Fran Wescott

Zen Movement? Nothing in my aesthetic could be considered "Zen," but even so, I find myself clearing shit out of our house with slow-but-steady efficiency. One good reason for my commitment to this odious process is so that we can save a space for the big, grown-up lives that The Girl and The Boy will be cultivating over the next few years. I am also, however, more keenly aware of the need to cultivate space in our home for my own life, my own thoughts. That's such an odd thing to pronounce. I could just have my thoughts. But I do believe that in much the same way we all need to cultivate sleep hygiene; I am finding the need to cultivate thought hygiene. And this will influence my decision-making around which shit must go. I shall weed mercilessly (but carefully) the shit I've saved for the kids. Neither child wants all their elementary school art projects: I shall exercise thoughtful curation of each young'un's "collection" of repr...

Teahouse This weekend I treated myself to an excursion into the Orange County countryside with my sister. Nestled in the middle of nowhere is an open-air teahouse crafted out of reclaimed wood and perched on top of an assortment of re-purposed shipping containers. Visitors to this aerie get a second-story view of more than a dozen raised flower and herb beds. There’s the vivid saffron yellow of the flowers that eagerly wave in the breeze as if to say to passersby and onlookers: “pick me!” Next to them is the spiky purple flower of the lavender plant. Lavender is the quintessential show-off plant: both herb and flower. Tall, impossible color, overly proud – perhaps even confident that it will be noticed before the saffron yellow of the neighboring bed. In spite of the cheerful beckoning of that sunny flower, lavender will garner the most attention with all that exotic fragrance and color. Standing watch behind this competition is a bed of very tall, very consistently-sized...

Stew All I’ve got is a stinkin’ analogy: You know how you make a giant pot of stew (of any kind) and you eat stew for a week in an effort to empty the pot? You eat stew every day and you exercise massive gratitude and you thank the universe for stew and you practice intentionality and savor every morsel. You observe reasonable portions and try not to gorge yourself on stew and at the end of the week you look in the bottom of the Tupperware and you still have about three bites of stew left. Before you move on to the next awesome – perhaps even improved -- meal for the coming week, you need to figure out how to dispense with those three fucking bites of stew. There’s no eating the stew – you’re done with stew. You can’t just pour the soapy wash water into the Tupperware – you’ll end up with nasty, soapy stew instead of a clean Tupperware. What do you do? You have to empty the damn Tupperware. So, in my experience of reality, the stew is this most recent phase and view of my life...