I think a lot, about all kinds of things. Like many folks, I think about thinking, what I’m thinking about, how what I’m thinking about affects me and those around me and how what I’m thinking about either serves to provide energy and steam to my day or instead drains energy, creativity and perspective. It’s a loop, friends. An infinity spiral, uroboric maelstrom at times, and I’ve realized something with all of this thinking. How we handle downtime, those ten, fifteen, twenty minutes here and there, really freakin’ matters. These small oases in the midst of busy lives could support moments of reflection, meditation, throwing a few rows or rounds onto a knitting project or chances to see something interesting.
More and more, I am choosing not to reach for my phone just to check email that I cannot respond to in the moment because I don’t have time (and then forget about responding to later because it’s not highlighted anymore), read the news that is consistently maddening and not much different from when I read it that same morning or afternoon, or from what it will be in the evening after my kids go to bed. I am choosing to try harder to tend to those things right in front of me and allow for a little space to remember to just be.
The other day, I had about twenty minutes in between engagements and I opted to step in to an antique store I’ve passed many times to take a gander and just have fun. Look what I saw!
yarn winder
old, old spinning wheel
another sweet wheel
And, I did get myself a treat…
old sewing bag
with thread and doilies made from it!
I still read the news that day. I stayed up-to-speed with my responsibilities and tasks. Got all the things done… but in the midst of it all, I found a little bit of time to look at beautiful things and breathe and relax. It felt like a tiny vacation, stolen in the midst of a work day. A reprieve and a joy. Even if it is simply looking up at the sky while waiting for a meeting instead of looking at the phone, consider it a moment lived, not killed. A moment that gave, rather than one to recover from. A moment spent with yourself, ultimately your most precious person.
Have I let too much time go by in between posts? My longing to write about the moments, the textures, the projects and the beauty around me has been dulled, stolen really, by my broken heart, fear and unyielding anger at what is this new administration in the county in which I live, the United States. I am finding it hard to write about lovely things that I get to enjoy when executive orders put out by the president-I-cannot-name and his lackeys are, in my estimation, severely screwing shit up. People, beautiful, innocent, loving people are being traumatized and retraumatized by having plans and dreams wrestled from their hands, literally, in airports. People, lovely, hardworking, courageous, resilient and prayerful people are trapped now, either within US borders or outside of them, regardless of having the right paperwork in many cases. We have here a president who is saying that all is fine, all is great, things are working well in airports… have you seen the images of people grasping at one another after being detained for many hours because of the country they flew in from? Have you seen images of the protests all over the country? All over the world? Sorry. Things are not fine. Things are not great.
The Dakota Access Pipeline…
The Wall between the US border and Mexico…
Healthcare…
Here’s what is bringing me hope, making the blood move in my veins with energy, combatting my desire to go to sleep for four years (or two~ here’s to the mid-term elections people, let’s make some shit happen): the protesters all over the world showing the powers that be that actually, not everyone shares the same ideas about huge groups of people; an overwhelming amount of people are aligned with world citizenship and have compassion and love flowing from their core; lawyers are freaking BRINGING IT to serve people, pro-bono, to help them deal with the cluster that is this Executive Order on Immigration. You guys, and the ACLU, you are amazing.
I’m just a regular person trying to keep up, trying to make sure that I’m reading accurate news and taking right action. I’m seeing in my corner of the world that all signs point to a major crossroads in this country. We’ve been tumbling in this direction for a long time. The highways, roads, rivers and tributaries leading towards the Moment of Choice, where we determine how we view ourselves in relation to the world have been covered over , polluted and at times unclear. Not any more. Not for anyone. Those who have always been fighting the fight for equality, justice and freedom have not succumbed to complacency or obtuseness the way many of us have, as I have. Not any more.
I am not a political writer. This place that I have secured to write about the healing effects of fiber art, handcraft and creativity, it will remain that and I love that, but occasionally I may have to refer to what’s going on here and around the world from my little vantage point. All I do is housed in the reality we all share, and compartmentalization has never worked very well for me.
