Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 100

A swaying golden sea

I've waited all day for this.

Come with me into the gold


Come closer


Float right out of your body, over these ripples


Here are wings ...


... they will catch fire, and it will be wonderful

Kamikaze Girls

Someone out in the wide Internet suggested that I watch Kamikaze Girls (2004, Tetsuya Nakashima: Shimotsuma monogatari in Japanese), and I did--rather, we did; we watched it as a family--and it was very odd and very great. The protagonists have both escaped the dreary roles they were born into and created satisfying personas for themselves: Momoko, the daughter of a small-time failed gangster and a floozie who abandoned the family early on, has gotten into what she terms the 18th-century Roco...

How people get through the very worst times

rachelmanija has an entry asking people how they've dealt with despair, how they've kept on going. People's replies, both on Livejournal (here) and Dreamwidth (here), are really moving and inspiring. It was a really wonderful thing Rachel did by asking the question, bringing together a treasury of hope and survival, but also acknowledgement of suffering and hardship.

It also shows the best of what social media--blogs and whatever--can be. It's not just one person sharing their thoughts and wis...

"I voted for the first time this year"

Through the jail volunteering I do, I got involved with a group called Voices from Inside, which runs creative writing workshops with incarcerated and previously incarcerated women. It's a small group, but wow, has it had a big impact on its participants and on the audiences who come to readings. I've been to one of those performances--the emotion and sense of shared purpose and support all the way around was intense.

Several of the women are on the board of the organization (which I love: thi...

birds and weathervanes, reflected sunset, dollar-changing machine

There's a weathervane perched on the tip of the steeple of the Congregational Church in town--I thought at first it was a skeletal fish, but maybe it's just a decorative arrow.... but maybe it is a fish, swimming in the sky ocean.

The birds are not sea birds. Maybe they perch on the fish-arrow the way savannah birds perch on elephants. Maybe they just like the view. So high. Now that I know they cluster there, I look for them every time I pass the church.



And here's a photo of a reflection of t...

artifacts from past generations

Little Springtime took some embroidery with her to our family's Thanksgiving get-together, prompting my father to bring out a sampler his mother had made when she was in seventh grade, in 1920:

Here's the overall sampler:




Here's the first portion (surname blurred out)



And her examples of stitchery:







Then he showed us his father's engineering notebook, from 1914, when his father was sixteen. I was fascinated to see that mimeograph technology, which I remember being in use in my own childhood, was a...

Refugee songs

What songs would you put on a playlist about refugees? I'd put on "The Seed," by K'naan.



I was a seed
planted by lovers in a refugee camp and
overseas I grew free
I grew my roots and became a tree
so now they never gonna cut me down

What else should go on the playlist?

frost and flame

This morning the candles left over from Halloween were covered in frost.



I lit one.

Ancillary Mercy fan art

Sphene and Translator Zeiat had spent the last two days in the decade room, playing a game of counters. Or at least it had begun as a standard game of counters. By now it also involved fish-shaped cakes, the fragments of two empty eggshells, and a day-old bowl of tea, which they every now and then dropped a glass counter into.

P.S. I imagine the fish-shaped cakes as being taiyaki:

Photo by Armi Deticio, from this website

this and that

I heard something on the radio this morning, a story I don't remember any details about, but it used both the words "contentment" and "complacency," and since then, I've been asking everyone (well, three people):

How do you tell the difference between contentment and complacency?

I'm not asking for the dictionary definitions of them--I know what they both mean--but both from the inside (in other words, if it's yourself and your feelings you're talking about) and from the outside (if you're talk...