Happy end of June.
I’ve seen heat waves making their rounds and life feels a bit like this painting above by Arthur Streeton. Painted during an Australian summer outside of Melbourne in the plains of an “artists’ camp”, Arthur was just 21 and this is now considered a masterpiece of Australian Impressionism. I can smell the dry grass and feel the cool shade slowly dissipate as the sun rises higher and higher to an unrelenting summer day.

Reading | Envy by Yuri Olesha - An NYRB classic- this is a Russian novel and it gives Dostoevsky vibes with the melancholy, wandering the streets at night atmosphere. A well off man takes in a drunk man on the street one night and he ends up staying with him for a while and it’s kind of a spiral of envious thoughts and woe is me and the toxicity of comparison.

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell - I know people reference 1984 a lot nowadays (and for good reason) and commend Orwell for his novels but this man was truly still a “man of his time”, meaning sexist, racist, prejudice, etc, etc. This was his first full length work detailing his time in the 1920’s experiencing poverty in Paris and London. We follow him around as he pawns his clothes and other random possessions he comes across in order to pay for his room in various locales.
While I was a bit annoyed at what I mentioned above, I did enjoy it to an extent because I like older books where the person lives from day to day like this. Another book that comes to mind like that is On the Road by Jack Kerouac. They don’t know where their next meal will come from (orwell didn’t eat for 5 days at one point), how they’ll make their next dollar, or where they’ll be but somehow they do it and they make it, just by living “by the seat of their pants”. While we live in different times, it reminds me that life is not that serious and the structures we were conditioned into believing is the one right way, is not the one right way. And it’ll all be fine.

At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond - I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this niche interest of mine but I am drawn to the Hampstead ponds for some reason. I will read anything, watch anything, follow anyone online that swims or talks about the ladies pond. I’ve never been there myself, but it is a bucket list item to swim there at least once. If you don’t know, there are very old ponds in London that are a ladies swimming pond, a men’s pond, and a co-ed pond. This book has several essays from women, young and old, who have swam and lifeguarded at the ladies pond. Apparently it’s quite deep and even has water snakes toward the bottom, several fish species and other creatures. I love how there’s a group of older women who swim year round and bob about in beanie hats for a couple minutes every day in the winter.
There’s a documentary on the ponds but I can’t find anywhere it’s streaming online at the moment.
I love the idea of having a women only pond as a third space, a place you can go and just exist in the natural world, regulate your nervous system, lie on the meadow next to it, and not have to worry about anything.

Ripening: Why Women Need Fairytales Now by Sharon Blackie - I’ve read all of Sharon Blackie’s books and this is the latest release. In this one she drops more lore on old fairytales, the original meanings, and how they’re meant to teach women everything they need to know to survive life I suppose. Fairytales have gone through a bit of the telephone game over the years and have evolved to express very different stories and meanings from the original intents. It’s fascinating to learn about their evolution and what the original tales can teach us.

A Spell for Trouble by Esme Addison - I found this on Libby to read on my kindle before bed. It’s a cozy mystery where a young woman whose mom passed away and her father kept her away from her aunt and cousins for 20 years, has now gone back to the town they live after leaving her job in NYC. She starts working with her aunt and cousins in their witchy apothecary in Bellamy Bay, North Carolina. A death occurs early on and they need to figure out what happened. I’ve just started it but it’s cute so far and great for summerween.

Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by John O’Donohue - Originally published as Divine Beauty, it can also be found by that name. I’m just starting this one also and I’m planning to dip in and out of it throughout my days as a bit of an elixir to daily woes. A page here, a page there. I have so much underlined and annotated already. I told myself I can’t tab every single page because I want to. I think I will make a post for this book when I’m finished. It’s everything I need right now.

Noticing | One of my side quests for the year was to write down 100 beautiful things I've noticed over the year. As of today, I have written down 38 things. We’re halfway through the year and I thought I’d be further along. I thought my eye for beauty was already properly attuned. This summer, with John O’Donohue and Mary Oliver, I plan to make this my main focus. Can I find something daily? I’ll try.. I’ll try.

Watching | I’m working on my side quest of watching a movie for every year I’ve been alive and just watched Miss Willoughby and the Haunted House for 2021. I feel like this should be a kids movie but it involves murder. I’m just not sure but it was fine.
I also watched the documentary Gauguin: A Dangerous Life (2019). There are documentaries on most of the impressionists and others in that time period on Tubi that I plan to work my way through this summer. Gauguin has never been a favorite of mine and he gives me a bit of the heeby jeebies. Particularly, because he left his wife Mette and 5 children to venture out in the world to paint and try to make money, found himself in Tahiti and married Teha'amana, a 13 year old.

Anticipating | I mentioned this before but there’s a definitive release date now~ The PBS special for Mary Oliver ~ Saved by the Beauty of the World will be released 8/25/26. A few days before my birthday and it’s the perfect gift. I can’t wait.

Listening | to concerts in the park. Every summer, my town has concerts in a few different parks on friday nights in June and July. My youngest daughter and I have enjoyed sitting on a picnic blanket and taking in the scene and watching the local bands. It’s one of those activities that helps turn the season in my mind. I know it’s summer now.

I just love Sargent’s work.

I created a summer playlist and it feels like this painting. You’re wandering the forest and happen across a fairy festival. You dance and dance and the trees dance with you and the fairies dance, and the sun turns to gold while it seems, do our eyes deceive, the flowers are glowing. Forget the world, we’re here now.

Quoting | I’ve come across some lovely quotes this month and I’d like to share them here~

“They’ll tell you that the arts and humanities aren’t practical and then read poetry at funerals and weddings, cry over films and search for meaning in ancient philosophy. Surviving is one type of practicality, knowing why we bother is another.” ~ Joel Uili

“Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.” ~ Henry Miller

“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of joy and wonder. I choose joy over despair, not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn to love- whether we call it friendship or family or romance- is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view but there is still a clear eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”
~ James Baldwin

Relaunching | August 1st will be a year Iris has been out in the world and I don’t think I did a good enough job sharing and promoting it so I’m going to do a relaunch and start posting more of it and probably pieces of Somewhere Dawn is Rising as well. I’ve written 3 poetry books and I don’t think from what I share online, anyone would really know it aside from me linking them. In the next week or two I’m going to photograph the entirety of both books to slowly share over time, most likely here and on instagram.

Well I hope you’re staying cool. Let me know if you have thoughts or suggestions on any of these topics!

x,
Courtney

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Happy Summer Solstice!

The summer solstice kicks off my favorite half of the wheel of the year. We’re at peak solar energy with the longest day and a gradual decline toward the winter solstice.

Summer~ the season of whimsy, harvest, delighting in what feels like endless energy and abundance from the skies and earth below.

This summer I’ve started a little patio garden complete with basil, rosemary, arugula, spinach, and jack o’ lanterns. I also have a single sunflower I’ve been growing since March and it’s finally blossomed just in time for the solstice, which seems quite fitting since they’re a symbol of the sun.

Quotes

The Sun, as common, went abroad. The flowers, accustomed, blew, as if no soul the solstice passed that maketh all things new. ~ Emily Dickinson

June is the pearl of summer, shining with warmth and joy. ~ LM Montgomery

Then followed that beautiful season… Summer~ filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape lay as if new created in all then freshness of childhood.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

To see the summer sky is poetry, though never in a book it lie - true poems flee.
~Emily Dickinson

A Solstice Recipe

The solstice is a great time for honey recipes, a popular one being honey cakes. I made these salted honey cinnamon cookies and they’re so good. The honey makes them taste kind of like browned butter or caramel cookies and also makes them nice and soft. They’re very easy to make and I highly recommend! They go great with a cup of tea.

Salted Honey Cookies

1/2 cup unsalted butter
1/4 cup honey
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon (optional)
sea salt to garnish

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350f (175c).
Line baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.

In a mixing bowl cream together softened butter, honey, brown sugar, and granulated sugar. Add egg and vanilla.

Add flour mixture to butter mixture until well combined.

Use a spoon to create golf ball sized balls to the baking sheet.

Sprinkle each ball with sea salt. (it’s ok of salt is concentrated, cookies spread and so will the salt)

Bake for 11-12 minutes until edges are golden.

Allow cookies to cool on sheet for 2 minutes, then transfer to wire rack to completely cool.

Makes approximately 12-15 cookies.

Note: Because of the low flour to sugar/honey ratio, these spread. Don’t make the dough balls too big or they’ll all turn into one cookie. I also think parchment paper is best for the baking sheet over a silicone mat to avoid massive spread.

A poem

Midsummer from my poetry collection, Iris.

A haiku from Iris.

An album

This week I’ve been listening to the album Magic of the Summer Solstice by Celestial Aeon Project. It’s been lovely magical background music to my days and I recommend if you’re looking for a wee bit of fairy tunes. :)

I hope you have a wonderful summer season. Let me know if you make the cookies!

x,
Courtney

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Last week I went to the San Diego Museum of Art for their new exhibition, Forging a Legacy: 15 Years of Landmark Acquisitions, specifically to see one particular painting.

Eglise de Varengeville

This painting by Monet is one of my favorites. It reminds me of Manderley in Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. When I saw the Museum of Art had it on display it was a “run, don’t walk” situation and it didn’t disappoint.

In the summer of 1882, Monet stayed on the Normandy coast where this was painted. It was a time of productivity and financial stability for him. He’d already established himself as an Impressionist painter and decided to venture out to new landscapes. He painted nearly 100 canvases during his stay, including 6-10 paintings here in Varengeville and several in the nearby fishing village of Pourville-sur-Mer. The Varengeville paintings include multiple angles of this same church, including this one:

Aside from the house in Rebecca, I think I love these paintings because they reminds me so much of the Torrey Pines cliffs here in San Diego. Instead of a church, we have a golf course, but the cliffs are so similar. It makes it much easier to envision the places Monet stands to paint these scenes. And it also highlights how small the world is and how similar our landscapes can be on different continents and how time in the natural world means very little. His painted cliff is very close to the photo of it taken in more recent years.
It’s us, the little blips in time, everything else just tolerates our presence.

Image of the Verengeville coast and a lovely description here.

Some other paintings from the exhibit

They had Monet displayed between his friends, this one from Pissarro and the Route de Versaille by Alfred Sisley.

They also had this one in the exhibit that I’ve seen regularly at the museum. It’s always a pleasure to see. It’s one of those paintings that come alive in my head when I see it. You can almost hear the sounds of New York~ people chattering, the sound of their newspapers rustling, the trains, the vendors, and the scents of the vendors come wafting through.

Interesting bubble art

There were 3 of these art pieces and they were huge and I couldn’t image the time it would’ve taken this person to create these. A syringe with hair gel in every place there was a star???? WILD.

Artist in Residency

I started my self appointed artist in residency this week. I was really torn between where I wanted it to be, which is why I waited so long, but I settled on the Botanical Garden. While a place I’ve gone regularly over several years, this week I took the time to walk through with a “painter’s eye” and photographed different things to paint when I returned home.

If you didn’t see my artist in residency post at the beginning of the year, I came across this post on Amy Stewart’s substack on the “unofficial artist in residency”, where you pick a place or subject and declare you’re now the artist in residency for that place for whatever length of time you decide. It’s been so much fun seeing different places people pick when they come up on my notes feed.

Now I’m pleased to say I’ve finally begun my residency. I took several photos and have painted 3 so far. While I thought I would use gouache for this project, I can never seem to give up this tiny watercolor palette and my water brush. It’s the best and I have a lot more fun mixing my own colors than having a pre-made palette of 100 colors or something. The challenge of making any color from these 12 is half the joy of it all. Anyway~

It was an infamous “June Gloom” day so the lighting was lovely for the micro level but not so much on the macro landscapes with blown out skies.

I have many more pages to fill and more to come. I may try gouache for a few, maybe not. :)

x,

Courtney

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And here we are, wrapping up May with a bow~ five months into the year. How is it almost halfway over now?

