THE ROBIN REVIEW

12/15/2024

12/08/2024

We are talking, again, about that ethology degree – which she eventually put to use in 2013 by buying and managing a 28-acre farmstead, 60 miles from New York City in Long Island. A conservation-minded community space where animals – including poultry, sheep and goats – are reared but never slaughtered, Mama Farm was born of weekend trips to the countryside with her children. “Then a piece of land came available and somebody suggested, why don’t you buy it and make a farm and take it away from the developer? And I did. It was ignorance and optimism. I didn’t know how hard it was. It’s still very hard.” She laughs. “But I don’t have a lot: I don’t want to die and have my children be like, Oh my God, what do we do with 5,000 sheep?”

Rossellini’s life is a happy balance of family, farming, film and other, more particular passions: she’s excited to begin touring her self-written one-woman show, Darwin’s Smile – “about the expression of emotion of actors and animals” – in France. For someone who has long been the face of anti-aging products, she’s decidedly pro-aging herself.

“You know, you get wrinkles and you get fat and you lose a kind of beauty – that is true,” she says. “But they never talk about the freedom that comes with that. More than freedom, a lightness. When you’re young, you have so many things to prove. You have to prove that you are intelligent, that you’re financially independent, that you’re a good parent. There are so many obligations. And when you’re old, you’re not proving yourself any more. I don’t know if I’m that intelligent or not. I am who I am. You start to say, if I don’t do what I want to do now, I will never do it. And life becomes more fun.”—Isabella Rossellini to Guy Lodge for

📸 Ali Smith

12/07/2024

I thought this was profoundly so insightfully correct on so many levels. Thank you always for your literary wisdom and kindness 

It’s as though we are living between two worlds. One world is filled with intimations of chaos, the other with glimmers of hope and possibility. Being back on the road again, I’m reminded of the goodness in people as we grapple with this extraordinary moment in history.

Many say Americans are apathetic, but I don’t think so. I feel a lot of people are just kind of frozen, almost paralyzed in this moment, disbelieving that we are where we are. Trying to figure out what to do.

But this isn’t a moment about figuring out what to do, because too much isn’t really known yet. It’s a moment to dedicate ourselves to who we can be. That’s the only way to fortify ourselves, to create the nervous system that will allow us to both endure and transform these times in which we live.

Having been through what I’ve been through over the last year and a half, I look at the world with different eyes. I said all the things that people are saying now are what we should have been saying. Ya think? I feel I’ve experienced thousands of years of womanhood speaking from the bottom of an ocean.

I feel gratitude for everyone who supported my campaign, if possible even more than I did at the time. We tried. And to those of you who listened to me before, or might be thinking that yeah maybe we should’ve listened to her more then, hear me now. I don’t know how, but I feel it in my gut. We are going to be OK.

But you can’t go to bed, pull the covers over your head and say “Tell me when all this is over.” This isn’t a time for checking out, this is a time for checking in. For facing the challenges in our own, individual lives, taking responsibility for our own mistakes and forgiving other people for their. Doing the inner work so we can be available for the outer work.

Rehearsal is over. these are the times, and we are the people, that will determine what happens now. This is not a time to cower. Turn on every light within your consciousness, of love and forgiveness and peace. Bless instead of blame, forgive instead of judge, stand up for what is right and true, and we will be OK.

12/07/2024

“Between light and darkness, within the shadows, there is always love.”

12/05/2024

12/04/2024

12/03/2024

Music Video · 2022 · Duration 5:18