Billed as one of the bestsellers in stores that sell such items, the Billionaire Brownie comes in many variations. For my first attempt, I used a recipe from the Magnolia Bakery cookbook, which uses a brown sugar shortbread as the base, a layer of caramel, and then a brownie on top of that. They said more caramel could be added on top, but I’ve never been a big caramel fan, so I veered away from that – and honestly there was more than enough in the middle layer (a whole cup).
The results were spectacular for what was a rather simple recipe. The only time-consuming part was making the shortbread base and letting it cool before all the caramel and brownie mix can go on top. I was worried about double baking the shortbread, but it didn’t burn at all – and the brownies actually had to bake for fifteen minutes longer than the recipe time indicated before they were done (I lost track of how many dirty toothpicks gave their lives for this enterprise).
These sorry photos don’t do the sweet goodness half its due justice.
The full moon called to me last night, without warning or preparation, as I found myself on an errand and looked up to find her there, low in the sky, dancing with the bare tree limbs of late winter, and playing hide and seek as if it were possible for a full moon to hide in the barren sky of winter. She ducked behind branches, obscured herself in evergreen boughs, but her light shone through it all.
She followed me as I finished my errands, rising and changing from a soft shade of canary to a pale white as the night turned black. I captured her on the rise, when there was still blue in the sky, when a hint of spring rode on the breeze.
This is the Lenten Moon – also called the Worm Moon – and it’s the final full moon of the winter. Another sign of the season of slumber winding down. While this moon was going up, I saw Jupiter and Venus descending in the sky. All this planetary action feels exciting, signaling the earliest shift from winter to spring.
At this time of the year, my weekly pilgrimages to Faddegon’s are the only thing keeping my plant-loving soul alive. Starved for greenery and life as we await the slow-to-come end of winter, I whisper a prayer for an early spring, or at least a respite from the winter weather we’ve had of late. Speaking of prayers, the stunning foliage pictured here is from the prayer plant, a tricky plant I won’t even attempt, as much as I love the way it folds up its leaves at night as in prayer, giving it the common name. They are rumored to be too finicky for my basic plant care routine, and the spider mites love them, so I just need the stress.
They remain, however, ravishing, as you can glean from these glimpses. The mottled pattern and varying shades of green of their leaves look like a visual essay on painting – a vital jolt of beauty while the outside world remains gray and brown and barren.
A Monday in March, when the calendar still reads of winter, can feel like one of the sadder days of the year, especially when the time change is still on the horizon (is this really the last one ever?) The question hangs in the air, like Monday takes its time to pass, crawling to a slow but hopefully inevitable end.
Outside, the pool looks like a little pond, a calm and quaint version of the riotously green visage that will return in just a few months. Winter’s slumber is not quite done. The re-charge continues…
Here we are at March, the month in which spring will arrive ~ whether or not the weather will mirror that remains to be seen. At the moment, it very much feels like winter, with one of our bigger snowstorms having just dumped a fresh crop of white stuff on us. With that in mind, let’s rush through this next week, on the way to spring, the sooner the better…
From the magical way she describes the visual alchemy of the blooming periods of goldenrod and asters, to the pin-point accuracy of her scientific acumen, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been seducing readers with her wonderful work ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’. Weaving her scientific work as a botanist and professor with her background as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer reveals the importance of people and plants working in tandem, and how a generosity of spirit and living is essential to our healthy survival. In beautiful fashion, she tells stories that aim to marvel in their gorgeous and moving way of intertwining science and a love of the earth. She earns this Dazzler of the Day for positing the revolutionary idea that how we treat the earth, and how we treat each other, will directly affect how we survive in the future.
“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.” ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s richly-resonant book ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ is a wonderful way to wind up this winter season, and I’m taking my time getting through it so as to extend its wonderful spell. Kimmerer writes stories that weave Indigenous wisdom with scientific theory, held together by her love for this earth and our place in it. Her writing is compassionate and healing, the very things we need more of, especially at the tail end of winter. It reminds me to be more careful and considerate of what we take, how we take it, and what we give back – in deeds, in love, in thoughts and in action.
“We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.” ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer
The tea kettle whistles from the kitchen, beckoning me to deeper warmth. Pouring the steaming water into a tea cup, I embrace the ritual, finding solace in the customary motion. The body and the mind lead one another – when the mind is stubborn and unwilling, putting the body into motion sparks the familiar sensations, and the mind follows. Alternately, when the body is not up to the motion, the mind may lead, and the desire for those same sensations sparks the movement. Taken together, the happy denouement of a warm cup of tea in hand staves off the coldness of another winter night.
