Artwork by Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing Reconstruction of two Sinosauropteryx sporting their orange and white striped tails, borrowed from here
Hi. It's time to color dinosaurs. Woohoo!
First off, there was an exciting discovery by a team of Chinese and British paleontologists and earth scientists reported in Nature. You can read about fossilized melanosomes, pennaceous feathers and integumentary filaments at that article, OR you can do like I did and read the Dinosaur Colors for Almost-Dummies at the NYTimes.
The upshot is that all the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and any other illustrations you've ever seen were painted out of someone's imagination. Fossils are white or gray or brown, not the color of the original obviously. So there would be no way to know what colors dinosaurs actually were.
Until now!
These scientists made connections over the last four decades that birds have microscopic sacs of pigment in their feathers called melanosomes, and that fossils of extinct birds have the same melanosomes. Paleontologists in the 1970s had started believing that birds evolved from two-legged theropods - dinosaurs. And this led to more studies and evidence of feathers on dinosaurs. And so on.
By analyzing the shape and arrangement of the fossil melanosomes, they were able to get clues to their original color. They determined, for example, that a 47-million-year-old feather had the dark iridescent sheen found on starlings today.
Isn't that crazy?
So I say, let's celebrate and color some dinosaurs! Not that I am going to be limiting myself to the iridescent sheen of starlings. I found this enchanted web site where you can pick from brachiosauruses and megaraptors and dozens of other dionsauruses and color them virtually - any colors in their palette.
See, this is mine. What can I say, I'm not too wild. But you can be as wild as you want, although it does not let you color outside the lines, drat.
January 26 is Republic Day in India ~ A day the whole world celebrates the power of non-violent civil disobedience.
~ ~ ~
Permit me to synchronize that with a poor artist's rich sunflowers on a postcard my daughter sent from Amsterdam some time ago. You don't need a lot of money to create something beautiful. In fact you might be very poor financially. You might not ever make a living at what you do best.
Vincent van Gogh
Sunflowers, repetition of the 4th version (yellow background) Oil on canvas, 95 × 73 cm Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
~ ~ ~
And a winter field clipped of its corn looking "like a man's badly shaved beard"* might be where power waits under a white winter sky that will come to life under the heat of the summer sun. Just a plow, soil, seed, sun, rain ~ and a new field of corn will rise up ~ Just like that.
With the right combination of elements an impossible alchemy is possible.
Golden.
Don't forget it. - -
* simile borrowed from Guy de Maupassant's Miss Harriett - -
In the early morning hour, just before dawn, lover and beloved wake and take a drink of water.
She asks, Do you love me or yourself more? Really, tell the absolute truth.
He says, There is nothing left of me. I am like a ruby held up to the sunrise. Is it still a stone, or a world made of redness? It has no resistance to sunlight. The ruby and the sunrise are one. Be courageous and discipline yourself.
Work. Keep digging your well. Don't think about getting off from work. Submit to a daily practice. Your loyalty to that is a ring on the door.
Keep knocking, and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look out to see who's there.
- Rumi
So. What is "the work"? Somehow (apologies to non-American friends who don't follow our political soap operas) I don't think it's trashing and bashing Martha Coakley for being an idiot or Scott Brown for being the male version of Sarah Palin or John Edwards for being a slimy bastard, or any other number of my responses to the frustrations of the last week. Maybe Haiti has brought out the work in a lot of us. But I think thatwork is far away - as good as it is and present in my heart - and still not what Rumi is talking about. How to bring it closer to home? When he talks about lovers, is he talking about sexual love? I don't think so, even though that's the language he uses. You have to get even closer than that intimacy. He's talking about quarrying out divine love inside, through the rock of the ego. When I manage to dig, listen, knock, and see the joy look out, that's when I stop seeing the difference between me and someone else, when I stop saying in my head, "Oh I would so not have done what you just did." I can think I am so much better than a lot of people. But when I stop saying and feeling that, tension and exhaustion just disappear - becoming one, like the physical act of lovers, but on the inside.
This digging isn't for sainthood. It's not applying for doormat status. It's not la·di·da·ing oblivious to evil and stupidity. I think it's realizing that I am capable of everything I see behaved by humans - from the top of the chain to the bottom - as the parade goes by. Not seeing someone else as the other. That's the work. If it weren't hard, we'd all be there. But when you see joy look out to see who's there, it's ecstasy, and worth digging for again.