I think this is the first year I never fully recovered from my winter creative lull. It has actually been quite shocking and it seems the harder I try to get it back, the more I push it away. So I do what I’m good at, a baseline creative level of sorts to keep the pulse beating, which is floral photography over the spring and calligraphy for my etsy shop. But we’re heading into summer now, the fields of flowers are fading, and I’m being sent back to start.
I don’t know if it’s the news of the world, personal happenings, or what but I am starting to feel desperate.

I just started a new journal and wanted to find a little salutation to write in the front to bring in positive energy~

This blessing by John O’Donohue was perfect so I want to share it with you in case you need to hear it too ~

May the light of your soul guide you.
May the light of your soul bless the work
You do with the secret love and warmth of your heart.
May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul.
May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light and renewal to those
Who work with you and to those who see and receive your work.
May your work never weary you.
May it release within you wellsprings of refreshment, inspiration and excitement.
May you be present in what you do.
May you never become lost in the bland absences.
May the day never burden you.
May dawn find you awake and alert, approaching your new day with dreams,
Possibilities and promises.
May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.
May you go into the night blessed, sheltered and protected.
May your soul calm, console and renew you.

Finding | This is quite random but last summer I was trying to find John Keats written letter to Fanny Brawn that included the lines “I almost wish were butterflies and lived but three summer days, three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”
Even though it’s a famous line, the museums that contain his works did not have it in any of the archives I sifted through. At random, I decided to re-search for it a couple weeks ago and I figured out why!

Apparently, the letters were stolen and last spring (2025) a man in NYC brought in some old books to a rare book shop to sell and one of them were John Keats missing letters! The shop reported the letters and after an intense investigation they were returned to the “rightful owners” on Long Island who will now decide what to do with them. This includes deciding to allow them to be scanned for viewing online, which I really hope happens! They seem to only show one page of the letters whenever it’s mentioned in an article.
Fingers crossed!

Reading | The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger - A book about the magical world of plants and how they adapt, thrive, and co-exist with us. If you like Robin Wall Kimmerer’s books you will like this too. The way plants can communicate with each other and create certain chemicals in their leaves for the bugs around them is so interesting to read about. It really makes you look at the entire world differently.

The Nantucket Inn by Pamela Kelley - A young woman gets fired from her journalism job in Boston and decides to go home to Nantucket where her mom decides to turn her home into a bed & breakfast. We hear from the mom and 4 siblings throughout the book. It’s a series of 9 books and I think the rest go into more detail of each person in the family. I thought it was a cute summer novel if you need a light beach read.

Our Perfect Storm by Carley Fortune - The latest by Carley Fortune and it’s another summer hit. It’s about 2 childhood best friends. One’s marriage falls through so the friends go on the honeymoon together.

On Women by Susan Sontag- Essays on womanhood with ageism, fascism, feminism, beauty, and more. We may have come a way, but I don’t know that we’ve come a long way. The way just looks a bit different. So much to do, yet.

Listening | to so many things. Here are my top spotify playlists~

Summer ‘26 - I just started putting this one together so it’s not done yet but I’m looking forward to building it over the next month or two. I want it to feel like Summer ‘25 below but with more female vocalists.

Summer ‘25 - One of my favorite playlists I’ve made. It reminds me of road tripping to yosemite and zion national park last summer. It feels like sunshine and the open road.

High Vibrational Frequencies - I’ve been playing this in the early mornings while I do yoga and journal. I don’t know that listening to these frequencies work for anything, I’d like to think they do, but it does give a calm atmosphere.

Ben Howard - I push play on the first song listed and let it go through his entire discography. I love Ben Howard and the way he plays guitar. His music always feeds my well of inspiration.

Looking | through Georgia O’Keeffe’s catalog that is now entirely online! Her paintings, writings, photographs, belongings, and so much more.
Her cursive writing makes me think of cavatappi noodles.

Watching | My 7 year old and I are watching the entire RL Stine Goosebumps series on Tubi. We’re watching it on the projector in the late evenings when it gets dark. While they were spooky as a kid, they definitely hit differently as an adult. There’s one that made me laugh last week about a kid going to “camp nightmare”. (Spoiler: don’t read this if you want to watch it LOL) To keep it brief, he goes to a summer camp in the middle of the woods where other kids are bitten by snakes, drown, go missing, and there’s some kind of bear creature lurking around. After all of his cabin mates have disappeared and the camp counselors deny the kids even existed, he’s forced to shoot the main counselor with a stun gun they said they were going to use on a girl from the girl camp. When he shoots the counselor they all cheer and said he passed the test. To which he was like “wtf”. And then all the kids and his parents come out of the woods cheering and his parents said they’re going on a mission somewhere really dangerous and have to bring him so the whole thing was a test to see if he could pass and survive there. And he asked where, so they all look up in the sky and you see earth in the distance. LOLOL.

Also watching | I love finding those small youtube accounts that film videos for the art of it, usually shot on iphone. Here’s a good example of that~

Live a little…

He has some other lovely videos as well.

Using | A campsnap camera. It came today so I don’t have any pictures with it yet but I plan to use it as my main summer camera. I love that it has no screen so there are elements of surprise and anticipation like ye olden days. It’s also very light and will fit comfortably in any bag. In my last post I mentioned I applied for the ambassador program and they said no. Lol. But that’s ok, they did give me an “affiliate link” to share but I’m mainly in it for my own creative ventures and to test it out for fun anyway.

Celebrating | My older daughter graduated from high school this week. I can’t believe how fast this time has gone by. I can’t believe I have an adult child. I’m looking forward to our summer together before college and making lots of memories. I’ve loved every summer I’ve spent with her and I hope whatever the future brings, we will always come together at some point in the summers to do nothing and everything, to exist in the same pocket of sunshine for a while with good food, laughter, and love.

Making | I think I’m finally ready to tackle a physical photo album. I have so many photos that sit on my computer just waiting for the day it fails. I’ve saved photos on external drives but even those seem to begin to corrupt after some years. While searching for photos on a couple external drives, I’ve noticed photos/files older than 15 years can start to pixelate in strange ways, some even have half the photos gone, as in one picture looks cut in half because of dead pixels. I guess even external drives aren’t forever. I am not a cloud user. I don’t like the idea of my personal things out in the ether for anyone to snatch up (or train AI with~ the horror). So my only other option, really, is to turn my favorite digital things into physical things and tote them around the rest of my life. Lol. But I can’t wait to sift through my several years of photos and pick out maybe 20-40 per year to print and paste them in an album or two. I think I’ll create one for family photos and one for nature/landscape photos.

Well, that’s all from me for now. What have you been up to? Any good summer book recs?

x,
Courtney

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Happy summer!

I love that that painting above is titled that. I also have a bit of FOMO. It looks like a jolly good time. If that was today everyone would be holding a phone and recording in their other hand.

If you’ve been anywhere on the internet lately, you’ll have seen “analog living” trending with analog bags (bags stuffed with non-electronic entertainment), and people announcing that they’re going off-line but somehow still update on-line.

I’ve enjoyed seeing the trend catch on because I’ve always had a soft spot for the analog life (and I have a mean pencil collection to prove it).

Here are two posts from the past 2 summers regarding analog plans if you’d like to read them as well~
It’s a 90’s summer over here from 2024 ~ This one has lots of good ideas to have a slower summer.
Analog summer from 2025.

Rant incoming…

But what I really like about analog trending is it means there is a resistance to the steamrolling of AI and what seems like a rapid force of advancing technology. I don’t know if you’ve seen the videos of robot “friends” or the insane “flock camera” installations all over the country and they’re adding flock raven which claims to try to catch the sound of gunshots (lol lame excuse) but it also conveniently says it can pick up on human voices. Truly a big brother situation here. Between cameras and microphones all over town, in businesses, everyone with recording devices in and on their cars, recording on their phones and meta glasses, how could we not be overwhelmed? How are all these people willing participants? Did they not read 1984? Do they even read?

My personal pet peeve is hearing that people are talking to ChatGPT like a friend and they ask it questions instead of using a smidge of their own mental brain power. Do you know the resources AI takes??? The water??? Did you see they are trying to build a data center more than twice the size of Manhattan in Utah?! And it will use more power than the entire state does now?? Any reasonable technology or innovation should 100% not need to use/destroy/monopoly this many resources.

I have a good example of the ridiculous usage of ChatGPT and I don’t know who reads my substack because I actively avoid the analytics page so hopefully I don’t ruffle any feathers mentioning this~ But I was at a dinner party not long ago and we were all asked to guess a secret ingredient in one of the dishes. So we’re tasting it and discussing it amongst ourselves and one person said “I’m going to ask ChatGPT” and pulls out her phone and asks it what are possible secret ingredients in that dish!!!!!!!!! Like what? You tasted it your own self! You just killed the game. That is so unnecessary. I will also note, this person wrote down the wrong answer even with the help of AI.. can’t we just have a good time anymore?

Analog Summer Plans

Phew, moving on.
The point is, I think we could all use a bit more analog and a bit more reality.
I started a list of ways I’m going to participate in this analog summer. For one, I’m not really calling it that in real life. It’s more of an intentional summer I suppose. I do plan to still use the internet for things, like substack for instance, but everything will be for a good reason. No scrolling, no checking my phone if I’m bored somewhere, no taking the easy way out (will explain this below).

A lot of the suggestions I put in my 2024 post I will also be doing this year such as~

• Playing card games ~ I love to play cards with my 7 year old. We usually play Go fish or Garbage. I’ve also taught her how to play solitaire.

• Snail mail ~ I’ve always sent snail mail but I like to ramp it up in the summer and send letters to more than the usual suspects. I also like to include little treats like tea bags, flower seed packets, bracelets, etc.

• Making friendship bracelets ~ Also my third year doing this - For myself, I like to make an anklet version at the beginning of summer and then cut it off September 1st. It’s become a fun tradition. I’ve already made a bracelet for my 7yo and I also fancied up my phone charger cable for my car~

  

• Mini Golf ~ In June is our 3rd annual Mini Golf Summer Kickoff and I can’t wait. I love a good game of mini golf (and the tiny pencils to record our scores). So good.

• Making s’mores ~ My older daughter recently turned 18 and I hope she will always remember a childhood of summer s’mores. We were sure to make them every year before the new school year started. I even have a little electric s’more maker that blows hot air up and you hold your marshmallow over the top with a little stick. One of my favorite memories is setting up our s’more station in our palm springs hotel during one of our “girls getaways” and jumping on the bed and eating s’mores.

  Some other things I plan on doing~

• Crossword puzzles - I have a book from last summer I’m still working on.

• Dominoes - We love dominoes over here. I like how winning is mostly based off the luck of the draw and how much you pay attention.

• Movie nights with my youngest and our projector. We’re having one tonight with pizza and we’re going to watch Gravity Falls instead of an actual movie. It’s so much fun.

• For summerween this year I want to read old RL Stine books. Do you remember those scary stories? I loved getting those at the library and also from the scholastic book fair. These books were a main feature of the early 90’s to me.

• Balloon toss - First, I will say I’m not a fan of balloons and I think they’re bad for the environment. I’ve picked up my fair share at the beach. However, one seems to appear every so often in my home, like this weekend. My daughter and I spent a good hour bonking it back and forth and trying not to let it touch the ground.

• Baking - Along with my weekly loaf of bread, I plan to bake some summer treats like pie, cookies, maybe ice cream.. and continue my cookbook side quest.

• Going in stores - Here’s where I explain the easy way out with the phone that I mentioned above. Instead of ordering pickup or driveup at stores, I plan to go inside the stores to buy what I want. Revolutionary, right? I think this depends where you live but in SoCal it’s quite popular now to either order delivery through any of the various apps or order pickup/driveup. I also plan to use drive-thrus less and go in the stores/restaurants/coffee shops instead. It allows for more human interaction in your day and sometimes you can have random conversations with lovely people you never would have just ordering. More human interaction = good.

