bee creative

#11 almost didn't happen

Tonight it was a struggle to make my daily pairing...

Dinner was a cucumber yogurt smoothie.

Glad it was just me to feed tonight.

I'm reading Pressure Cooker Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It by Sarah Bown, Joslyn Brenton and Sinikka Elliott.  I'm about half way through and still in the section of why feeding a family can be so difficult. The link above is to an interview with one of the authors. The suggestions in the interview have more to do with low income families, although the book profiles a variety of income levels. I'm very curious what other solutions they have in mind. Unfortunately, I suspect that food as an issue is a symptom of a bigger problem. An illness of culture.

Examples of what I've been harvesting from the garden the last couple weeks. I am thankful it is something that I can do, that I have the knowledge, the space, the resources. 

#10 primary

Most referenced cookbooks (Enchanted Broccoli Forest is by Mollie Katzen), still sorting out which ones I find most inspirational.

Pairing number 10.

h is for hazelnuts, hummingbirds, here, and hope

Here... Home but altered.

"Here" a poem by Pablo Neruda that I want to stitch into the robe/jacket that I am making. It's in The Sea and The Bells.

Here, there are hummingbirds in the hazelnut trees.

And squirrels. They climb out to the tips of the branches, causing  the tree to bounce, shake and shimmy.

Not much hope of there being anything left to ripen. 

I can hope for other things though...

b is for books, bags, and blueberries

1.  It was a rainy, windy morning...seemed a perfect morning for blueberry-lemon muffins.  Recipe from Moosewood Restaurant New Classics. It's a great cookbook although not so "new" anymore.

2. I have three bags under construction.  I decided to work on this one this morning:

The complete text I am adding is "Wildflowers don't care where they grow."  Dolly Parton

3. The one assignment I have some hope of catching up on and finishing this year would be the pile of books I picked to finish reading.  I am still reading Seaweed Chronicles. It's beautifully written and I am learning new things. For example, sheep will eat seaweed. 

 

 

random edges

 

Three layers + one filter.

1. The mama and baby deer that have been in the neighborhood are doing fine. It's risky though, they graze in yards along a very busy road.

2. I am currently reading Seaweed Chronicles, A World at the Water's Edge by Susan Hand Shetterly.  Right now my imagination has been particularly captured by the idea of the seaweed equivalent of roots, a holdfast.

3.

While knitting or stitching I'm listening to H is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald. 

Current bus project, shawl for dye pot in progress:

Mostly sewing this:

Robe started in Jude's (Spirit Cloth) second Contemporary Boro class.

 

take it outside

"I thought about lines-the lines we draw, the lines we write, the lines we cross, the lines we cross out.  An actor's lines, deadlines, headlines, borderlines-lines drawn in the sand; lines we never forget, the lines we leave behind. A circle is a line touching."  Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land

The take it outside basket.

Knitting, sewing, reading. 

I am reading Mary Oliver's Upstream, and listening to Terry Tempest Williams. It's a kind of conversation to move back and forth between the two. A pairing.

After spending about a hour stitching the sleeves on to a shirt by hand, I spent less than 5 minutes cutting them off. 

(I loved the way the pink seam showed through though.)

That's how it goes sometimes.

 

pulling a green thread

From Teju Cole’s book, Known and Strange Things:

“There is another possible book that contains all that is not in this one.”

I put myself on the wait list for a few of Teju Cole's books after listening to his interview on On Being.

I've read a few of the essay's, enough to know I want to find a copy to keep, to take time with.

Counting stitches for a sleeve.

Stitching with plant dyed fabric, some printed silk that I've had for a long time.   

It's May and the first rose is blooming and I may be absorbed into the garden...

journaling, part two

I am still working on my field note blanket, not however, as a daily project. Two years are documented this way, the rest is more a documentation of a moment, an observation.  The blanket will be done when it is done.  It is a kind of journal.  A journal in that I have recorded an observation about a day, a moment, an experience.

I've gathered more thoughts about journal keeping, in particular a response to Grace who wondered about the difference between a journal and a field note:

• A journal or diary might document anything. A thought, an experience, an emotion, a reaction.  It may start from any experience.
• A field note starts with place specifically, with documentation of the environment.  Field notes haven't remained objective for me as a journal with a strictly scientific perspective would have because my emotions and responses are reflected. In this way they have become a field note about human emotion too.
• A field note is a type of journal entry.
• The perspective that humanity is separate from the environment and the environment is a resource for us to use doesn't feel true to me. I am part of the field note. I am part of the moment.
• There are so many ways to journal. We can write, record, photograph, stitch, draw.  A journal need not be paper, it's the act of recording and documenting in a continuous manner. A record of time passing.
• Journal keeping may fit some people's learning styles better than others. For myself, I need to gather thoughts and ideas and express them somehow as part of the process of integrating knowledge. In this way it is a tool.  There is research about this but I'm not looking for it right now.
• I have rarely looked back on my journals and yet when I do I am struck by how consistent I am in my thinking. There is something worth considering here.
• When I do look back at journal entries, it is usually to revisit important moments in my life that I have documented...my trip to Italy for example. Still thinking about why we keep the things we do.
• When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams.  Her mother's journals were blank, unwritten in...  Thinking about the subtitle, "Fifty-four Variations on Voice."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

assignment #2 March, reading list

Assignment #2 is to finish 12 books that were picked out at the beginning of January.

Book number one finished:  Wanderlust, A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit.

Where my mind wandered...walking puts us directly into the world in a way that encourages, among other things, wonder. We look closer, we see more.

Walking encourages community and conversation. Community helps builds resilience. We need that.

Having a safe place to walk is a privilege.  There are limits and boundaries in our world. Where do I fell safe walking and why? How are we shaped when we live in places where it is unsafe to walk? Considering vulnerability.

I spent a lot of time thinking about Solnit's writing about streets as part of city as part of forming citizenship. About the act of having space to gather, spaces to walk and space to protest.

We have a growing problem of homelessness where I live and they walk. They walk to stay warm, walk so that they won't be labeled as loitering, walk so that they don't take up space.

Considering what it means to be out of step.

 

 

silent worlds

Silence In the Age of Noise  by Erling Kagge (a rabbit hole Nancy, Pomegranate trail, sent me down). Book

Movie: "In Pursuit of Silence"

Gordon Hempton Interview

From my journal, when I feel/have felt silence: 

1. September 11th… Seattle, in the garden, the planes grounded.
2. Boulevard park, sitting on a rock, rainy day when I was in college.    
3. In Venice, Italy. Walking alone into a silent neighborhood, a little lost.
4. At the beach.
5. Early in the morning…like now.
6. Snow
7. Out on the boat, anchored up for night.
8. In Alaska, up the Stikine River, at a glacier (childhood memories)
9. When the power is out.
10. Vising the cathedral in Florence Italy.

Words to consider: quiet, noise, volume.

Thought:  Silence isn't always an absence of sound.

Question:  What does silence inspire? 

What I've been stitching on both in silence and while listening to things about silence.

Loving that this piece has become a blending of things learned from multiple people/sources.