Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 32

journal

I'm moving around some diaries I wrote, and I started reading the one I kept in Timor-Leste, and it's full of details that of course I'd completely forgotten. THANK YOU, past me, for writing things down!

Like this:

"More notes I made from the early morning in Dili: lettuce and other greens on the roofs of taxis; at one place where we waited, a little boy shooting tiny rubber bands through a gate at sparrows."

Or this from the bus from Ainaro back to Dili:

"Across the aisle from us, someone had a ro...

Laloran justisa

I keep on promising word-content, but the will is weak. Instead, have some pictures.

In the interim between Tetun classes, my classmate and I have been practicing, in part by watching the drama Laloran Justisa, Waves of Justice. It's subtitled in English, and I'll listen over and over to catch and try to learn the Tetun phrases. I take screenshots from it and then we ask each other questions about them in Tetun. But I love them also just for daily life in Timor-Leste, unspoken things that are con...

all the creatures of the great water, owl update

One of the best things about going to Logan Airport (Boston's international airport) is getting to visit with these creatures of the ocean, set in the floor:







Those are just some--there are more.

This journey, I took the time to read the artist's plaque. They are by Jane Goldman, and the title of the overall work is Atlantic Journey



Apparently it was completed the year we returned to the United States from England: 1998. We'd been in and out of Logan many times before that, but now I can't imagine a...

Christmas Eve miscellany

Yesterday, December 23, I did an angel with tidings of great joy. I had big, big ambitions for this picture! Unfortunately sometimes the execution doesn't quite live up to the plan. I can say about this angel's face... it has that naive look. Yes. Naive. Here are two views--one of the angel himself, and one photographed upside down and flipped (so the head and not the bottom of the robe are larger), in relation to the shepherd picture:





And here is the driveway this morning, just before sunrise!



....

Driveway Advent calendar, Dec 19–22

We're entering the home stretch now!

December 19 is a Christmas tree:



December 20 is stuck Santa--he just needs to wriggle a little to pop himself out.



December 21 is a raccoon receiving a present. What's in there? osprey_archer had the good idea of a box of corn, but I think for missroserose 's sake it has to be a colander, which the raccoon can use to rinse his vegetables--including his corn--in.



And today's drawing is a shepherd, watching his flock by night.



Last night it rain/sleeted, so it was j...

December 17 and 18, plus snowy owl

A snowstorm is expected today, so yesterday I only felt like doing something kind of perfunctory, so I did these very standard Christmas bells.



But then this morning I woke up and ... no snow. No snow expected until after noon. Well, I couldn't do *two* perfunctory pictures, so I did one I'd been saving up: a blue jay.



And here, unrelated to the Advent calendar, is a sweet photo from the Daily Hampshire Gazette, a local paper: a snowy owl ^_^ What an armful!



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Driveway advent calendar December 14–16

... I can see why/how people flag with their October art posts.

On December 14, I drew a trumpet. When I was a child, there was a horn Christmas ornament that went on our Christmas tree. Therefore, horns--and musical instruments more generally!--are good for an Advent calendar. So I hereby declare.



Yesterday, December 15, I drew oranges. Buying those boxes of mandarins seems very December-January, and we used to always put oranges in the bottom of our kids' stockings for Christmas--except for the ...

Driveway Advent Calendar catch-up

Here we go!

December 11: A gray squirrel... only purple



December 12: Ice skates



December 13: A (somewhat creepy) gingerbread man ... he's giving me bad former-president vibes.



Aaannnd, the overall calendar:



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Driveway Advent calendar update

Just a quick note: yesterday it rained heavily all day, so I didn't add an image. Today it's brilliantly sunny, but I'm traveling, so probably I'll update tomorrow at some point, hopefully with three images.

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Holding Tightly: Custom and Healing in Timor-Leste

My Tetun classmate alerted me to this film on healing in Timor-Leste. It's beautiful in every way: as a respectful inquiry into other people's ways of living and dealing with injury and illness, as cinematography, and as a meditation on what healing and care is. As the introductory text on Vimeo says,

The film asks viewers to consider what we understand health and wellbeing to mean, showing how healing is intimately entangled with forms of belief and care grounded in deep connections between peo...