T Kira Madden, birds + the love of food

Bots and babes, 

Welcome to June! Welcome to Pride Month! Tell your queer friends they rock the socks off your world because they are just that awesome (that's what I'd want to hear, at least). The corporations, the Man, the cishets of the world will try to capitalize on this celebratory month but we won't let them steal our joy! Do yourself some good by reading books & stories, listening to music, and consuming art by LGBTQIA+ folx! Our stories are magical and painful and profound and constantly relevant, no matter who you are. 

Am currently reading Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, something I picked up purely for the title. I'm in love with Madden's storytelling. She captures the eyes of a young person and the wisdom of her older self entirely, forcing them to be as intrinsic on paper as they are in real life. She writes this epic romance between past and present/future self in a way I've only seen one other time in Justin Torres' We the Animals. These writers are the life-blood of memoirs for me. Forget (but not really) Joan Didion, Roxane Gay, and even (dare I say it!) Camille Dungy because Madden and Torres are mystifying the genre! It's magical realism. It's creative nonfiction. It's multidisciplinary. It's weather on a page. There is something in Madden's book that I can't put my finger on, something I'm familiar with even though it's shaking me. 

in other news 

Got into bird watching. Left Boise just in time to see the lazuli bunting migration. I'd share my own picture, except it looks a bit like a bad selfie. 


This particular one is what they, the bird community, call a "breeding male." And while I find the fact that male birds generally have more vibrant colors than females depressing, I wonder what their feelings on the matter are. In an attempt to find beauty beyond the blue, I've decided the real glories of lazuli buntings are the elegant slope of their foreheads and the cupped roundness of their beaks. More simply, the lines. In the same way I love wire sculptures, I find the curves and bends of bodies absolutely breathtaking. Ruth Asawa is a wire sculptor who captured such lines ephemerally...


There is also Kendra Haste, who I came across recently in my own exploration of Asawa's work...


As birds go, I tend to like mine plump (think: pregnant quail) or super tiny (think: baby quail). It dawns on me now that I might just like quail in general, but this is a thought for another time. The shapes/lines/colors/elegance of lazuli buntings are getting farther from the point here...which is quite nebulous anyways. So let's return once more to the bird...

I first admired lazuli buntings early in the morning. I was studying rainbows on the window when I spotted it. And then another, and another, and another until there were six lazuli buntings pecking at seeds with tiny perfect beaks under the feeder. They approach their food with such definitive bites, not as though they are hungry but as though their only job in the world in this moment is to eat one seed and then another. I envy this purpose, though I wonder if/how these small birds enjoy such morsels. 

Food rides the gorgeous wave of pleasure and necessity, sometimes falling to one side more than the other in painful, violent ways. I can't imagine a scenario in my life in which eating a meal was the one and only task in front of me, no future to think of, no tasks or goals, no work, no one requiring attention. I don't think such a world exists for it would surely be far away, peaceful, and calm. To make such a circumstance for myself would require more energy than perhaps that one meal was worth not to mention privilege. And yet, lazuli buntings ride this wave every day. Of course, they have obligations (like migration), but their desires are genetically engineered to meet their needs. Why can't life be that simple for us?  

I suppose the only thing I can say is this: eat well and love desperately. Be like the bird, don't be like the bird, bird is the word, bird is not the word. Just enjoy what you can, as you can, when you can. 

xoxo BLT

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Cooking Dinner Looks Like in an Environmental Co-Operative

On a Sunday night at Bryn Mawr College, most students are rushing to finish assignments or stumbling over paper topics. But in the college’s only environmentally conscious living co-operative, Batten House, spaghetti squash is a much more pressing issue.   Varuna, 22, and Sophie, 21, signed up to cook dinner for the house that night. They began slowly and with conviction, two friends using each and every week-old vegetable in the fridge for their meal. They prepped four pans for the stove with canola oil. Varuna, with one of her white t-shirt sleeves, pulled up and a dark green apron attempted to cut a hard spaghetti squash open with a long paring knife. Apparently, they tried a larger knife before but it couldn’t pierce the squash’s skin.   Sophie, sporting a light green shirt and white apron, lifted the squash in the air with the knife handle and looked at the large yellow mound quizzically. After yanking the knife out, Varuna succeeded in cutting the squash with a bread kni...
Read more

maybe this and maybe that

Babes and bots,  How's it going? Are you also dairy-free? Do mysterious Thanksgiving leftovers make you fart silently, atrociously, or fantastically? Are you reading this in a bedroom? A living room? At work? In the car? In an office somewhere you'd rather not be? Are you sad? Is your dad a jar of ashes in your car? Yeah. I guess that escalated quickly. Don't be alarmed, read a book. Maybe one by Alice Wong called  Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life . It has pictures!  Or maybe read this poem by Chen Chen about poop and buttholes and anal sex, somehow titled "Winter." Or maybe read this other poem by Chen Chen, "When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities" Or maybe talk to yourself the way you did when you were younger. Give yourself that agency. Do it!  Or maybe half-ass something, like I half-assed this blog post. And then realize you can't half-ass anything, not really. Not even wiping your butt. Everything you do you do wi...
Read more

Is Compostable Plastic Really All It's Cracked Up to Be?

Buying compostable plastics or composting your food scraps is an attractive choice for many consumers, but do we have the infrastructure to make this eco-friendly market work?   Composting is the process by which organic matter is turned into fertilizer. Compostable plastics used in food packaging, take-out utensils, and napkins are often labeled with a green leaf or ‘100% Compostable’ tag.   Compostable cups, the most heavily purchased compostable item in the U.S. and Europe, are made from a corn-based substance called polylactic acid (PLA). According to Jeremy Kranowitz at Sustainable Living, “PLA cups are better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions since the corn used to create them captured carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the cup, if recycled, can enrich the soil.”   The problem is, most compostable plastics are not disposed of in the proper composting facility because the municipality in which those products are being circulated has no infrastructure for it. ...
Read more