5 on 5

So much has been happening around here this past month!  Lots of interesting things are in the works. I have much news to share and many stories to tell, but first I have the great joy of taking part in 5 on 5, along with some wonderful photographer friends. Each month we share 5 of our own photos from the previous 30 days, and we link to each other's blogs, creating a chain of beautiful photos and stories.  How wonderful is that? Big thanks to my friend, Stephanie, for starting this group back at the beginning of the year.  I've known Stephanie for years now through the blogging/Flickr world, and I've long admired her photography, so I'm just chuffed to be a part of this group.  You can see her 5 on 5 post here.

As some of you know, I've been working on a series of pictures that I'm calling my Dark Flower portraits.  The peonies above are one of the newest in the series.  I'll have news to share about the series in my next post, but for now, I'll just share some writing I did in an Instagram post that was inspired by this photo:

A gardener thinks about life and death always as one. In each flower's race toward blossoming is its race, too, toward decline. I'm saying nothing new, only that when you garden, this thought is always present. In the garden I am surrounded by the new growth of runner bean sprouts, the full flush of a climbing rose, and the last breath of a lush peony all at the same moment. My wheelbarrow is piled high with a day's kill: the weeds I pulled, faded blossoms I plucked, lily beetles I crushed between gloved finger and thumb. The gardener must not be squeamish about death. She must recognize its necessity even as she rejoices at the sight of her first ever iris uncurling itself with a flourish from the spear of its stem.

Not all of my recent photos have been dark.  In fact, some have been quite light and even ethereal. I'm taking nearly all of my stills in a northeast facing window of my little workroom/studio/study.  It provides my favorite light for stills.  I can't imagine taking photos without that northeastern light!

The peonies in the twilight shot above are only a few of the thousands to be seen and smelled at Gilsland Farm in June.  This old farm is home to the Maine Audubon Society, and it is one of my favorite spots anywhere in the world.  Meadows, woods, marshes, and lush gardens all in one magical place on an estuary just a few minutes outside of Portland, but truly a world away.

Clearly, peonies have been inspiring me over the past month, but so have many far less showy flowers right here in my own gardens, including the pelargoniums (geraniums).  In the shot above I tucked some lovely wild pink ones into a busted old crate.

The purple geranium in this final shot is one of Todd's favorite flowers.  It's combined with a wee sprig of lady's mantle in a handblown perfume bottle that a former boss gave me a lifetime ago. The Dark Flower portrait series is helping me to see photography--and thus my life--in a new way, and helping me come to terms with some things about the creative process (and the process of just living in this messy, heartbreaking, beautiful world) that have always frightened me.  I relish this chance to dive deeper and work harder.

Thanks, wonderful friends, for stopping by.  You never cease to inspire me.

A Year and a Word: My 400th Post

I awoke early with the cats this morning and watched the light outside my kitchen window shift from deep blue to grey-blue to soft white as I ate my steel-cut oats and almond milk.  It was a morning like any other, except this one was the last of its year.  I had some thinking to do.  What would be my word for 2013?  I still hadn't decided.

And then I was smacked by a stomach bug.  It's one that I think I've been fighting since Christmas Eve.  It finally won, and I climbed back in bed, where I was joined by wild dreams of traveling to Paris, only to find that I was in a high school gymnasium and I had to cheerlead again, decades after my cheerleading days.  I had, of course, forgotten all the words and motions, and everyone was furious with me.  Not a promising sign for 2013.

And yet I woke up with the word for the year in my head.  "Persevere."  I've had to persevere through some pretty terrible times over the past several years, and I've managed to do it, but I have been wondering whether I could do it this time.  I must persevere as a writer now more than ever when I have two manuscripts trying to find homes and a whole bag of worries and fears to carry with me as I move forward.  

"Persevere" is not as pretty as "inspire" or "grace," my words from 2012 and 2011, but it is real, and it's what I tell my students to do all the time.  It's also what I need.  Perseverance gets harder for me as I grow older and I fear I won't achieve many of the things of which I've dreamed.  I am not as patient in the face of rejection now, something I see loads and loads of as a writer.  I see successes, too, but I don't linger on those.  I tend to linger on my failures.  "Persevere" will require a whole slew of other words like "hope" and "optimism" and "try" to come along for the ride.  

As Samuel Beckett writes: "Ever failed.  No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better."

