2024: Masuk angin is a uniquely Indonesian thing that is hard to explain. Masuk angin literally translates as “wind goes in”, and it is a danger …
Apr 2, 2024: Jepun bali flowers.
Apr 2, 2024: …hard to imagine the intensity of their cognitive dissonance, or to say what it’s done to your brother, the experience and trauma of …
Apr 2, 2024: The opposite of bocor (leak) is actually mampet (clog). There’s a mampet in the drain line of our AC unit causing a drippy cascade of water and …
Apr 2, 2024: My interest in (devotion to? ministry of?) sleeping and napping is definitely an overarching theme of my blog. Also one of my more relatable …
Apr 1, 2024: Shiny new toy.
Mar 31, 2024: Sing more.
Mar 31, 2024: Peaches and sea-green.
Mar 31, 2024: One of the few good memories I have of my father is how he would sing me songs at bedtime. Barbara Allen, Poncho and Lefty, Frog went a-courtin. …
Mar 30, 2024: If you don’t take the nap, you might miss the dream being sent to you.
Mar 30, 2024: Odysseus is also an opportunistic napper??
Mar 29, 2024: A nap, in the event of a nap, is what I should have been doing anyway.
Mar 29, 2024: One symptom of my pms/pmdd (project: find better language for it) is inability to focus. I experienced this a lot and blamed myself for it (laziness, …
Mar 29, 2024: One year anniversary ♥️
Mar 26, 2024: I feel very strongly like I sympathize with those Byzantine monks. I feel for the devotion and humility it would take to spend their lives …
Mar 25, 2024: Hello my name is Elizabeth and I am an etymology addict. Because reply goes back to re + plait, as in, to re-braid. I don’t know if that’s …
Mar 25, 2024: Grey is the coziest color. Dark grey camisole, dark grey sweatpants, light grey flannel, fuzzy grey ankle socks, my favorite outfit for a rainy …
Mar 25, 2024: Where girls played in the sand (b&w).
Mar 24, 2024: Why can’t one piece of dental floss last forever? Can somebody ask a LLM and get back to me please?
Mar 24, 2024: Translation, from mid. 14th century: the carrying of the bones of a saint from one reliquary to another. And the more familiar definition: the …
Mar 24, 2024: How awful when you’re eating dessert and in the middle of sweetness, the flavor of garlic. Keeping clothes in the shopping cart for months and …
Mar 22, 2024: Early morning boys (2/3).
Mar 21, 2024: Stumbled across some old voicemail messages from a time of upheaval in my life, digital land mines or ephemeral treasures, the voice of E from when we …
Mar 21, 2024: But when in love, all bets are off. “I’m actually a rationalist. Everything I do is rational,” she said and shrugged. It was her horizon, her …
Mar 21, 2024: Early morning boys (1/3).
Mar 20, 2024: He brings me salak, rambutan, and langsep before he leaves. I braid his hair. He opens green coconuts, whispers a prayer over each one and pours the …
Mar 20, 2024: Heavy earth light.
Mar 20, 2024: When in doubt (which should be much of the time), mind your own business. The trick is figuring out which business is (truly) your own. So, …
Mar 20, 2024: Odysseus escapes Scylla by becoming Scylla. He beats monsters by becoming the monster. Odysseus and Achilles show two different and monstrous sides of …
Mar 19, 2024: I try not to write “meta” entries i.e. blog about blogging especially the vicissitudes of it (platforms, history, future, “reach”, etc.) because if I …
Mar 19, 2024: Stranger sunrise.
Mar 19, 2024: Everything we eat from bule restos here in Bali we put sriracha on, we have to or it doesn’t taste good. I didn’t used to need hot sauce …
Mar 18, 2024: Lowest tide.
Mar 18, 2024: Started reading Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree. 📚 Looking for some literary xanax as E visits Java this week. Home alone with cats and a …
Mar 17, 2024: Ahh I spent years thinking the Indonesian word for “leak” is spelled “pojor” and today I learned it’s actually “bocor” and now I know that I know …
Mar 17, 2024: Finished reading 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson.📚 Expansive and thoughtful portrait of a post-Earth, post-capitalist artist. The evolution of art, …
Mar 16, 2024: Blue sunset chill.
Mar 15, 2024: Pale sunrise.
Mar 15, 2024: How Not to Break // Phaedrus 227β Σωκράτης: καλῶς γάρ, ὦ ἑταῖρε, λέγει. Socrates: Beautifully said, fellow. // People forget the absolute confusion it would throw us …
Mar 14, 2024: Dreams.
Mar 12, 2024: Moonchild, mother of cats // “about” Moonchild, mother of cats, mask-maker’s wife, call me Elizabeth, artist and poet and maker of things out of words, ashtanga yogini and translator of …
Mar 12, 2024: Bright hot.