• Using my wired earbuds to listen to music/audiobooks on my phone. I’ve used wireless airpods for a while now and I’m kind of just tired of it. Untangling the wired ones is very nostalgic. I also get tired of that sound the airpods make when the battery is dead.

• Using a campsnap camera this summer for photos - I don’t have this yet and a week ago I actually put in the application to be an ambassador. I think this is the first brand I’ve done that for. Fingers crossed. Haven’t heard back yet but if I don’t, I will get one anyway. I plan to document my summer on it. It’s essentially like a digital “disposable” camera. It’s not disposable but has the look. There is no screen on the back of it and I might upload them every 1-2 weeks to my computer so it’ll be a fun surprise to see what I captured, just like with film. I think I want to post these snaps to instagram over the summer and treat IG how it used to be, just fun random stuff.
  

• Something I want to do ~ I would really like to buy a disposable camera for myself and one for each of my daughters and maybe a couple other people and we each capture special/fun/mundane moments over the summer. Then, at the end of summer, I would get them all developed and put on a thumb drive and we could give presentations of each of our film rolls on the projector one night. I reeeally want to do this but I also know the price of disposable cameras and developing them and it would be close to $200. I shudder. But it would be so much fun.
  

• Picnics of course! I’ve had a couple so far and eating out of doors will be a staple activity.

• Hosting an ice cream social. I did this in 2024 for the summer solstice and I would like to do it again. We had build your own sandwiches and ice cream. A root beer float party could be fun too. Bean bag toss anyone?
  
  In addition to those, I’ll be doing my artist in residency, going to the beach, taking a road trip, having pool days, and attempting to just live in the moment.

  
  What are you doing this summer?

  
  x,
  Courtney

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Happy May everyone!

May first brought the Celtic celebration of Beltane. The halfway point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. On the wheel of the year it’s a time of beginnings, growth, abundance, positive energy, and joy. The soil has officially defrosted, the gardens are sprouting or well on their way, depending where you live, and we’re covered in flowers.
Locally, our jacaranda trees are covered in purple flowers that decorate all the sidewalks and paths below. It’s such a gorgeous time for Southern California.

Beltane is also the halfway point to Samhain (or Halloween) when the veil between worlds is thinnest. It’s also believed to be thin now and a time when fairies are most active out in nature, passing between the fae realm and ours.
I have a fairy necklace I like to wear at this time of year as a wee sign of reverence for our mischievous neighbors that are passing through.

May, in my opinion, begins the best time for whimsy and our own lighthearted mischief. It kicks off the months of “anything can happen” and “don’t take anything too seriously.” It’s a month for making wishes and shifting our long hours indoors to out of doors.

In case you find yourself out of doors and happen across a fairy sighting ~
:)

Fun fairy facts

• If you want to get on a fairy’s good side, offer it a gift. Something shiny or food like honey, dairy, berries, or sweet treats.

• It’s dangerous to accept favors from fairies. Your gratitude is not enough, and never say “thank you”. Accepting a favor admits you’re now indebted to them so it’s best not to.

• Never tell a fairy your real name. Names have power and they can use this to control you.

• Fairies don’t like iron, bells, some herbs and salt. So if you want to keep them away you can use these things around your home or door.

• Fairies can be any size and can appear as human.

• They can be beneficial to your garden and you can invite them by planting some of their favorite things like foxglove, thyme, roses, and bluebells.

• Holes or doors at the base of trees, particularly Hawthorne trees, can be portals to the fairy realms in the Otherworld.

• If you see a fairy ring (a dark or light circle in the grass or a circle of mushrooms or stone) do not step inside, lest you be whisked away to the fairy realm (although, the way things are going this seems more enticing than ever).

• There are many types of fairies and all have varying temperaments. Not all are bad, not all are good, but most of them do enjoy tricks.

• Ways to know a fairy is near - your things go missing or are misplaced, particularly jewelry or other small objects. You can smell flowers or flowers pop up in unusual places. You hear light bells in the distance. You see a fairy ring. Your pet is acting funny. You see fleeting movements in the corner of your eye.

A Poem

Beltane
by me from my book, Iris.

On the eve of Beltane
summer opens
with a parade of embers
in the black night sky

the ash softly flutters
down, drifting
silvery feathers
of the fire

landing in our hair
we watch
the crackling timber
glowing orange cinders

toss in our wishes
carefully scrawled
on scraps of paper
our longing

Something to watch ~

Read last year’s post on Beltane

Beltane, summer on the horizon, and celebration ideas.

Quotes

“Come fairies, take me of this dull world, for I would ride with you, upon the wind and dance upon the mountains.” ~ W.B. Yeats

If you see a fairy ring
In a field of grass,
Very lightly step around,
Tiptoe as you pass;
Last night fairies frolicked there,
And they’re sleeping somewhere near.
If you see a tiny fay
Lying fast asleep,
Shut your eyes and run away,
Do not stay or peep;
And be sure you never tell,
Or you’ll break a fairy spell.

William Shakespeare

“Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons; it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

And remember~

“Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” ~Roald Dahl

Happy May! I’ll see you soon.

x,
Courtney

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April felt a bit like a labyrinth to me. Turning corners not knowing what I’d find, draining energy, but with little pockets to sit and rest. Never to fully recharge~ just long enough to keep on..

Reading | The Big Four by Agatha Christie. This is a Poirot novel and it was a classic Christie. The book begins with a man dying and Poirot finds out “The Big Four”- four powerful people in the world who are scheming together, are behind the murder so Poirot has to figure out who they are with obstacles along the way. If you like Christie’s novels and haven’t read this one yet, it’s a good one!

I read two Sophie Kinsella books for the first time this month and I was bummed to read that she passed away last year. The books I read were~

My Not So Perfect Life- a story about a young woman who grew up in the UK countryside on a farm and decides to move to London for a career in advertising. She interns at a place filled with drama, eventually gets fired, and returns home to help her family start up a glamping business on their farm. She gets some familiar visitors and more drama and hilarity ensues.

The Undomestic Goddess- Samantha is a lawyer who makes a huge mistake that cost her chance at partner and 5 million pounds for her client. So she runs away from work when she finds out she made that terrible mistake and gets on a train, not knowing where she’s going. She stops at a country house to ask for a drink of water and directions to a hotel. However, the woman living there mistakenly thinks she’s there to apply to be their housekeeper. Samantha goes along with it because she doesn’t want to be rude, even though she can’t cook or clean, and gets the job. So she has to figure out how to do this new job.

Both of those novels are cute and perfect “fluff” reads for spring or summer.

My Husband’s Wife by Alice Feeney - This is a thriller and the audiobook is so good. It has different character voices along with environmental sounds. It’s like you’re listening to a film. Eden leaves her home one evening to go on a run and to clear her head. When she returns from her run, her key doesn’t fit in the door, and when she knocks, a woman that looks like her, just a bit older, answers the door wearing her clothes and jewelry and insists she lives there and has her same name. When Eden’s husband comes to the door he acts like he doesn’t know who she is and that this other woman is really his wife. The story unfolds from there. Riveting!

Love Letters of Great Men ~ Lol. This has been sitting on my physical tbr shelf for a while now. I decided to give it a go this month and it was quite amusing. In the intro it mentions “an alternate name for this book could be ‘Great Men: Going On About Themselves Since AD 61”. The sentiments that pass as love letters… well the bar is really low and always has been apparently.
Here’s an excerpt from Mozart to Constanze - “I am delighted that you have a good appetite- but whoever gorges a lot, must also shit a lot- no, walk a lot, I mean. But I should not like you to take long walks without me. I entreat you to follow my advice exactly, for it comes from my heart.”

Uh, yeah ok.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico - Picked this off my TBR stack too. It’s a book about a couple of expats living in Berlin as “digital creatives” doing freelance work and living a life on aesthetics but as years go by they get bored and realize the life they created is no longer fulfilling. I just started this and I’m only about 20 pages in. I’ll have to let you know what I thought in the next Ings post but so far I’m a little weirded out that it’s written in 3rd person like a narration to a film. I haven’t seen any dialogue yet.

Watching | I’m working on my “movie for every year I’ve been alive” quest and I recently watched Message in a Bottle from 1999 with Robin Wright, Kevin Costner, and Paul Newman. A woman who works at a newspaper in Chicago is on a trip to Cape Cod and goes running along the beach when she finds a message in a bottle. The message is from a man to his late wife and she brings it back to Chicago to try and find out who it is. The letter gets published in the newspaper (behind her back) and she’s sent to the Outer Banks to find the man behind the letter. I thought it was a pretty good movie.

I also watched The Miracle Club (2023) about a group of friends who go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, France for cures and dreams. I pretty much watched it for Maggie Smith but there’s also Laura Linney and Kathy Bates. It was funny, sweet, and a good time.

Celebrating | Earth Day~ Reflecting on the beauty of the natural world while also watching governments destroy it. Very dystopian times.

In the Persephone Books April newsletter they posted a poem a reader sent in to them and it really resonated with the current atmosphere~

My meditation this month has been walking amongst the flowers, taking each of their photos like it’s school picture day and they’re all dressed in their finest attire. I swear they smile.

“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.” ~Wendel Berry

A birthday

I’m also celebrating my eldest daughter’s birthday! She turned 18 this month and I can’t believe how fast the years went by.
I’ve always taken to heart the responsibility of giving a person the experience of a childhood and being the one that creates that base for their entire life. It’s really nothing to take lightly and I think to change the world in a good way, over generations, it’s through this care of childhood.
I hope she looks back on hers fondly. :)

Cooking | I wanted to give an update on my 2026 side quest of cooking everything from a cookbook this year. I chose one of Ina Garten’s cookbooks because I love her and her recipes but this book is falling a bit flat for me. I’ve made a few things that were pretty good and a few things that have been shunned and discarded. I’m just not sure this is the book for me or what I should do now. Find a new cookbook and start over? Abandon the quest? Make a few more recipes that might redeem it? I am pondering….
I think the best way to do a challenge like that is to find the book first by happenstance and think “wow, all of these recipes look amazing! I think I’ll make them all!” Rather than decide to cook everything from a cookbook and go buy one that looks decent.

I did however make some really good brownies last week. My mom purchased a flour mill so I was able to mill some flour to bring home and I made these fresh-milled flour brownies. Apparently recipes are different measurements with fresh milled flour. They were so rich and perfect with vanilla ice cream. They disappeared very quickly.

As we go into summer, I think I will need to loosen my posting schedule a bit. Generally, I try to post on sundays and I still will try but I may skip a few or post midweek instead. Autumn should bring back more regularity.

I’ll see you next week for a wee Beltane celebration.

x,

Courtney

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Spring, over the years, has become a leading contender for my favorite season. After the bleak winter season, it always feels like the most optimistic season full of hope and promises and it actually follows through as we witness the flowers popping up, leaves unfurling from tree branches, and new life all around.

Spring is the season where you can look around and think “yeah, maybe everything will be ok.”

Let’s have a little spring indulgence through paintings, art, music, film, books and more.

Paintings

In the painting above, Untitled (Yellow House with Yellow Roses) by Matilda Browne, Matilda painted the yellow house in Old Lyme, CT where she lived for 4 years after the First World War. She featured it often in her paintings as well as her garden.

That painting looks like the epitome of spring to me with the varying shades of yellow and green, the dappled light, and sunshine. I can almost smell the fresh air.

The yellow house where Van Gogh lived and worked in Arles. He stayed here for 15 months and created over 300 paintings!

I could sit here forever. Pierre Bonnard was a French painter, illustrator and printmaker. He was a founding member of Les Nabis, a group of post impressionist avante-garde painters. He painted a wide range of subjects including portraits, interiors, landscapes, and urban scenes, often prioritizing the use of color and texture over accuracy of what he was painting.

