All posts by witchyrichy@gmail.com

Comfort Zone? What Comfort Zone?

books, Making, thinking out loud,

I joined Ali Manning’s Handmade Book Club this year and completed several challenges. Membership includes the possibility of connecting with other book members in your area. Introverted me would normally avoid a face to face group meeting, but I met a few women in the online community who suggested a meetup. I am proud to say that I agreed, not using my rural location as an excuse, and I spent a wonderful day with three other bookmakers sharing books and stories and creating together. We have a second date on the calendar, and I have homework.

I have seen lots of articles about how hard it is to make friends when you get to be my age. One good way is to connect with people who have similar hobbies, and online communities have made that much easier to do. I have lots of online friends who I will never meet in person. But it was nice to be in the same room with other people. I am looking forward to our next meeting, and there was a talk of a road trip. One aspect that made it successful was our shared interest in book making and other arts and crafts. The hostesses, long term members of the club, took time to create folders of materials for us as they knew we were new to book making and may not have had a stash of materials.

These women are visual artists ways that I am not, and I am looking forward to learning with them. Meanwhile, I am exploring ways to combine my crochet with books, and I created this accordion style book yesterday using two granny squares crocheted with thread.

Crochet Book

Quick Takes

thinking out loud,

I am ruminating on and drafting a few blog posts but am not ready to commit them to public text quite yet. Here are a couple first sentences and general ideas:

It must be exhausting to be Kim Kardashian. I like scrolling through morning after pictures of the red carpet. That meant almost 180 pictures from the Emmy Awards last night although blessedly my bad Internet stopped loading at 100. It looked very exhausting. I have now heard several celebrities describe themselves as being so completely worn out and depressed even at the height of their fame and fortune when it seemed like they had everything they and everyone else wanted. Rainn Wilson talks about it in Soul Boom; Dan Harris and Glennon Doyle talk about it as part of a recent podcast.

Seeds are tiny parcels of possibility. The next three months are the best time in a gardeners’ life as all is possibility. We inventory our stash and peruse the catalogs, choosing, planning, and, most importantly, imagining. Beatrix Potter and Edwin Way Teale both write about seeds, and NPR had an excellent story about a long running experiment that involves seeds.

I was born in 1962 just as the Vietnam War was ratcheting up. Browsing this list of wars involving the United States, I discovered that there were very few years in my life when the United States was not in some kind of conflict, with just a short break after the end of Vietnam when we were licking our wounds and there was little appetite for war. It didn’t last long: by 1982, we were fighting Lebanon and then invading Grenada the next year.

In the face of the current round of horrific death and destruction in the Middle East, I find myself back in my hippie days, thinking less about taking sides and more about how to get to lasting peace. My senior year in college I made peace collages, photocopied them, and then pasted them around campus. It was an odd gesture perhaps but a memory of imagining a better world if people would just practice peace. It seemed simple, a change in mindset. I may have been inspired by Another Mother For Peace‘s campaign against the Vietnam War and their famous logo. Sometime after my own campaign and college career ended, I connected with Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the ice cream makers and activists, at an event in Vermont where I learned about their effort called 1% for Peace. The goal was to redirect 1% of the military budget to peace-oriented activities. Sadly, the bumper sticker didn’t really work well as it made people think you were *only* 1% for peace.

So, that is a sample of what has been rattling around in my brain. The last bit is probably the closest to a complete thought. I will leave you with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

I Thought It Was Just Me

writing,
Singer songwriter Cindy Walker’s Typewriter at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

As I write this blog post, an episode of the long-running British murder mystery show Midsomer Murders is streaming on my iPad. I have seen this one before, probably multiple times. Actually, I have seen all of them but don’t always remember them. This one is familiar although I am not sure I could name the killer.

Meanwhile, I digress. I am only half or maybe a quarter paying attention. It is entertaining the part of my brain that would prefer to be doing anything except writing a blog post. Food TV, the old version where people cooked rather than competed, was a favorite while I wrote my doctoral dissertation. I always felt a little guilty about this practice, as though I wasn’t fully concentrating on the writing, but it worked for me.

So, I felt a little vindicated when Brené Brown, in the section on boredom in Atlas of the Heart, described her writing process:

A big part of my book writing routine is watching super predictable, formulaic mysteries–even ones I’ve seen ten times. These shows would bore me to tears if were in a normal mental space. But when I’m coding data and writing, something weird happens. It’s like the shows lull the easily distracted part of my brain into a rhythmic stupor, setting free the deeper meaning-making part of my brain to engage and start making connections between things that don’t seem connectable. I actually sit on my couch with a notepad next to me because the more bored I get, the more ideas bubble to the surface (p. 40).

