endless yeses

I've MOVED!!!

2011-10-26T10:39:00.001-04:00

to: http://endlessyeses.tumblr.com/

please visit me there.

holdin' on to summer

2011-10-09T23:39:00.003-04:00

its what i'm rocking for fall..

2011-10-02T23:48:00.003-04:00

the gettin' is Goods

2011-09-26T23:24:00.009-04:00

Beware the Red Devil River Dolphin (and Other Stories)

2011-09-06T22:42:00.024-04:00

Happy Is England

2011-09-01T22:42:00.001-04:00

with liberty and love for all

2011-08-09T13:00:00.034-04:00

On a spotless New York summer evening aboard a boat called 'Romantica', two lovely friends were married in a beautiful and very legally binding ceremony. Over calm waters and under a cloudless sky, David and Kevin pledged to love one another, lifelong, as husband and husband. I can attest that there were a lot of happy tears up on that ship's bow. Love is love is love, and if you are lucky enough to find the real thing and keep it close, it certainly doesn't matter what the configurations are. We should all be so fortunate as to have what these guys got.

It is well known that storms can rush in and that even the sturdiest vessel will rock when the seas get choppy, but I'm not a bit worried with these two at the helm. I wish them many lifetimes of happiness as they set sail out across the wide expanses of their future, together.

barn door portraits

2011-06-12T22:23:00.013-04:00

join us for a walk?

North Branch, NY

2011-06-12T22:05:00.015-04:00

and just like that....

2011-05-31T10:34:00.022-04:00

it's summer.

2011-05-19T00:30:00.000-04:00

¡ VIVA MARFA !

2011-05-09T16:36:00.012-04:00

recommended: traveling far even when time is short. driving into the hot desert with warm people. geodesic shelter. drinking lonestars in the texas afternoon. gazing at stars high up in a dizzying night sky. flirting with cowboys. following art. this radio station.

Fresh Air

2011-05-02T12:19:00.050-04:00

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have a moderate fear of flying. Like, a 7 on a scale from 1- 11.5. It's not a crippling, keep-me-from-getting-to-all-the-incredible-places-I-want-to-go-in-this-life terror, but a distinct nervousness, to be sure. I'm acutely aware of the rattles and clicks during any given flight. I study the faces of attendants as they roam the aisles, looking for any sign of distress behind their warm and plastered smiles. I meditatively count backwards from 100 once the wheels go up. As a girl, my mother would hold my hand from take-off until well past cruising altitude and when I got older and no longer had her hand to grip, I clutched the hands of others who loved me and graciously indulged me in my non-sensical rituals.

Strange then, that I found myself (voluntarily) in a tiny two-seater propeller plane this past weekend flying over the Long Island Sound. I said yes to the invitation because the friend/pilot who offered is a person whose experience I trust and whose passion I admire (he loves aviation truly, deeply.) I said yes because I can recognize a unique (and visual) opportunity when one is presented to me, but mostly I said yes, because historically, I would have said no.

In the past few years, I have been pushing myself to do what's a bit scary and outside the mossy garden walls of my comfort zone. I am happily inching that perimeter a bit wider as I go. I'm no daredevil but I am trying each day, in my own little way, to jump a row of flaming cars - star-spangled and brave.

The short flight was beautiful and exhilarating. So much so that I completely forgot to be frightened. I didn't count backwards. I watched only the horizon and the sunshine angling to set behind it. I didn't need my hand held because it was too busy clapping giddily with its opposite.

we ALL deserve to dance

2011-04-24T22:26:00.012-04:00

The Earlykill

2011-04-12T11:26:00.011-04:00

Its a lovely time of year, the early spring. Warm sun on your face is like a present. You feel all of a sudden as if you have the room to spread out, but it's still just chilly enough to want to gather close.

birthdays, lossdays, lifedays.

2011-02-28T13:46:00.005-05:00

She is as in a field a silken tent

At midday when the sunny summer breeze

Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,

So that in guys it gently sways at ease,

And its supporting central cedar pole,

That is its pinnacle to heavenward

And signifies the sureness of the soul,

Seems to owe naught to any single cord,

But strictly held by none, is loosely bound

By countless silken ties of love and thought

To every thing on earth the compass round,

And only by one's going slightly taut

In the capriciousness of summer air

Is of the slightlest bondage made aware.

