Tenille Evans

@tenilleevans

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1,269
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The state of the world right now has us feeling like we aren’t allowed to feel our own personal pain. Like we aren’t allowed to have small town problems. Like our problems aren’t important in the big scheme of things. I want to remind you that if you follow your problems to the source, they are likely caused by the same huge systems of oppression that are ripping the whole wide world apart. They all just intersect at different places for all of us. Your personal liberation is tied up in the liberation of the world and your pain is important too. Your struggles are important too. Don’t switch off one or the other, just learn to better flow between them. Softly and with care and purpose. Your passion for liberating the world and your passion for liberating yourself are linked. And so they should be. Don’t turn away from one or the other. There’s room in your heart to feel everything for everyone and include yourself, I promise. Cake for attention because people like cake. PS I know I haven’t posted in a long time, it’s likely because I’ve been caught up thinking I have nothing to offer the world right now. My thoughts of course were lying, as they do. This post, like they usually are, is a note to self as much as to whoever needed to hear it. PPS I love you
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1 month ago
My boys play in the garden of our new home. My favourite trees and flowers were lovingly planted there by a settler before me and I adore them. It takes work and different soil to make peonies thrive where the earth knows wattle and gum. I appreciate that. Deliberate care and attention is how humans make homes out of places. I also know they make homes with machine guns and tanks though. By planting foreign pine forests in the place of ancient olive groves. Making rubble of homes that had been there before. It’s hard to feel joy here in the face of that. Knowing that what is happening now on the other side of the world, also happened in this place too. In a series of events that led to these peonies that I love. This choosing of paint colours. I don’t know what to do, but what is being human other than seeking out that centre amidst the extremes. Riding the waves of contrast. Death, grief, longing, bliss, peace, safety. Home is precarious. And like all precarious things all we can do is pay attention and generously love anyway. That is to say, we with the privilege of relative peace and safety can do that. We with the boys playing in the garden and not buried under rubble. Life really is a lot right now. I don’t know if happy is the right word but I am grateful. Always grateful.
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4 months ago
Happy birthday @mitchkablephotography . I can’t imagine a better person to share this life with.
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7 months ago
“Paying attention to things, it’s how we show love.” Fresh strawberries. Compote. Elderflower and strawberry gum jelly. Whipped cream. A little streak of gold as the sunlight through the trees. Paired with quince, elderflower and basil. There’s something about strawberries and cream that speaks to the sublimity of simple pleasures. It reminds us that the holiest of experiences are the most human ones. The moments that anchor us in our bodies, that pull us out of our heads and into the moment. At the end of the world, it’s these things that matter. Photo by @mitchkablephotography #thelastofus #vegan
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8 months ago
I want to talk about convenience foods. Convenience foods are life saving. It’s ableist and classist to judge people who eat packaged foods and assign some kind heightened morality to being able to eat freshly cooked from scratch meals every day. By the way, there are convenience foods that do meet our nutritional needs, this isn’t a health debate (I would never attempt to start one, that’s not my forte). I eat packaged food. A lot. When I come home from work I’m so overloaded from the huge amount of sensory input that I get from making food for other people. I usually can only handle safe, plain foods and I often don’t have the spoons left to cook for myself. (And yes I do need a new job, that’s another discussion.) My point here is that you shouldn’t let anyone make you feel like you aren’t doing veganism right if you aren’t batch cooking loads fresh organic vegetables and picking fruit straight from a tree. Yes cooking can be pleasurable, but when it isn’t, you still deserve to be nourished and not feel guilty.
