Saipua

It snowed a snow that stayed on the ground for the first time this year.  It brought me a bit of hope that we could have a snowy Christmas.  Toronto never does.  I woke up this morning to rain.  Rain on the first advent of December? Not funny mother nature...not funny at all.

I have been reading (not just looking at the pictures of) Sarah Rayhanen's blog for a few years.  Her images and words are captivating!  She has a flower shop in Brooklyn called Saipua which is a hub for her incredible and prolific florist activities and more recently a charming "money pit" of a budding flower farm upstate--World's End.  She splits her time between the two and in her blog, the contrast is salient.  She teaches floral arrangement classes in Brooklyn and abroad, rubs elbows with the mayor, shovels horse shit and rips out ancient plaster walls.  Livin' the dream!  The thing that makes me love reading her stuff is that she doesn't fluff it all up.  She seems to have the same moodiness, battles with time, hilarifying moments and affinity for mistake making that the rest of us do.  Her arrangements and images are perfection; she is as real as they come.

Here we are, there we go. Time goes by in a flash. Everyone experiences the illusory quickening of time as we get older. But what if time is actually warping as the universe expands? As space balloons outward, why wouldn't time, the fourth dimension, also quicken in order to keep up with it? I think about my little niece and whether time for her as a 1 year old feels the same as time for me as a 31 year old simply because we live in the same time-reality. If my theory is correct, it would explain why people didn't live as long hundreds of years ago; time must have seemed epic! You got to be around 48 and you'd be like "Enough already!"

Saipua is located in Red Hook which is one of the neighborhoods hit hardest by the hurricane.  They are working hard to get things back to regular business. If you live in New York, you should stop by the shop to check things out or maybe let Sarah teach you how to make a beautiful bouquet at one of her classes.  Maybe they will do one in Toronto someday!?  I would be there with bluebells on.

Images above from SAIPUA.

More on flora coming soon...