Mar 10, 2024: After ogoh-ogoh, tomorrow will be Nyepi, Bali’s silent day. No electricity, no internet, no data, no leaving the house, no talking, enforced by …
Mar 10, 2024: Giving birth to something evil. Ogoh-ogoh, Penestanan Kaja, girls’ team (3/3).
Mar 10, 2024: Ogoh-ogoh, Penestanan Kelod, boys’ team (2/3).
Mar 10, 2024: The monsters ran wild in Bali tonight. Ogoh-ogoh, Penestanan Kelod, girls’ team (1/3).
Mar 3, 2024: Mid-morning thunder.
Mar 2, 2024: The perpetual war between art and cats.
Mar 2, 2024: Where girls played in the sand.
Mar 2, 2024: Too many spider webs? Time for “spider liberation day”. Take a large coconut frond (or other stick with branches/leaves), gently sweep around the …
Mar 1, 2024: Burnt sunrise.
Feb 29, 2024: It will be the ten thousand moods of Lipah beach for a while.
Feb 29, 2024: Overcast tide.
Feb 29, 2024: We took a holiday to Amed for our anniversary. A symphony of small disasters but romantic in an all’s-well-that-ends-well way! May the world always …
Feb 22, 2024: Aventurra // Phaedrus 227α-β Φαῖδρος: παρὰ Λυσίου, ὦ Σώκρατες, τοῦ Κεφάλου, πορεύομαι δὲ πρὸς περίπατον ἔξω τείχους: συχνὸν γὰρ ἐκεῖ διέτριψα χρόνον καθήμενος …
Feb 22, 2024: Me: It’s hard to cut mie goreng with one spoon. Would you like another spoon? E: No, thank you. This isn’t hard. What would be hard is if I didn’t …
Feb 17, 2024: Blih said to E, “Bro. I think one of your cats is stealing my feather duster.”
Feb 15, 2024: Through the breath the parts of the body become whole. To this end, the strong must learn to follow the soft. The biggest and beefiest muscles yes, …
Feb 13, 2024: We stopped to pick flowers from neighbors’ bushes along the way. She pressed the pink and white blossoms into my hands for safe-keeping, a handful of …
Feb 12, 2024: My husband’s grandfather said domestic cats are the ancestors of wild cats.
Feb 11, 2024: The Opening Question // Phaedrus 227β Σωκράτης: ὦ φίλε Φαῖδρε, ποῖ δὴ καὶ πόθεν; Socrates: Beloved Phaedrus, where to and where from? // Sometimes I long to go back. To …
Feb 10, 2024: Handsome Ismail.
Feb 10, 2024: ΦΑΙΔΡΟΣ / Phaedrus.
Feb 10, 2024: And I thought, if I imagine myself as an angel in heaven, what would I be doing? And I knew, I would be translating Plato’s Phaedrus.
Feb 9, 2024: Tomorrow, as begins a new lunar year. Bismillah Hir Rahman Nir Rahim. May our homes and our passages between homes be blessed. 🌘🌑🌒
Feb 9, 2024: Everybody knows it’s fun to eat in bed a few times (especially ice cream, chocolate) but if you do it too many times it will make you depressed and …
Feb 8, 2024: It’s not really a climate crisis but a human crisis, a crisis of human civilization. It’s not the climate that is destroying itself, it’s not the …
Feb 5, 2024: Your body is an expression of ancient intelligence to which you have literally psychic access!
Feb 4, 2024: The first day back after convalescence is like Mercurial sunrise, the inner landscape a chiaroscuro of white-on-black sensation. Limits touching, …
Feb 3, 2024: Let go of what? The frozen-shut psoas and illiacus, the clenched-fist side of my diaphragm, which hold everything else hostage, being unable to exhale …
Feb 3, 2024: Didn’t practice yoga for almost a week because I got sick after our return from Java, again, a body rebells against exposure and exertion. Now my …
Feb 3, 2024: The opening passage about sunrise on Mercury is very good: “The spill to left and right keeps spreading, farther than seems possible, until it is very …
Jan 27, 2024: We’re losing Ibuk (my mother-in-law) to Alzheimer’s disease. Sometimes she whispers to me in basa Jawa and I just can’t understand. Sometimes the …
Jan 27, 2024: I feel very smug sitting in Mak Sun’s kitchen, eating krawu and trancam and mendol and tempe goreng, knowing that the best vegan food in …
Jan 23, 2024: Investing in artificial intelligence without believing in natural intelligence is modernity in a nutshell.
Jan 22, 2024: Writing (is) for strangers.
Jan 21, 2024: Java makes me feel foreign again, cozy and completely uncatered to.
Jan 20, 2024: Sounds of Java: growling engines, whining brakes; azan from the speakers of every masjid; dangdut on blast from a roadside warung; sawing and chirping …
Jan 19, 2024: Never let anybody tell you where your breath should go. It doesn’t matter what famous gurus say. Yoga yamas, niyamas, asana are preparation for …
Jan 14, 2024: Wijaya kusuma, midnight diva.
