This week’s mushroom is Lactarius indigo, or the indigo milk cap. This mycorrhizal mushroom grows in eastern North America, Central America, and East Asia. The fruit bodies range from a striking dark blue to a pale blue-gray and ooze an indigo “milk” or latex when cut or broken. The cap is depressed with gills that are adenate or decurrent and produce a yellow spore print.
I normally draw my mandalas in Procreate, a raster art program, but this week, I started teaching myself how to use Affinity Designer, a vector art program. This will enable me to produce lines that are sharper and cleaner. I got impatient with the tutorials I could find and kind of jumped right in! I vectorized my logo in color and b&w, digitized one bullet journal page to be printed as notepads eventually and even started next week’s mandala in Designer. It’s definitely a learning curve as drawing this way is very different, but I love that you can zoom in on the images without the image getting all pixelated.
Physically, I mostly took it easy as my toe was still quite sore and early in the week I was still feeling weak from my stomach bug last week, but I did manage to pack a few boxes. And I booked movers! I officially have a moving date!
We went to the library and I picked up a few books; Crip Up the Kitchen- an awesome cookbook geared toward making its recipes accessible; The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self Love, which I’ve been reading and journaling along with; and lastly Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit.
Last week, I joined a Decolonization Support Group to work on my decolonization journey in community with others. This week we talked about what decolonization means to us and where we are in our journey right now. In this context, decolonizing is about, as a piece from The Peace Chronicle defines it, “deconstructing or dismantling colonial ideologies and challenging the superiority of western thought and approaches.” On the flip side of the coin is “re-indigenization” in which we learn about indigenous approaches to society and begin to replace our western approaches with more indigenous approaches. While re-indigenization is a newer concept to me, I’ve been working the past few years on decolonizing how I see and walk through the world and working to challenge the pillars of white supremacy culture as I notice them and I’m super excited to have a group to work with on this.