- - Some husbands give their wives flowers. Or Cadbury Kraft chocolates. Some get robin's egg blue Tiffany boxes enclosing something shiny. I watched old movies when I was little where tuxedoed men gave mink stoles to their wives, who then twirled round and round, diaphanous gowns flaring at their calves as they buried their lipsticked smiles in fur.
Happily for me, my husband gives me photo ops.
Like ornamental chickens with Samuel Beckett hairdos (see Honey on my sidebar). A weather vane named Carl the Cutter. A row of heavy bent sunflowers left for chickadee feeders and corn stalks that radiate the January sun. Gifts that are stealthy and still life-y, such as veggies in September just off the stem resting on the turquoise metal garden chair where I can see them when I pull in the drive. Or gourds and pumpkins lined up on fence posts.
Sunday it was the day's just washed eggs arranged by color on a dish towel showcase. Better than jewels. He said he was really just seeing how many he had of each color.
So what does the wife offer the leaver of egg art? His favorite vegetable that happens to have egg in its name, in a winter-warming soup: roasted eggplant with garlic. Even I who am not the #1 fan of eggplant's texture loved it, because it was pureed and super yums. Why do you suppose they're called eggplant? Sometimes Don's hens lay long eggs shaped this way, poor things. Well, apparently some cultivars of eggplant in the 18th century looked like hen's or goose eggs and were yellow or white. And, who knew? They originated in India, where they are known as brinjal, and that sounds something like the name I think is most beautiful for them: aubergine.
eggplant roasted with mashed roasted garlic mixed with Herbes de Provence
Eggplant-Garlic Soup
Ingredients: 1 cup roasted garlic 1/2 cup Herbes de Provence (available bottled, or dried herbs of your choice) Drizzle of olive oil Kosher salt and black pepper to taste 2 large eggplant 1 tablespoon olive oil 1 cup minced onions 1 tablespoon minced garlic 1 1/2 quart of vegetable (or chicken) stock (I added more stock to leftover soup the next day and liked the thinner consistency better) 1 cup coconut milk (or heavy dairy cream) Cayenne pepper to taste
Directions: Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In a mixing bowl, combine the garlic, herbs and drizzle of olive oil together. Season with salt and pepper. Mix thoroughly. Split the eggplant in half, lengthwise and smear the garlic mixture over the top of each eggplant half. Place the eggplant on a baking sheet and place in the oven. Roast the eggplant for 30 minutes or until the eggplant is tender.
Remove from the oven and cool. Using a spoon, remove the flesh of the eggplant and discard the skin. Heat the oil in a 2-quart saucepan. When the oil is hot, add the onions. Saute for 2 minutes. Add the roasted eggplant and garlic and continue to saute for 2 minutes. Stir in the stock and bring the liquid to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes. Using a hand-held blender (I don't have one, so I just put it in a regular blender), puree the soup until smooth. Stir in the coconut milk or cream and continue to simmer for 3 minutes. Season the soup with the salt and the cayenne.
Special post script note: I want to sincerely apologize for posting incomplete information about Turkish rescuers in Haiti. After the news program seeing Turks in the rescue effort, I searched online, even at the Hurriyet Turkish newspaper, for information about a Turkish contingent. I found many references to the Armenian group, and since many Armenians live in Turkey, I came to an imperfect conclusion that this was the Turkish contingent. I was unable, unfortunately, to find anything at that time about the Turkish group. I should have been more thorough and clear about that process in the paragraph about it. I have nothing but respect for Turks, who clearly in the last decades have come to the aid of not only their own who have suffered, but to those in other countries as well. In this post I have conveyed a personal story that reminds me that the Haitian tragedy, while massive, is about individual suffering and individual aid.
Here is the Hurriyet article posted 6pm today, about Turkish rescuers and the generous ten tons of goods donated to Haiti. Clearly in 2010 our friends Cemal, Hassan, Dilber and Ali would have something different to say.
"In Turkey, she would die."
We looked over at Cemal (pronounced Jeh-mahl) in the blue TV light. Hassan, Dilber and Ali all nodded in agreement.
"If a child fell into a hole here, no one would try to rescue her. We don't have the technological resources, and besides, we would just consider it her fate."