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9 months ago
Mushrooms by Margaret Atwood In this moist season, mist on the lake and thunder afternoons in the distance they ooze up through the earth during the night, like bubbles, like tiny bright red balloons filling with water; a sound below sound, the thumbs of rubber gloves turned softly inside out. In the mornings, there is the leaf mold starred with nipples, with cool white fishgills, leathery purple brains, fist-sized suns dulled to the colors of embers, poisonous moons, pale yellow. Where do they come from? For each thunderstorm that travels overhead there’s another storm that moves parallel in the ground. Struck lightning is where they meet. Underfoot there’s a cloud of rootlets, shed hairs or a bundle of loose threads blown slowly through the midsoil. These are their flowers, these fingers reaching through darkness to the sky, these eyeblinks that burst and powder the air with spores. They feed in shade, on halfleaves as they return to water, on slowly melting logs, deadwood. They glow in the dark sometimes. They taste of rotten meat or cloves or cooking steak or bruised lips or new snow. It isn’t only for food I hunt them but for the hunt and because they smell of death and the waxy skins of the newborn, flesh into earth into flesh. Here is the handful of shadow I have brought back to you: this decay, this hope, this mouth-- full of dirt, this poetry. Photo by @caitlinschokkercreative
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10 months ago
This kid is 13 today! Happy birthday Cash, so grateful that he chose me to be his mum. 🥰💕
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10 months ago
I walk a slow path, in search of secret fruit. Calling out their names in my mind, like spells that might summon them. Practicing laying each syllable neatly along my tongue like lamellae. The sunlight hits something that isn’t grass and I move faster towards where it shines. Not faster than the gleaming thick slug that is already curled around my prize. Too many doughy wet chunks have already been digested, the pileus too disgustingly slick. I keep looking. Searching for that flawless form. Knowing it only lasts one moment. One brief moment between dirt and wet digestion. Each addition to my basket is another fleshy reminder of how all perfect, momentary things melt back into the earth.
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10 months ago
And in the blink of an eye, my baby, Lincoln is 6.
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11 months ago
My beginner ID tips for lactarius deliciosus aka the saffron milk cap, also called pine mushrooms in Australia. Saffies are the best mushroom to start with here in Australia if you are a beginner forager. They really no dangerous doppelgängers once you know the key ID features and they are abundant and easy to find this time of year in the many pine forests across the country. 1. That’s actually the first tip - they are ALWAYS under pine trees! If there are no pine trees anywhere around, you do not have a saffie. They grow symbiotically with the pine trees and cannot grow elsewhere. 2. The cap will be a lovely matte orange, usually with a slight concentric ring pattern. The cap will usually have a bit of a dip in the centre. 3. The gills underneath will be a brighter vibrant orange. Older or bruised specimens do start to turn a little bit blue or green in places, this is normal but the best ones for eating will be a nice bright orange. 4. The stipe, or stem, is usually hollow and has a matte mottled pattern running along it 5. There is usually a milky orange latex that comes out when you cut it, you will get orange fingers! When IDing a mushroom you haven’t found before, make sure you tick ALL the boxes. It’s best to go out with someone who is experienced the first time. You can also send me a message with some pictures if you aren’t sure! Bonus… Harvesting tips… Cut or pull?? There is contention around this, but there have been studies that show that cutting the mushroom off at the base with a knife or pulling it from the soil makes no difference to the health of the mycelium (the underground root system of the mushroom - the mushroom is just the fruiting body of the mycellium!) Foot traffic actually makes more of an impact than this. I like to cut the mushroom off cleanly so that I don’t take too much dirt home in the gills of my mushies! also… use a woven or wicker basket so that the mushrooms spores have a chance to disperse around the forest while you’re harvesting. If you liked this, save it! I’ll share cooking tips sometime soon too. #mushroom #mushroomforaging #lactariusdeliciosus #bluemountains #lithgow
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11 months ago
8 blissful years with the sweetest, kindest, most thoughtful little person by my side. Happy solar return to my middle baby Clark, what a pleasure it is know him.
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11 months ago
It’s that time of the year again. Nothing anchors me to reality more than foraging for mushrooms. The reality that we are all part of an interdependent whole, part of a circular, abundant ecosystem. The reality that the earth is caring for us, even when we don’t care in return. It’s an exercise in gratitude, for all of the ways that the universe is taking care of us. Not because we deserve it, or anything entitled like that. But because we actually are the universe, awakened to itself. It wants us to thrive, because it is us. If only we understood that the reverse is true too. The universe, the earth, is us. We might look after it a bit better if we did. Thanks for the photos @mitchkablephotography #mushroom #mushroomforaging #autumn #forestphotography
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1 year ago