Celebrating our Blog-O-Versary!

In celebration of our two-year blog-o-versary, Tam and I wish to express our deep gratitude for the many gifts that blogging together at Kissing The Earth has given us. We’ve been looking back over the past two years and wanted to recount some aspects of our landscapes that we are especially grateful for. We’ve agreed to limit it to seven each (hard to do!) for the days of the week, for the seven liberal arts, for the seven wonders of the world and one more reason that will be made clear at the end!

Here are seven things in my urban San Francisco landscape that I am grateful for:

Crissy Field with its dramatic views of the Golden Gate Bridge, Bill Dan’s on-going creation of gravity defying temporal rock sculptures, the wide grassy space to kick the soccer ball for my Sheltie, Emma while sipping a hot chocolate from the Warming Hut (because even in the summer, especially in the summer, it’s cold down there!)

The Filbert Steps, home of the famous wild parrots of Telegraph Hill, leading down, down, down through the lovely Grace Marchant gardens, to Levi Plaza with its wonderfully wet granite walk-through fountain. Or up, up, up to Coit Tower with it’s brightly painted WPA murals and 360-degree views.

City Lights Bookstore, home of the Beats, half a block from The Language Of Birds light installation of flying books and the three story mural featuring Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Herb Caen and Emperor Norton, in the midst of North Beach’s vital café society where modern day Beats still gather to read from Howl on Sunday afternoons.

Fort Mason with its Readers Bookstore, Italian Museum, world famous Greens Restaurant, Cowell Theater, Blue Bear School of Music, SFMOMA Artists Gallery, (where you can rent beautiful paintings for a reasonable monthly charge), Long Now Museum (with the Rosetta Project which is archiving all documented human languages), and San Francisco Children’s Art Center.

Grace Cathedral’s labyrinths—walking the inside labyrinth when the organist is rehearsing and the sun is low on the horizon, so it casts dancing lights through the stained glass windows, or outside after dark with the trees in Huntington Park cheery with Christmas lights.

Golden Gate Park with The DeYoung Museum, Academy of Science, Japanese Tea Gardens covered in pink cherry blossoms in March, Opera in The Park, The Shakespeare Gardens, (and the soft serve ice cream truck with flavors like Saffron, Meyer Lemon/Thyme and Blood Orange—yum!) Stow Lake and the Great Blue Herons who return every Spring to nest in the Pines.

My lovely and amazing blog partner Tam, friend of my heart and soul. And our incredible writing community that stretches across the country and across the blog-o-sphere and with special thanks to our dear friend Sarah Wones Tomp who blogs with Suzanne Santillan at Writing On The Sidewalk for nominating us for the One Lovely Blog Award!

And from Tam: My list of seven things I am grateful for:

Watching the world turn from pitch black to orangey-blue as I run on the river trail at sunrise

Digging and planting and watering with my kids and—lo and behold—eating our very own cucumbers and tomatoes for the first time ever

 Fresh fox tracks in the snow

The scent and shade and soft of the pine

needles on the stonewall section of the Mud Pond trail

The spicy sweet smell of the essential oil my yoga teacher, Diane, puts in my palms, as we do shavasana at the end of class in her beautiful upstairs studio full of windows and plants and light

All five of us (my family) reading books or writing papers or relaxing in the living room with the chug chug chug sound of the pellet stove and the beat beat beat sound of our hearts

And I am grateful for Sharry, my blog mate, writing mate, soul mate, dear friend; and for the rest of my writing friends—you all make this wild wonderful process worth it; for all of you new blog friends who have chosen to share this part of the process with us, and to Writing on the Sidewalk for nominating Kissing the Earth for the One Lovely Blog Award.  Sharry and I are grateful, yes, and honored to be nominated.  Thank you Sarah and Suzanne!

We're delighted to pass on the One Lovely Blog Award by nominating a few of the blogs we love. (Again, it’s so hard to choose!) Here are three of our favorites:

The Drift Record

Write At Your Own Risk

Fiction Notes

The Rules of Accepting the One Lovely Blog Award

1. Link back to the person who nominated you.

2. Post the award photo in your post.

3. Share 7 facts about yourself.

4. Nominate a few other bloggers.

Take Good Care,

Sharry and Tam

The Language of Birds

On the corner of Columbus and Broadway, in San Francisco’s North Beach (my neighborhood) a flock of illuminated books hang suspended. Words spill out on the plaza below.


The Language of Birds—a permanent site-specific sculpture created by artists Brian Goggin with Dorka Keehn—was commissioned in 2008 by the San Francisco Arts Commission for a new plaza linking Chinatown and North Beach. The frosted white translucent polycarbonate ‘books’ give the impression of birds startled up in a flurry—or a dream of thoughts rising above articulation, while the words imbedded in the cement appear to have been left behind, like tea leaves, like bits of divination. Standing in the plaza, I always have the sense that a personal message is hidden in the scattered words, if only I could find the proper order.

Half a block down, on the roof of City Lights bookstore—the heart and soul of literary San Francisco—solar panels power the installation and offset the energy used to light up the books at night.

I read that the artists, Groggin and Keehan, decided the pattern of the fallen text through a project at San Francisco’s Modern Art Museum, by taking words from chosen phrases and randomly casting them from the third floor gallery down to the main lobby, relying on chance to give them order, and on interpretation for the meaning. It’s like a word game we writers sometimes play to summon the muse—I have a carved wooden box, filled with words I like, scribbled on bits of paper (cut up watercolor paintings from my girl’s kindergarten days.) From time to time, when I’m stuck, or bored, or looking for a way to jar language loose in my sub-conscious, I’ll close my eyes and take out a small handful, spread them on the table or drop them on the floor and start making sentences from the words I’ve been given. Here are seven words just chosen in a blind pick:

Chirp.

Plait.

Stir.

Ripe.

Slant.

Moan.

Levitate.

You could write a scene using the images conjured up by the words, or try to put them all in one sentence: She leaned into the slant of ripe moonlight and stirred her dreams with a levitating plait of longing—the chirp of floorboards made her moan. Yes, I cheated—the m-dash really links two sentences.

We all have words scattered throughout our landscapes, some less random than others. A guerrilla poet has been leaving charged poems in marker on strips of cut tape on North Beach sidewalks for the past few years.

For more thoughts on writing on the sidewalk and the writing life, check out the cool blog our dear friend and classmate, Sarah Tomp, writes with Suzanne Santillan—Writing On the Sidewalk:  http://writingonthesidewalk.wordpress.com/

Sharry