Some Recent Things:
Ice:
My Sweet Littlest Harvesting Icicles Like It’s Her Job:
Our Resident Owl:
Teaching Weaving to Children Is One of My Greatest Joys:
Paper Making Attempt:
I read a cool thing the other day, maybe a friend’s Facebook post? I don’t remember, but the gist of it was that in order to handle all that our world, our spirit, our heart asks of us, we must also attend to our places of love and hope, health and strength. I wish for all of us to reside in these places, and meet with what comes our way from a place of integrity, wisdom and power. The other day, I showed a group of 6- and 7-year olds images of people weaving from all over the world. All different colors of skin, all different kinds of attire, all different kind of settings. I told them them that when weaving, we are engaging in a practice that humans have been participating for at least 10, ooo, but more likely closer to 25, 000 years. We are all bound by a need for clothing, housing, containers, and beauty. These fibers, they connect us to each other and to our ancient ancestors. It felt good to talk about that on Friday, having no idea what was about to transpire.
I’ll keep talking to kids about things like that, for as long as they’ll listen.
I am dyeing wool right now, after a bit of a break. Flowers that I placed in jars with water about a month ago to collect sunlight have been waiting to be turned into dye paths. As I sit outside next to my pots, I can appreciate the fact that they waited too long. They are generously sharing their riotous scent. Maybe odor is the better word. Wow. My cats seem to love it, but I think I might be smelling this in my memory for years to come. It will be an experiment. I dyed with marigolds earlier in the summer after a 24-hour sun soak. Will this dye bath produce different colors?
This is a heavy time. While sitting and tending to my smelly pots, I tune into the drone, drone, endless drone of the crickets and grasshoppers. I’ve really appreciated them this year, but today for some reason, I’m moved by a different feeling. Sadness and maybe a touch of apprehension. How long will this song go on, or as I think about it, I realize that I’m imagining the wrong song to be the constant.
I love bagpipes. When I hear them, I start to cry almost instantaneously. One of my favorite memories is of a time I was taking a walk with my son on the beach. It was a beautiful dusk, he was a baby, in my arms, warm and cozy. I heard bagpipes and turned and there was a man, facing the ocean, playing this ancient instrument. I made my way closer and sat down, holding my boy, rocking him to the sound of the waves and the magic music. I cried because I felt grateful and like somehow, in this moment, I was holding on to a rope, connecting us to our ancestors.
Most bagpipes have at least one drone and one chanter. The drone is what makes that one, long constant sound around which the chanter is played to make the melody. It occurred to me today that really, what I’ve been considering the drone of grasshoppers and crickets is really the chant around the drone. That specific, hypnotic sound is part of the melody of summer and early fall. It changes in volume and pattern throughout the season, as does the chant of frogs, birds, water flow, energy and even life and death. These things I get so attached to and imagine as constant are really just the chant around the drone of something so much more constant. I suppose that’s where religion, philosophy or other things come in to play. I remember reading in college about an astronomer, Tycho Brahe I think, who believed that the planets all made their own unique sound as they rotated around their axes. That may very well be the one iota I recall from that class, but I loved it then, and it resonates now.
Anyway, who ever said that dyeing wool and working with flowers and raising children and thinking about life was straightforward?
Here’s some recent pics:
What is this funny bug nest on a willow leaf?
Tiny willow branches in a warp/weft attempt.
Then what happened…
Collection of willow leaves and branches for my next dye pot.
I’m starting to gather lichen from bits found on walks (not on live trees!) and from wood delivered for this coming winter.
It takes a while to collect lichen. As it should.
