U is for Urn-Burial, Uxorious, and Underhill

Steatopygous female figure
I’m catching up on my Encyclopedia of Me entries:  it’s time for “U.”
Urn-Burial is a section of the title of an extended essay by Sir Thomas Browne:  Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial, or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk (1658), which takes the occasion of an archaelogical discovery to consider the nature of [...]

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Owls and Orreries

The barn owl (Tyto Alba) is my favorite bird.  The owl was sacred to bright-eyed Athena, and its name in Greek, Υλαυ´ξ, glaux, also refers to the brightness of its eyes.  Although there are many debased images of owls–remember those terrifying and ubiquitous macramé things with the frayed and fluffed acrylic yarn surrounding wooden bead eyes?–they retain [...]

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Inscape, Implacable, and Ironing

Inscape is a marvelous word, uniting as it does Victorian poetry and late medieval neo-Platonism, two things I love.  Inscape is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ word for a unique quality of particularity which dwells in every created object.  Every thing–person, blade of grass, cupcake–has its own inscape, which expresses some element of the Transcendant which could not be expressed by [...]

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E: Embroidery, Ectoplasm, Ebony

Embroidery was the first needle art I learned. My first project was a classic 1972 owl pattern on coarse brown linen. I may or may not have finished it–but I remember having to take out crooked stitches and re-do them! When I look back at that, I marvel at my mother taking time to teach [...]

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Over at BellaDia

Cassie is starting the “Encyclopedia of Me” meme.  Here’s what she has to say:
“Okay, here’s the meme that I was thinking of: Starting tomorrow, August 1st, I’m going to make a post each day of the month beginning with “A is for…” and on the 26th day, “Z is for…” Now, I know there are [...]

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