Category: Photos

That tomato leaf smell

Sometimes my mind feels like a pinball machine — zooming in opposite directions every five seconds, triggering happy lights and sounds on some journeys, falling into a pit of existential crisis on others. My likes, my dislikes, and even my identity can seem so volatile.

But one of the few things I’ve found to be consistent is how I feel when I am around growing plants, specifically growing vegetables. They make me absolutely buoyant. I feel radiant, like jumping around — sometimes the feeling seems almost too ridiculous to be genuine, but it is.

One veggie thing I adore in particular is the smell of tomato leaves and vines. This like became heightened after I found a tomato leaf candle at an arts festival last summer in Rogers Park. I would get way up close to it while it burned, breathing in the joy and peace, having a quiet moment in my first solo apartment.

Here in Mexico, I’ve been really wishing I could smell a tomato plant and get that little hug from home. I’ve been poking my head into nurseries, and even scanning the streets. Well, yesterday I took a trip to the college botanical gardens and finally got my wish. Plants galore, and so many tomatoes. Here’s a little collage of the trip.

 

 

Words are on vacation!

Taking a break from words and posting a few photos from the past couple weeks.

* Some images of parks/Chinatown from my stopover in Mexico City.

* A beautiful image of a nun adorned in flowers, taken at a religious art museum that used to be the Santa Monica Convent. It was the first convent where lower-income indigenous women could join, and the history was fascinating. A very austere place, but radical for its time. Upon entering the convent, families could only visit the nuns twice – once when they were inducted, and once when they were buried. It has a lot to do with what I’m writing about now, so I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

* Training with lucha libre fighters (their hands are over their faces because they are masked rudos), plus a beautiful image of a luchadora I found in a book. Learning lucha libre has been an awesome source of fun and stability here. They say if I train with them for a couple more months, they’ll give me a mask and costume and let me perform! Definitely learning some crazy moves I’ve never seen before, but MMA is a good foundation.

* Miscellaneous photos of the space here at Arquetopia, street art I’ve seen in Puebla, and random little tinkerings of me getting tired of writing and playing around with someone’s leftover charcoal and modeling clay. I have no idea what I’m doing, but it’s fun getting messy and out of my head! And now I have a little earring holder.