I had come to call this “our deer”. An orphan, we watched this deer grow up all summer, losing its white spots, enjoying the wild flowers in our field. I think I just saw it dead on the side of the road coming home from dropping my kids off at school, having been hit by a car. We always told each other when we saw it, keeping an eye out for it, wondering where it would go this winter. Just the other day, we talked about rehabbing our wearing out play fort to make a comfy spot for deer to sleep if it got really cold. I wish people would slow down when they drive, put their phones down, remember that there are animals around. I guess it was seeing our deer, dead and alone on the road that made me think of what chants are swirling around the constant drone. I know this is just part of it, but damn…
Today I picked up my knitting needles to begin a sweater for my daughter for when the temperatures change. I am looking ahead. I wanted to start a project now that will keep her warm and comforted in the future. I don’t know why. Maybe for many reasons. Maybe because she has strep throat and is in pain. Maybe because I love her more than I can explain. This is the sweater. I learned how to do a cable cast on so far and feel rather impressed with myself. I also know I made a mistake, but I don’t know how to fix mistakes in knitting. So different than crochet. Pulling out already knitted stitches fills me with dread and makes me anxious. So for now I’m going to keep knitting and hope my mistake isn’t too grave. Kind of like parenting. I make mistakes daily. I hope none will be too grave, too difficult to repair.
this mystical dog statue was in our home growing up in florida. my mom gave him to me a few years ago and he guards our house through all weather.
our humble garden
every night a robin sits atop our open shed and sings its goodnight song
I love this post from Two Hands Healing and Creative Arts ! It inspired me to pick up a project I started last winter. It’s the Babette Blanket, designed by Kathy Merrick. Thank you for the inspiration, Andee! Perfect for today. It’s summery, warm and wonderful outside, but my daughter is not feeling well. I was able to crochet some granny squares while she snuggled on my lap, her hands gently resting on mine. Happy summer crocheting, everyone. What projects are you working on?
Summer is truly here now. Even up on my mountain we are feeling the heat. Of course what seems “hot” to us is nothing compared to what friends and family all over the country are dealing with. This past week temperatures have been over 100F in lots of places. Making me very grateful for our easy days of 87-90F days at my house.
When I go down to town to do errands it can be significantly warmer. But at least in Colorado humidity isn’t the factor that it is for many others. I’m looking forward to seeing all my yarnie friends at the conference in a few weeks, but it will be in Charleston, South Carolina. I suspect that I may be melting in the heat and humidity that they are experiencing.
In heat like that how does one keep crocheting? My choice for travel and for hot weather crochet…
I was so incredibly pleasantly surprised to see in my email a notice that my little blog here had been nominated by another wonderful blogger, Mrs Craft of Craft and Other Crazy Plansfor the Creative Blogger Award! You know, it’s really quite a lovely feeling to learn that someone reads my words, looks at my pictures and thinks that they’re cool! It’s also wonderful to have the chance to share the blogs that I love to read and look at for inspiration, information and simply because they are fabulous! So, I’ll get to that below!
This is especially tender for me because I am actively working on a “healing” piece. With heartbreaking world events, a busy life, transitioning to summer break with my children, and experiencing a bit of grief of the personal and existential sort, I needed to begin a piece I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’m using my large Majacraft Circular Loom and making a sitting rug. It will be textured and smooth, soft and hard, mostly in a beige/off-white/cream color palette. Peaceful. Natural. Cloud-like. Quiet. I want something to call my own, my little space that invites touch and that reflects the complicated aspects of life, but in dulled down color. I need that space and am making it for myself.
Part of being nominated for this sweet award includes the act of sharing five things about myself, so here it goes:
I am absolutely fascinated by ancestral history, and believe that as I age, I will spend more and more time pursuing information about all of the people who came before me in my family. I wonder about them. I thank them for surviving, because without them, I wouldn’t be here.
If I could go back in time, I would not quit creative writing in college. I would pursue that interest with more devotion and more discipline. That regret is fueling my urge to write, and my discipline now.
I hope to join the Peace Corps one day, even if I can’t until I’m an “old” woman. This woman inspired me not to let my mind succumb to antiquated and stereotyped images of aging.
I love to run, workout and be strong, and have found this love later in my life.
I used to live in Florida and I really, really love and miss the Gulf of Mexico. I also love the Atlantic and spent a lot of time at the Jersey Shore when I lived in NJ as a youngin’. There is something magically wonderful about salt water and all of the life it supports, and I hope to get to hang out by the sea a lot more in the coming years.
The above blogs are ones I love to follow and check in on. They all have inspired me, not just in the crafting way, but in the living life artistically kind of way. I hope you check them out.