I think the reason I enjoy impressionism so much is because I believe the painters in this period really knew the color wheel very well and generously employed it to create tonal masterpieces.

It’s a feast for the eyes. As Emily Dickinson said, “Bring me the sunset in a cup”.

Film

Hilma is based on the true story of Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), a Swedish pioneer of Abstract Expressionism. Hilma studied landscape and botanical art at the Swedish Royal Academy of fine arts and hid behind the facade of being a painter of nature.

But privately, she was exploring abstract art and her spiritual interests with a spiritual group she cofounded with 4 other women called “De Fem” (The Five). They would have seances to contact the “High Masters”, spirits that held knowledge of the universe’s mysteries. These seances, along with af Klint’s mediumship practice of letting spirits control her paintbrush, led to much of her abstract creations.

Af Klint intentionally hid away her abstract work with instructions to be uncovered no sooner than 20 years after her death, stating that people would not understand what she was trying to do. It wasn’t until the 1980’s her work was exhibited for the world to see.

I find her story so fascinating! The film is available to watch through viaplay. If you go through amazon prime you can sign up for a 1 week free trial of viaplay to watch it.

Music

I’m certain I’ve mentioned this playlist here before but it’s such a good one for spring and I’ve been listening to it the past few weeks.
It’s my spring classical playlist on spotify. I’m listening to it now and it’s the perfect background music for working, for thinking, cleaning, or whatever else you may be doing.

Spring book recommendations

A Sky Painted Gold by Laura Wood - This is set in the summer but it gives hopeful spring vibes. It’s 1929 and a young woman living on the coast of England meets her neighbors who live in a grand house next door that’s only accessible when the tide is out and she can walk over to their property. She wants to be a writer and befriends the adult siblings who own the house. It gives Great Gatsby vibes in atmosphere.

Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life by Marta McDowell - Emily may have been a recluse but she was a prolific gardener. This book is all about the garden she tended through poems, letters, photos, and art.

Iris by Courtney L Smith - Hey, what can I say. Every season is featured in here but the spring poems are some of my favorites.

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer- Exactly what the title describes and offers us the hope nature emanates in the spring months. I have a full review of this book here.

Old Herbaceous: A Novel of the Garden by Reginald Arkell - A slow sweet classic about an orphan boy who grows up to be a head gardener and esteemed flower show judge. This one feels like a Saturday afternoon with a cup of tea near a sunny open window, the birds are chirping, and maybe you doze off a bit to wake up in dancing light shining through the trees of your garden.

Spring Quotes

“Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.” - John Ruskin

“Flowers teach hope and patience. Flowers teach tenderness. Flowers teach futility and amazement. You know me, I am always willing to learn. Besides, it is spring. The beautiful forces of nature refuse to remain silent and I feel like observing everything.” -Katherine Mansfield

“The sun just touched the morning; The morning, happy thing, Supposed that he had come to dwell, And life would be all spring.” - Emily Dickinson

“It is spring, and the night wind is moist with the smell of the early flowers; the moon pours out its beauty..” - Margaret Atwood

The quote I’m choosing to live by at the moment:

“A little madness in the spring is wholesome.” - Emily Dickinson

And lastly, not necessarily spring but most definitely topical:

“There is a direct connection between what you’re watching, reading, and listening to all day, and how you feel. Your energy levels, your mood, your ambition.” - Marie Forleo

If there’s anything you’d like to see me write about here, let me know. I feel like I’m in a bit of a lull since my mind has been on other things.

See you soon.

x,
Courtney

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I came across that painting above this past week and I love it so much. I don’t think I’ve seen it before and I’m surprised. It seems like it would be fairly popular. John Lavery (1856-1941) was an Irish painter and mostly painted portraits and wartime depictions. He has some really great paintings that include landscape.

They feel so refreshing.

Anyway- It’s Ing time!

Ings

Reading | I read the least amount of books in March that I’ve ever read. Too much was going on, I was in a flu haze, and I just couldn’t focus with everything happening in my personal life.
I only finished 3 books this month but they were really good so I’m happy with it.

The first book was The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers (he’s also the author of The Offing that’s on my TBR). The Perfect Golden Circle was really good. It’s a book set in the summer of 1989 and two young men create crop circles over the summer across the English countryside. It’s their mission to stay absolutely anonymous so they venture out at night with a map of their planned crop circles. The next morning you see the newspaper article trying to figure out who did it and some write only an alien could’ve done that. The men get a kick out of seeing that and while they slightly grapple with wanting to be known for their artistry, they enjoy the anonymity and do it for the beauty of it.

It would make a nice book club book for late spring/summer!

The next book is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans which was also a great read. It’s a book of the correspondence of an elder, Sybil Van Antwerp. Letters from herself to her neighbors, family, friends, authors she likes, customer service reps, and letters from them back to her. I loved it so much and I think it would really entice anyone to up their letter/correspondence game. Such a fun read.

Lastly, I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chobsky - I’ve always wanted to read this since it came out in 1998 and never have. It’s the coming of age story of a teenage boy in high school. I’m no longer the target audience for it but I’m glad I finally read it. It was endearing and hopeful and great for older teens or college-aged people who think they’re the only ones struggling to figure things out.

Watching | While bed-ridden with the flu I finished watching the series Sullivan’s Crossing. I struggled getting through the 3rd season but it was fine. I think I mentioned it here before. It’s set in Nova Scotia and the landscape is stunning. I would absolutely move there. There’s a lot of town drama and stuff. A typical drama series. Canada is gorgeous.

The new season of Virgin River also came out this month so I’m a few episodes in to that. It’s a nice drama series and quite similar to Sullivan’s Crossing with the town drama and themes.

I watched the new Netflix documentary The Plastic Detox. It follows 5 couples who have been trying to conceive for 2+ years and haven’t been able to for no particular reason. So they start eliminating microplastics from their lives to see if that’s the answer. I’ll let you watch for yourself so no spoilers. But it’s all definitely alarming. Plastics enter our bodies in so many ways. It feels like an uphill battle we’ll never win but small differences in our homes and routines do help.

Anticipating | The East of Eden mini-series coming to Netflix. There’s not an official release date except “early 2026” but I can’t wait to watch it. That was my fav book of 2025. I’m also interested in how it’s supposed to be set in the Salinas Valley in CA but it was mostly shot in New Zealand! Interesting!

I’m also super excited about the Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World documentary coming to PBS American Masters series this summer. I’m on the edge of my seat.

Visiting | Our local flower fields. Spring is in full swing here in SoCal and this month I’ve been visiting the flower fields when I can.

The flower fields are a sanctuary every spring. I wish I could bring everyone there to experience it at least once. You can see more of it on my instagram, notestothewild.

Starting | To post again on instagram after my 6-7 month break. I think it’s the time of year when optimism, new beginnings, and the flourishing earth makes me want to share those things with people- little bits of joy to interrupt their doomscrolls.
I have to say, after taking several months off, it doesn’t feel the same to me anymore and I keep forgetting to check it and post but I think that’s a good thing.

Improving | So I typically try to live a healthy lifestyle but this spring I’ve decided to make a couple more improvements. I purchased an air purifier for my home and it has become my new entertainment to watch the air quality number go up and down depending on different things like cooking, blowing out a candle, opening the door, etc.
I also downloaded the app Yuka (free!) and have been scanning all of my food and body care/cosmetics to check for chemicals and see the health scores. My 7 year old is also really into it now.
What’s cool about the app is when you scan something, at the bottom it shows healthier alternatives so you’re not just bumming out about having toxic food and products, but you can actually see better options to get in the future.

I fully intend on scanning everything in store before I buy it from now on. I think any little steps we can take to attempt to stay healthy in a country determined to poison us from birth is worthwhile.

Anyway, that’s about all for this month. What have you been watching and reading? See ya soon.

x,

Courtney

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I’ve been here myself and it’s just as beautiful as it appears in the virtual tour. I love the way the LA sun shines on the Getty’s tiles, creating a gorgeous warm light that envelops you as you walk around.

Through Google Arts & Culture we can take a full tour of the museum rooms and take a look at the extensive collection.

Come, walk through the rooms.

The paintings can all be seen here. There are lots of interesting photographs as well.

One of my favorite paintings The Getty has is the Young Man at His Window by Caillebotte, which I’ve mentioned previously in my Windows post. It was featured last year in the Painting Men exhibit at the museum. It depicts Caillebotte’s brother in the family’s newly built apartment building in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. This painting was Caillebotte’s debut piece to the public as a painter at the 2nd Impressionist exhibition in 1876, when he was 27!

More Favs:

The original daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe! Made several months before his death at age 40. According to Arts & Culture, after Poe’s wife died 2 years earlier, he befriended a couple woman for support and companionship and it’s believed that one of the women, Annie Richmond, whom he met at a poetry lecture, set up and paid for this portrait sitting. I will never not be alarmed at the incongruities of Poe’s age and appearance.

Fruit Piece, Jan van Huysum, 1722

A Dutch painting and companion to Jan van Huysum’s Vase of Flowers~ his paintings included a high gloss glaze to make the fruit and flowers glisten and shine that he gatekept and wouldn’t allow any visitors in his studio to witness his technique.
Love that for him.

Lastly, Spring by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1894.

I can’t wait to go back to the Getty and see this one in person. If you’re near, it’s in the Museum West Pavilion, Gallery W202.

Another Dutch painting, it depicts women and children adorned with flower crowns on May 1, or May Day, who set out to the countryside to collect flowers and celebrate spring. Alma-Tadema placed the scenein ancient Robe to suggest the festival’s antiquity. Of the design he said “Now if you want to know what those Greeks and Romans looked like, whom you make your masters in language and thought, come to me. For I can show not only what I think but what I know.”

Movie

This week we’re watching Kiki’s Delivery Service. A Studio Ghibli film from 1989. This film is about Kiki, a 13 year old witch. It’s tradition where she lives for witches to leave home for a year when they turn 13 to develop their special skills. So the film starts out with Kiki taking off from home on the night of a full moon to find a new town to live in. She begins a delivery service for packages and other things on her broom with her little black cat Jiji.

I don’t want to give any spoilers but it’s a fun, endearing, magical time. I watched it on Apple tv here.

Are you a fan of Studio Ghibli films? Which is your favorite? This is my first one and I’m looking forward to watching more.

Happy spring! See you next week for Ings.

x,
Courtney

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Happy 3rd week of Movie & Museum March.

I genuinely did not expect to have anything to post this week as I’ve been bedridden with the flu. I couldn’t even maintain focus to read anything, let alone write. But here we are and I’m slowly making it out the other end.

This week my step-dad also passed away (rough week) and a poem by Emily Dickinson came to mind which inspired me to highlight Emily’s house for the museum portion.

I find this poem to be one of Emily’s best and profoundly beautiful.

Because I could not stop for death

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves— 
And Immortality.

We slowly drove—He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility—

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess—in the Ring—
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—
We passed the Setting Sun—

Or rather—He passed us—
The Dews drew quivering and chill—
For only Gossamer, my Gown—
My Tippet—only Tulle—

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground—

Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity—

Here’s a lovely video of it being read aloud.

Museum

Emily Dickinson lived in Amherst Massachusetts with her family. This is the home she was born in, lived in most of her life, and where she died. Today the home is a museum you can visit in person and also virtually, which is what we’re going to do.

Come take a virtual tour of Emily’s room. When you scroll down in each section you can click on the photos to open up further insight.

If visiting in person, you’re able to rent Emily’s room for 1-2 hours to sit at her desk and write. You get to peer out the same windows Emily did while writing her own poems and letters. Definitely on my bucket list!

Tour the Homestead Library and Conservatory - Love the photograph of Emily’s garden. When Emily wasn’t writing, she was tending her garden. There’s a book called Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life that details everything about her garden. It’s a great read!

