Choice

I've been thinking about choice lately. More than usual...and so I give you:

The word that allows yes, the word that makes no possible.
The word that puts the free in freedom and takes the obligation out of love.
The word that throws a window open after the final door is closed.
The word upon which all adventure, all exhilaration, all meaning, all honor depends.
The word that fires evolution's motor of mud.
The word that the cocoon whispers to the caterpillar.
The word that molecules recite before bonding.
The word that separates that which is dead from that which is living.
The word no mirror can turn around.
In the beginning was the word and that word was
CHOICE.

I didn't write this. Tom Robbins did.

Totes!

When I was little, my mom carried tote bags everywhere. Perhaps this is because she was/is a teacher and tote bags are the best things to carry books and papers in, aside from a backpack and my mother has never been the backpack kind. Well, I never got it. I always thought it seems cumbersome to lug all those bags around. I'm very much a backpack kind of girl, or was, until I moved to the city. (I swore I'd never carry a purse and now I never leave the house without my black leather purse from Fossil. Ha!)

As it turns out, I'm becoming a tote carrier too. Last summer, when I was in Germany, D's friend Sandy gave me my very first tote bag from her shop, RoyalWe. It's thin, light and it's made of modern looking black & white print. I used the bag a lot in the summer and since then, I keep eying other tote bags. Seriously, how many does one person need? It's likely that I'll only ever carry one a time anyway! That being said, I recently acquired this bag:



But that's it, I swear! But in case anyone else out there is looking for a good tote bag, take a look at this one:


It just goes to show you- no matter what you think you like or don't like, your tastes and opinions are constantly evolving as you grow, in both big and small ways.

(First tote is from Alphabetbags.com; the second is from APC)

Always with Us

I recently saw these pictures on Pete Dungey's website. He's an artist who plants flowers in potholes. Brilliant.


These pictures remind me of a conversation I had with one of my teachers back in highschool. At the time, a stretch of woods near my house was about to be buldozed to make way for a new highway and I was upset about it. My teacher and I were talking and she pointed out that no matter how hard we humans try to squash all the nature around us, nature always, always prevails. She reminded me that even the toughest concrete cracks over time because lush, soft green plants are pushing with all their might below. We've all seen little weeds and flowers growing out of sidewalks before but I don't think we consider how much effort it took for them to break the concrete that is suffocating them or the fact that those delicate plants, with the help of humidity and frigid cold, actually did all the work.

Pictures like the ones above and this incident remind me that the real world is always with us. No matter what. No matter what we do. You could be standing on a sidewalk in Toronto, drinking a latte and texting on your Blackberry, and you'll look up and they're could be a deer looking back at you.