I don't remember how far the emergency team was into the 58 hours spent rescuing 18-month-old Jessica McClure after she fell 22 feet into a well in 1987. She was just a few years younger than Lesley and Peter. We looked like lemurs in our Istanbul apartment staring at the television news footage of Midland, Texas workers at night under floodlights leaning over her far below, talking to her, passing food and water down the narrow hole. She was still a baby, crying, the only word she said was "Mommy." They drilled a rescue shaft next to the well and dug over to where she was. Even cavers came in to help.* I don't know how many worked on her rescue, I couldn't find the total. I'm guessing dozens, maybe a hundred, or hundreds. The whole community around Midland donated time, equipment, tens of thousands of dollars, food, diesel fuel, and more for the effort of saving one child.
Fast forward 22 years, 3 months. On the news Friday we watched a Turkish rescue team with a Haitian man trying to find his missing wife who was trapped under a broken cement building. They had been tapping, and she had been tapping back. But the last tap they heard was an hour before. The Turkish rescuers and the husband weren't going to leave until they removed all that cement rubble and found her. They knew from experience that it might not be too late, and they had to find out. In India, after the 2004 tsunami, those Turks had rescued a woman - alive - after 7 days. Today is the sixth day since the earthquake hit Haiti.
From what I could find, it seems that the Turks who were sent by air across Africa and the Atlantic to Haiti were 52 Armenians. At least 30 countries have sent rescue and relief teams.
- - There have been countless messages of water in the last week. Garlic and sapphires in the mud (T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets), silence, or music, and the river - the Blue Nile, the Tigris, to name a few -
Every object and being in the universe is a jar overfilled with wisdom and beauty, a drop of the Tigris that cannot be contained by any skin. Every jarful spills and makes the earth more shining, as though covered in satin.
.................................................- Rumi, from The Gift of Water
I think we don't believe it, those words. Or many don't, and that's why we're in such trouble. But you know what? I believe.
It's just so hard to see sometimes. Like now, in a ravaged island in the Caribbean. Water water all around and not a drop to drink. But look how the water flows from every direction toward that point, to cover it with love and healing.
Anyway, the water flows, but still Nature and men rage, do wild and destructive things, we say stupid things.
GO WITH MUDDY FEET
When you hear dirty story wash your ears. When you see ugly stuff wash your eyes. When you get bad thoughts wash your mind and Keep your feet muddy.
I made a short slide show of water images. I took all the shots, except the last one - I don't have that capability.
Have a good weekend.
All images but the last "marble" image taken by the Galileo, courtesy NASA, are mine. Music in the video provided for free use by musopen.com - Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg performed by Free Tim with symphonic pieces on a professional Yamaha Midi board.
- - If you go at last to the Ethiopian restaurant nearby, remember this post, or google a bit before making an ethnocentric fool of yourself.
Most of us remember the 1980s when famines turned Ethiopia into one of the poorest countries and starvation was real for 8 million people. One million people died of it. Food is not something we associated with this country - more like the lack of it. But Ethiopia is now one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, and there seems to be at least one Ethiopian restaurant in most good-sized U.S. cities.
At our Ann Arbor Blue Nile, our waitress was a white American, so at least when we goofed and asked for small individual plates and used a fork to scoop up the wat, it wasn't in front of an Ethiopian. Yikes. Oh wait, the owner saw because he brought us more bread, he's Ethiopian. Such humiliation.
In the shot below Don has figured out the technique of tearing off a piece of the stretchy injera bread to scoop up some stew with his fingers. But see, he still has a little plate. And there is that blasted fork. Duh. Individual plates were my idea actually. "Could we get some small plates please?" They had so neglected our needs.
But the thing is, if any person in the world would not make you feel stupid for ignoring the whole point of Ethiopian cuisine - a way to bond by sharing food from the same plate and eating with your fingers - it would be an Ethiopian. I have never met more gracious and genteel people in my life. My sister Nanny's best friend is Elsabeth, from Ethiopia. "Hello Rootie, how are you? How is Don? How is Lesley? How is Peter?" she asks after not seeing me for maybe ten years. I happened to be squeezed in next to her surrounded by thousands at the outdoor Obama rally when he came to campus during his campaign in the summer of 2008. Elsabeth's daughter Kalcadon looks a lot like the painting of a face in the restaurant, top photo.
