
G’day mates. It’s always astonishing to watch the transformation of bare branches in the springtime: the maple tree outside my kitchen window, a clean silhouette just days ago, is festooned with ornate chartreuse flowers. The leaves will soon obscure my view of the ocean. On the hillside behind my house the dogwood trees are preparing to shine and every morning a symphony of ordinary brown songbirds sweeten the sky.
After everything that this planet and its people have suffered these past Trumpen months, it’s amazing to discover that peas are still plantable, that one of my chores involves draping garlands of starlike clematis flowers onto a bower, that I can stop the apocalyptic Babel just by holding the upturned little face of a pansy between my fingers.
In the total avoidance of anything to do with orange despots, I have been accumulating interesting findings from around the web. Grab your coffee/yerba mate/teacup and enjoy some of these thoughtful and strange musings:
The unconscious is a machine for operating an animal. Mapping the San Francisco archipelago. Are we asking the wrong question about the housing crisis? Silicon Valley is a libertarian dystopia. Listening to trees. Internalized artworks. Tea with woodland friends. Use this app: or, open a window. Blue-blooded crabs and the infinite strangeness of the horseshoe milking industry. The future we’ve been warned about is beginning to saturate the present. “Off scale happiness” and the shape of stories.
This week in Andrea Palframan:
Please, people: In the next few weeks, I am headed to New York City, Boston and London, UK. “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” Bring me yours.
Tough City pulls itself together. Standing with the Heiltsuk First Nation. The making of a superpod of orcas. Name that Farm Centre. Joying in the renaissance of “Gasoline Alley”: welcome to Ganges Alley Inner Garden, Abara and Priestess & Deer.
I am receiving an “Earth Hero” award today at Centennial Park at the heart of Salt Spring. Shall I wear my luchador mask and rasta morphsuit? Or will I test drive the outfit I am planning to wear when I march in this fabulous parade?
Got your tickets to Pitchfork Social yet? If you are on Salt Spring, today is the last day to catch the Easter Art Tour. Don’t miss the luminous paintings of the likes of Stephanie Denz, Susan Benson and Jeanette Sirois. I got to take in the show during a tender and sometimes-raunchy tribute evening celebrating Leonard Cohen that began with a ginger wigged Pokemon-tail vendor and ended with us all singing:
“There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken hallelujah”
Inspired by science, brilliant remixes, and the art of protest: however we come, let’s come together, in our rags of light, dressed to kill”.
Peace, love and birdsong,
Andrea