Here are the rules for the bloggers I’ve nominated. I hope you all enjoy participating in whatever capacity you choose.
Nominate 15-20 bloggers and add their links.
Thank the person who nominated you and include a link to their blog.
Share five facts about yourself.
Notify the bloggers you included.
Keep the rules in your post.
Thank you again, Karen (Mrs. Craft) for nominating me. This was really fun!
This is the time of year that marks the beginning of my favorite season. In summer, when it is hot, humid, froggy smelling and quiet, I am a better version of myself. It is easier for me to gain perspective and to slow down. Heat requires a different pattern. I learned that from my brother when we lived in Florida. He owned a landscaping company, and he and his crew went out early in the morning, to beat the suffocating heat of summer late-afternoons.
For me, summer has become the season for washing wool and imagining all I’ll do with it. I occasionally enjoy blasts of creativity and the drive to work up an idea. Last night, I listened to the coyotes, screaming, yipping, barking. I’ve come to crave that sound on hot summer nights. It reminds me of last year about this time, when I sat up late and experimented with hat designs, almost too hot to be handling wool, but not quite. Then, like now, the coyotes did their wild thing and I felt comforted the way I did when I heard snow plows working in the middle of the night the month after we had our first baby.
I may be finally starting to get the hang of understanding and riding the waves of seasonal rhythms. Rather than charging through each day as though it’s a job, I’m longing to respect the specifics. We are not really meant to do the same things day after day, with the same timing and the same momentum. It seems to me like there’s a reason for energy surges that visit some of us in the spring and fall months~ there’s a lot of work to do to bring a garden up and put a garden to bed! There’s a reason for the home-ing in that winter calls for (and that’s so often challenged by our steadfast cultural allegiance to busyness); we need a time to go within. To rest. To regroup. To gather the insight and energy required to face the coming seasons of outward growth and physical labor. And to let go of those things that have died away.
For now, I’ll enjoy the early morning garden tending, the wool processing, the swimming and playing with my children, and the planning. And I’ll relish the moments I get to hear other life happening outside my open windows, in the pitch dark during the deepest hours of night.
Busy beyond breath. Slow beyond words. This juxtaposition has been a hallmark of the last two weeks. Running around, trying to meet all obligations with grace on one side, cancelling everything and only nurturing, tending and resting with my sick little girl on the other. Times like these leave me feeling out of sorts for sure, but I’m happy to say I’ve got myself in a sweet rhythm that includes working with wool and other fibers every day, even if just for five minutes or so.
A heart a day keeps my feet on the ground…
I’ve got this wonderful heart-shaped rock. I love it and it sits on my kitchen sink window sill. Recently, I decided to make a felted heart around it, and once done, fill it with lavender. I loved it, and after a rather bleak news cycle, decided to attempt to make one heart every day. So far, I’ve done it minus a day or two. This has led to me making some little wet-felted bowls/vessels, because I’m already there, right?
Standing at the kitchen sink, felting, thinking, hoping, wondering… it’s helping to get me though these jumbly days. Making things that smell good, feel good, and that I can imagine tucking little notes into, or wishes for people to have on their own jerky, jumpy days, that require so much patience and so much discipline… this has helped and funnily got me back to my drum carder, and to my spinning wheel.
Today, too, I’ve found out about a goddess associated with the spinning wheel who I now must pursue and know more about… Habetrot. She comes from northern England and Lowland Scotland, and I think will have some things to teach me. For a few years, I’ve been wondering about this long buried/hidden passion for fiber art that I’ve thankfully discovered. Where had it been resting in my psyche all of those years prior? I can think of many times in my adult life when having things to do with my hands and mind would have been intensely useful, and I cannot help but lament the years I remained so disconnected from what now feels like an utter and true love. When I think of it, I also can’t help but wonder about my ancestors from England, Ireland, Germany, and maybe Scotland (my grandfather often referred to the Isle of Lewis as being a seat of some ancestry).
Why does it matter?
I suppose because at times in life, it feels utterly true that energies that move us come from our ancestral histories, from journeys started long before that brought us to bear in this life here.