The table in that same photo, with chairs intimately circled around? That's a mesob - authentically it would be made of straw too, like the conical cover, which you leave over the food until everyone's ready to plow a furrow in the wat with their rolled injera. I am the worst kind of blogger. I research after the experience.
The spices used for wat are similar to Southwestern chili spice and the mix is called berbere, with chile peppers, ginger, cloves, coriander, allspice, rue berries, and ajwain (in Amharic, it's netch azmud and it's a type of caraway seed. By the way, I discovered a spice information page of a German Professor Gernot Katzer, including history and different names of spices in various countries and languages. Brilliant!)
Is every Ethiopian restaurant in the U.S. named The Blue Nile? Almost, I think. I don't know if they are connected, I didn't find out. But it's a good name for an Ethiopian restaurant, of course, since of the Blue Nile's miles - 900, about 560 are inside Ethiopia. The Blue Nile meets the White Nile in Khartoum (Sudan), which means "the place where two rivers meet."
In the next two photos are appetizers, which I liked a bit better than the main course wats. I'm not proud of that, because I'm pretty sure the appetizers are Westernized creations for morons like me. These rolls made with the injera bread are an ingenious way to make me happy though, with fresh veggies inside. Using that stretchy bread for wraps is a good one - easier than sticky rice California rolls, says me.
And crostinis with humus and roasted peppers and onions. I think that's feta on top. Super delicious.
Of course now I find a youtube, How To Eat Ethiopian Food.
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
"The Snow Man" - by Wallace Stevens
NOTE: About Bishop, the barn cat in the photo, above. Several of you left comments that you are worried about her. She lives outdoors. She has a very, very thick coat of fur. She has an ever-heated cozy bed in the garage where she can go when she wishes. In the shot above, she is doing what she loves to do on a sunny winter day - squirm around in the snow so I will pet her. Believe me, she loves her outdoor life and romps out there all winter long. On the very coldest days, she stays in her warm bed perch in the garage.
I really feel very sorry, and even a little afraid, for my poor friends who live in the South of the U.S. and in parts of Europe who are unused to a cold winter and have had many days of freezing temperatures. I hope you will be feeling warmer in the next few days. If your house isn't warm, please layer on lots and lots of clothes, and wear a hat and gloves indoors if you have them. Weather.com says the next couple of days will see temperatures start to moderate for you in the South.
I don't know how long my love of winter will keep me in Michigan, if it will last until the end of my life, if the end of my life is another twenty or thirty years as my parents lived. Even if I bundle up and feel toasty, my fingers turn into icicles before the rest of me gets cold. I think they must have had minor frost bite one of those nights ice skating in Grand Ledge under the bridge. When I went out yesterday to shoot these photos, every bit of me was warm, especially my heart. Except for my fingers. Even with good warm gloves and sticking them in my pockets between shots, they froze. But regardless of my aching fingers, I will always have a mind of winter, in the sense of Wallace Stevens' poem.
- - In January Michigan is cold. This week the whole U.S. has had a cold snap, with even the Orange Bowl football game being played in Miami in forty-something degrees fahrenheit (around 10°C). But that's far from normal, whereas here in The North, 0°F (-17°C) is not uncommon this month and next. When Mr. North Wind bottoms it out with some wind chill, staying warm is an art. Out in the country we have a propane gas tank that feeds our forced air furnace ducts that web into the walls of the house, but we try to keep the front half of the house where we live warm with heat from the wood stove, allowing us to turn down the thermostat and save propane. This means the rest of the house is chilly.
If you are truly of The North and love it as I do, this is perfect for bedtime, because where I sleep must be chilled - in fairy tale proportions. So for instance if Hansel and Grethel were sleeping in a cold room, a Grimm might have written something like -
The fire had gone out, and the air became colder every hour that the hands on the clock moved around the face's numbers. The brother and sister huddled together under their shared thin blanket, hoping to catch some heat from each other and fall asleep before morning. But there was one good thing about being too cold to sleep. They were alert to plan their escape.
But that isn't how it was in the wicked witch's cottage. She had fed them and was plumping them up to be eaten. After a supper of pancakes with sugar, milk, apples and nuts they were tucked into a warm bed for a cozy sleep, unaware of their impending doom. See? If they were cold they might have been more wary.