Here's to 2012 and to failing better.  I wish you all love and adventure and a dose of perseverance in the coming year.  

xo Gigi 

Story Fragment

Before the heaviest snows came, the girl walked for many miles, her feet echoing over wooden bridges,  clambering over tree roots, and shuffling through leaves tattered as forgotten letters.

She never followed railroad tracks, preferring to cross them and move on, off into the cover of the forest.  She was not sure what she sought, but her feet and her heart knew she wouldn't find it in the cities where the railway led.

Each night she made her bed from the forgotten leaves, with pine needles as her pillow.

Always the towers of distant cities beckoned to her, but still she moved on, deeper into the wild.  As winter slipped further into its icy slumber, ponds and lakes froze, turning to silver mirrors that reflected the sky.  Sometimes the girl slid and spun across the glass surface, pretending the clouds were beneath her and she was a red-tailed hawk, circling the world below in great, sweeping gyres.  Often, she broke small bits from the edges of the sky to hold in her mouth, letting the ice melt and and slip down her throat, making her shimmer inside.  

In her pack she carried a folding knife and bits of hard crackers and a notebook and pencil for remembering small but important things.  She wasn't lonely as she walked among trees and grasses and reeds.  She knew the calls of birds and the chatter of squirrels.  She knew the comings and goings of foxes.  She knew the way of things--how they begin and how they end and all the in-betweens.

She knew nothing is certain, all is ever-changing, for she had seen in winters past how even the thickest  of ice melts and the sky returns to its proper place in the heavens.  Yet she came to value uncertainty as much as her trusty knife and pencil.  Long ago, the old man had taught her that everything we fear can be honed and shaped into the finest of tools.  She had sharpened and polished uncertainty until it glistened each evening in the light of the setting sun.  

On Fear, Trust, and What Makes a Home

I turned around today and saw the past year slipping off into the distance.  Last year at this time we had just signed the lease on our apartment in Portland and we were preparing to rent out the loft we own down in Massachusetts so we could move up here.  We were emerging from a very difficult and dark time in our lives and finally making a move that we'd longed for for years.  It wasn't ideal; the current housing market meant we couldn't simply sell and make a clean break.  On the other hand, we were moving to our favorite city.  That was more important than buying a dream home, especially after the battles we'd been fighting in a place that felt very, very unhappy to us.  

Suddenly it's a wonderfully full year later and I feel a little frazzled, a little edgy, a little on the verge, if you know what I mean.  We've just rented out our old loft to new tenants for another year, which means another year of not selling it, which in turn means that we won't be buying another home this year.  As much as I'd like to settle in and put down roots in a permanent home in this city we love so much, I'm trying to tell myself that I'm okay right where I am for the moment.  We're here and we have a roof over our heads, and the city is our oyster.  I'm grateful for all these things, but I will admit that the renting thing is getting a little old.  Renting when I was twenty was great--and even when I was thirty during grad school.  But now that I've owned two homes of my own and I'm nowhere close to thirty, renting doesn't sit so well with me anymore.  

I want to paint my walls any damn color I please again.  I want to design--at last--the kitchen of my dreams.  And most of all, I want to create another garden.  For now I dig around in my mother's gardens and grow herbs on my porch, but I am an obsessive gardener so this never seems to be enough (why am I obsessive about everything I love?  Are you this way, too?).  I can deal with the drunk guys who sleep on our back steps (ah, urban living)--or sometimes even our front steps--but I want to plot and plant and putter among the weeds again.  

Don't get me wrong, this is a rockin' apartment, but it's an apartment, and it's not ours.  

  

I'm trying to be more positive about the situation.  We have ocean breezes.  We have a huge kitchen and hardwood floors.  We have loads of sunlight and pretty rooms.  Our neighborhood is bursting with book shops, coffee shops, galleries, and restaurants.  Oh, my goodness, I am lucky, lucky, lucky.  

And I will share a marvelous secret about our apartment with you.  If you live near the water here, you have the privilege of witnessing the seagulls raising their babies on the rooftops of Portland.  If you simply look up anywhere on the East End, you'll see mamas, papas, and baby gulls on the rooftops where they nest each summer.

This is our second summer here, and thus we are getting to know our second baby gull.  He spends a lot of time looking in our kitchen window, practicing his squawking (which sounds more like squeaking at this point), and following his mama back and forth across the roof next door.