-Robert Frost

lucky me

2011-02-17T11:10:00.019-05:00

One of the best things about my job is getting to work with amazing photographers whom I have long admired. People who can capture moments in time, illuminating them beyond what the eye easily sees and the imagination usually renders. One such photographer is Eric Ogden. His images are gorgeous, haunting and timeless and I recently had the good fortune to be on a shoot with him. He snapped this shot of me during a light test. Work should always be this fun.

photo by Eric Ogden

To see more of Eric's work visit: www.ericogden.com

the never summer mountains

2011-02-07T22:39:00.017-05:00

I went for a walk in the High Rockies on a recent clear morning following a quiet and laden snowfall. Outside, it was the kind of cold that seizes your breath, snatches your will and freezes your eyelashes. The snow had enveloped everything in sight and the arctic air had frozen it in place. A crystalized Lapland wherein tall Ponderosas, arms tufted in white, looked like shivering flamenco dancers.

I thought a lot about the ancientness of this place while stepping through the drifts. The geological lifetimes, the layers of ice and rock come and moved and gone. Rows of Aspens stood together mathematical feet apart - I learned that they grow their roots down into the ground and then intertwine them with the others', as if reaching out to hold hands secretly beneath the soft loam and jagged earth. I imagined bareback Comanches galloping across the Front Range, over tectonic plates, outrunning the shifting ground beneath them.

My companion, walking ahead, pointed up at a looming peak. He noted the space around its crown - bare, where nothing green seemed to grow. "There is life up there," he said. "Its just hard to see from down here. You have to be awfully hearty to live above the tree line....but imagine the view if you can survive."

time travel

2011-02-06T12:34:00.002-05:00

eventually.

2011-01-28T11:47:00.004-05:00

we built this city on rock and roll

2011-01-19T17:12:00.003-05:00

the company I keep

2011-01-05T11:31:00.000-05:00

for auld lang syne

2011-01-03T14:30:00.009-05:00

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

-Lord Alfred Tennyson

not so secretly...

2010-12-13T15:30:00.006-05:00

I SORT OF LOVE L.A.

Greetings from Asbury Park...

2010-11-07T18:11:00.012-05:00

"Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun

Oh, but Mama, that's where the fun is

I was blinded

I was blinded"

Last weekend we found ourselves on the Garden State, in the Garden State, driving in the direction of a Bruce Springsteen song.

Part pilgrimage, part brief escape.

In my learned opinion, often the best thing you can do for a wound is to pour saltwater in it.

Arriving in town (the heart of the chorus) we noted it to be complete with diners and dive bars, auto body shops and rotary clubs. There were even railroad tracks running a clean line between the wrong side and the right.

I was looking for Johnny and Rosie to be necking on the hood of a muscle car, the sound of waves crashing muffling the groaning of some hot rod engine somewhere. But this being November, the boards saw less scruffily masculine young men in blue jeans leaned up against side walls and more plump, aging lovers in matching windbreakers walking hand in hand.

Madame Marie has been facing that shoreline since before I was born, watching the churning and swirling in her crystal ball. I wonder how many sea changes she has predicted from her psychic parlor by the sea? Perhaps had we arrived sooner she could have warned us against all our failures and heartbreaks. Or maybe she would have told us simply that 'our strength is devastating in the face of all these odds...'

All I know is that sometimes you just have to cast your troubles aside, head down the shore and split a milkshake on the boardwalk with your best girl.

dialogue : love songs

2010-10-28T11:16:00.006-04:00

"Its like I can hear all these soaring, beautiful lyrics about love in my head, but when I open my mouth to sing, all that comes out is a monotone recitation of toaster-oven operating instructions." - me to a friend on not being able to express myself.

2010-10-18T11:27:00.001-04:00

my perfect heart

2010-09-15T14:41:00.011-04:00

Palmyra All-Stars

2010-09-09T16:54:00.004-04:00

Ringers

2010-09-07T21:29:00.007-04:00

nips/belts

2010-07-19T21:45:00.007-04:00

Summer Catch(Up)

2010-07-05T17:03:00.011-04:00

Just so that you are up to speed: I have been in beautiful places with wonderful people...

Brooklyn, NY

Tafton, PA and Bethel, NY

Dover, VT

Philadelphia, PA

VineyardHeaven

2010-06-09T00:08:00.008-04:00

photo by heath shapiro

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine.