100% wool blankets made by the Orr felt and blanket company of Piqua, Ohio (pronounced pick-wah) could have been a blanket fairy tale children would cover themselves with. When I pull out this old blanket I feel like a child of an old time. Wool has been the warm weave for centuries, unlike microfibers in comforters nowadays, which are very nice and warm but just don't have the same aesthetic. However one blanket is never enough, and I don't put a wool blanket directly on top of the sheet, because it is too itchy and scratchy, even through a sheet. It's better at the foot of the bed in case I wake up freezing and need an extra layer against the frost.
On dark winter nights it is nice to turn pages of Grimm's Household Fairy Tales, illustrated by R ANDRÉ under a warm fleece blanket by the wood stove. Snow-White and Rose-Red welcome a big black bear in out of the cold to warm up by their fire. Evil dwarves and wicked Queens are always stealing or selling, and usually plotting to kill somebody, sometimes to eat them - all pretty scary and grimm.
When it's time for bed there are those uncomfortably Siberian minutes getting undressed, washing my face, brushing teeth, thinking about how cold the sheets will be. This makes me remember sleeping in a three hundred year old stone cottage in the Scottish Highlands outside a village called Lairg on Loch Shin in November 1980. They kept each room's door closed and only heated them as needed. So our bedroom was freezing - more than even I could stand - but there was a heated mattress pad in the bed waiting for us after painfully undressing in the Frigidaire - I mean frigid air.
When one of you goes to bed before the other, or sleeps alone, there must be some strategy for warmth. I don't care for electrically heated pads or blankets. I like a heavy pile of three or four blankets that doesn't move when I do - first the sheet, which needs to be dense weave cotton, no polyester, then a soft cushy fleece, then a heavy cotton quilt, then a flannel blanket and maybe the Orr wool, and if it's any warmer than 60-63°F (15-17°C), I get too hot. Perfect is having your body toasty and your face cool. The heavy blankets feel protective when you've just read grim and scary stories too, I think, but I don't want the story too scary to stick out my foot in case I get too warm.
The Orr felt and blanket company and Pendleton started making blankets in the 19th century, and during World War II both made hundreds of thousands of drab green army blankets for soldiers. I picture them not being able to get quite warm enough under one thin wool army blanket on cold winter nights, and that's no fairy tale.
Photo by Ginnie of her "Gathering Wisdom" bronze sculpture in October getting packed for her move to the Netherlands last month; NOTE: the sculptor is Mark Hopkins - after a couple of you thought Ginnie sculpted it, but quite frankly, she is artistic and soulful enough to do this kind of work, believe me. I am adding her avatar, below, which she drew when she was a teenager. It was my idea to make it her blog avatar. I don't know what I love most about it - the free girl, the forward motion of the whole image, the sillhouetteness, I don't know, but I have admired it since I was a little girl, maybe longing to be as free as that.
Remember if you can the first time you heard the word blog. Weblog. Web log. We blog. I think my first time must have been in 2005 when my sister Ginnie started hers. (I call her "Boots" because when she was born she was tiny, her booties went all the way up to her hips, and the doctor said "She's all boots!" That's her photo, above, and the blog post about the lady is embedded in Ginnie's name under it.) Blogging hadn't exploded yet, and I just wasn't very interested. I didn't even visit hers that whole first year, I really didn't get it. What's a blog? Even so, I tried to convince our decorator sister Nancy to start one too, picturing her beautiful designs on a pretty site that would reflect her talents.
Finally in January 2006 feeling inspired by Ginnie's In Soul blog because she did such a good job chronicling her life in words and photos, and I always liked journaling (though I didn't stick with it), I went out shooting pictures of the snow, came in, picked out a Blogger template (Minima Ochre), uploaded a photo of our spruce tree, et voila! -- instant publication -- what a rush! On January 21 I will have posted here every three days for four years, something I couldn't have known I would stick with at the time, let alone turn it into an outlet for writing practice and a new hobby of photography.
I've noticed a lot of reflective end-of-year and new-year blog posts about how blog friends are real friends. I couldn't agree more, and I also wonder what we imply with that statement. Maybe we feel some guilt that we don't have more face to face contact with people nearby? More on that in a minute.
These days online newspaper columnists have blogs. Celebrities and authors have them. What is it with blogging?
