40 days
i LOVE my yoga class.
it surprises me by being musically inspiring. the soundtrack to our practice is rock'n'roll, hip hop, old-school ballads. i often find my booty shakin'. when my teacher natalie recently challenged us to practice SOMEthing for 40 days, i chose to blow a decade and a half of dust off of the guitar i never learned to play. and learn to play. 7 days in and my fingertips hurt so good.
it's been a while since i've committed myself to learning something brand new. i forget how challenging it is to start from scratch, to be bad at something and to keep at it. i watch my one year old daughter do it every day - try and fail and try again. so i keep strummin'.
these are musical days: i saw the pixies last week and in a few days, among other bands at austin city limits, i'll see sonic youth and the flaming lips. the music of these 3 bands altered me, shaped me, blew my young mind. this weekend i get to plunk on my guitar then scoot down the street to hear the sweet sweet sounds of some of my musical heroes. ahhhh, austin.
cowboys and indians
herndon heald has roots in both austin and santa fe. over the years these towns have carved their names in our heart. our latest collection is a bit of a love note to these towns and their aesthetics– cowboy and indian.
santa fe is a place that in many ways still lives its history and i find it fascinating for many reasons. one of those is the unabashed adornment of both men and women. because of santa fe’s native influence, you see men wearing bright colors with long hair, earrings, and cuffs the size of a purse. you don't see that in many places in this country. and for the most part, it looks good. it’s a town full of folks that brazenly adorn themselves; fringe, silver, and turquoise abound. there is a part of me that finds it calming. it’s not about the latest trend in santa fe - it’s a place where you can actually see history wrapped around someone’s wrist or braided into their hair.
now texans,by and large, aren’t afraid to accessorize either. the women have a reputation of big everything and it’s not hard to find men wearing gargantuan belt buckles and cowboy hats. but in austin, the treasured accessory is a tattoo. glance in any direction and you’d be hard pressed to not find one - on men and women, on the young and the not-so-young. seeded from cowboys and hippies, austin has a rebel streak that the art of tattoo seems to go hand in hand with. it makes sense to me that a town that revels in the art of live music would also appreciate the live art of tattooing with its emphasis on the here and now, the artist and the ‘audience’.
i got my first tattoo this week. or i got it started at least. i felt moved to mark this time and place, to take a bit of the here and now and keep it with me always. my outlaw great uncles had tattoos. my mother in law has tattoos. my husband has a tattoo. my daughter won’t remember me without one. I’ve just carved another little somethin’ into our family tree.
in celebration of adornment of all kinds, we offer this, our latest collection.
at the center
we just got back from a month in santa fe. every year we try to trade austin’s hottest days for the respite of santa fe’s summers. i spent most of my hours in our herndon heald studio, which sits on the santa fe river at the foot of the sangre de cristo mountains. it’s calm outside our studio – babbling water, rustling leaves, the crunch of the gravel beneath one’s feet.
but inside the studio, it’s buzzing - machines humming, folks talking, music playing, everyone moving about.
herndon heald summers are marathons. the world blurs as we race on. i am reminded of the chaos that is so often in the middle of apparent stillness, the restlessness that can reside under ostensible calm: the storm at the center of the eye at the center of the storm.
the monsoon storms were magnificent this summer. it was my daughter koruna’s first thunderstorms. she said ‘hi’ to the thunder. she said ‘hi’ to the rain. she has just turned one and says ‘hi’ to everything - to the raspberries in the yard, to the bird as he flies by, to the morning moon as she makes her way across the sky.
her greetings are not casual; they are invitations to engage. the ‘hi’s actually sound as if they might be a response more than an initiation. one morning on a hike i found myself addressing objects in this way and discovered that i like the subtle shift in viewpoint. saying ‘hi’ to the trees allowed me to feel a kinship. it required me to pause and to find the calm in me that recognizes the calm in them.
it seems fitting to greet the wind, the stars, the water in the land of the pueblo indians. but i wondered how the conversation would translate to my austin life. i now say ‘hi’ to my studio when i arrive in the morning. i greet the pile of dishes in the sink before i wash them and the beans as i pour them into the pot. it alters things for me. it alters me.
a scepter
i love sunflowers - especially dying sunflowers. they’ve sprouted up and are now fading in our vegetable garden – volunteers whose seeds dropped from the bird feeders. i went out to the garden the other morning to spend a few minutes with their wilting bodies and encountered a familiar face there. it was the face of a big papier mache head that ian was making the moment i first felt koruna moving inside of me. that face has been perched on a dead tree all the days and night since, hands outstretched, and is beautifully weathered now. like the sunflowers. when i look at that tattered man amidst the chorus of dying sunflowers I think of him as the deliverer of sermons in Ginsberg’s "Sunflower Sutra".
“So I grabbed the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul
too, and anyone who’ll listen,
--We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread
bleak, dusty, imageless locomotive, we’re all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed
by our own seed and golden hairy naked
accomplishment bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hill tincan evening
sitdown vision.”
koruna just turned one on father’s day. the speed of her first year astonishes me though i reckon it feels a lifetime to her. some days i feel aged and am glad to count as kin those beautiful weathered things out in the garden.