As sweet as this is to watch, it is not without its terrifying moments.  Baby gulls are not exactly sure of foot, and that roof is quite steep.  There have been many near misses.  Last year we became very attached to the little gull who lived next door, and then he was attacked and killed one hot afternoon by an osprey.  It was a very good day for the osprey, but a terrible day in all other respects.  The gull parents are so attentive and caring, that it was heartbreaking to us.  I keep wondering this summer if these are the same parents back to give it another try on this same rooftop.   

And that's just it I realize.  We lost so much a year ago.  I lost a job and many friends.  I also lost all confidence in myself.  Truly.  All of it.  I felt utterly alone and desolate.  This has been a year of trying again.  And again.  Much good has come of it.  I still feel the losses daily, but I make myself try harder.  It's an old cliche about picking yourself up and dusting yourself off, but cliches are born from truths worth repeating.

This rented apartment has sheltered us while we've reinvented our lives.  In my heart that makes it the best of homes.  And when I feel afraid of failing again, which I do almost daily, I look out the kitchen window.  There's that flightless (for the moment) bird, making its way across the roofline, guided by its mother, but trusting in its own two feet.  

Remembering Why

 

The childhood scents of Easter were always milk chocolate, of course, and baked ham, and the overwhelming scent of my favorite purple hyacinths--for I adored anything purple and anything from my father, and this flower was his special gift to me every year, its little pot wrapped in pink foil and tied with a wide yellow ribbon.  

And then there were the sights of Easter Mass: the church crowded with grownups and children alike, kneeling stiffly in their best dresses and suits, and every female wearing a new--or newly decorated--straw hat.  My own was white straw decorated with fabric daisies and bearing a white elasticized cord that hooked under my chin to keep the hat firmly on my head.  The straw made my scalp itch, and throughout the homily I tugged at the cord, certain that it was going to choke me to death before we ever got to communion.  Even so, I loved Easter and what it represented.  It seemed to me a day of mysteries and questions at the end of a long month of mysteries and questions--and, of course, sacrifice.  The big question among all my Catholic friends every year was always, "What are you going to give up?"  My answer was always candy.  The obvious choice, but also, looking back, the wise one, because it made that hollow chocolate bunny taste all the sweeter come Easter Sunday, but also because giving up some small thing that we truly desire is a good practice in life, as in Lent. Even as a very little girl I knew it was a meager gesture in the face of the magnitude of Christ's sacrifice, and yet all the children I knew made it quite solemnly, a credit to the people who raised us to see ourselves as one small part of something much greater than ourselves.

I still remember asking my Catechism teacher repeatedly why Good Friday was called "good."  I was  eight years old, and I kept saying to the poor woman, "but it can't be good, if Christ died.  That's not good."  She sighed and said, "Yes, Gigi, but he rose again.  That's why Good Friday is 'good.'  He died so that he could rise again."  I sat in the large, dimly lit church every morning during Holy Week, peering up at the stations of the cross, wondering why Christ had to die and rise again.  Why, I wondered, couldn't he just have kept on living, making loaves and fishes and doing other wondrous deeds.  Sister Edwina had led my class all around the church the previous week, showing us the stations and teaching us about Christ's Passion.  Now I sat beside my family in our pew and realized that my question about Good Friday was only the the first in a long line of hard questions that I would be asking for the rest of my life.

Today, as my husband and I colored Easter eggs and he made the traditional potato, kielbasa, and horseradish borscht from his mother's recipe, we talked about the Easters of our childhoods, each of us living in small New England towns, he an altar boy in a Polish Catholic church and me the granddaughter of French Catholics.  Our upbringings were shaped by traditions and foods and words and gestures imbued with a history that we couldn't have imagined as we hunted for eggs and chocolates in the wet morning grass, our baskets hooked in our elbows, feet racing to discover the next secret hiding place.  Little did we know that life would always be full of mysteries, and that decades later we would still be searching.  

I looked up this afternoon from dipping a perfect white egg into a bowl of blue dye.  "Why," I asked my husband, "do we still make all the traditional dishes, and why do I remember exactly how your dziadzi liked his borscht--with lots of horseradish stained pink by beet juice?" 

"Because," he replied, "so many of the people we love have died.  We make these dishes to remember them.  We remember them to feel connected.  They helped to make us who we are."

