bee creative

hats and broken hearts

One of my uncles made me this hat. 

I'm not sure exactly how old I was, it's one of those things that I just have always had.  That I hold on to as one of my childhood treasures. 

Today I hold it and think of family.

I don't usually buy flowers, or even more so, buy flowers out of season.  But yesterday while I was walking by, a local florist was putting buckets of flowers out. 

Sometimes we just have to go with our impulses...

The pink hat is finished. 

Without ears so that I will continue to wear it.  Pink is a troublesome color for me as it is.  Because I work with young children, I constantly see little girls wearing pink.  

Something that I am thinking about...where does strength come from?

...

From yesterday's journal:

7:50ish, I took my coffee outside this morning.  Oh I need to do this more often.  Watched the swoop of a flicker, the crows flying south, leaving wherever they slept for the night, on their daily mission; 3 black squirrels tumbling about in one of the neighbor's trees, the odd seagull, and finally, 6 swans or snow geese.  I know they weren't Canada geese as their necks were too long.  The song birds were warming up, the hummingbird adding it's 2 cents.  I thought the freeway noise sounded a bit like a river.   A few airplanes.  The sky started to streak pink, but mostly clouds.  A few neighbors starting to get ready for the day.  Frost on their windshields, frost on the roofs.  

They were swans, I looked it up.  Snow geese have shorter necks too.  Both winter in this area.

Later on in the day a package arrived.  I knew instantly that I needed to make a butterfly.

I have more ideas and thoughts about hearts as butterflies, hearts broke open. 

I think of a poem (one that keeps surfacing in my imagination since hearing it), by Naomi Shihab Nye (found here),

"What countries may we
sing into?
What lines should we all
be crossing?
What songs travel toward us
from far away
to deepen our days?”

 

keep knitting

Sometimes I stop and think about world events that have occurred during my life time that have remained with me and about how technology now allows it to be shared so immediately.

The very first national/international "news" story I can remember would be the launch of the first space shuttle.  I like that it is a memory of something hopeful. 

I can remember seeing live coverage of bombing in Baghdad, the first live video coverage of war; the realization that it was happening as we watched. 

The strangeness of watching the Berlin wall come down while eating pizza. 

And September 11th. 

Yesterday will be another day that will linger. 

I wasn't able to march or stand at a rally so instead I listened to live broadcast of the Washington D.C. gathering.

The words that I want to take with me are that we need to keep going.

Keep growing and nurturing the world we want to live in.

I want to remember to live from a place of being for something rather than against. 

...

It is completely a coincidence that this weekend I will start the decreases on my liminal scarf, but it is a coincidence that seems very meaningful to me. 

It will be marker. 

It is also a coincidence that the colors of this scarf can be the colors of the morning sky before a storm. 

Storms can open up spaces that might be considered liminal. 

The shadow of a solar light bulb.

The last two Sundays I have been knitting red/purple to mark the sunshine coming through the windows of my home.  Today there will be gray stripes for no sun. 

Thinking of illumination.

...

One of the things that I didn't consider when I made a pledge to myself to eat as local as possible was that it also meant I would eat more seasonally.  This was an easy transition for me. 

Lettuce doesn't really appeal when it's freezing outside.

Carrot soup.

More or less followed this recipe.  I added a diced potato to thicken it a bit more, plus I had potatoes to use up.  The topping is diced preserved lemon cooked in a bit of butter. 

 

 

observations

I chose my home in November.

It was the covered front porch, the potential for garden, the location, that it was an old house, and that the price was right.

I fell in love with my home in January.

It was the slant of the light coming through the windows. As the years have passed I have found that I love the way the light enters this house best this time of year. Certainly it has to do with the orientation of the house. Slightly crooked, Northeast to Southwest.

....

At the kitchen table:

Things preserved are in season.

Risotto is a perfect thing to add dehydrated vegetables to.

I added an egg to the leftovers and made pancakes/patties/rice burgers? 

I also added dehydrated peppers and tomato sauce (also dehydrated, like fruit leather) to the lentils. 

I could eat lentils cooked like this every week. 

 

....

make one, mend one:

Little bear beast has acquired a layer of wool.

It's still very cold out there, one of the coldest winters on record according to the record keepers. 

Thinking about common wisdom that comes from observation.  Someone commented the other day that this was the coldest, snowiest winter they had seen here.  I told her that it seemed to me, it happens about every seven years. The next day I read a news report that this winter pattern happens here about every 8 years...  

