Nicki Chen's Blog, page 7

Good Neighbors and Bad

A couple of weeks ago our family took an overnight trip to Canada, our northern neighbor. The Canadian border is only 84 miles from my house–a two-hour-plus drive–so I’ve been there many times. This time, we went by sea, sailing from Seattle to Victoria, a beautiful city on Vancouver Island. Americans like Canadians, even though […]

Books & What My Dad Didn’t Tell Me

Dad wasn’t a shy person. He made friends easily and had lots of them. But he was a doer more than a talker. You wouldn’t hear him discussing whether he wanted to start a project or not. And yet, before long, you’d find that he’d been out in his shop building something like … maybe […]

Volcano Love

I’ve always lived near a volcano. Most of them quiet. Most of the time. Mt. Baker I was born and grew up not far from beautiful Mt. Baker. It was part of our landscape. The way my mom talked about the mountain, it belonged to us—to her specifically. That’s the way people around the world […]

Flight or Invisibility

If you had the chance, which superpower would you choose, flight or invisibility? Quickly. Choose. It’s said that your spontaneous response reveals something about your personality. Hmm. After a minute, though, don’t you start to think about it? That’s what interests me—the details of the superpower. If I could fly, how would I know that […]

Stopping Time & Saving Beauty

The nursery school my daughters attended had a large grassy playground with a kalachuchi tree as big as a large house on one end of it. Every day when I dropped my daughter off, there were tens of dozens of kalachuchi blossoms on the grass, and the gardener was sweeping them up and throwing them […]

Crowds at the Tulip Fields

Oh, no! I thought. The closer we got to RoozenGaarde the more the traffic on the narrow country road began to back up. I’d been warned not to attempt to see the tulip fields on a weekend. But I wanted to go with my family, and they had to work during the week. So here […]

Cascadia Art Museum, Thoughts & Images

A few weeks ago I visited The Cascadia Art Museum. See An Artist Date. I described there that an “artist date” is meant to be a solo affair, a time to pay close attention to the sights and sounds, how the place you’re visiting makes you feel, and what it brings to mind. So here […]

An Artist Date

Last Sunday I went on an “artist date” to the Cascadia Art Museum. The idea of artist dates comes from Julia Cameron in her book, The Artist’s Way. They’re meant to be solo affairs, a time for the artist or writer to take a couple hours out from her daily affairs to observe and reflect. […]

Love House & Crow — a Chinese Proverb

Chinese proverbs can sometimes seem terse, mysterious even. It’s not surprising, I suppose. The Chinese language is thousands of years old, and at some point people are going to want to shorten familiar bits of advice, making them confusing to the rest of us. “Love house and crow” is one of those mysterious bits of […]

Moss, Moss, and More Moss in the Quinault Rainforest

It’s not surprising that the Quinault Rainforest would have lots of moss. After all, it gets 140 inches of rain every year. When we visited last November, though, we were lucky. It didn’t rain at all. We took advantage of the good weather to explore. Walking through the forest, the moss intrigued me–the way it […]