Jan 14, 2024: One problem with re-interpreting traditional Sumba death rituals through digital multi-media is that the sacred beings involved might not like digital …
Jan 8, 2024: When an ant colony produces a flying swarm in your bedroom, (because they live in your cheap bamboo furniture), a good solution is to turn off all the …
Jan 7, 2024: Leonard Cohen’s middle to late catalogue continues to provide excellent commentary and companionship in these times.
Dec 1, 2023: Deep sleep last night with all that electricity in the sky. Thinking this morning about Shane MacGowan, some angel, as mosquitoes bite my hands, Jeki …
Dec 1, 2023: Banana leaf after rain.
Nov 30, 2023: Must be a snake nest in the garden because the cats have caught three babies so far. Small, brown, narrow heads, E says not dangerous but how they …
Nov 25, 2023: When it seems like a luxury but also like you need it, or you want it in a truly special way, then you make a religion out of it? A fabulous alibi for …
Nov 25, 2023: Yoga days 5 and 6 completed, I wanted to let you know, although family demands have temporarily disenabled writing. I was thinking how writing is a …
Nov 22, 2023: Black ants on lemon leaves.
Nov 22, 2023: Was gently reminded by yoga day 4 that progress sometimes feels like confusion. Then Ish caught a baby monitor lizard right before headstand. …
Nov 22, 2023: A spell of rain before sunrise, just enough for the orchids. Last quiet day before E returns with Ibuk. Happy to see them but I savor today’s …
Nov 21, 2023: Rainy season means bugs, so many bugs. Colonies produce frenzied night swarms that last mere hours before dropping, energy spent, masses of bodies …
Nov 21, 2023: Jeki mood.
Nov 21, 2023: Woke at 2, big loud soaking rain, couldn’t sleep. Too many thoughts and edits of thoughts too fast. Ah, hormonal insomnia. Best to let it go and …
Nov 21, 2023: And who among us doesn’t have a secret name?
Nov 21, 2023: One reason we resonate is that we also are hybrid beings. Always one foot in and one foot out the door of each world we occupy, it makes us more …
Nov 20, 2023: Jepun bali (frangipani) leaves after rain.
Nov 20, 2023: The bathroom had cream colored wallpaper with gold birdcages on it, peeling at corners. Rose glycerin soap, threadbare bathmat, old calendar with …
Nov 20, 2023: Felt a little progress in my yoga practice today, unusual for day 2. Progress: finding a new way into an old problem.
Nov 20, 2023: Lalah with coconuts.
Nov 20, 2023: Slept late, woken at 6 by Ish. Small rain overnight, overcast now. Less flu-y because didn’t use ac? Jeki was almost sweet about eardrops this …
Nov 19, 2023: Jeki was fine, evening’s dose of eardrops was easier. Rain this afternoon. The minty smell of new dental floss reminded me of Greta’s (grandmother) …
Nov 19, 2023: Woke up at 4, coffee. Felt flu-y, probably from mold. Gave Jeki ear mite drops, barely. Ish didn’t want breakfast. Startled by centipede in …
Nov 18, 2023: They cut into the banyan tree. (In the early hours of the morning, under the waning crescent moon, before the rainy season came.) Now they hammer the …
Nov 18, 2023: Sri Rejeki with new bonsai.
Nov 18, 2023: Coffee with complicated reflections.
Nov 13, 2023: History may be written by the victors, but fiction is beholden to no such law. There’s a limit to the quality of fiction someone can write who has only state-sanctioned dogma. Without geometry, without a basic understanding …
Nov 11, 2023: Coffee with orchid shadow.
Nov 11, 2023: Tales leaf (mbote, taro) after rain. Bulb at base of stem (corm) can be steamed/boiled/roasted/fried. Can eat leaves and stem but must be processed …
Nov 9, 2023: Reading The Future by Naomi Alderman.📚 Can’t resist a rec from Cory Doctorow. Morbidly interested in future-obsessed billionaires with bunkers, eager …
Nov 9, 2023: Peppermint tea (infusion). For two.
Nov 8, 2023: Touching the surface I need to get more comfortable before I write an “about me” page. That’s a little neurotic but sometimes it’s the simple things that are hardest to …
Nov 4, 2023: Ish and Lalah. Bali cats.
Nov 4, 2023: Saturday morning coffee. Kopi tubruk.
Nov 3, 2023: Grateful for rain.
Nov 3, 2023: Rainstorm this morning as I drink my coffee in the dark. Does it mean rainy season is here? I miss the sound and the smell of rain.
Nov 2, 2023: On Making Music (content warning: war) I like to follow hurricanes. I lose myself in it as the pressure system builds, as if from nowhere and everywhere at once. It draws water and fire …
Oct 31, 2023: Batik with burung merak (peacock) and wijaya kusuma flower, a gift from Ibuk.
Oct 30, 2023: Having become beautiful and young, Elizabeth writes blogs.