“I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.” ~ Oscar Wilde
The water in the crystal vase long ago dried up, but the roses largely held their form, still recognizable as roses, and from a distance still giving off the approximate form of their lush beginning. The rich rosy resonance has dissipated, any scent that remains is tied to decay and desiccation – a not-quite-fragrant embodiment of the word ‘faded’, the way you expect an antique to smell – dusty and ancient and dry.
Memories fade in a similar way, regardless of how many times we go over them in our heads, trying as we might to hold onto every detail of events and people that matter to us. In the end, all we have are hollow approximations of what came before, and they grow more hollow and empty with each passing hour.
“I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.” ~ Oscar Wilde
Youth fades too, and the plump full faces and skin cells of our younger years become gaunt and tired and saggy. Hair grows brittle and gray, as if being drained of life, and our senses grow dull and weak. It’s been a process that I haven’t been as bothered by as some had predicted, myself most of all. Perhaps that’s why it doesn’t seem as scary as I thought it would be. I was preparing for worse, and maybe that’s still to come. No one is spared the indignity of age if we are lucky enough to achieve it.
“But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.” ~ Oscar Wilde
And so we attempt to still time, to create something that lasts, a way to enshrine our memories, a method of preserving what has happened with the keen eye of what is current. This blog has come to embody the stilling of time in a certain sense, the way it freezes a moment, a memory, a photograph. These are the many pictures of Dorian Gray but in reverse – they stay the same while the rest of us grow old and whither away. It’s the way life should be, no matter how much we may rail against it.
“There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.” ~ Oscar Wilde
In a high scratchy collar decidedly not made of silk lace, in ropes of pearls around neck and wrist, I bind myself to another past, to another world, to another life. Tethered by trinkets and all that is trite, I have tied myself to an image entirely of my own making, and even if I have devised it to be shape-shifting and morphing and boundlessly expansive, it remains limited by my own failure of imagination. It is a trap, laid carefully by desire and fantasy, made pretty and frivolous and silly so as to mask its terrifying necessity, and the only way out is to become someone else.
If you’ve been yourself for as long as I’ve been myself, you’d be tired too.
“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.” ~ Oscar Wilde
The first whispers of wisdom, when we finally start to listen to them, are naturally upsetting. There is no way to face the reality of this life without feeling sadness, a sense of fatality, and futility. The second whispers of wisdom, if we haven’t given up listening, are the ones we hear when we realize that we are not the end of the world, that the wonder and the horror and the glorious muck we have made of things will not end with us. That comes with its own menace and regret, but wisdom’s work is not quite done. It will follow us around until we are finally ready to listen again – and if we are still alive, and still listening, the whispers reveal the wisdom of those at peace, who have reached a certain stage of grace and happiness and contentment. The beginning of enlightenment, perhaps, if you believe in that sort of thing.
Sadly, I’m nowhere near that last bit of wisdom, however I am starting to listen again. The music is faint, but I know it’s there. Maybe it’s a song for another time, and another blog post. Maybe it’s a song you don’t want to hear. Maybe it’s a song I’m not quite ready to hear. And so I leave it here, for however long this fading corner of the internet remains in place. When we are ready for it, and I hope we will both be ready one day, may we find our way back.
Truth be told, Angela Bassett has been doing the thing for years. She easily earns this Dazzler of the Day thanks to another year of winning performances on screen, including her award-winning turn in ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’. From her star-making role in ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’ through spellbinding work in ‘Waiting to Exhale’, ‘How Stella Got Her Groove Back’, and dozens of other movie and television roles, she has amassed too many award nominations and wins to name, and she remains at the top of her game.
“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.” ~ Oscar Wilde
Courage and sin sometimes go hand in hand. Unlikely bedfellows, their dance is often as incendiary as their uncoupling. When two things that don’t seem to go together find union, the results are unexpected and jolting. It presents something new to the world. New things, at this late stage of life (and it is definitely starting to feel like the end times) are strange and wondrous and welcome. We each seek the thrill of a new experience, no matter how old we get.