Tour the Parlor - That painting of Emily and her siblings has always stressed me out. The proportions of her sister’s head to torso.. unsettling. But how cool is the Aeolian Harp? A harp named after Aeolus, the Greek god of wind because it’s played by the wind. This is a pretty fun rabbit hole topic if you’re interested. (Check out this one for example, lol).

My favorite way to look at the museum’s collection of things is through the “random images” button on the collection page. See it here. If you keep clicking random images, new treasures appear to click on and learn about. So fun.

Movie

Birders is a movie about people bird watching and talking about the birds in Central Park in NYC. There are hundreds of birds that visit the park and it’s fun to see the varieties with the excitement of the people spotting them. Bird watching is a spectacular act of presence.

If you need something relaxing and optimistic, give it a watch. I watched it free on Tubi but it might also be on other platforms.

While looking up the trailer I noticed there’s another Birders film on Netflix. I might give that one a watch sometime too.

It’s always interesting to me to notice the entire worlds and ecosystems that run alongside us. Birds have their entirely own reality and relationship to the earth and the seasons and their own perspective of us, of cars, of society.

When you notice these things- the lives of every creature, plant, tree, around us, it’s quite grounding and you realize that nothing is really that serious. That everything else on earth doesn’t need to come up with reasons to be here. There aren’t birds setting numerical goals for miles traveled, seeds and bugs to eat. They’re just here, enjoying a life.

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” ~ Alan Watts

I hope you give a watch and also enjoyed Emily’s house.

Now I must go rest and cough and cough and cough.

x,
Courtney

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Welcome back for our second week of Movie & Museum March! This week we’re taking a look at the art of Anne Vallayer-Coster and watching a fascinating documentary by a British artist, Andy Goldsworthy, titled Rivers and Tides.

Museum

Anne came from an artistic family. Her mother painted miniatures, her father was a goldsmith, and they lived at the Gobelins tapestry factory, so she was surrounded by art. While she wasn’t classically trained, she received a small amount of training from her father and his friend Joseph Vernet, a landscape painter. Anne mostly painted still life scenes and occasionally painted portraits and other genre paintings but didn’t paint them as much due to restrictions on women in the mid-late 1700’s.
-
Side rant: The restrictions on women being “conventional morality precluded women artists from drawing from the nude model, which was the necessary foundation for the higher genres.” So it was not acceptable for women to paint/draw other women or even themselves but men could. Gee, I wonder why……
-
She began her career as one of four female artists admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Soon after she was invited to exhibit at the annual Salons, in which she caught the attention of prominent figures in society.
Her primary patrons were the French monarchy, with Marie Antoinette taking particular interest, until the Reign of Terror and the fall of the monarchy~ then Anne’s reputation declined as well.

Let’s take a look at some of her work. In researching the locations of her paintings, hoping there would be a museum with a good chunk of them, I’ve come to find out they’re spread around quite a few galleries such as the National Gallery of Art, National Museum of Women’s Art, The Met, The Museum of Berlin, The Louvre, and so on. Interestingly, I can’t find her at the museums here on the west coast, not even the Getty.

According to wikiart, there was an exhibition in 2002-2003 of more than 35 of her paintings, provided by museums and private collectors, shown at the National Gallery, The Frick, and the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Nancy, titled “Anne Vallayer-Coster: Painter to the Court of Marie Antoinette”.

Here are some of her paintings that may have been on display ~

I love her florals but there’s also something special about the curation of items in the other paintings. It’s fun to imagine her gathering the items and arranging them to be worthy of painting.

Here’s one of her few portraits. She had quite the range and could have been a prolific portrait painter, had it been “allowed”.

What do you think of her paintings?

Movie

This week we’re watching Rivers and Tides - A Documentary with Andy Goldsworthy.

You can watch the whole documentary on Youtube or Tubi.

I came across this documentary when searching for films on nature and beauty. I’ll be honest, it doesn’t look that interesting at first glance and I will say this - if you can watch this whole thing and not reach for your phone or other distraction, I think you’re safe from modern social media brainrot and your focus is just fine.

However, I think it’s really great and spurs a lot to think about in regard to art and what it means to the person making it, to those who view it, and the necessity of its longevity.

Andy creates sculptures and things from nature and in nature, with the intention of impermanence. He spends hours stacking rocks and driftwood to soon be taken by the tide. He pins leaves together (with tiny sticks) to make long strands that glide through water or over landscape. He gathers flowers, and wool, and anything from the landscape he’s working in, to build his art just to watch it disappear shortly after.

This is an older film and he has a more recent video from a gallery exhibit in which he’s doing the same thing, just indoors~

I find his career so fascinating and I will try to articulate why that is- In the documentary it shows his young children and his wife and he’s talking about what he went out and built that day (I think it was the rock sculpture that washed out) and his family was so supportive. I’ll also add that he lives (or lived) in Scotland at the time and from the perspective of a US citizen in a capitalistic society that drills the desires and drive for money and success and corporate ladders and glass ceilings to break, etc… to see this man outside essentially doing nothing “productive” because what he makes gets ruined by the end of the day/week~ to see his family supporting him and excited for his work? And dedicating his life to this art he truly believes in for 50 years now.. I don’t know..

He’s living the dream. He’s following his curiosity and love for the natural world and making a life he loves out of it with the support of his family, despite society’s textbook definition of what success must look like. He’s made an entire life out of play and I think he’s won.

The longer I live, the more firmly I believe it’s the artists, in any capacity, that are doing the “real” work.

“When it’s over, I want to say: All my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” ~ Mary Oliver

Let me know your thoughts when you watch the documentary!

x,
Courtney

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Welcome to the first Movie & Museum March of 2026 where we visit a museum, an artist, a painting, or other form of art as well as a film of the week.

In the museum portion, I will provide a short synopsis, but the idea is not for me to reiterate what the museums and articles say, it’s for us to head over to the articles and museums and links to look together. (I don’t get any commission through links, we’re just sharing fun bits of the internet here). Let’s be off~

Museum

The Art Newspaper published this article on Feb. 20 titled Why yellow was Van Gogh’s favourite colour.
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam just opened a new exhibit on yellow and what it meant for Van Gogh and other artists around 1900. If you happen to be in Amsterdam, it runs until May 17th, 2026 and it looks quite interesting according to the museum’s site. If you know anything about Van Gogh, you know his use of his favorite color, chrome yellow.

“Sunshine, a light which, for want of a better word I can only call yellow — pale sulphur yellow, pale lemon, gold. How beautiful yellow is!” - Van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo.

According to the article, from April 1888 to April 1889, Vincent asked his brother Theo to send him over 66 large tubes of yellow chrome paint from Paris, which means he likely used over a third of a large tube of yellow for each painting he created in Arles.

The exhibit at the Van Gogh museum asks “What is yellow?” What does yellow represent? How does yellow make you feel? Light, warmth, joy, sunshine, optimism.. Visit the link to see this portion of the exhibit. In portion 6 “yellow according to…” has videos of what yellow means to some curators, designers, writers, etc that’s quite fun to watch.

Take a 4k tour of the museum exhibit: Yellow Beyond Van Gogh’s Colour on youtube via the museum’s channel.

Do you like the color yellow? What does it represent to you?

I’ve always liked pastel yellow and its warmth and representation of happiness. When I was probably 22-ish I had a pastel yellow hoodie that I would wear sometimes and every single time I went somewhere wearing it, people would talk to me more than when I wore anything else. It was so noticeable that I remember telling my mom about it (mom- let me know if you remember) and that I should stop wearing it because I’m an introvert and it was too much social interaction. Lol. I did stop wearing yellow for this reason.

Coincidentally, I recently (like a few days ago) realized people don’t talk to me as much when I’m out and about and I wondered if it was because of my black coat. I never used to wear black until a few years ago and I really do think it has something to do with it. My theory is the black clothing or that I’m middle aged now. Ha.

I have plans this spring to test my theory and wear some pastels. I’ll definitely report back. Have you had experiences with this?

Movie

This week I watched Séraphine. Séraphine is based on the true story of French painter Séraphine Louis, known as Séraphine de Senlis (1864-1942).
In 1912, the German art collector and critic Wilhelm Uhde hires a cleaning lady, Séraphine. In her spare time she paints, entirely self-taught, inspired by nature and the stained glass windows of churches.

One evening, Wilhelm finds a small painting in his home that she created and asks his dinner companions who painted it. They say it was Séraphine, the cleaner and from there he helps her sell her paintings and have exhibitions, provides her with materials, and she become well-known.
Wilhelm returned to Germany during World War I and told Séraphine he’d return when it was over. Eventually he did return but by this time, after a life of having “mental health issues”, she was committed to an asylum with chronic psychosis, remaining in hospitals until her death in 1942.

Here is the movie trailer if you’d like to watch it. I watched the movie free on Tubi.

Highly recommend it. I always find the topic of mental illness in artists to be quite interesting. Painters, writers, poets, musicians.. there are so many artists inflicted with mental health issues (see this non exhaustive list of artists who’ve died by suicide) and I often wonder if it’s what leads to art and people becoming artists in the first place. Maybe it’s a conduit of artistic genius. Maybe the way an artist’s brain is wired is not an “illness” but a unique characteristic to enable seeing the world differently than others, in order to make the art nobody else can make. Of course, it’s not this simple, but interesting to ponder.

I don’t know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely. ~ Sylvia Plath

See you next week!

x,
Courtney

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Anne! How I love finding a new (to me) woman painter from times past. A little taste of March, more below.

I don’t know about you but, man.

That’s it, that’s the sentiment, and I feel like it translates well. You know what I mean? This year…

I will pop into the ings now as to not get off track -

Reading | I have a goal of reading the entire work of Thoreau and recently read Poems of Nature: A Collection of 50 Nature Poems. I’d say I had expectations that were not met. I believe he is not known for his poetry for a reason. He’s much better at essays. Apparently even Emerson tried to tell him what’s up. I can’t remember where I read it, but he even got rid of some of Thoreau’s poems. If I come across it again I will share. With that said, they’re not terrible, they’re just not great.

Notes on Nationalism by George Orwell - Topical.
“The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when “our” side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified -- still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function.”

Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer - This was a re-read for me. I needed something light and what better than an entire book dedicated to moss. Love it, love her.

Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield - Her autobiographical diary of an upper middle class woman living in Devon in the 1930’s. Thought it was pretty funny and entertaining.

Njuta- the Swedish Art of Savoring the Moment by Niki Brantmark - you’re sensing my comfort seeking through books by now, surely. :) I saw this on a table at B&N and it happened to be available on Libby so I read it. I like most of the books like this that involve different cultures and “the art of ____” and I’ll read any that I happen across. One of my top books in this genre is Ichigo Ichie- the art of making the most of every moment, the Japanese way by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles.

Little Alleluias by Mary Oliver - This poetry/essay collection came out last august and I mentioned and read a bit of it then but I finished it now. Love, as usual.

Three Rooms by Jo Hamya - I did it again! I fell into the trap of yet another book with no quotation marks. This trend is killing me slowly. Anyway, it’s Jo Hamya’s debut novel and muses on the idea of “a room of one’s own”. It’s set within a year and follows a woman and her “three rooms” and the idea of place, and personal space in the world. I liked it and I think it’s an interesting topic.

The Good Part by Sophie Cousens - This is the book that captured me the most this month. It’s a “fluff” book but it’s just what I needed for a bit of escapism. It’s about Lucy Young who’s 26 and living in a shared flat, roof leaks, can’t afford anything, etc. One night she’s feeling sorry for herself and is walking through London and finds a little shop with a wishing machine. She decides to wish for her life to “get to the good part”. Of course she wakes up 16 years later in her 40’s with a husband, two small kids and a great job. No spoilers but it was a fun time. I’d watch a movie version of it.

Coveting | This Benu pen. Just look at it. Can’t you picture me writing with it? Sigh.

The Hemingway Freewrite. I know what I’ve said about Hemingway, but this isn’t about him. I can hear my clickity clacks just looking at it. I could be a serial novelist with this thing.

