Yesterday, while marking up my sketchbook with sharpies to finish a design project, I realized that I don't draw enough. I also don't blog enough. Considering the genuine bliss and zip that both of these efforts bring me, this is doubly sad. 

So here's the compromise: a thirty day drawing challenge. Day One: yourself.

And, since I was sitting at my kitchen table eating tapioca out of a coffee cup when I made this decision, here I am sitting at my kitchen table eating tapioca out of a coffee cup. Plus a crown of flowers in honor of June, which has been for me a month of magic from day one and counting.

send her victorious.

The facts are these: I have a really stellar mum who a) not only tolerates my eccentricities (I speak in accents, mostly British/Commonwealth, when especially happy) but b) often encourages them. Like last week, when we kind of sort of laughed about celebrating the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and then, around two o'clock that Saturday afternoon, suddenly realised COR LOVE A DUCK WHY WOULD WE NOT CELEBRATE THE QUEEN'S DIAMOND JUBILEE?!

So I cut a quick stamp and scrawled out a dozen invites while my sister whipped up the trifle and my mum and I set about transforming the backyard and seven hours later we had a party full of people from all sorts of places but one common love. Hail Britannia, indeed.

The good news for those of you who may have missed out on such an occasion is that while the official party played out last weekend, the Jubilee celebrations last until the end of the year and you can join in when you like, where you like, and as you like. Not convinced? Spend some time with the best of the best over at our party playlist and you might just change your mind.

me + mum | BALTIMORE '88

This past Mother's Day I was asked to speak at my church meeting, which I did, somehow, despite a whole lot of panic and procrastination in the weeks leading up to my ten minutes at the podium. Mostly my friends and family did not understand this. "What do you mean, 'what do I speak about?'?!" they'd say. "It's Mother's Day! You talk about mothers! Why is this hard?"

Thing is, it's just not easy. Mothers, motherhood, mothering. I think about this often, mostly confusedly, seeing as it is both my mortal birthright and eternal inheritance, and here I am in the middle of it, very much single and researching travel writing stints in Nepal. It's a whole lot of in-between to fathom.

Which is all just to say that this was my first official time writing about motherhood, but it can't possibly be my last. And if you'd like to read what I'm thinking, you can catch the full essay after the jump or download the PDF here.

yellowstone.

[Silence] permits us, in short, to be who we are and could be if only we had the openness and trust. A chapel is where we hear something and nothing, ourselves and everyone else, a silence that is not the absence of noise but the presence of something much deeper: the depth beneath our thoughts . . . They are the one place we can reliably go to find who we are and what we should be doing with our lives — usually by finding all we aren't, and what is much greater than us, to which we can only give ourselves up.                                   

 PICO IYER | Chapels

1. morning glory   2. grand prismatic   3. spasm geyser   4. the grand canyon 

  5. uprooted   6. lodgepole pines   7. at the falls

Happy Mother's Day to the best and brightest.