“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.” ~ Oscar Wilde
A ring and an earring dance on a saucer below the shade of a tea cup. Delicate steps of gold and pearl leave dainty taps against a landscape of porcelain, while shimmering light shards of diamonds cut across the curve of a cup. What simple magic there is to be found at the bottom of a tea cup… and beneath it.
“Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.” ~ Oscar Wilde
We say we want to know everything, we say we want to learn, but we don’t really mean it. How much peace comes from understanding? Solving a mystery rarely brings the complete satisfaction for which we supposedly strive, and the mysteries that remain in life are the only things that carry much interest. When you discover the secret of the magic trick, the magic is instantly erased. I wonder why we want so badly to excise all the magic from the world.
“In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.” ~ Oscar Wilde
A smoky candle burns beside a dried rose. A string of pearls winds its way around a silk scarf, an exquisite study of spheres, serpentine like the tendrils of some gorgeous perfume trail. Flecked with gold, the tea cup refuses to spill its secrets. When confronted with certain moments of beauty I don’t know whether to flee or cry. Beauty makes the heart hurt.
“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.” ~ Oscar Wilde
Muted are the sights and sounds of winter. March may bring storms and wind and other such fury from time to time, the proverbial lion making its dramatic entrance and roaring its arrival, but there are still a few weeks of winter left, weeks that may likely be gray and drab and colorless. There is beauty here too, though, something I’ve only recently discovered in trying to making peace with winter. The beauty of winter, for me, is in these quiet scenes – before or after a snowstorm, when the world is bracing itself for something, or creaking a sigh of relief beneath a pretty snowfall. There’s a hush that happens unlike the quiet of any other time of the year, buffered by the snow cover and aided by the hibernation or migration of noisier summer residents.
If you look closely here, you can see the buds of the Chinese dogwood. I’m hoping the worst of the cold temperatures are over, as a spell of sub-freeing temps may mean disaster for this spring’s crop of flowers. That’s always the risk at this time of the year, and after all this time I should have learned not to worry about that over which I have no control. The buds aren’t concerned, so why should I be?
I’ve known Elizabeth Brown-Shook since were were both in a summer Bible school, and after sharing that kind of trauma one can’t help but bond with someone. She accompanied me on many a ride to and from Empire State Youth Orchestra and Choir rehearsals, and I still remember her singing back-up to ‘The Immaculate Collection‘ back when Madonna dominated my airwaves. During high school, she was an indefatigable defender of positivity and school spirit, which was directly at odds with my persnickety and stubborn defiance of both, and she’s carried the same smile with her through adulthood. She’s seen more than her fair share of tragedy and hardship, so whenever I find myself complaining about some ridiculous thing, I think of her and her grace and perseverance, and am instantly reminded to return to a position of gratitude and thankfulness. For those reasons alone, she is crowned Dazzler of the Day – and for a whole lot more of how she dazzles, check out her linktree here for more of her eclectic endeavors.
There were works that came before and after which came close to perfection – ‘Confessions on a Dancefloor‘, ‘Erotica‘, and ‘Like A Prayer‘ are all solid entries in the Madonna canon – but ROL was a masterpiece form start to finish. Even her best albums have at least one clunker, while ROL has none. And so we hit play on the wondrously-whirling title track, which exuberantly reminds of all those moments when we feel like we just got home:
The ‘Ray of Light’ album taught me many things, and continues to do so. First and foremost was the idea of being present and living in the moment. For far too much of my life I’ve focused on planning and plotting and what was going to happen next. That makes for a well-organized existence, but zaps a lot of spontaneous enjoyment and fun out of each day, even if it was designed and planned to be enjoyable and fun. Some things in life cannot be planned, and if you’re a Virgo that’s always a little disappointing. Learning to appreciate the present moment was a key stepping stone on my road to becoming a little happier. The totality of the ROL album helped me to see that.
Twenty-five years have passed since this Madonna moment played out, and the work has stood the test of time. Its themes are universal and its lessons are continuously resonant. For all of its racing tracks, there is a Zen-like calm to its trajectory that makes ‘Ray of Light’ more like a musical meditation than a mere collection of songs. That journey is a trip worth making again and again.
He first came to unassuming light with his understated but anchoring performance in ‘The History Boys’, and since then Russell Tovey has been turning in one surprising performance after another, in work that varies from ‘Looking’ to ‘American Horror Story: NYC’. He and his body have been featured here previously in this gratuitous post, but this marks his first crowning as Dazzler of the Day.