Is it that in just a few minutes you can fly over oceans and continents and meet a man in Chennai, India who tells you a story about a young girl named Priya saving him from wild dogs in a lovely tribal village near Varagaliar forest? That post needs to be made into a children's story and picture book. Through stunning photographs, humor and wit, rauf opens our eyes to Indian culture, to Nature, to what is not right with India's society and ours too, and he also shows what is so very right with humans, by being the right kind of human. I hope one day Don and I can shake hands with rauf in Chennai-Madras, with the smell of curry and diesel, the yells of street vendors and humidity so high my hair frizzes up like bird feathers - oh, kinda like Priya's, below. Please do browse rauf's posts and photographs, but be gentle on him because he hasn't had as much time to blog as he used to, and comments might frighten him as much as wild dogs!
Photos of Priya by rauf
This is what we owe each other. To speak honestly, to listen quietly, and to connect. When we live like this, our life is a prayer. I could not have predicted that in four years of contact with bloggers I would travel so far and learn so much - about specific places in the world and in space, about humanity, about myself, and that I would become more curious.
Don's turkey and chickens
I've watched my husband Don raise chickens and turkeys, gathering information for months, and blog about it. He researched some of his most valuable knowledge from other chicken bloggers - including Susie - who knew what they knew from personal experience. That is so helpful when you've read what you can at the official information sites, and now you just want to know what works and what doesn't.
I reconnected here at sync with an old high school acquaintance who is now a dear friend from whom I've learned much about the world: Loring.
Riding along with Bob, I rocketed into the night sky with conjunctions and fireballs.
I've imagined joy and mischief with future grandbabies reading stories and seeing photos shared by Susie, Oliag, Cottage Girl, Nancy and Bella Rum.
Each of you who visits synch-ro-ni-zing, I have felt you, here in my heart. I get new inspiration every day. Thank you for what you do, for helping shape this world, this gift of possibility.
I am happy to report that at least five of these dear friends are real. Don is my husband: real. Ginnie is my sister: real. Loring is my hometown neighbor and classmate: real. I've met dear friend Susie twice and Sanna once, and it felt like old home week: real.
As for face time with locals, I actually think I may get enough of it with Don's and my big families and my 1,000 academic advisees. But something Patricia told me in a comment got me to a gorgeous web site that supports reestablishing oral stories, to connect people with each other and the earth, called the Alliance for Wild Ethics - "a loose group of folks around the world who all share a common aim to rejuvenate a wild, animistic, participatory culture that honors the whole boisterous community of earthly life -- plants, animals, woodlands, rivers, winds, and thunderclouds -- as our real neighborhood." Apparently the site is somewhat dormant now, according to the founder David Abram, that is until he releases his next book in August. But it's worth exploring even in dormancy (like a woodland in winter). In 2010, thanks in part to Wild Ethics, while we're meeting here in our digital salons I'm going to remember to keep eye and hand connection with people and Nature firsthand.
Here's to being more wild, more free, more connected. If you have time please listen to Andrew Bird accompany himself on violin - while he sings - about becoming "this animal" in the official Rolling Stone released stop-animation video directed by Lisa Barcy.
Anonanimal
See a sea anemone, the enemy see a sea anemone And that'll be the end of me While the vicious fish was caught unawares In the tenderest of tendrils
See a sea anemone, the enemy see a sea anemone And that'll be the end of me, that'll be the end of me While the vicious fish was caught unawares In the tenderest of tendrils
Underneath her tender gills I will become this animal Perfectly adapted to the music halls Oh and I will become this animal Anomalous appendages, anonanimal, anonanimal
Anonanimal, anonanimal Anonanimal, anonanimal
Hold on just a second Don't tell me this one you know I know this one, I know this song I know this one, I love this song
Hold on just a second Don't tell me this one you know I know this one, I know this song I know this one, I love this song I know this one
Underneath the stalactites The troglodytes lost their sight, oh The seemingly innocuous plecostomus though posthumous They talk to us, they talk too much
See a sea anemone, the enemy see a sea anemone That'll be the end of me, that'll be the end of me Vicious fish was caught unawares In the tenderest tendrils
Underneath her tender gills and I will become this animal Perfectly adapted to a music hall I will become this animal Anomalous appendages, anonanimal, anonanimal
The window of the year is open the field white where nothing grows yet there it is curled 'round itself eager and attentive the magic life still, and ready to rise
the ear of corn the swaddled bean the bird and the leaf up and down like a wing
slowly slowly slowly here it is folding and unfolding inside. - -
Artwork by Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing
Artwork by Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing
