Posts by skincarematt
Bibliographing: A Petition For Belonging
There is a story about Picasso that goes like this… Someone is introduced to Picasso and wishes to buy a drawing. He takes up a pencil, draws out a flower and hands it to the man, who asks the cost. “$10,000” says Picasso. “But it only took you less than ten minutes to draw it!”…
moreHungering Only For Meat: The Raspberry, The Gem, The Fat, The Trickster
Faithfully the green in my garden is waning and the dry and the brown are making their way. An astonishing thing to say is that I have raspberries in my yard in New York City, in Harlem, that come back cane after cane, thorn after thorn, year after year. I will have to cut them…
moreThe Distance In Between Is So Vast: On Phytoplankton, Proximity and The Ecology of Change
Such is the unseen world. In the beginning, the ammonia saturated orange sky covered the deep green methane sea. Neither could have been beheld by any eyes. Eyes hadn’t been made yet. They could not be noted as good yet. Not even dreamed of. There were no dreamers then. But surely the sky was just…
moreThus Spake Sila: The Sun Rises Once Again In Greenland
In Greenland the sun goes down in about mid October and rose just a few weeks ago. I’ve never been to Greenland but I’ve known a few folks who have spent time there and have a great love for the place. I was leafing through “This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland” by Gretel Erlich…
moreOn Cilantro and Grief: Forbearance In The Presence Of The Bruise
Cilantro has a fascinating ancient pedigree. The seed. The leaf. The root. It is all edible and some people love it. Obviously some people are neutral about coriander/cilantro. And some people are deeply disturbed by the flavor of it. Julia Child is one – she said that when it came near her she wanted to…
moreOn Dice, Death, and Endings: The Whispering To The Old Gods of Chance and Fate
Knowing what the last two years have been like it is no wonder that while some folks are profoundly hopeful that “it’ll all be better” others are more reticent and one person who I know said that entering 2022 with any kind of hopeful composure was like thinking you have good odds in a game…
moreNo Hats: The Prayer Of The Virgin Condor
This is a very broad generalization about sports but I’ll say it anyway. Sports where there are hats involved are more explicitly about control of your opponent than the free flow of play. This is not to say that there aren’t amazing and improbable and improvisational and miraculous things that happen in football or baseball…
moreThe Pure Chestnut: The Grammar of the Gone
This isn’t a story about the American Chestnut. In the world over but very broadly in the Northern hemisphere there is a persistent mythical understanding of a World Tree. An Axis Mundi. A Tree of Life. The Spine of The Great Mother. The Source of All Wands. This tree might be holding up the heavens,…
moreBeset By Mystery: The Wiffle Ball
So often I write about indigenous people or a traditional cultural pathway. But the other day I saw a few minutes of a baseball game and I haven’t watched baseball in years. I used to be a fan and then it fell away for me. Then the same day I saw some kids and a…
moreWe Are The Stars Which Sing
The Schoodic Peninsula in Maine comes from the Passamaquoddy Indian word ‘skut-auke’ meaning ‘place of the fire’ or ‘land that has been burned’. Whether this was a place that was the origin of their fire story or a place that they burned at some interval to spur new growth or a spot that was prone…
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