-Thomas Jefferson

you can go home again

2010-06-01T21:30:00.024-04:00

They say that you can't, and this can be especially accurate when your definition of where home actually is gets murky...but for me the stretch of road along I-95 south, between DC and New York City, is a palpably familiar one. It takes me back and forth between a place that I left and the place that I went to, and more profoundly, between the person that I was and the person that I have become. That southern point on the map of me, starred to mark all notable firsts - kisses, dangers, fears, loves...how could I have ever reached my current latitude without the coordinates given to me by this place?

This past weekend I went back down below the Mason-Dixon for a Dunbar-Dixon wedding. The groom- an integral figure in my post-adolescent upbringing: a big brother, a guide, a protector. A burst of Boo-shaped sunshine always, in even the gloomiest of conditions. It was a joy to watch him marry his luminous lady love under the branches in Meridian Park, surrounded by masses of people who all hold him in the same treetop-high regard.

It is with love and thanks that I wish these two the best that life can possibly offer; for their maps to guide them to the starry, far points of all their hopes and dreams.

babes in the woods

2010-05-23T11:23:00.004-04:00

West(erly)

2010-05-23T11:14:00.003-04:00

Empire State of Being

2010-05-05T13:23:00.012-04:00

I'll admit that I was a bit blue yesterday - having a tough week and feeling somewhat deflated due in part to day jobs, oil spills, frayed heartstrings and pollen count.

I was lamenting these sufferings to my dear friend Neal, who can always find ways to lift my spirits and with whom I had plans to spend time later in the evening.

Neal said this:

"we can't help when we're feeling down. the only way to fix that is to go up.....88 floors up!"

And so up is precisely where we went.

We shuffled with tourists and waited in lines behind bobbing heads festooned with foam Lady Liberty hats. Visitors in our own, Art Deco home.

We went up and we took a slow turn around the top of the world.

We looked out from our internal observation decks. The view from there was tremendous, slightly intimidating, and truly, truly gorgeous.

And whatdyaknow if afterwards I didn't feel 102 stories better.

Yes so we are flowers all

2010-04-24T17:01:00.010-04:00

O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

-James Joyce

we are the ones we have been waiting for

2010-03-31T21:20:00.008-04:00

dialogue: perspective

2010-03-08T15:22:00.004-05:00

me: "my entire being feels like an exposed nerve; raw and caught in a cold wind..."

her: "good. that means you are alive."

...and she lived her life out to the tips of her fingers.

2010-02-28T11:21:00.005-05:00

my favorite dreams are the ones with you in them.

happy birthday..

lovefest

2010-02-14T14:36:00.011-05:00

winter blues (reds, purples, greens)

2010-01-28T10:16:00.008-05:00

oh, midwinter. you get me every time.

its cold and its grey and my heart is challenged not to feel as though its been nestled in a 3 foot drift of snow.

the only yeses manageable seem to be those uttered to staying home, sleeping early (then sleeping late) and to figuring out how one fashions blankets into acceptable outerwear.

the pit of this long season, however, only serves to reassure me of the promise of the next. for springtime, dear friends, is just a few hairpin turns around the bend and I am craning my neck to catch a first glimpse.

i have an awful lot to look forward to as the days begin to lengthen. i have bikes to ride and bells to ring, music to follow and songs to sing along with at the tippy top of my lungs. i have hugs to give and love to receive and when the ice finally melts, i have a whole lotta stones to skip across this little pond of mine.

until then, i am planting bulbs in my imagination and daffodils will dapple the hillsides on my insides.

Dear Detroit,

2010-01-05T17:54:00.012-05:00

all photos by Anna Groth-Shive

Though we wander about,

find no honey of flowers in this waste,

is our task the less sweet --

who recall the old splendour,

await the new beauty of cities?

The city is peopled
with spirits, not ghosts, O my love:

Though they crowded between
and usurped the kiss of my mouth
their breath was your gift

their beauty, your life.

-Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961)

Pin a blue ribbon on my heart

2009-12-03T16:59:00.038-05:00

You know what is the $%#*ing best?

Riding a horse. That's what.

