Children Sprinkled In

Drawing by Rick Beerhorst (left) drawing by Grace Beerhorst (right)

I stumbled across this picture above as a favorite among my daughter Rose's Flickr favorites.  It reminds me of how magical and righteous it is to have children regularly sprinkled into your day.  It really is a good thing and I need to remind my self because they are fun and creative and sparkly and cute but they also wreck your favorite shit on a pretty regular basis which is just part of the whole frikken ball of wax.

Since we brought home a used upright piano via Criags List a couple of weeks ago, Rain (age 9 yrs) and I are trying to learn how to play.  A very crude version of Beethoven's Ode to Joy can be heard several times a day at completely random times coming from the foyer of our home which has recently been designated the Music Room. I am working up my own primitive version of Professor Longhairs's Mardi Gras. Some portion of us must remain a child forever and having children around are a great reminder of this simple truth. 

Beasts, Trees, And Stones Can Talk

Bookish, Constanza Camarillo

Sabriel, Pearl Beerhorst, drawing available here

The Bridge, Ann Wood

I began reading to Rain and Grace from a new fairytale book last night at bedtime.  The book has come from Pearl's Room.  I asked Pearl for suggestions because we just finished up Little House On The Prairie and we needed a new book. She wisely recommended The Violet Fairy Book first published in 1901 by Longmans, Green and Co., London. In the preface it includes this;

The stories in this book, as in all the others of the series, have been translated out to the popular traditional tales in a number of different languages.  These stories are as old as anything man has invented.  They are narrated by naked savage women to naked savage children.  They have been inherited by our earliest civilised ancestors, who really believed that beasts and trees and stones can talk if they choose, and behave kindly or unkindly.  The stories are full of the oldest ideas of ages when science did not exist, and magic took the place of science.

Can there be anything better than sending children off into their dreams through the pages of an ancient fairy tale?

Beerhorst Family Spring Art Show 2013

Rain show off some of her handiwork.  The children are growing up in the flux of making and selling which gives them an earl taste of the "real world".

Here is a shot from the living room seeing through to the dinning room.  The house at this point is over flowing with the abundance of arts and crafts that had been slowly building up through out the cold winter months.

Here you can see that we are living on a micro urban farm.  The fresh spring starts are visible through the straw mulch along with brand new peach trees.  The Wonder Wagon has become an icon symbol of our bohemian family life style.

This little video put shot and edited by Pearl is our invitation to all who may be interested to come and share our Beerhorst Family Spring Art Show this May 3, 4, and 5th 10AM-8PM each day.  This is an important event for us because if gives us a chance to open our home to the public and share what we have recently created.  Going into an artists home is a much different experience than what will ever happen in a gallery or a museum.  It is not necessarily better but it is unique and decidedly more personal and revealing. 

Deep Into The Woods

This week we borrowed a car and got out of town to the beautiful Seidman Park just to the East of Grand Rapids about 20 miles.  We walked the trails kicking through the layers of fallen leaves.  The woods were beautiful and sad with bare trees all in a pallet of muted greys and browns.  We all dressed too warm and the layers started coming off as we made our way deeper into the park.

At one point we noticed a small mostly hidden pond which we had to leave the trail to get to. Rain was picking her way along the bank when she stepped off a large stone and on to what looked like the dry bank and sunk past her boot in the wet mud camouflaged with the layer of dry leaves.  She made the rest of the journey with a one foot soaker but she didn't seem to mind too much.

It just felt so good to walk through the woods that day. We finished with a picnic dinner of sandwiches and nut mix at the end of the trail. Getting out of the house and taking a walk through the woods was a simple way to reconnect with nature and each other.  I cherish those opportunities.

Natural Disaster

Natural Disaster  (listen to song here)

She's a natural disaster, ain't nothing faster
coming to your town, just to blow it down
waking you up in the middle of the night
she don't care a damn thing about treating you right
she's bringing destruction, it's her big production
so mister get your self ready for the reconstruction
I can't help but wonder who gave her all her thunder
what we did to deserve her wrath incurred

now she's swinging her censor a smoking fragrance of disaster
I wish she'd just calm down and skip over our town
but there's anger in her eyes that's hard to survive
knocking over the trees, gett'n us down to our knees
reconnecting our lives to some real live pain
here come the tears, mixed up with the rain
with a big gust of wind, she pushes her way in
it feels like the end of the world in a storm with the name of a girl