Get to Know Lisa Rosman Through Her Various Works

Not Giving Up Just Yet

“I’m a wild seed again/Let the wind carry me.” I woke with such a strong urge to listen to the whole For the Roses album. I fear it’s because Joni is slipping from us for good—she’s been in between worlds for a while now—but more I think it’s because her tranquil turbulence, her third eye in the storm, is exactly what we need right now. I love you, Joni Mitchell. I love everyone else too.

Schmalentines Liberation 2018

I am beyond cool with the fact that this leggy supermodel is my most constant valentine. She is coated in the softest stripiest fur, purrs rather than barks (more than I can say for my human loves), never steals the covers, has the tiniest emotional carbon imprint , and thinks everything I write is the bees knees. Sure, I spent the day debunking the capitalist myth of romantic love for an essay on the second-wave legacy of The Feminine Mystique, and that felt pretty durned good. So did the two episodes of Broad City I just inhaled with two shots of tequila. But my point—and I do have one, to quote the great Ellen DeGeneres—is that love is love is love, and I’m grateful to experience it in so many ways in this life. I wish you oodles of love as well.

Cocina Asana

One thing I have been in 2018 is scattered. First I was a whirling dervish, then I crashed like a bad 90s band. So tonight I’ve been doing what I always do when I desperately need to collect myself: I’m cooking. There’s something about the slow deliberation of cooking–the foraging for ingredients, the chopping and scrubbing and peeling, the tuning into what wishes to be prepared–that is more centering than lotus pose, tadasana, or even the New York Times crossword puzzle.

Simmering on the stove is my first real kitchen endeavor of the year–a moroccan lamb stew, with cinnamon, lemon peel, ginger, garbanzo beans, tomato paste, chicken broth, apricots, onion, carrot and parsnip, bits of cilantro and mint and garlic and cumin tossed in for good measure. Like all good witches, I’ve gone way off book, and am trusting the wind to tell me what to sprinkle in my cauldron. My house smells great, but only tomorrow will reveal if my culinary magic is still in place. It’s the day after that tells the real story.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy