at Great Salt Lake, Utah

Lieve Verschuier - "Comet Above Rotterdam" (1680)

The people I love best jump into work head first without dallying in the shadows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

Peruvian textile fragment

By Joachim S. Müller

my spring colour palette: hilma af klint paintings

Observed by andy11889, CC BY-NC

compiled by Sultan Murad III Albums of Murad III; Persian art 1570-90

band of lace made from human hair, likely worn as a bracelet, 17th century, from V&A

an animated bowl – the images on the bowl are an ibex. when turned by the hands, we see the ibex leap to bite the leaves, and the images merge from one to the other in succession as if the animal was animated. iran, 2600 b.c.

from City of Fire with Starwatchers by Moebius

laumeb

marie léon

Craiglockhart Grotto, Colinton Dell, Edinburgh, Scotland. June 2026.

Disused concrete outflow-pipe supports, near Troon, Scotland. November 2025.

— Emily Dickinson, from “[1708]”