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Waxing Poetic

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Poetic Inspiration
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Fragments of lovely, a beckoning of gorgeousness from the everyday, the tiny truths that would otherwise get lost or hidden inside and underneath the mundane.

Poetic Inspirations, by Brianna Colburn
Love. Life. A Rough Attempt at a Field Guide...: (2010)

The Situationists, an art movement in Paris in the 1950s, used a word, “dérive” (in French, it means drift) to describe the art of getting lost, on purpose, in your own city, in your own life, if just for a little. To rediscover who you are in the world, to relearn what you love, and why.

This made us start thinking about maps. Maps. As if to have one would make everything better, would make everything understandable. Compasses may tell you what direction you are going in, but maps...do something different. They tell a story. They have back-information. Maps say "I am here," "I was here when..." Maps are a way of charting not just distance and location, but memory. Particular details. Things that matter. Things that matter enough to pass on.

It turns out that 'wayfinding' is actually a navigational term. It means exactly what it sounds like it would mean: orienting yourself in a place where you lack a compass, don't necessarily have the accurate longitude, and are, in effect, going to have to feel your way through wherever it is that you are. Sort of like love. Sort of like everything.

It seems appropriate that the first paved streets in medieval cities were paved over various footpaths. It seems even more appropriate when we learned that there's a term for footpaths – animal, human, what have you. They’re called desire lines.

The terms as actions: Desire lines. Psychogeography. Cartography. Drifting precisely so that you can find your way home. It's all related, or at least, it feels that way. Let's hear it for wayfinding. Let's get lost, and then found.
Beloved, for Valentine's, or How to Find a Word to work for a Day: (2009)

Oh Beloved. You are a tricky word. We sent our girl running to the arms of the Oxford English Dictionary, searching for the right word, when you arguably, were there all along. How interesting to learn that beloved is both a noun and an adjective – like darling like sweetie like caro or amor – we sometimes use them recklessly, but always with care. Beloved pops up written on and in Hearts and flowers and ribbons and Victorian throwbacks – useful, sure, on this one holiday – but Beloved, there is more:

Beloved can refer to

Not just (and not excluding) the one who has our heart, and all of our secrets, but the others, who have the rest of us, and who hold us close, with all of our embarrassing backstories, who hold in locket-shaped memory fragments all our almost-forgotten things; all the break-your-heart-moments; all of our laughter and silliness, all of our favorites, our most precious and absurd details, our sisters, our brothers, our daughters, our mothers, grandmothers, aunties, girls down the hall, soulmates, buddies, fellow dreamers and companions. Beloved: you are all of these. You have our hearts. We’d like to share ours.
Oh my. Mama. (2009)

Oh my. Inscriptions are hard...

For the most enchanting -

For the most loyal -

For the most frustrating -

For the most beautiful -

For the heroic -

For being brave in awkward ways, for wearing macaroni necklaces like precious gems, for tolerating loud sounds, for checking to see if the table corner was hurt (and not just our knee), for thousands of hours of lost sleep, for making sure we went to bed, for giving us names and in effect giving up (some of) yours, for sharing more than we could comprehend then and still wonder how you did (and continue to do) it:

For love and dancing and cheering and comfort and sometimes sad or sick days when you made sure we had something delicious for distraction and hell, for FUN – we want to share medals and mementos and letters and numbers and all the things you keep track of far better than we could and just lovely things –

For all of our mothers. Natural, literal, figurative, Step,Would-be, chosen, found, inherited, borrowed, born-to, and otherwise:

THANK YOU FOR OUR LIVES!
Paying attention (2008)

We have been thinking. A lot. A friend of ours gave us a term, "flâneur", which the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire used to describe a specific sort of person – a person whose life, in a certain way, revolves around paying attention. The word is hard to translate into English – the verb it comes from in French means "to saunter, to stroll", but the walking wasn't the important part to Baudelaire – it was the noticing that happened along the way. Baudelaire compared it the job of a botanist – a flâneur is constantly paying attention to the tiny, as well as the large details, of life – as it happens.

There is something so important about paying attention – it sounds silly, it sounds obvious – but just being mindful of that action, of the importance of that action, at all times, changes the world for us, and you and everyone else in tiny, exquisite, luminous ways.

We want to celebrate noticing – not just nostalgia, or memory, but active, right now, noticing. We want to make markers for sharing – for the big moments, and the tiny ones. We want to help pass along all our beautiful details, our milestones, love, wonder, life...and mischief...but above all, hope. Hope comes out of paying attention. If we let it happen, if we let ourselves notice more often, extraordinary things can happen. May we all be so blessed