Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 88

post it again, this time with attribution

I saw the beautiful image below--straight out of a children's story or a fable--on Facebook, but with no attribution. Some clever photographer had caught this moment of convivial interspecies refreshment, but who?

Fortunately, these days, you can put a photo's url into Google Images and search it out, and by doing so, I found it was by Toshiyasu Morita, a photographer who mainly makes portraits of cosplayers--but who also likes to photograph hummingbirds (and their bee friends).

Its original l...

at the intersection

At more and more intersections, especially ones with multiple lanes of traffic, there are people holding up signs saying they're homeless and hungry and asking if you can spare anything. When traffic is moving, cars are speeding by. When traffic is stopped, though, I guess some people must give, otherwise no one would bother asking.

I feel even more conflicted about this form of panhandling than I do about other forms because it seems dangerous, mainly for the person begging, but potentially f...

Lithotherapy

I'll have a story coming out eventually in Not One of Us in which a stone is enlisted as a therapist. I sent the story to oiktirmos (we had been corresponding about stones), and he sent me a wonderful article from the Seattle Times about stones being used as confidantes by heroin addicts in Kyrgyzstan: "Addicts in Kyrgyzstan Fight to Break Heroin's Grip, Armed with Stones."

The stones not only accept the people's confessions, they also take on all the negative things that the people associate...

across this powerful river

I've started volunteering--just a little bit--helping high school kids with essay writing, both at my town's high school and in a troubled school district nearby. The kids at my local high school are relatively privileged (but still so various--one told me about moving from Maine, another about his Soundcloud page, another about being the child of Indian immigrants), the other are in a program for kids struggling to graduate for one reason or another.

That second bunch of kids--I love them so...

November magic

Today I'm going to meet an LJ friend in person. This never, ever gets old. So many friends here have become people whom I see out in the wide world too, and I love it. (Others I still know only online, but I count you as true friends, too.)

Yesterday I went to get some apples, to have some fresh fruit to offer. At the orchard, they'd moved some hives onto the loading dock, and the bees were buzzing around, glinting in the sun, and the fragrance! Sweet, sweet beeswax. It was marvelous: November...

murmuration

(The icon's a crow, not a starling, but)

The other day I went on a long run in the late afternoon, and at the end, was passing a field, and the starlings were congregating there for the evening, and they did that thing--small groups joining one another, sinking, then lifting, and others joining them, and others, and the setting sun was shining through their wings so they looked golden, while the birds themselves were black, and my heart lifted right up with them.

I use my very old (used to be m...

Ashitaka's words

One of my heroes is Ashitaka from Princess Mononoke. In this scene, from after the death of the forest spirit, San speaks in desolation, and Ashitaka answers her:

San: It's over. Everything's over. The forest is dead.

Ashitaka: Nothing is over. The two of us are still alive.

It's true. So long as we're alive, nothing is over. The good things I (or you) wanted to do yesterday will still be good to do tomorrow. If anything, the kindness and hard work you (or I) offer today and tomorrow and the nex...

Sunset on I-90

I was on the road Friday and Saturday, and this beautiful sunset happened in front of me:

First hints



Our beautiful star, low on the horizon



The gauzy sunset sky



Golden mist rising on the sky ocean

Impressions of Into the Inferno

This was more an invitation to tag along with Werner Herzog and volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer as they shoot the breeze and visit some volcanoes than it is a volcano film. There are volcanoes in the film, to be sure, but there's no underlying structure, questions to be investigated, or organizing principle, and it spends a lot of time on topics that have only very tangential--or no--relation to volcanoes at all. You can still enjoy the conversation, but.

Herzog obviously made a deliberate dec...

Containment (a spoiler-free review)

I finished watching the series Containment on Netflix the other day. Yes: although I hate zombie stories, I have a morbid fascination with contagion stories. The premise of this story is that a flu virus has been genetically modified to cause hemorrhagic symptoms, resulting in an impressive 100 percent fatality rate, killing its victims just two days after exposure. That’s a trifecta for an infectious disease: easily transmitted, exceptionally deadly, and fast acting. In real life there isn’t...