Atlas of the Heart: mapping meaningful connection and the language of human experience, brené Brown

Early January has had moments of boredom for me as I few commitments compared to the busyness of the fall. Life is a little dull, frankly. And yet, my writing and other creative pursuits seem to be thriving. Ideas, as Brown describes, are bubbling up and I am taking time to pursue them. So, while boredom opens the door to creativity, I am giving myself permission to write about what interests me, in a way that I hope connects with others, sharing larger lessons learned from my experiences.

Who knows? I may even write about Midsomer Murders.

#WIPWednesday

creativity, Making,

WIP is short for “work in progress,” and is, surprise to me, a supply chain and accounting term. I encounter it in my crochet threads, and today someone referenced #wipwednesday on Instagram. The hashtag takes you to a lovely page of all sorts of WIP from crocheted blankets to hand painted miniatures. There are Lego structures and lots of visual art, all partially completed. Some people post videos as they work, describing the process and offering tips. While it is always fun to see final products, watching the process unfold is far more interesting to me as it is often hidden from view, as though seeing something being created takes away some of the magic. This hashtags celebrates creating, encouraging others to join in and experience the joy of making.

#WIPWednesday is also reassuring for crafters like me. While I tend to read one book at a time, I usually have at least three crochet projects in various stages. Right now, I am trying to finish up the second snow person in a pair before winter ends. There is also a green wool cardigan and a soft purple coverlet waiting their turns.

The snow people came in a kit that sat for a year before coming to the top of the pile. There are more kits in the closet plus more coming as I am part of a monthly crochet club. Kits, of course, do not count as WIP because they have not been started. I can always, as I did this year, gift them to someone who is not yet hooked on crocheting. (See what I did there?) And, kits are a hedge against the future when, presumably, I will finish all my WIP and existing kits and need something new to work on and no longer have access to the outside world. (Zombie apocalypse perhaps?)

I wish for you a WIP in 2024. Give yourself permission to just work on something without worrying too much about the final product. Take your time, sink into the creating, make it a a meditative act, connect with a still place beyond the frenzy of the world. And, yes, I might be talking about crocheting a dishcloth.

Happy #WIPWednesday!

An Apology to Mr. Teale

gardening, Nature, thinking out loud, ,

As I mentioned, I am reading naturalist Edwin Way Teale‘s Circle of the Seasons: The Journal of a Naturalist’s Year. I took him to task just a bit for suggesting that winter is a pause in the turning of the wheel, arguing that the life of a gardener and her garden doesn’t stop, neither for that matter does the wheel of life. This time of year, especially, we are treated to birds taking advantage of our feeders and shrubbery. The cardinals are a favorite.

While I still might quibble over the word “pause,” Teale makes my argument for me in the entry for January 7. He writes eloquently about life being everywhere even on the coldest winter day:

Protected by sweaters and a leather jacket against the biting blasts of the north wind, I walk along the hillside this afternoon. Snow lies drifted among the wild cherries. Where the wind has swept bare the ground, the soil is frozen and rocklike. On this day of bleak cold, the earth seems dead. Yet every northern field and hillside, like a child, has the seeds and power of growth locked within. From cocoon to bur, on a winter’s day, there is everywhere life, dormant but waiting (p. 3).

Circle of the seasons, p. 3

He goes on to describe how some seeds and bulbs actually require a period of cold in order to thrive. For instance, tulips and lilacs signalled spring in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. So, when I moved to Virginia and started my own garden, that is what I planted. I quickly discovered, however, that we lived on the very edge of their range and growing them was challenging. It just didn’t get cold enough.

Now, as the climate warms and the plant hardiness zones shift northward, those spring favorites may become less common in Pennsylvania as well. Developed in the early to mid 20th century, the plant hardiness zones attempt to identify the average minimum temperature a zone. Changes to the existing zones were announced in November 2023 making changes to the 2012 maps. While I continue to garden in Zone 7b, my parents’ zone changed from 6b to 7a, making them warmer by 5 degrees, which may be just enough to discourage the tulips and lilacs from blooming. You can check out your zone on the interactive map. It provides your 2012 and 2023 zones for reference.

Part of the reason my lilacs struggled in Virginia was also the heat and humidity we experience in the summer. They survived but certainly did not thrive, already weakened by a too-warm winter. The American Horticultural Society developed a heat zone map that looks at the other end of the thermometer and what the high temperatures for each zone are.

Gardeners were not surprised when the new maps were released last fall. We have been seeing the changes in our own backyards for some time now. Collards, a staple of southern cooking, may be the canaries in the coal mine. The tradition is that you only pick collards after the first frost. It sweetens them up. But, lately, the frost has come later and later, and one recent year, we weren’t sure it would happen by Thanksgiving. There would be a hole on many holiday tables.

I am grateful to be able to live here on the farm, my own bit of nature to observe, my own bit of wilderness to tend. It affords me a golden opportunity to look closely and connect to the turning wheel of the seasons.