In the face of mysteries and questions, these gestures--these flavors and smells and snapshot memories--help us remember where we came from, help us shape who we wish to become, and to make each day, in the most profound sense, truly good.

A Deep Breath

For the first time ever tonight I'm at a loss for how to begin a post.  I've been a million miles away.  I could blame it on the holidays, but I won't.  There's nothing earth shattering to report.  I have been working hard, spending time with family, writing consistently, and tucking in Christmas-y outings here and there.  I can't seem to make every piece of my life fit right now, and I am almost afraid of what would happen if I did.  I'm also afraid of looking back over my shoulder at all that I lost this year.  I know I am gaining other things, but at costs that cut me to the quick.  I know that you know about years like that--the ones we'd just as soon pack away with the ornaments come January. 

One saving grace has been family, another has been intense work.  A third has been the Legacy Series, and all who are participating in it as writers and readers.  I'll be continuing with it for a few more weeks with a new post next week and more writers coming along to help begin the New Year with beauty, wit, and insight.

In the meantime, I'm gathering up my nuts and berries for winter, and wrapping up tight 'cuz, baby, it's cold outside. 

Back soon with holiday cheer.  Hope your season so far has been merry and bright.  xo Gigi

The Knot

I'm working on a difficult piece of writing that I want to share with you, but it may be some time before I can.  Once when I was having a tough time with a piece of writing in graduate school, one of my professors told me, "Put the problem into the poem."  She suggested that I write about what exactly wasn't working in order to find my way into the heart of the piece.  

To do this feels a bit like trying to untie a particularly nasty knot with your eyes blindfolded.  At first, it seems an impossible task, but as you gradually begin to trust your fingertips, you feel the contours of the thread, and what you learn as you tease out the loops and twists is that the center of the tangle disappears at the very moment it reveals itself to you.  Where there was once a knot there is now a long line running through empty space, which feels like possibility, a string to follow back out of the maze, a thread to weave, a rope on which to walk across a treacherous river.  It's not a guarantee of safety or comfort, but a guide through the hardest parts of the journey.  

I find that I can't untie the knot without trusting myself first.  Tonight, I don't feel it.  Putting the problem in the piece takes an act of faith.  For a long time my acts of faith have failed.  I know that is the point.  I know that means I must have more faith--in myself, in others, in my work.  I read that quote from Emerson and I feel it burn like a condemnation.  What if what lies within me is not the long thread of possibility but the empty space through which it travels?  What if I truly am the nothing I feel?

I went to a lecture once that the late scholar Edward Said gave on hope.  Maybe I have mentioned it before.  It stitched itself into my life more than a decade ago, and now I can't imagine myself without it. What he said boils down to (and sometimes I hear it like he whispered it into my ear alone): to create is to hope.  To face the bleakest moment and still put pen to paper or brush to canvas is to hope.  It can be a chicken and egg problem, which is where the faith part comes in.

A few weeks ago I wrote about loving even when we feel least like loving, and I think this post tonight is a mere extension of what I was talking about.  In fact, both posts are just me taking the advice of my wise professor.  I've chucked the problem right into all of my writing for a few weeks now,  and I'm still messing around with the mere surface of a knot the size of those fabled giant balls of string (or tinfoil ) that enterprising and obsessive hermits have managed to turn into tourist attractions out on dusty desert roads.  I can imagine the crumbling billboard: 

FIVE MILES 

TO THE LOST GIRL'S 

MYSTERIOUS AND AMAZING

NEVER-ENDING KNOT 

OF DOUBT AND FEAR  

And yet I'm still writing.  It can't be all bad.  And for you, because you have been kind enough to visit my little roadside attraction--complete with a souvenir shop peddling snow globes, snake skins, and miniature replica knots on keychains--for you I have the gift of a song from the Josh Ritter show we saw this past weekend here in Portland, just a few blocks from my house.  Yes, I know it's pitch black for much of the song, but that's because he sang it in the dark, which is almost as good as a blindfold, and I promise there's a glimmer of light at the end.  

Seeking Balance

“The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.”

~ Albert Einstein

I don't have words to express the sorrow and fear I feel about the BP oil catastrophe.  What are your thoughts?   I feel powerless to the point of despair.  Talk to me.  I'm not seeking comfort where there's none to be found, but real talk, your real thoughts, ideas, questions, and fears.

