Hi to new subscribers! I’ve been on a bit of a summer hiatus. Sticky words for sticky days, attention pulled elsewhere, etc. I hope to come back with more regularity at some point, in the meantime, thank you for being here!!
Milk thistle’s green leaves are covered with marbled white patterns; like thick cream you can lick off but for spikes that will stab your greedy tongue. I put the seeds in the ground in April. Sometime in May, I noticed bits of green poking out of the bare bed. The thistle grew fast throughout the month and into June, covered in claws pointed chaotically outward. Not the perfect triangle points on a stem leaving an unprotected rose on the top. A defensive and beautiful trap that you can only sit and stare at.
My kids are drawn to it and anything else in the newly sprung garden like moths floating toward a buzzing fluorescent light on a humid summer evening. Just bloomed flowers, smashed between eager hands that can’t resist soft petals. The lemon balm leaves fresh and citrus, perfect to chew on while walking around. The favorite: the thin stalks of the green onion, wedged between their lips like little cigarettes.
Little rocks I’ve skipped across a pond.
The Virgin Mary’s milk fell on the thistle’s leaves, imparting those white veins, so they say. Silybum marianum, or St. Mary’s Thistle, or milk thistle. The plant compounds collectively known as silymarin, is known for its medicinal qualities like helping the liver and the brain. I knew it from its presence in some lactation support teas but it was its strangeness that made me want to plant it.
There was an old wooden fence eaten up by English Ivy when I first moved to my house. My deck was on its way there too. Huge parts of Virginia and up the mid-Atlantic are overtaken by ivy. You see it driving on I-95; choking trees and native plants in thick carpets, reaching out any and every direction. I have methodically over the years pulled the ivy back, slowly but surely getting at its extensive root system. The thistle would take over too, if you let it, making huge thickets of brambly hedges, toxic to cattle and other animals. A weed, invasive, dangerous, prohibited in some places in the US.
On an early summer morning in nearly June, before summer picked up in its heat and humidity, I look out my window and notice the electric purple- the thistle’s first flowers.
Doing/wanting. I spend my days pulling weeds that will come back tomorrow. Taking my son to occupational and physical therapy appointments. Making lists, making food. Listening to audio versions of news articles. Lifting weights and swimming laps. Trying to fix my attention span and read more.
On Instagram we can see each other’s likes on reels. Once step removed from sending a friend a reel to laugh at, two steps removed from watching Youtube videos together on your home computer, like I used to do in high school. Summer vacation pictures with location tags. Look where I am.
Its easy to say you want something, its easy to make a list of morals and beliefs. Its even easier to slip into the void of not doing. I’m interested in why we say we want things, in what people actually do rather than what they say they want to do.
Feeling: heat. In the morning you can feel it right outside the door, squeezing its way in through the cracks. It supercharges what exists. Exposing seeds planted in colder months, slow and then fast. Plants charged in the sun. Compost breaking down even faster, adding its own heat and dispersing life to new forms.
My kids chose a spot for their own cucumber plants and we wait to see whose will grow the most. My patch of native flowers floats in the wind, frequented by bees and birds.
Wearing: Lime green, yellow, havaianas flip flops, long skirts, thrift t-shirts, wranglers straight legs, old military surplus buys. Still living in linen and yoga pants. Slicked back hair and Sun-in.
Dreaming: of cold and brackish water in the bay, the James river, Maryland blue crabs, salt water, open windows, music on my Yamaha amp, sweaty hikes, trips to Cape Charles, camping, foggy humidity, that outside green that hurts your eyes because its so vivid and bright.
Reading:
Listening. Sloop John B is my favorite Beach Boys song. I don’t know why but it reminds me of my dad for some long forgotten reason. I’ll make the unoriginal point that Brian Wilson dying is part of the larger decline of our shared “mass” culture. We all listened to the Beach Boys, but do people have such unifying cultural touch points these days? Taylor Swift? Marvel Movies? Maybe? Brian Wilson’s brother Dennis Wilson was friendly with Charles Manson “back in the day,” the noted (maybe, probably?) MK Ultra connected cult leader. Maybe the CIA and US government helped influence our favorite figures in in the last century to give us that specific “American-landofthefree,antiussr,anticommunist,patriotic” thing but maybe they were okay curators. Now we silo. I first listened to Bob Dylan because I found one of his records among my stepmoms massive music collection. I wanted to soak up her aura, her coolness, by listening to what she did and I could access and she left the physical trail to pick up - cds, records, tapes. And now of course this lives online and the algorithm learns based on spent attention. I don’t know, I don’t think its necessarily bad, it’s just different, its just new. I also just don’t listen to as much new music since having kids. I’ll live in what I already like over and over and become an Aphex Twin dad:
Watching: Nature fill voids everywhere but mostly my garden at home, faded blue summer evenings and late movie nights with the kids. Summer falls heavy on old favorites - horror movies in the theater, classics like Jaws and Indiana Jones, but especially 80’s fantasies.
Okay, until the next <3
-Morgan
Would take a CIA culture curation role 💅 That bit made me lol.
Grandma core and the Virginia Slims comment made me 🤣