Enjoying | The rain! SoCal has gotten a lot of rain this month and with each drop and wind gust, I envision all the sea glass getting swept up to shore for my picking.
This is the best time year in SoCal for sunsets and sea glass.

Watching | As part of my side quest, watching a movie for every year I’ve been alive, for 1990 I watched Awakenings with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. It’s based on a true story about a neurologist who helps people in a hospital who are essentially catatonic and he gives them a medicine that was created for parkinsons and the people start “waking up” and coming back to themselves and learning life anew. I enjoyed it.

In an effort to seek joy this month, I watched Napoleon Dynamite as a personal experiment because when it came out in 2004 I thought it was so funny. I had tears in certain parts. So I wanted to see if my sense of humor changed or if I’ve become jaded.
Well, I still think it’s funny but not as funny. For some reason now, I felt like it would’ve been funnier if he opened his eyes more. Such a small, weird detail but he’s pretty much squinting or with closed eyes in every scene and now it feels the “funny” is forced so it’s not as funny. I don’t know, but I was slightly disappointed that I didn’t get a chance to laugh to tears. I’m also disappointed that I’m not as easily amused by things. Interesting experiment, not doing it again. I’d rather burn on the fumes of memory.

I also watched this video by Tiana Thompson. If you ever wonder, like me, why protests rarely amount to anything here, this is quite enlightening.

Planning | Movie and Museum March. This is my 4th or 5th year doing Movie and Museum March and I’m looking forward to sharing films, paintings, and exhibits over the next month. If you haven’t seen my previous M&MM posts, each sunday I will discuss a film and an online exhibit, museum, or artist. I started this in 2021 (on my old blog) when a lot of museums had put their exhibits online for “distance viewing” during covid. It’s a fun time! See you there :)

Celebrating | My mom’s birthday! Here are a few fun facts about my mom since I know she’s reading this and now she’s getting nervous~

• If you told her to draw something, she’d draw “a man over the fence” which is the top half of a man’s head looking over a fence. It’s her one drawing she’s drawn my entire life (and probably hers, lol).

• She makes the best cookies. If she offers me a cookie at her house I am sure to ask if it’s homemade or store bought before I proceed.

• She’s a natural gardener and has a prolific tomato crop all year. I exist in a perpetual state of heightened levels of lycopene due to my weekly allotment of tomatoes.

• She’s a redhead and behaves like one.

• Happy birthday Mom :) Hehehehe
  
  

Listening | There’s a few days left until Ludovico Einaudi’s Solo Piano album comes out. You can hear the track list already because it’s made of previous songs, just solo.
One of the songs on it will be Elegy for the Arctic. If you haven’t seen/heard this - give it a watch. Perfection.

I’ve also been listening to Secret Forest by Wagnuka on a loop during morning yoga and it’s been really nice.

Anticipating | Flowers! Our local flower field opens March 1st and I have my season pass on order.

I’m looking forward to doing my annual laps around the field, getting to know the flowers. There are acres and acres and millions of flowers and each season they all become familiar to me. I can return and know “I’ve taken a picture of you last time”.
My joy in spring is nature coming alive. I have a poem about this field and how I measure time by it.
I’ll share it here. It’s in Iris~

Measured

I measure every spring
by a field
a field of flowers
early days in the north
when the final gales of winter
lick at the wakening buds
stretching, yearning
for the sky
rising from a deep sleep
in the cool coastal terrain

Somewhere in the middle
April prances in
vibrant and alive
dancing with every flower
fields abundant
bursting at soils seams
music plays in the distance
naturally
as we all feel a fullness
of life

And the sun grows long
south by May
when the southern fields are
blooming in all their glory
they’re waving to the spent rows
of bowed heads
tucking themselves back in
and the days start to feel
limited

Another spring gone
with just a small portion
of this field left
of petals trying to hold on
while the heat grows
incessant
but all things must end
for something new to begin

x,
Courtney

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I’ve created a compilation of good things from quotes, to photos, paintings, to podcast episodes, music and more. A small way to pass a bit of sunshine your way.

A Painting

Spring is on the way and that means flowers. Flowers, flowers, flowers. It’s such a beautiful time of year to stop and look around and notice.

Frederick Carl Fieseke was an American Impressionist painter who lived most of his life as an expat in France and mingled with the other Impressionist painters in Giverny. His main influence was Pierre Auguste Renoir, which is evident in his incorporation of women into his paintings.
Regarding the painting of flowers, he explained his method as~

“If you are looking at a mass of flowers in the sunlight out of doors you see a sparkle of spots of different colors- then paint them that way.”

Ah yes, easy enough. :)

This just reminded me~ Did you know a group of fireflies is called a sparkle?

“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of joy and wonder. I choose joy over despair, not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

~Robin Wall Kimmerer

A Podcast

I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts and I used to listen to them more often years ago than I do now, but one of my favorite podcasts I’d listen to is On Being with Krista Tippett. (I believe she’s here on substack too).
There are many great episodes like the one with Mary Oliver and also with Robin Wall Kimmerer. Mary rarely did interviews so that one was really special.

One particular episode always stuck in my mind though and it’s this one, Silence and the Presence of Everything with Gordon Hempton. Hempton is an acoustic ecologist and has traveled all over the world to study the level of sound in nature. There are very few places left in the US, in particular, that are silent. According to Hempton, a place is added to the list of “the last great quiet places” if it can have a noise-free interval of only 15 minutes or longer during the daylight hours. When this episode was recorded in 2012, he had been collecting data for 30 years and had only 12 qualifying places in the US.

One of those places is the Hoh rainforest in Olympic National Park in Washington state. He created a recording in this forest called One Square Inch of Silence. You can listen to it here. I recommend listening with headphones/earbuds and preferably noise canceling ones. It’s so good. Imagine being in that photo above and hearing the sounds in that recording. Heaven.

A Poem

by John O’Donohue

This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.

Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.

A youtuber

“Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?” ~ Mary Oliver

Not this lady! She’s really living it up.

Wendy Outdoors~

Wendy is who I aspire to be when I grow up. I watch every one of her solo camping videos on the west coast of Canada and they’re always full of beautiful scenery, cooking things over the fire, and some of Wendy’s musings on life. Her recent video from her Yukon adventure was super fun to watch too. I recommend subscribing if you’re a kindred spirit. :)

A snippet from a poem- To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

By Mary Oliver

The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of the single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another.

Wildlife Pond

I came across this video a couple weeks ago and it was so cool to see the progress of his pond as well as all of the wildlife that visits. It’s an older video but he’s still doing updates and the amount of birds and animals at his home in Canada is astonishing. Check it out~

Book recommendations

Books on nature~ the beautiful, the mysterious, the interesting, and how to live in harmony with it.

Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer
Gathering Moss - Robin Wall Kimmerer
Little Alleluias - Mary Oliver
Never Home Alone - Rob Dunn (I read this a few years ago and still think about it often, particularly in the shower and when I look down my sink drain)
The Peace of Wild Things - Wendell Berry
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
World of Wonders - Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Iris - Courtney L Smith :)

I hope you’ve found some joy in this post today. I want to leave you with one final quote:

“Peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity. It is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful, arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice. It is about a revolution of love that is big enough to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free.” ~ Shane Claiborne

Ok maybe two quotes because that one on a larger scale, reminds me of this one on a smaller scale~

“So, what if, instead of thinking about solving your whole life, you just think about adding additional good things. One at a time. Just let your pile of good things grow.” ~Rainbow Rowell

While the world is spiraling, what if we all just keep adding good things? Someday, it will be inevitable, that the good things outweigh the bad. And hey, maybe they already do. Maybe we just have to notice.

See you soon.

x,

Courtney

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Let’s celebrate Black History Month this week with some talented women artists from the past 2 centuries.

This year I want to focus on black women and their creativity. I’d like to pose the question~ If black women’s creativity was never suppressed, but embraced throughout history, and celebrated, what could the world of art look like today?

Annie E. A. Walker

Annie E. A. Walker was an artist (1855-1929) and one of the first African American women to complete an institutional art education in the United States. She graduated from the Women’s School of Cooper Station in New York and after graduating she sailed to Paris in 1895 to study at the prestigious Académie Julian as the first African American to do so. Her work was exhibited at the Paris Salon 1896 - an official, juried art exhibition. The work she had on display was La Parisienne ~

La Parisienne was created using pastel, her medium of choice. It’s now in the Howard University collection.

After Paris, Annie traveled around Europe for a while before returning to the states and settling in Washington D.C. She married lawyer, Thomas Walker, in 1875. From there she attempted to balance life as an artist and lawyers wife but two years after her return to the states she had a breakdown, said to be from societal pressures and the “duties of being a lawyers wife”, and stopped working as an artist and remained “invalid and homebound” until her death in 1929 at the age of 73. She’s buried in DC. What I find pretty wild is that there are no known photographs of her. The only way to get an idea of her appearance is through her description in her passport application. You can click to enlarge:

There’s a lot of mystery surrounding her life. Why is there only this small portion of her life known? And what really happened to turn this talented artist into a “homebound invalid” for the rest of her life who gave up what clearly was her life work? There isn’t much out there that she’s created but she was obviously gifted. Such a tragedy!

Hazel Scott

Hazel Scott (1920-1981) was born in Trinidad and came to New York with her mother at the age of four. She was a child music prodigy and at 8 received scholarships to Juilliard. She later became a jazz and classical pianist and singer and used her influence to fight against racial discrimination and segregation. She also became the first black woman to host her own television show.

Here’s a great article from the Smithsonian on her life and career.

You must watch this preview of the PBS short series of American Masters on Hazel Scott. You can see the series on pbs here. I’ll be watching it this month. What a woman!

Effie Lee Newsome

Effie Lee Newsome (1885-1979) was a Harlem Renaissance writer. She mostly wrote children’s poetry and parables. She edited a column in The Crisis, the NAACP magazine, titled The Little Page for children with drawings and poetry on being young and black in the 1920’s. She also wrote and illustrated for Opportunity, an academic and literary journal published by the National Urban League.

Her only volume of poetry is titled Gladiola Garden.

A few of her poems~

The Quilt

I have the greatest fun at night,
When casement windows are all bright.
I make believe each one’s a square
Of some great quilt up in the air.

The blocks of gold have black between,
Wherever only night is seen.
It surely makes a mammoth quilt-
With bits of dark and checks of gilt-
To cover up the tired day
In such a cozy sort of way.

Sassafras Tea

The sass’fras tea is red and clear
In my white china cup,
So pretty I keep peeping in
Before I drink it up.

I stir it with a silver spoon,
And sometimes I just hold
Al little tea inside the spoon,
Like it was lined with gold.

It makes me hungry just to smell
The nice hot sass’fras tea,
And that’s the one thing I really like
That they say’s good for me.

The Bronze Legacy (To a Brown Boy)

’Tis a noble gift to be brown, all brown,
Like the strongest things that make up this earth,
Like the mountains grave and grand,
Even like the very land,
Even like the trunks of trees—
Even oaks, to be like these!
God builds His strength in bronze.
To be brown like thrush and lark!
Like the subtle wren so dark!
Nay, the king of beasts wears brown;
Eagles are of this same hue.
I thank God, then, I am brown.
Brown has mighty things to do.

Edmonia Lewis

Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907), also known as Wildfire, was half African American and half Native American and a brilliant sculptor. She was born in upstate New York and became the first African American and first Native American sculptor to gain national and international prominence when she moved to Rome and spent most of her career in Italy.

There isn’t a clear history of her early life with inconsistencies in interviews regarding her birth date, who she spent her childhood with, who her father is and where she stayed.

“Until I was twelve years old I led this wandering life, fishing, and swimming...and making moccasins. I was then sent to school for three years in [McGrawville], but was declared to be wild—they could do nothing with me.” -Edmonia Lewis

She did have a brother that went to California for the Gold Rush and made enough money to help put Edmonia through college.