What My Heart Knew

Yes, this is a humble pigeon that I photographed last summer in London (and processed like crazy tonight, including a texture from Skeletal Mess), but somehow a bird that looks rather silly cooing and pecking and strutting on the ground assumes a mantle of grace as soon as it takes wing.  I feel like I was a grounded pigeon myself for a very long time.  Not that I am exactly what one could call graceful now,  but once I stopped pecking at the crumbs others tossed me, I certainly felt much less restricted by my own fears or measured by other's opinions.

As I take a running leap of faith and attempt to catch a bit of air to hold me aloft, I am summoning up all the courage I can.  Over the past few years I have lost much, including friendships, a career, and any  feeling at all of being at home in the place where I live, but I have gained a new perspective, and I have discovered a profound self-respect.  And with these gains, my heart has grown stronger, more able to withstand the judgement, harsh words, and even the cruelty of certain others; it has grown more willing to fail, and more willing to succeed as well.  I think my heart knew all along what I could do.  Only my stubborn, skeptical mind needed convincing. 

Do you ever doubt that you are amazing?  When you do, come visit me here.  My heart and yours will have a chat.  Together, we'll cast away doubts.  Together we'll grow stronger than our fears.  Together, we'll take flight.  Together, we'll find grace.  

L is for . . .

The sun shone yesterday, and the air was sweet, 

so we traveled the old road

of salt marshes and blueberry patches 

to my childhood beach;

the beach where we played in the surf 

until, even in August, our skin was red 

from the ice-cold, pounding waves;

the beach where my father dove in,

fully clothed, to save me from the undertow

when I was five (for years after he held on

to the salt-stained leather belt

that he'd worn that day); 

the beach where we built sandcastles and forts,

where we scrambled over granite rocks,

fed french fries to greedy sea gulls,

and drank grape Shasta from cans.

This is love, revisiting a place

that shaped you

in the best ways, a place

where danger and comfort

are intertwined, 

where ever scrub pine

whispers the past,

where when your love takes your hand,

you hold fast--

not from fear--

but from the sense 

that in the space between your palms

lie the answers

to all the questions

you could ever ask.

Todd's Point, Reid State Park, Georgetown, Maine

F is for . . .

I have come here my whole life, returned to scramble over stones, climb dark stairs, explore the honeycomb cells and arches and hear the wind moan.

I was born near the mouth of a river, that in-between realm, neither salt nor fresh, shifting with tides and storms and the ocean's swell.  Yet still the fort stands, and we return for welcomes, farewells, the fights that no words can solve, the pains that time never seems to quell.   

We come back to the stronghold, defenseless ourselves, seeking solace in the salt and wind and seagrass whipping harsh against our legs.  Here we stand at the edge, not safe at all, but still we stay

as if the stones themselves support us, as if memories of the years we've spent sustain us, as if we've never had to say goodbye, as if as long as these arches stand we are safe, there is something sure, there is this, always this, if nothing else--some things endure.

Fort Popham, Phippsburg, Maine

Try, Part II

Back in November when we were still on the island, I wrote a post called Try about taking a leap of faith, about teaching, about poetry, and about failure.  I reread it tonight, and realized that I had never shown you the poem I mentioned in that post.  In fact, even though I am a poet by training and trade, I almost never post my poetry on The Magpie's Fancy.  Thought I'd post this one tonight just for the heck of it.  I wrote it after watching the Leonids meteor shower.  I won't explain it, because I hate when poets do that, but I will say that it's meant to be read aloud.  That first sentence is long and breathless because the speaker is completely overwhelmed with her thoughts.

When I write poetry or fiction, I love to imagine a speaker or character, and just let myself climb inside her mind and heart.  Please feel free to do the same.  

The Leonids

Meteor Shower, Peaks Island, Maine, November 17, 2009

How could we little heathens

have known

that the gods check their watches, 

that the skies over beaches

and horizons 

and channel crossings

where fishes know the old

rock formations carved by the glaciers

by heart--

how could we believe

that those skies

could flash

a matchstick’s scratch

and streams of fire

could rain down 

just like the old woodcuts

in bibles, the end of days?

Only, these sparks 

flying from Leo’s mane

don’t fall for us;

Christ, we nearly missed them,

so bleary from late shows 

and facebook, wrapped

in the worn quilts and scarves I knitted 

on insomniac nights long past.  