At 10 years old, somewhere in the time between sticker collecting and before hair band name-doodling on my jeans, I became afflicted. It just crept up. The wholesome, unavoidable girl-ness in me wanted a pony. Within weeks I had finagled lessons. Within a few years, I managed to barter a veritable lifetime of allowance for a horse of my own. It was cliche and it was magic. During that span of time I looked exclusively at horsey things, pontificated at great length on horsey topics and made horsey friends to pal around the barn with. It was an immersion. A head first, horsey high dive.

It went on like this. My mom would shuttle me back and forth to lessons, competitions, for lazy trail rides through corn fields on Sundays in the summertime. Once I got my driver's license, I would drive myself out to the barns after school and on weekends in my (legendary) banana yellow station wagon. The tape deck long since broken, I kept a boombox riding shotgun, flipping tapes over at stoplights.

My interests broadened over the years: music, ill-advisable boyfriends, nursing broken hearts imposed by said ill-advisable boyfriends, art. But the horse thing never waned. It was one of the few things that happened during my teenage years that I was aware I needed to be grateful for at the time, conscious of in the moment, and I recognized the need to hold those moments in my head and heart in an effort to keep them whole once they inevitably turned into memory.

I gave it all up when I moved to New York for art school. While having a pony in Brooklyn would make for a great children's book, it did not comply with dorm regulations and parking would've been a bitch. I traded in my saddle for ColorAid paper and charcoal.

I have had the opportunity to ride again here and there since then- treats while traveling and through fortunate and generous friends with horses of their own. The recent holiday weekend was one of these such happy occasions. I was gifted a lesson and the chance to hitch a ride atop a beautiful and very well-trained equine. We moved around this little ring about 600 times. Never before has running in circles taken me so far away. Kicking up dust, warm breath from both our snouts visible in the cold, my body remembered what to do. Trotting, cantering, leaping in the air...you couldn't chisel the silly, slappy grin from my face. I was a little girl again, doing what made me purely, undilutedly happy.

I have been chasing this feeling for the better part of the last 15 years. And while I am not ready to up and move to the country in an attempt to capture this lightning in a bottle permanently (yet), I'll be damned if I don't make an effort to do it more often. Its a priceless thrill to be reminded of the things that make you feel inherently glad and more importantly to be reminded to do them in the first place.

Lucky for me, I had the sore muscles to remind me well into the week.

Thankful, Full.

2009-12-03T10:32:00.009-05:00

Three Wishes

2009-12-02T09:23:00.011-05:00

picture by bethany toews

I make wishes all the time.

Many mornings, rubbing sleepy eyes, blinking back at myself in the bathroom mirror, I'll lift an errant eyelash and blow it like a dandelion from my fingertip, sending a day-beginning wish out into the universe. When passing a fountain's pool, I will dig in my pockets for some small currency to hurl. I acknowledge the hour of eleven past eleven with a brief and magical hope. This past August I found myself on a hillside in Scotland watching a late night summer meteor shower. Lights were streaking across the sky at such a speed that I became overwhelmed trying to keep my wishes apace. (waiting for me when I got back to the heart-achingly pastoral cottage in which I was staying was a warm fire and a just-poured highball of Lagavulin neat. Wish #42: delivered.)

I'm not always wishing for amazing holidays and top shelf booze. I don't even need the prompting of a star. Often times I am wishing for sweeping things: happiness, health, love, knowledge, grace, understanding, patience....and other times I am wishing for the specifics: to somehow preserve tight in a bottle late night, street-side, falling-down laughter; for the handsome gent smiling shyly at me from the opposite train platform to sprint through the underpass to the downtown-Brooklyn side and ask me to supper in lieu of riding the Uptown E right on out of my life. (I KNOW I could do the sprinting, but sometimes a sister is wearing new heels...next time I will wish dually for arch support.) To discover, while unpacking old boxes, a garment worn by my mother that might miraculously still hold the smell of her; for the people I love who are flush up against a difficult time, to find within themselves what I know to be there: a wellspring, nay, a GEYSER of strength to help their little boat through the choppy waters.

My wishes are hopes, wants, prayerlets to some master of the universe I have yet to give a name. They propel me through my days and my nights and keep me looking forward, squinting towards a sun-drenched horizon. If you wish and keep wishing, I like to think the odds are that a healthy abundance of them will come true. Don't let the ladies in this happy picture lead you to believe otherwise- you get WAY more than three.