your life is a poem

🌸🌞🌸

Your life is a poem being written everyday by you ✨ 

may loving things like blooms in the daylight, bright moons at nightfall and bird chatter be always at your window.

✨ things to remember ✨
- we live in a world with birds
- we live in a world with books and berries that grow on trees 🍒
- don't forget to water your plants
- don't forget to have water for yourself too 🦋
- sing like the birds do, just because
- put a flower in between a book to press it 🌸
- not everyday has a positive way to lean
- imagine tomorrow being better than today, it is quite possible

✨ What are your things to remember today? ✨

educated woman ~

Album is exclusively available at Blackbyrd Myoozik in Edmonton and Calgary! 

 

You can also purchase at LIVE SHOWS!

 

Available online NOW

♡

in favor of taking your time

home sweet new home

 If you have begun to wonder where I have been — I return to you today.  My winter has been scattered with work and play, both of these have required a certain type of brain energy that leaves me very tired by midday. My November was twenty days away from home as I embarked on a songwriter tour from Alberta to British Columbia and back through. I saw the mountainside before and after an avalanche, I listened to the prairie wind howl, the sky-like space that rolls between each ocean wave, I sang for my supper, I sang for strangers, some of whom became friends. I visited nightly the notes between my lungs and guitar as if every broken moment was meant to lead me here.  If you asked me of the hardest hill to climb in doing such a thing, I would speak of how I missed the early morning coffees at home and the way thoughts have time to gather and conclude when you're not on the road. As you ride the highway, you think often, but you don't have the hours free to make much sense. You know as the wheels roll, you are on your way to a new town with new faces but you don't yet know what they will think of you and what you will be thinking when you fall to your pillow at night. 

You go on singing into the shining lights in a room you've never stood in before and it gives rise to both an uneasy and beautiful feeling like nothing else I have ever known. When I was young, I only dreamed but it seems lately these dreams have come true and I am required to pinch myself in order to believe this reality of mine. Sometimes, I feel like I am just singing into a jewelry box and one day when the lights go dim, somebody will jump out at me and say "wake up, you're still only dreaming.."

the squirrel highway and autumn.

I stood in Griffith Woods as a storm was blowing in from the mountains. The living trees shook and the dead ones crackled as squirrels hurried across the broken down log, their own highway of sorts. I thought about the imagery of a tree being knocked from its roots and falling down in front of me. I shuttered at the way a tree stands so tall, then quite suddenly, something like the weather roars and rattles, swallowing whole what once stood so tall and it made me begin to wonder about the very strangeness that is my own life.

These woods. This wind. The cutting down of our snapdragon crop. Never knowing if it is too early or too late to pull the flowers from the ground and making dried bouquets. I take what is left of the tomatoes and watch them ripen on the kitchen windowsill. Dreaming, always dreaming of berries cooked in pies and the way sunlight bends through these spaces we have come to know as ours.

my life in photographs

 It has been thirteen days since I last posted here — which quietly breaks my heart. I found an interview I did years ago and it reminded me of why I began blogging in the first place. It was not for the applause or the very small promise that is sharing your inner world and hoping others like it too.  No, it was an escape shoot from the mundane, a way of finding myself as a girl, as an artist, and beyond all, my own way of figuring out what it meant to be a human being. I could convince you with certainty that I am a better woman for having had this blog. It has been the greatest task I have ever followed through - because of what I have learned, because of who I have met, because of how vulnerable these blog entries turn me and I am so glad to have shared these years with you.

sunlight on the staircase

the wild call of summer

Where has the time gone? It seems to me that it was only yesterday when the wild call of summer came knocking on the door, now it is passing us like a sprinting pony and all I can do is try to hold on without quivering or crying at the thought of this warm hug of a season leaving me. I had plans, I had dreams, I had a lot to say in the months of June, July and August but mostly, I simply moved through the days and now I am here, sitting beside the climbing sweet peas, knowing one day they will be no more, but doing what I can to remember how good it is when they are here. I guess this is what happens when you make an album or take a dream from your head and try to make it into something you can hold. You spend so much time sitting on the stoop thinking about it, wondering if it is good, if it is worthy, if it is the best you can do. Art is a strange thing and nothing swallows time quite like over-thinking.

How to press flowers

A few years ago, I wrote this post and it still remains as one of the most asked questions around here: how does one press flowers. I decided to post it again as August is nearing its departure and petals are blooming all around - the perfect time for flower pressing!

summer flowers

How Long Blues Music Video

I am both over the moon and out of the comfort zone sharing this with you today. The music video for my song 'how long blues' has been released into the wild and it is my greatest hope that those of you who watched the storyhive pitch video and voted for this to come true are pleased and proud with our final video. 

griffith woods in july

In Griffith Woods, the birds hop from tree to tree and the bells of nostalgia ring. Here, I find reminders of my own childhood — the light, the warmth, the way Alberta flowers are growing from the ground, the distant sound of creekbed water rolling over fallen logs, the sense that nothing matters, yet everything does. I could spend many hours here and I would still want to spend an hour more. To be away from the world as we know it, to set this brief life as something good, to wake as if waking from a fever and to find myself in these woods, how could I want anything else?

----

Tomorrow, I will be leaving for Hawaii with my mum. Hawaii in July was never something I planned, only because the winters here can be harsh enough, if I were to ever dream of a holiday, it might be to escape the winter's bluest days. I am feeling a bit strange about missing out on the garden or the singing gigs that seem to come in double during this time, but I am also feeling a slight twinge of guilt for worrying about these things that come to mind at all. How often in my lifetime will I get to adventure with only my mum by my side and the taste of mangoes from the tree? Isn't it just like a human to find reasons to worry or complain when everything is actually quite good and lovely?

I will leave C behind. I will leave my banjo behind. And the snapdragons too, but it has been so long since I left the city and I know it will treat me well to do so.

If you want to follow along,

I will be posting on my instagram!

outfit details: winners blouse, good looking objects leaf earrings

at life's crossroads

The sun is doing a dance between cloud and open sky. I should be so glad and feel as if I am a part of it all, but I spent the morning crying which made the sun just a soft spot for drying my eyes. Some people will tell you that you need reasons if you're going to be crying but the truth is sometimes crying is just a human way of saying "look after yourself." Many a dream or idea was born out of the badlands of a crying bout, it is a certain kind of reaction that happens when hearts and heads meet. Today, it was no other than feeling like I have so much to be done and not knowing how I will get to it all. How does one measure the day with just the right amount of work and rest so you can carry on happy as a fat caterpillar on its way to becoming a butterfly?

--

Below the lilac tree, honeyed light colors my hair red, a color that used to sit on top of my grandmother's hair but we never had the chance to meet. I wonder what she would say to me now. Perhaps, she would say something along the lines of worry less and live more. It takes time, these things we do, these meanings we try to uncover, these dreams we try to pull out of the ground, but there is an art to befriending time in such a way as to not fear it, but to welcome it, an art to keeping time without wishing it away.

I know the nasturtium is growing wide-eyed and able, the snapdragons are climbing, the marigolds are already tall, and I remember how long I waited for this. To be able to rise in the morning and walk barefooted into the backyard. To look for hummingbirds and bees and all sorts of signs from the living. It is not yet over for us — even when it feels like it is as your eyes fill with salty water, you're just a human being and what you do with that both wicked and beautiful understanding is

 up to you.

outfit details: topshop embroidered jeans, thriftstore blouse & sunhat

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