While at Oberlin College, she was subjected to racism and discrimination and there was an incident where she was going to go out sleighing with 2 of her classmates/roommates and served them spiced wine. The 2 girls got sick and a doctor decided they were poisoned. Nothing came of it at first but she was soon taken to trial over it and even though she was found not guilty, while walking home alone one night after that, she was dragged into a field and badly beaten and left for dead.

Thankfully, she did not die, and left college (she was given her degree posthumously), and she moved to Boston to begin her career as a sculptor. She was inspired by the abolitionists and civil war heroes so many of her early sculptures are of them. Later, when she moved to Rome she adopted the neoclassical style of sculpture.

Let’s have a look at some of her work~

You can see more of her sculptures here on wikiart.

I hope I’ve inspired you to look into the work and lives of each of these women as I’ve only been able to give you a little snippet of their lives. And there are many more out there to discover. Just think of the African American women whose art never came to light. Brilliant art kept to themselves and their families, maybe passed down through generations, maybe faded away or lost. Legacies and art lost to time and circumstance.
We must cherish what is left and encourage and support art and expression in our black sisters going forward.

“A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.”

- Toni Morrison

If you’d like more, you can read my post from last year here.

X,

Courtney

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Happy February and Imbolc.

At the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, Imbolc is an ancient Celtic fire festival to celebrate the increasing return of light and new life stirring under the thawing earth. Depending where you are of course. Here in SoCal, spring comes early so it feels like it’s already here.

I’m noticing yellow flowers popping up around town. The evergreen pear trees all over the neighborhood are in full white bloom, which usually lasts a couple weeks and is a sure sign spring is on the way. Our local strawberry fields are also open and the farm stands are filled with strawberries the size of your palm.

Since Imbolc celebrates Brigid, the Celtic goddess of poetry, healing, smithcraft, fertility, and fire~ I’ll share a poem from Iris that I wrote for this time.

Imbolc

frost melts to water
nudging bulbs awake
green limbs stretch to break
softened ground

We feed on sun rays
eager for the world
of blue skies
bees and butterflies

And gentle footsteps
of the wanderer
who happens to see us
emerge in a rush

To exclaim “a daffodil!”
spring must be near
oh how wonderful to hear
joy upon our arrival

You can find poems in Iris that correspond with the wheel of the year as well as other seasonal poems and haiku.

A haiku from Iris

Ice of winter melts
allowing spring seeds to sprout
and with them our dreams

Celebrate

I don’t know about you, but I love a good excuse to celebrate just about anything. If you’d like to join in and partake in the celebration of growing light and earth, here are some traditional and/or fun ways~

• Light a candle to take a moment and honor the light and your endurance through winter

• declutter and clean your home to make way for new beginnings -physically and energetically (I love a good cedar smoke cleanse)

• Plant seeds in your garden or in pots or start indoors

• Make an imbolc feast with hearty things like bread and soups (I just made this rustic loaf and it’s really good.)

• Make an offering to nature- something like feeding birds. Seed bomb your neighborhood with native flower seeds for the sweet little bees to enjoy. Pick up trash at a park, beach, nature trail, etc.

• Write poetry or craft

• Meditate next to a sunny window or outside in the sun on what abundance you would like to see this coming season. Or just zone out and enjoy your warm spot in the sun.

• Go for a walk to notice signs of the coming spring. They’re everywhere, even if it’s still snowing where you are. They might be really faint but they are there, such as the position of the sun in the sky.

• If you do yoga~ sun salutations!

If you’d like, you can read my Imbolc post from last year as well. I share a recipe for sun bread that’s fun to make (you’ll see why).

While writing this post, I’ve been listening to this Celtic fairyland playlist on Spotify. You may enjoy it. :)

Spring is coming!

Xo,

Courtney

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Happy last week of January, eh?

Reading | The year started off with Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns. Published in 1950, this is the story of a 21 year old woman artist who marries a fellow artist. It’s kind of a coming of age story of learning about life the hard way and how her husband’s art would always come first, especially after having a child. It was somewhat a tragic tale with a decent ending and a good amount of humor. I hope to read more of Barbara Comyns work this year.

The Salt Path by “Raynor Winn”- I wish I could get the time back I spent reading this. I genuinely feel duped. It’s allegedly the story of a couple in Wales who are around 50 years old and they “made a bad investment” through a friend which ended up costing them their home and jobs and everything they had. So they decide to walk 630 miles of the coastal path around England which is roughly a 3,000 mile trail around the entire country. They received some kind of unemployment pay to get about $40 a week for food and decided to set out. Oh and the husband was made out to be terminally ill.
Well after the book, which I did like in the moment, I thought I’d watch the movie so I googled it to see where it’s streaming and then….

I found this article- The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit and desperation.

Ugh. You can read it but basically she’s a thief who stole thousands of pounds from several different people and in this follow up article~ “This quiet farmer, in a corner of a busy service-station cafe, nervously showed me a letter. It appeared to have been written by Winn, and in it she admitted to emptying the bank accounts of her parents-in-law and her own mother, leaving them without savings and unable to pay for basics like rent.”

Oh my god. What a heinous person. I can’t.. It’s definitely a rabbit hole to dive down if you’re interested. Needless to say, I’m not watching the movie now.

Saving Beauty by Byung Chul Han - a philosophical deep dive into beauty and how “smooth” and dull everything has become in the digital age. Thought I’d like it more than I did. I gave it 2 out of 5 stars.

Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr- Read this for MLK Jr day last week and I felt like it could’ve been written today.
"Darker yet may be the night,
Harder yet may be the fight.
Just stand up for that which is right.” - MLK Jr.

Always, always.

This part at the end of his letter made me sad:
".. and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.”

What would he say if he came back to life today to see the state of the country (and the world)? Sadly, the “tomorrow” is far more distant than it should’ve been.

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer - Otherwise known in the UK edition as Monsters: What do we do with great art by bad people? This is an interesting book on the dilemma of engaging with art from books to film to paintings and liking them while despising the artist who created them because they’re terrible people. How do you grapple with that? Such an interesting read!

Body Electric by Manoush Zomorodi - Out May 5th, I received an advanced copy to read and I thought it was really interesting. It’s about what’s happening to our bodies in the age of hunching over computers and phones for most of the day. I’ve learned so many things like how beneficial it is to move for 5 minutes after every 30 min of sitting and that it improves your health more than just an intense workout in the morning and then sitting the rest of the day.
I also learned more kids today are becoming nearsighted because of devices and there are some eye specialists that can actually reverse it since children’s eyes are still growing. I guess the corneas become egg shaped the more kids stare at screens creating nearsightedness and there’s a contact lens that they can wear at night to reshape the corneas back into circles. Then they no longer need glasses. Trippy. Great book.

The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy by Rachel Cusk. Rachel documenting a summer in Italy with her husband and 2 kids. I am halfway through this on audiobook through spotify and I ran out of minutes so I can finish it later this week when I get more..

Bookmarking | The Art Newspaper. Found this website full of international art news. The only worthwhile news website to read imo.

Downloading | Books from gutenberg.org. This website lets you download or read for free over 75,000 ebooks. Likely any backlist classic you can think of is on there. One of my goals for this year is to read all of Thoreau’s work so I went on and sent 10 of his books to my kindle! I think it may be all, if not most, of his work so I found it to be incredibly easy and resourceful. You don’t even have to make an account. If you have an ereader and enjoy classics, check it out!

I also downloaded an app called Cove. I took some screenshots of it (click to enlarge) in the app store for you. It’s kind of like a journal on your phone where you can document things, places, save photos, write entries, save links to things, and you can also share folders with friends if they also have cove. It’s all private but if you took photos with friends or something you could share the folder with them so they can see. I don’t know if I’d use that feature but I’m looking at saving things of “beauty” from the year to help document and have it as a resource when I go to log things in my paper notebooks. It looks like a fun alternative to social media if you use social media as a memory keeper.

Cooking | I found the cookbook in which I’ll be cooking nearly every recipe this year. It’s Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa Family Style. I spent over an hour standing in the cookbook section at B&N looking through so many books I started to feel like this lady~

By the end, it was either this book, leave with nothing, or collapse on the floor in defeat because barnes and noble no longer has chairs. Standing and holding and flipping through heavy cookbooks for over an hour felt like I went to the gym.

Anyway, I did not settle with this book. I’m genuinely excited for the recipes in it. And I say “nearly” every recipe because, as previously mentioned, I am a vegetarian and this is not a vegetarian cookbook. I am willing to (and occasionally do) cook meat for my family so some of the meat recipes I will make for them. I’m willing to cook the chicken dishes, a roast, and possibly a shrimp dish but I really draw the line at lamb and tuna tartare. Lol.

The thing about being a vegetarian and cooking meat for people is that I cannot taste it, I don’t know if it’s good, and I also have to rely heavily on the recipe’s cooking times and temps not to poison anyone, rather than using personal experience. :) I take their trust in me to cook these things with great honor and I do not wish to push my luck.

With that said, a close runner-up was this book - The Italian Summer Kitchen. It was so pretty and I desperately wanted it to work but there were a lot more meats and fish than in Ina’s book and I just couldn’t omit that many and still feel like I cooked through the whole book. But it’s gorgeous and I still have my eye on it for some future date.

So far, I’ve made 3 recipes from Ina’s book- blueberry coffeecake muffins, which were a hit, a birthday sheet cake which was not great, and also coconut macaroons which were pretty good but not as good as the muffins. Actual meals coming soon..

Following | Céline Cremer. If you read my early November Ings, you’d know I’ve been following the disappearance of Céline Cremer when she went on a solo hike to a waterfall in a Tasmanian forest. There’s an update! In December some of her friends and family flew to Tasmania (from Belgium, where she’s from) to help search for her with youtuber Rob Parsons. After my last post, Rob and his father and father’s friend (I think) found her cellphone! Authorities are currently trying to get data from it to see if it can help piece her disappearance together.

Well this time, with the large group they found her water bottle and the place she hid for the night with a garbage bag that was torn and looked like a shelter along with a piece of the trash bag that looked like she used it as a hat to keep warm and a piece of weathered string that held the trash bag to a log. It was a huge discovery. Her friends and family had to fly home but this progress gave everyone confidence and I really hope an update that they found her pops in my subscription box soon. They’re getting so close.

Listening | I’ve been listening to my summer ‘25 playlist. It’s really good.

I’ve also been listening to silence more. Usually I will always turn on music no matter what I’m doing but in an effort to think without distractions and possibly come up with inspiration and other ideas, I’ve turned the music off and it’s kind of nice. Epiphanies incoming..

Watching | I’ve started my side quest of watching a movie from every year since I was born. For the 80’s I decided to google top movies from each of those years instead of trying to find them organically because it doesn’t seem like there are that many in the genres I tend to watch. After scouring lists I feel like that decade was not good for film. Ack. I did find some gems from each year though. I’ll update you throughout the year with anything worth watching. I did watch Clockwatchers the other day from 1997 with Lisa Kudrow, Toni Collette, and Parker Posey about a group of young women temps in an office. It was genuinely a pretty pointless movie but very mildly entertaining. I gave it 2 out 5 stars. Only up from here. (jinx)

I did come across WikiFlix which has really old films you can watch for free. Like really old, look at this 1 minute movie from 1897. Pretty cool.

Welp, I think that’s about all from me for the month. What have you been up to?

x,
Courtney

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I’ve been debating since Tuesday whether or not I should post this. Sometimes it feels like I’m stating the obvious. But I also think we can’t say some things enough. And it’s one thing to say things, acknowledge them, and agree, but it’s another thing entirely to act on that agreement~ to actually live the things you believe in rather than passively think “yes, that sounds nice.”

