Four card set with classic black envelopes. Drawn by an old friend of Far Leaves along her inspiring journey.
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There is a personal story behind these cards, and the small drawings that appear on them. How did they come to be (in significant part) created in the Far Leaves shop? The short version is that years ago, when I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, I used to sit in the old Far Leaves in Rockridge, where the oolong tea inspired me to make charcoal drawings. Now, decades later, I live on the East Coast and have an interest in drawing (still), although it’s not my day job. Last May, I suffered a serious spine injury during a yoga class, as the result of which I couldn’t walk. Actually, I couldn’t do much of anything: work, sit, stand, or move around extensively. So I took up drawing again, and had the inspiration to draw every line of a very long song. While I was creating drawing after drawing, the idea was, I would also learn to walk again, adding a few extra steps every day. The song I chose was Bob Dylan’s great 1962 ballad, “Hard Rain” – recently sung by Patti Smith to the Nobel Committee in Sweden where its composer neglected to show up to accept his Nobel Prize. Each of the lines of that song seemed like a whole world, an end and a beginning, so I began with line one. By the time I got to the middle of the 47 lines (in the body of the song), I was able to walk a block or two very, very slowly. It was late June by then, and my family had planned to spend the summer in the Bay Area. I managed the flight and immediately on getting to Berkeley, started spending time in Far Leaves to complete lines 26 through 47. By the end of the summer, I could walk several miles.
The drawings on these cards are miniaturized copies from the original series, which was done in ball point pen--because you almost always have a ball point pen on you! They feature some of my favorites from the series. I hope these little drawings will be as fortuitous in your life as they were in mine.
--Rebecca Lemov
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