community life in the downtown eastside.
+ bikes, books, photography, plants, tea.
contact // flickr
Birthday dinner turns into laughing at my sister for failing her driver’s license and fawning over Dick van Dyke in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
1. Plants are doing well.
1a. First sun in quite a long time—went for a long walk to celebrate.
2. We booked the tickets to Europe! This thing is really happening.
3. Paolo Nutini.
That is all.
D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia
Very dark under the great carob tree as we go down the steps. Dark still the garden. Scent of mimosa, and then of jasmine. The lovely mimosa tree invisible. Dark the stony path. The goat whinnies out of her shed. The broken Roman tomb which lolls right over the garden track does not fall on me as I slip under its massive tilt. Ah dark garden, dark garden, with your olives and your wine, your medlars and mulberries and many almond trees, your steep terraces ledged high up above the sea, I am leaving you, slinking out. Out between the rosemary hedges, out of the tall gate, on to the cruel steep stony road. So under the dark, big eucalyptus trees, over the stream, and up towards the village. There, I have got so far.
One of the things I love about Birken are the mornings—I always wake before most of the others and make myself a cup of tea on the wood stove and read a book while everyone around me sleeps. The mattresses are haphazardly strewn and there is always the dull roar of the wood stove sucking in oxygen and the rattle of the tea kettle as it boils, but there is a stillness and peace to the morning that’s impossible to acquire in the DTES.
I love this picture of Mercy and Liam because it reminds me of one of the ways community is—trusting others not to hurt you in your sleep.
I’m in a Tennyson mood.
Sat at my kitchen table for half an hour today and read aloud Lady of Shalott and Lotos-Eaters and Ulysses and Locksley Hall and cried and loved deeply and strongly.
