*I found this art work on the internet, with no artist credited, perhaps because it is embroidered by – one assumes – a woman. It reminded me of the work of Frida Kahlo: intense, dark, lovely, detailed, almost shocking but – not, in part because it is so gorgeous, colorful, intense, detailed. I have always – since I was a child – aspired to do embroidery – an aspiration I have done absolutely nothing, nada, nyetski to accomplish. Aspirational, and at this point, my embroidery is of words, while I admire anyone who actually engages in the art of needle and thread.
I’m not even sure if this is a raven or a crow, which confusion mirrors my real life inability to distinguish between these birds in the area around my rural home. How many times have I looked the differences up – crows are bigger, I think – only to forget. There is a difference in the beaks, one is more crooked than the other – but. I cannot retain the deets, and that’s okay too. When I was a kid, I thought my dad knew everything, and would ask him to identify a lord flying by the window of our car, which he might not even have seen. Regardless, he always came up with a name, the more ridiculous the better: cross-eyed sap sucker, double breasted nut hatcher, green-eyed hula bird. The ability to appreciate without having to name or know what a bird or anything else in the natural world is – is okay, particularly given the way naming has happened in this world, too often by colonizing men, after themselves!