I think there’s a lot we can learn from the natural world. Some things on a larger scale, and some much smaller and obscure.
But the lessons are there if we pay attention. And I’d say most of the things we can learn on a smaller scale are the ways in which nature, flora and fauna, help each other. From the way trees feed and communicate through root systems to the way bees pollinate plants. The world around us is a great coming together of reciprocation and I would wager a guess that humans are the only thing on this earth that actively avoids helping others.

On Flowers

One of my favorite times to visit our local flower field is during a good spring rain. I mean, the space between ominous clouds quickly approaching and I’m speed-walking toward the flowers to catch their plight. And would you know, they’re just as calm and serene as when the sun is shining, maybe even more-so.

And I think it’s because they have each other to lean on. When the droplets get heavy on their delicate petals, they can rest ever so gently on their neighbor, and then on theirs, and so on. If a single flower was out in the field after a good rain it would be flat and defeated by the end, perhaps petals lost, drifting on the mud river to the bottom of the hill.

To witness a field of flowers in a storm and see how fragile they are individually, yet so resilient as a whole can teach us something.

Lessons from flowers

• you’re beautiful and worthy just for existing

• being a shoulder for someone else will cost you little, but you will gain a lot, and so will they

• you might not see immediate effects from helping another but you also don’t need to (if a tree falls in a forest when nobody is around to hear it……)

• if a storm rolls in, it’s easier to withstand it and rise together

• helping others can, in turn, make you stronger

There’s a quote that I’ve seen going around:

“Everyone wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager.”

I tried to find the origin of the quote but didn’t find it. I think it’s quite true today in our individualistic society.

It reminds me of something my mom would tell me when I was little and I’d check the mailbox for letters. She’d say “You have to send mail to get mail.”
And that is true. But at the same time my 8 year old self would think “Well, the other person didn’t have to send mail to get mail if I’m the one sending it first.”

But I’m not 8 anymore. And I know that’s not how reciprocity works. That’s not how kindness works- sitting around waiting for someone else to be the first to send mail, to offer a kind gesture, to offer a passing smile, to share news of distant family members, to just say hello. If we’re all waiting for someone else, nothing will ever happen.

Small efforts can create big change. Lives could change from the ripple effect of small gestures. That might sound dramatic but I think it’s true.

I think looking out for others, truly caring for them, is what the world needs right now.

How beautiful would it be to show radical kindness to everyone around you? How beautiful would your world be when it all comes back to you? Because you get what you give, right?

I think it’s easy to forget, when sitting behind screens, that we are all humans wanting the same things ~ love, a safe, comfortable home, connection to others, and good food. It doesn’t matter the country, where we’ve been lucky or unlucky to appear on this earth, we’re all just here trying to do our best.

Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude. ~ Anne Frank

I’m sure you’ve heard the quote by Ram Dass “We’re all just walking each other home.” But are we? What if we did? What if we really did?

What if we see who’s hurting and give them the flowers instead of waiting until they’ve passed. What would a flower, metaphorically speaking, mean to someone who really needed it and was expecting nothing? What if someone gave up on life, on themselves, felt removed from their family, and voila~ here you are with your flower, showing up at their door?

What if your flower to give is just a phone call telling someone “I saw something today that reminded me of you”. And knowing they were thought about by someone made their day or renewed their hope?

A wee flower is the spark that can light the fire.

No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity. ~Toni Morrison

Just something I’ve been mulling over this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and it’s inspired you to reach out to someone or offer up a smile in passing. You never know.

x,

Courtney

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I think all readers have some form of a TBR. I have two~ a digital wishlist that I’ve been saving books to for 7-8 years now. It’s fun to look through and identify the different moods and mental spaces I’ve been in over the years to be drawn to each of the books.

And then I also have my physical TBR. The ones behind me right now, whispering for attention. These are the ones that have graduated from my digital list and purchased, came across by happenstance at the bookstore, was recommended, gifted, or I saw someone talk about it and I thought I’d get to it asap (ha ha ha).

What’s funny is no matter how many times I repeat the want > buy > shelve process, I always think this time is different. I will get to it soon. But.. I’m a firm believer that some books need to age on your shelf until the perfect moment when you’re subconsciously ready to read them.

There are many books that I’ve read where the timing was off and I either read them again later and got more from them or I wished I read them when I was younger. But either way, early or late, there’s no wrong time to pick up a book in general. And curating a beautiful collection that speaks to you and portrays who you are to others when they browse it, is a special thing.

On buying books

A brief history of my book buying habits and preferences~

I’ve been a kindle reader since maybe 2013? Before that I would buy books sometimes (RIP Borders) but I frequented the library the most so I had some random books but nothing that could be defined as a collection.

On my kindle I liked to read mostly fiction and sometime around 2015 I decided to only purchase poetry in physical form. Poetry is hard to format on kindles (ask me how I know!!!) so it doesn’t usually look great and it’s a genre that I like to return to often so it made sense to buy it.

Naturally, this progressed into other genres and escalated quickly.

Now, the books I generally read on my kindle are non-fiction, memoirs, and trendy fiction like Emily Henry or something you’d find on tiktok (I don’t watch them but I see the tiktok table at Barnes and Noble…).

The books I like to purchase are still poetry, literary fiction, classics, books that have deeper messages that can be read in different stages of life and you get different meaning out of them, nature books, and books that I feel like define me as a person. My books are a portal into my psyche.

My physical TBR

With that said, let’s hop to it because there’s a lot. In no particular order~

Against Nature (A Rebours) by Joris-Karl Huysmans - The inspiration for Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray- An old aristocrat retreats to an isolated villa to indulge in a life of solitude of luxury and excess through art, exotic jewels, rich perfumes, classical literature & more.

The Offing by Benjamin Myers - A 16 year old boy sets out in the summer after the second world war from his home in Durham village to the village of Robin Hood’s Bay and meets Dulcie, an eccentric older woman who lives in a ramshackle cottage facing out to sea. He stays with her and his life opens to one of rich food, sea swimming, sunburn, and poetry. While different, they form a profound friendship.
This is getting made into a movie with Helena Bonham Carter as Dulcie and I’m excited to watch it.

Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey - Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one way flight to New Zealand, living her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. Her husband scrambles to find out what happened to her. She goes on an inner and outer journey through New Zealand that tests her reality. Looks like a page turner.

Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse - Harry is a sad and lonely figure, reclusive and whose life holds no joy. Struggles with the emptiness of life and social norms and the roles we play and the multiple personas one must have to navigate through life in various situations.

Walking by Henry David Thoreau - a meditation on walking in nature. I read this years ago and want to read his entire collection of work this year so I will re-read.

A Sunday in Ville- d’Avray by Dominique Barberis - A woman leaves her home in Paris to visit her sister in Ville-d’Avray and spend the afternoon reflecting with each other on past secrets.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway - Bullfighting and stuff. Been on my shelf so long I just need to read it but admittedly not that excited about it. This might be controversial but I feel like Ernest wasn’t that great of a writer. His writing is very clinical to me. Like someone told him “this is how you write books” and he never strayed from the outline to imbue any sense of personality. He’s like the AI of classic writers. Ok that might be too harsh. I’m sure it’ll be good…..

On Photography by Susan Sontag - six essays on photography and a critique of the functions of imagery - to seduce, advertise, evoke, commemorate, conspire, and conceal. A damning portrait of the ways we use imagery to manufacture reality.

On Women by Susan Sontag - seven essays and exchanges on the challenges and humiliations women face as they age, the relationship between women’s liberation and class struggle, beauty, feminism, fascism, and film.

Candide by Voltaire - a satire and attack on philosophic optimism. Candide has a mentor that teaches him that everything happens for a reason. He encounters absurd situations that counter these ideas. Written in 1759 in response to the 18th century french enlightenment culture.

The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig - Christine looks after her ailing mother and works in a provincial Austrian post office in the years just after the Great War. She is not happy with life and receives a letter from a rich aunt from America who invites her to stay with her and her husband in a Swiss Alpine resort. She begins to enjoy a life of privilege that she never imagined and when she has to return to her “real life” she doesn’t adjust back very well.

A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L’Engle - a memoir sharing personal stories from her new england farm.

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka - a traveling salesman turns into an insect.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico - a young expat couple living in Berlin. They’re digital creatives chasing aesthetics. While their life appears enviable they soon get bored. This was a popular book last year. I think it’s about the “highlight reel” people portray online vs what life is really like.

Letters to Milena by Franz Kafka - What started as business correspondence develops into an epistolary love affair.

August Blue by Deborah Levy - At the height of her career, the piano virtuoso Elsa M. Anderson, a former child prodigy, now in her thirties, walks off the stage in Vienna mid-performance. Now she’s in Athens watching an uncannily familiar woman purchase a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. She goes to the ferry and begins a journey across Europe, shadowed by this woman who appears to be her double.

Watch this and tell me you don’t want to read everything she’s ever written afterward.

Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark - London, 1949, Fleur Talbot wants to gather material for her writing and finds a job on the “grubby edge of the literary world” at an autobiographical association. Mad egomaniacs write their memoirs in advance. When the director steals Fleur’s manuscript, fiction begins to appropriate life.

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer - While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle aged woman awakens to find herself separated from the world by an invisible wall. She has a cat, dog, and cow as her sole companions and she learns to survive with her loneliness.

The Penguin Modern Collection - This is a box set of classics. I’ve read a few of them so far and I’ve learned, if I read them while waiting to pick up my daughter from school, I can get through one of these books in 2-3 days (approx. 1 hour total of reading time). So the plan is to read these at school pickup.

I can’t bring myself to write a synopsis for each one so I will highlight the ones I’m most excited to read and will probably read first.

Lance by Vladimir Nabokov
The Survivor by Prinno Leni
Fame by Andy Warhol
The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges
The Haunted Boy by Carson McCullers
Madame du Deffand and the Idiots by Javier Marias
Of Dogs and Walls by Yuko Tsushinna
The Dialogue of Two Snails by Federico Garcia Lorca
The Problem That Has No Name by Betty Friedan
Death the Barber by William Carlos Williams
Letter to My Mother by Georges Simenon
Dark Days by James Baldwin
The Cracked Looking Glass by Katherine Anne Porter
Leaving the Yellow House by Saul Bellow
The Duke In His Domain by Truman Capote
Why Do You Wear A Cheap Watch? by Hans Fallada
Piers of the Homeless Night by Jack Kerouac
Glittering City by Cyprian Ekwensi
The Gigolo by Francoise Sagan
The Red Tenda of Bologna by John Berger
Africa’s Tarnished Name by Chinua Achebe
New York City in 1979 by Kathy Acker
The End by Samuel Beckett
The Skeleton’s Holiday by Leonora Carrington
The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House by Audre Lorde
The Distance of the Moon by Italo Calvino
Four Russian Short Stories by Gazdanov & Others
The Missing Girl by Shirley Jackson
I Have More Souls Than One by Fernando Pessoa
The Vigilante by John Steinbeck
Create Dangerously by Albert Camus (I have another copy of this that I’ve read but will re-read)
An Advertisement For Toothpaste by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady by Clarice Lispector
Investigations of a Dog by Franz Kafka
Till September Petronella by Jean Rhys
The Black Ball by Ralph Ellison
The Legend of the Sleepers by Danilo Kis
The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh
The Three Electro Knights by Stanislaw Lem
Food by Gertrude Stein
Notes on Nationalism by George Orwell
The Veiled Woman by Anais Nin
Three Japanese Short Stories by Akutagawa & Others
The Custard Heart by Dorothy Parker
The Finger by William S. Burroughs
The Breakthrough by Daphne Du Maurier
Television Was A Baby Crawling Toward That Death Chamber by Allen Ginsberg
Letter From Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr

So that’s it. My most pressing TBR picks. In addition to these I will also be reading on my kindle, more current books, and whatever else I come across. But I’m hoping by the end of the year I can say I finally read through these!

Have you read any of them? Any favs or opinions on what I should read first?

See you soon.

x,
Courtney

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