What Happened to Starfruit Salad?

Hi friends! It’s been a while.

Now, if you are reading this on my blog Starfruit Salad, you may be thinking, “What did happen to Starfruit Salad? Something, I assume?” And if you’re reading this on my new website, maybe you are wondering, “What happened to the old one?”

The answer is: I’ve been working on a re-brand, if you will, of my online art presence/blog, and I decided to use the name Maria Katharine instead of Starfruit Salad. This has been kind of a long time coming—I’ve been talking to friends for months about how I couldn’t decide whether to use Starfruit Salad, or Maria K. Ramsey, or something else, for the creative work I’m sharing online. I sort of liked them both, but neither really felt right, and it was really throwing me off.

Finally, a few weeks ago, I had the idea for a third option. I wrote out all three of my ideas, checked in with how I was feeling as I looked at them, and my answer was pretty obvious.

Adventures in Sleeping, Part II

Last time I told you about some of the strategies I’ve used to get better at sleeping, and I promised I’d share some of the strange inner workings of my sleepy mind. Are you excited??

After I got kind of tired of reading when I was trying to get to sleep, I moved on to writing. I’m a big fan of journaling, of getting my thoughts out of my head and onto paper. Afterwards I often feel a sense of relief, like I’ve acknowledged and let go of these thoughts and can relax, so it has at times helped me in the sleeping department. Sometimes, the words that come out when I journal at strange hours of the night turn into poems. I wrote the following at approximately 4 in the morning sometime last year:

September Salad Toppings

Hi friends!

I thought I’d share some more of the toppings that have been making my Life Salad so delectable lately. If that last sentence confused you, check out this post.

Here we go:

Brandi Carlile
Love her! Especially this song. I signed up for a free 3-month trial of Spotify Premium but I think I forgot to cancel it (which is probably exactly what they were hoping for…#oops.) Anway, now I can keep listening to Brandi in the car on the way home from work for another month, so things are all good.

A Love Letter to the Earth

Dear Earth,

You are a very nice place and I like you very much. Also you smell nice. Right now you smell like rain. You smell soft and quiet and sweetly herbaceous and the smell makes me want to breathe deeply and think a lot.

One time I went for a walk with my mom around a nearby cross country course and I thought it smelled so amazing. There were all these fabulous and unidentifiable plant smells mingling in the air and it made me feel like summer and happiness. My mom thought it smelled like dog poop. Obviously we had very different olfactory experiences. (Side note: the fascinatingly unique scent profiles that individual noses are able to detect is yet another testament to the awesomeness of this planet and all the life on it!)