In reading a book about Navajo Weaving, I came across this:
The beginning of the world, I am thinking about it
The beginning of the world, I am talking about it
This is a Navajo ceremonial chant. I love reading about about Navajo myth and the beginning of the world in their story. “According to Navajo myth, the Dine, or the People (which is how Navajos refer to themselves), were led to their home in the Southwest from another world beneath the earth by supernatural spirits called Holy People. Spider Man, one of the Navajo Holy People, taught the Navajos how to make a loom from sunshine, lightning and rain. Spider Woman taught them how to weave.” from: The Navajo Weaving Tradition: 1650 to the Present, by Alice Kaufman and Christopher Selser, p. 4.
Reading this is what led me to that fantastical Google, and that let me to Habetrot. What did we do before Google? I remember, actually. I’d spend hours at the library after school, sometimes allowing myself the luxury of reading whatever I wanted in the corner rather than doing my homework; other times, following one bit of information to another and another still, getting hung up on a weird books about phenomenon like spontaneous combustion, only to get back to the initial investigation on whatever topic. That is what it’s like, researching one’s own ancestral history and its accompanying mythologies. To follow one lead, if you are lucky and patient, can afford you the chance to learn about others along the way. The ultimate in grounding when you are not in a rush.
We are in between seasons right now, here in Vermont. When I first moved here from Florida, I heard the term “mud season” and didn’t understand what people were talking about. Living in Burlington at that time, and not venturing much out of the city, I had little occasion to experience Mud Season head on. Now, after almost twenty years here, I get it.
The ground thaws (not too hard this year, after such a mild winter), the red wing blackbirds, robins, cardinals and cedar waxwings make an appearance in our yard. Large flocks of geese sail overhead, their calls to one another feeling like a call to my spirit, encouraging and light and commemorative of a winter gone by. The air smells clean and wet. Sugaring begins. The mud, it adds inches to my height, and a wobble to my walk when I muck around in the yard, this year imagining my cleaned up garden beds, a hoped for herb spiral, and a dyer’s patch. The need to vacuum much more frequently to prevent the brought-in-the-house mud, dirt, pebbles and sludge from making its way to the carpets is a fact. Why is taking one’s boots off in the garage so difficult?!
On a walk the other day down by Lake Champlain, the weather was the epitome of the “in like a lion” description of March. It was windy, rainy, snowy, icy… it was epic, really, and since I was dressed appropriately for such riotous weather, it was absolutely exhilarating. I laughed out loud in reaction to some especially strong bursts of wind, feeling not one ounce of embarrassment because I was alone. Down on the water, I could see Winter releasing her grip from the stoney shore.
I found large pieces of driftwood that I harvested~ a project will happen with them, I am sure. Walking all the way back to my car with these water-logged, slippery gifts, against the wind, at a speedy clip (I was due to volunteer in my son’s class in just a little bit of time) proved to be the workout I needed. Sore and tired, wind-kissed and grateful, I was able to finish a project later that day that had been waiting patiently, in all of its scattered parts, for some attention.
I love working with my Majacraft cirucular weaving loom. I’ve been making completely random things with little bits of all kinds of materials~ sari silk, banana silk threads, handspun, conventional, thick, thin, chunky, wild yarns, twine and wire. I am fully appreciative of the process of beginning a circular weaving project, releasing into the hard job of finding clarity in the first few messy rounds. I can hardly tell the order of warp threads at first. Now I can predict how much time it takes for me to begin to worry that I’ll never get it straight, and then, voila, the foundation is set for my piece and I can relax with the ups and downs of weaving. Then, adding a new element creates its own new chaos, anticipated but surprising, nonetheless. Sometimes it takes another few rounds to straighten things out again, to hit that rhythm where predictability and order are available if desired.
These projects conjure similar feelings of excitement, tension and hope as Spring does, in all of her wild glory. They promise beauty out of chaos, like spring’s pungent dirt promises baby birds, more light, new growth, froggy smells and strong storms. Order from chaos, gifts from turbulence, beauty reborn. Laughing out loud at all this natural noise is such a relief.
Healing Handcrafting 