Drawings of Dulwich Wood

Much as I love to wander in the interwebs, encountering what I'd never otherwise encounter, nothing means more than finding there an evocation of my own close, physical locality, like Canadian artist Liz Charsley-Jory 's drawings of Dulwich Wood, which are full of the lines and textures, shapes and stories I see and try to photograph when walking there. This drawing, for example: yes, this was the pattern the trees were making on the sky when I took the photos above and here. How lovely to find online, so beautifully executed, a picture that my eyes remember so intimately. I went to see some of her drawings on show in a local cafe and found them, in deep, glossy sepia ink, even more evocative. (scroll down her website a little to see the whole series of drawings and click on each for a larger view)

Small changes

Light (4 of 4)

So I thank these brilliant, difficult, challenging women, Mary Karr, Jeanette Winterson and Lauren Berlant, for not trying to please, for going to the hardest places and putting their talents and intellects at the service of sharing hard experiential truths that all too few have the gall to share. These are not comforting words. But the knowledge that they've been here too: that comforts me enormously; that surely is one of the things writing is for.

Cruel Optimism (3 of 4)

" This is not a time for assurance but for experiment—to have patience with failure, with trying things out, to try new forms of life that also might not work—which doesn’t make them worse than what’s there now. It is a time for using the impasse that we’re in to learn something about how to imagine better economies of intimacy and labor. "

Lauren Berlant (via wood s lot)

Things get worse (2 of 4)

" I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.

And here is the shock - when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, then you do not experience great joy and huge energy.

You are unhappy. Things get worse.

It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded. "

Jeanette Winterson

Not whistling (1 of 4)

" If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There's an initial uprush of relief at first, then... a profound dislocation. My old assumptions... are buried, yet my new ones aren't yet operational. There's been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell no resurrection is possible. "

Mary Karr

Blue too (ceonathus)

Pink

There's something, isn't there, about the pink chestnut blossoms? They have a sweet, satisfying ice-cream beauty on the tree, especially a really big tree (giant strawberry sundae?). But carpeting the ground, there's something raw, lightly bloody, in the colour and texture; in each tiny form, something creature-like.

more pink blossoms here

Can-can

Open space

This both gladdens and saddens my heart. Five minutes' walk from my house is a grassy, wooded hillside with dense, lush vegetation and long views towards the city - a precious open space that I DIDN'T KNOW WAS THERE! I suppose it's more than a decade since I walked that way...