illustration friday: fuel

When you keep your red wrigglers happy, that is feed them peelings from veggies and fruit, coffeegrounds, garden waste, dead leaves, straw and some nice steamy horseshit for dessert, they will give you the nicest compost in return: fuel for everything that grows. So let autumn do his job, let all the dead organic material rest where it falls. Let blowers and rake untouched, let the worms, bacteriae, fungi, amoebes, microbes and all the small unseen workers in the ground do their job. They make fuel for the earth.

illustration friday: scattered

Books lay scattered on the skyblue floor, almost floating. Luckily there were lots of hardworking  bookkeepers who kept them together. Sort of.

illustration friday: contraption

This contraption I invented for autumn play. It's specially designed for racing through heaps of dry, crispy  leaves.  To hear the rustle and crackle, to feel the twirl around you, to be in the whoosh of a brown, orange, yellow tornado.

illustration friday: hibernate

The words of Anais Nin are so true. It's what I do all the time. I'm busy all day with cleaning and shopping and playing and nursing and walking the dogs, and cooking and feeding and eating and gardening and when it's time to go to bed I say to myself: That was another busy day. And then I think: But there is one thing I didn't do and that's painting and that's the thing I really like to do, but I don't do it and don't know why there are allways so many others things that are in the way, and just before I close my eyes I say: Tomorrow I start painting. Tomorrow...

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934