Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 8

"Looking at the mountain is an instant relief from all pain"

Some quotes from Ailton Krenak's Life is Not Useful, (trans. Jamille Pinheiro Dias). These are from the essay "You Can't Eat Money."

Here, on the other side of the river, there is a mountain that guards our village ... Looking at the mountain is an instant relief from all pain. Life moves through everything, through rock, the ozone layer, glaciers. Life goes from the oceans to solid ground; it crosses from north to south in all directions. Life is this crossing of the planet's living organism on ...

prayer to the bright object in the western sky

Walking home from the supermarket in the dark around 6 pm, I saw in the Western sky something brighter and larger than a star but not quite as large as a streetlamp light. Could it be Venus? I wondered. That big? Maybe?

Or would it start moving and reveal itself to be a plane?

Not an asteroid, probably--we'd have heard (or would we???)

So I kept my eyes fixed on it as I walked, saying, Please don't be a plane, please be Venus, please be magnificent morning star evening star Venus, please don't sta...

Maria Herrick Bray--emergency lighthouse tender, naturalist, activist

There was a great article by Jeremy C. Fox in the Boston Globe a few days ago about Maria Herrick Bray (1828–1921), whose identifiers therein are way more extensive than in my subject line: "abolitionist, suffragist, temperance leader, lay minister, innkeeper, writer, 'editress,' naturalist, lecturer, matron of a women’s shelter, and philanthropist." But the article leads with the heroic feat for which she's best remembered:

For three days and nights in 1864, from her wedding anniversary to Chri...

Mnemonic traditions and listening

In The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler made the fact that octopuses were able to write a central part of what indicates they're advanced (a character says, “Yes, they have writing… which is an enormous leap in cultural evolution”)--a hugely ethnocentric notion.

So it's very affirming to read Natalia Brizuela's introduction to another brief collection of essays by the Indigenous Brazilian activist Ailton Krenak. (The collection is called Life Is Not Useful.) She writes:

Yasnaya Aguilar, the Mixé li...

which oak leaf are you today

Thin and sharp, edges honed to keen points?

Broad and wide, a surface on which others may place their needs, but a bit battered and stained?

Round and open-lobed, expansively and graciously symmetrical?

Anemone-like, your parts drifting across each other, more to you than you can account for or control?

(Feel free to respond with a different oak leaf that represents you today)

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the sound of 40 miles per hour

Wakanomori found a battered aluminum tuning fork in the road, not any old tuning fork: a police speed gun radar tuning fork, with 40 m.p.h. stamped on it.

Stationary speed radars work by shooting radio waves out at cars and then noting the frequency at which they bounce back. So this is the sound that equates to the frequency produced by waves traveling back after hitting a vehicle going 40 miles per hour.


It's the tune of a speed.

Movement sings.



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always things to do -- for example

I've been supporting Beautiful Day RI as a monthly donor for years. They're a nonprofit that helps newly arrived refugees acclimate to the United States and get job skills (and an income) through the business of granola making and ancillary work. They also run language classes and classes for refugee teens. Their team is largely run by former refugees, people from Syria, Somalia, Iraq, DR Congo, Afghanistan and more. I did a post about the organization in 2020 --it has some nice photos.

The other ...

What fruit or vegetable is my baby this week?

So nowadays, if you're pregnant, there's an app that will tell you how big your baby is, week by week, with fruit and vegetable comparisons (lentil sized, grape sized, lime sized, and so on). There is a website for this, too.


I found this out because the tall one's girlfriend is pregnant! And they have been keeping track of the pregnancy this way. And now that they're out of the first trimester, I can talk about it ;-)

Anyway, I find these comparisons very fun if sometimes a bit ??? I've been mak...

(c) The Los Cedros Cloud Forest

There are rivers whose personhood has been recognized--in New Zealand, Colombia, Bangladesh, Canada, elsewhere too. And now, on the occasion of COP16, the 2024 UN Biodiversity Conference currently underway in Cali, Colombia, there's a legal petition to have Ecuador's Los Cedros cloud forest recognized as a co-copyright holder for a song, created by writer Robert McFarlane, musician Cosmo Sheldrake, mycologist Giuliana Furci, legal scholar César Rodríguez-Garavito--and the forest.

In this Guardia...

a last job

I was retired, but when the Queen of Faery comes with a request, you listen.

"I have a little job I need you to do. It requires cold iron--and lead. I'll pay you well."

Now I didn't want to get wrapped up in that line of work again, but she's a hard creature to say no to, so I agreed. My only stipulation: payment in cash, up front.

"But of course," she smiled.

And left me two gold coins, a king's ransom in today's world.

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