Working on a ragged star.

It suits me. 

 

bears and other stuff

I grew up knowing there were bears in the woods, bears on the beaches, bears going through the garbage at the garbage dump (It would be reported in the community newspaper, something that always seemed very funny to me...).

I remember another summer camp hike in SE Alaska that my brothers and I went on where we wore bells and sang for a good part of the hike...one of the rules for living around bears is make lots of noise so that you don’t surprise them.

When we moved to Washington (where bears are still a possibility but less likely in the areas where I have lived) my bedroom was located at the front part of a daylight basement, with the windows pretty much at ground level. I can remember (age 10) laying on my bed in the dark thinking the bears were outside the window and that I needed to lay very still so they wouldn’t notice me. Another bear rule, for brown bear and Grizzly bear only, play dead if necessary.

This was also a stage of my life that I was sure there was something scary under my bed and that if I let my foot dangle over the edge while I was sleeping that it would be grabbed and awful things would happen. I am so thankful I never shared that with my brothers. Sure enough one of them would have been under my bed waiting for me to fall asleep...

...

This year I decided to participate in Carla Sonheim's 365 day class.  Like my friend at handstories, I realized very quickly that a drawing assignment was going to take me right to a Jude inspired beast...

Still in progress.

...

Vulnerability has been on my mind, still thinking about how and what we share.  How it ties to taking risks, being willing to get lost occasionally.  About being willing to be a beginner. 

Found this morning in Rebecca Solnit's book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, "Between words is silence, around ink whiteness, behind every map's information is what's left out, the unmapped and unmappable."

...

Stars

I revisited making crackers, this time adding sesame seeds (stirred into the flour not as a topping).  The crackers are really best rolled out as thin as possible but the cookie cutters are so much fun to play with. 

 

words: lost

I have been physically lost at least twice in my life time.  Not scarily lost, not the type of lost where I held the fear that I wouldn't be able to figure out where I was going, but the mild sort of lost where you know where you are, know that you can get where you need to go, but aren't sure how to get there. 

Event number one:   I was on a hike with a group for a summer camp program. I would have been eight or nine and we were living in South Eastern Alaska.  Some of us must of went ahead and got off the trail.  I don't really remember being told as a child that it was important to stay on the trail; we played in the woods a lot. I am pretty confident we were told if we felt like we were truly lost to stay put and someone would come find us.  Some one in the group decided the thing to do was to go down, that sooner or later we would run into the trail that switched backed up and down the mountain.  And sure enough, we did find the trail. 

Event number two: Venice, Italy.  The person I had been traveling with was tired and wanted to go back to the hotel room for a nap but I wanted to keep exploring so we split up.  This is a big deal for me, I'm not one to go unfamiliar locations on my own.  I started walking and soon realized I'd gotten off the main paths and wasn't really  sure how to get back to where I needed to be (I never did find the maps of Venice all that helpful.). I decided to just keep walking, figuring that sooner or later I'd find something that looked familiar. And sure enough I did.

 

There is something about this kind of lost that helps us build trust in ourselves.

 

...

I have two words for this year, release (last year's word that I'm not done with yet) and liminal.

...

 

This past week I've been immersed in words and story.  Remembering how important they are to me.

Hurry Up and Wait by Maira Kalman and Daniel Handler: “Next time, you hurry, and I’ll be the thing waiting here while you pass by.”

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, writing about butterflies and more: "Instar implies something both celestial and ingrown, something heavenly and disastrous, and perhaps change  is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far."

I checked both of these out from the library, but I really do want them in my permanent library.

Brain pickings Maria Popova.  A blog I need to spend more time at. 

 

 

field notes

9:04 AM and it is 34 degrees F this morning.  Icy snow on the ground.  Windy. 

While I was outside taking care of the chickens this morning, I was buzzed by a hummingbird; probably the one that has been hanging out in the garden.  

He was moving fast. I hope he had somewhere warm to go.  

Earlier this week I stepped outside to bring Lola in and saw one of the ravens that live in my neighborhood park chasing off a hawk.  

Field notes.  I wonder about my need to document the world around me. 

Is it part of making meaning in this world? 

28 minutes passed between dawn and the moment that the sun came through a window, into my home.  28 rows of purple/red to knit on the liminal scarf in honor of today. 

And there are stars to stitch...