Lisa Loves...
I’m so excited to bring you this batch of “Lisa Loves” — I hope you find ideas worth keeping.
USB Rechargeable Candle Lighter
If you’ve read my blog at all, you know I love candles. Candles are an integral part of the sanctuary I create every day.
One thing I DON’T love is all of the non-recyclable waste that comes from candle lighters. I have so many candles that I could go through
Enter my new USB Rechargeable Candle Lighter! It’s good for tens of thousands of uses, and the plastic and batteries can be recycled. As it uses no fossil fuels, it is the Tesla of candle lighters.
While it’s not a perfect solution to mountain of plastics that we create and discard every day, it is an incremental improvement that I love. And it works great.
Interiority
I decided to include this concept of Interiority among the things that I love, because I am all about what this word stands for. This is a word I find myself using more and more as I delve deeper into the meaning of sanctuary.
Sanctuary spaces become, in a sense, alive. They are not exactly conscious in the way that we think of living things. But they have a sense of “within” about them. That is the interiority of a sanctuary space.
I believe that everything, every plant, every rock, and even human-made things like a house has a sense of within, an inner life that is its interiority.
Rachel Carson
Yes, I love Rachel Carson. She was, like all of us, a woman of such formidable depth.
Born in 1907, she earned her Masters Degree in Zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932. Derailed from her work as a PhD candidate by the Great Depression, she then became only the second woman hired for a full time position by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in 1936, outscoring all of the other candidates who took the Civil Service Exam that year.
She was “the scientist-poet of the sea”, a gifted and celebrated writer on the ecology of the natural world. Her best-selling work The Sea Around Us(1951) won the National Book Award.
In 1962 she published her final book,, Silent Spring, and singlehandedly launched the modern environmental movement.
DDT was used at that time as a common agricultural and household pesticide. With scientific proof and her gift for narrative she wrote movingly about how DDT was less an insecticide and more of a biocide that killed indiscriminately wherever it landed, decimating our wildlife and leaving our natural resources desolate.
The power of Silent Spring was such that it provoked the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1963, the Wilderness Act of 1964, the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act of 1972, and provided the impetus for the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.
Rachel Carson was a woman of poetry and power.
Farrow & Ball’s Color by Nature
Farrow & Ball makes some of the most beautiful colors known to designers the world over, and they are coming out with a collection of 16 new colors.
That alone is worth getting excited about.
When I heard that this color collection, created in collaboration with the Natural History Museum of London, was based on the 200-year-old publication “Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours” my heart nearly skipped a beat.
This is the 1814 volume that was the first attempt at naming colors with exactitude, making it the precursor of such modern systems as the Pantone Matching System.
This was the volume carried by Charles Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle in 1831 on it’s 5-year voyage around the world.
The colors of Farrow & Ball’s Colour by Nature Collection are nothing short of glorious, and I am already imagining a sanctuary warmed by these gorgeous hues.
With gratitude,
Lisa