What can we make of this?  What 

can we enact, predict?

We gaze.  Stars require that.

Our necks tense.

Out in the channel, 

the markers flash like beer signs;

behind us the city is an odalisque,

a siren luring our eyes 

back to the horizon.

Treachery is everywhere.

Just south, Ram Island’s light

winks, jealous Ares, old

and endlessly erect--

does he ever grow tired

of protecting?  Even his lantern 

is weak, its power on loan

from Apollo.  How could he 

ever hope to compete?

In the end, he and the siren 

are no match for the streaks

of green and gold

that catch us, hold us cold

until their end, 

unbelievers

on the porch

alone in November 

beside the storm’s brink, 

on the edge of a waning crescent, 

waiting for the next

tiny speck

of the universe to fall

whether we blink

or not,

whether we ever

even look at all.

Try

Here are three pictures after the weekend storms; the whole island was wrapped in what my mother calls sea smoke.  It was truly beautiful in a Mists of Avalon sort of way.  Even for all that beauty, what I wish I could do is show you images of the Leonid meteor showers we watched last night from our deck.  At two a.m. there we were, wrapped in jackets and scarves and blankets, clutching mugs of chamomile tea and shouting at the sky as streaks of white, green, and gold flashed by.  I had to turn my back on Portland and on the lighthouses across the harbor so I could fix my gaze on the darkest parts of the sky, east of the island, where it's open ocean.

Yes, I wish I could show you gorgeous photos of comet particles falling from the heavens, but I have neither the camera nor the talent for capturing that particular kind of magic.  I do have words, and I am writing a poem, but that must wait, too.  I revise and revise and revise, for that is what I love best about my training as a poet: the process of revision.  Inspiration, that initial rush of writing, is the fun, sexy, and relatively easy part of writing.  I always tell my students (and they groan--oh, do they groan) that the real work, the real craft comes through re-vision, through re-seeing the poem as a whole and as its parts, each line, whether endstopped or enjambed, each metaphor, each slant rhyme.

What poetry students eventually find, the serious ones at least, is a kind of joy in that work as the poem reveals itself anew with each revision.  The process becomes one of discovery and revelation.  Writing well is like reading well, and I think that both are like living well, although it is easier, of course, for me to write and read well than to live well.  I am working at it.  What does Samuel Beckett say?  "Try.  Fail.  No matter.  Try again.  Fail better."  What I wish for tonight is a willingness and an ability to try again.  I wish to see the world around me clearly--people, their fears and joys, and to accept them for who they are.  I also wish to be a little braver.  My whole life feels on the brink of changes, some good, many hard, but nearly all tinged with risk, so I need to pack some courage in my rucksack.  I think of the Leonids; they blaze and burn out, rushing off into their own oblivion no matter what I do down here on earth, a fact which I find oddly comforting.  Archibald MacLeish wrote in "Ars Poetica" that "a poem must not mean but be."  I often think the same of life.

Here is a moment.  We are alive.  We are.    

The Sacred and the Profane

Would you like to follow me on a journey 

into The Festival of the Sacred and the Profane?

It's just over there on the other side of the marsh

in that old World War II bunker.

Let's hike in to take a look.

No one advertises the festival.

There are no posters or fliers.  

It just appears each year 

on one day in October,

and so you find yourself there

among the graffiti and mud. 

And you ask yourself, 

"Where have I seen this bike before?"

To attend this festival, 

you've really got to want it.

But once we arrive, there's crowds and warm food

and aliens to show us the way.

Let's go inside.

We've entered a sort of subterranean Moulin Rouge

full of wonderful characters

and neon umbrellas to light the way

if not to keep us dry.

There's sex

and strange music pulsing through the near total darkness.

Stick close to me so you don't get lost in the chambers.

I thought I saw Todd pass by,

or maybe I just dreamed it.

You don't know who or what you'll meet,

or how they will greet you,

or when you'll find your way back out to the light.

The Festival of the Sacred and the Profane is an annual tradition on Peaks Island, and I was thrilled that we were able to attend it today.  As you could tell from the photos, it was pouring rain, but that didn't stop anyone from going.  It's a strange blend of heartwarming community (think Steampunk Saturday bean supper) and very dark, often edgy or eerie art installations and performances--a complete blast.