restingmotion

A Few End of Year Projects

This will be my last post for 2018.  My mom is here until the end of the year, and although we aren't doing anything significant, just hanging out, my thoughts are elsewhere, not on blogging.

 

I have been entertaining myself with small knitting projects however.

First, I started this cowl for myself, using some yarn in my stash, a skein of Manos del Uruguay's Wool Classica in the deep wine color, and a skein of Colinette's discontinued wool, Skye.   The cowl started with different yarns and a pattern.  My original yarn choices didn't really work and I ended up ripping and restarting the pattern several times because I didn't like the way the color bands were turning out.  Eventually I modified it into something I liked.  Consider this my practice cowl.

About the time I figured out what I was doing, and just before the final ripping and reuniting of the wine cowl, I decided I needed to change up my planned gifts for my step-daughter Miriam and knit her a cowl.  Family Christmas was on the 23rd and I made this decision around mid-day on the 22nd, so off to the yarn store we went.  I picked four yarns, two by Luisa Harding (Trenzar), a variegated yarn by Auracania (Alumco) and another blue yarn for the background.  I've already lost the tags so I have no idea what yarn I used.

I tend not to be drawn to high contrast, and I was a little worried, as I knit this,  that there would not be enough contrast in the final fabric.  But we are both happy with the results.

Family Christmas was a lot of fun.  Mom carried on the family tradition of wearing one's bows.

I restarted, and finished my cowl.  Historically, I tend to knit cowls and scarfs on a whim, often inspired by a particular yarn.  Apparently there is a theme.  It seems that all of my scarves, except the grey one I knit earlier the year, all fall in the same color family.  Luckily my coats are wine, grey and taupe, but I do think that perhaps I should. branch out, just a little bit, in 2019.

 

See you next year.

 

 

A Scarf and A Question

I am surrounded by piles.  But they are not piles of obligation.  I am not stressed.  I am simply in a place of reconsideration and rethinking, hence the piles.  But I am also find it is perfectly acceptable to leave those piles in place, to release the pressure to address all questions immediately, perfectly acceptable to just do nothing and see what happens.  It is perfectly acceptable to sit back and wait, perfectly acceptable to hold on to the thought that I want to do will become perfectly clear in its own time.

I did knit a scarf for my mom.  It is a simple infinity loop.  I gave it to her yesterday because it was cold and I decided gifts could be given freely, when the time seemed best, rather than waiting for a specific day. 

 

The idea for the scarf was a last minute inspiration.  However the finished result was not what I originally intended.  Mom is allergic to wool so the yarns are cotton and a cotton rayon blend.  The cotton is Cumulus by Juniper Moon, and it is very soft and fluffy.  The multi-colored yarn is Alumco by Auracania.  It is lovely, but it also proved too slippery for my initial idea.  I knitted and frogged, reknitted and frogged again, working through multiple bouts of knitting and ripping before I settled on this very simple idea.  

Although there have been moments of temporary frustration, that entire process of starts and stops, of knitting and ripping and trying again, was actually very calming and freeing.  I was reminded that sometimes you just have to sit back and wait, sometimes you have to fail and try again, but eventually your efforts pay off.  I think in my younger days I was too concerned with production.  I was too concerned with the idea that success in life meant accomplishing as much as possible in as little time as possible.  I see now that this was an error.  Yes it works, but I wonder if that sense of accomplishment is really a false sense of accomplishment. How many potential rewards were cast off because visible results came too slowly?

 

What if  success in the game of life is not about what you have to show for your time, but who your use of time allows you to become?

Holding the Center

I more or less shut the door on the world for a few days.  I went out to see a production of a Christmas Carol Friday night, and Sunday was the Christmas pageant at my church.  Watching little children always makes me smile, the littlest sheep especially.  Somewhere in between the two I watched Alfonso Cuáron's 1995 version of A Little Princess.  All three left me smiling and singing happy little songs to myself. I am no opponent of sappy romanticism.  Sometimes it is exactly what we need.

That also could have been because I spent much of the weekend working on knitting and handwork.  While I watched the movie I did some hand-sewing, alterations and mending on a velvet jacket (above) that I hoped to wear to a couple of holiday parties this week.

But I also did a fair amount of knitting as well, working on a few last-minute gift ideas, as well as a project for myself.  The last-minute gift knitting wasn't particularly pressured.  I'd already done all my shopping and have everyone covered, this was just inspiration knitting.  Ideas popped into my head and my fingers were itching to get started.  One should run with inspiration when it hits after all.  

By Sunday afternoon I had found my equilibrium again and I managed to catch up with the world a bit, reading the Sunday NY Times and this week's Economist between bouts of knitting and a trip to the gym.  Despite the news, and the fact there will be a bit more hustle and bustle over the next few days, I am still humming.  

 

For me, increasingly,  this season isn't really about doing more, but about finding the light and holding the center.   Somehow in my head thoughts are swirling around a bastardization of two metaphors. First there is the idea of life as an aboriginal longhouse, from Louise Penny's newest novel, Kingdom of the Blind, where "Everyoe we meet, every word we speak, every action taken or not taken lies in our longhouse. With us. Always. Never to be expelled or taken away.".  I am juxtaposing that with the idea of a magic circle, rekindled yes, from A Little Princess.  This entire holiday season whatever you celebrate or believe, seems to be about maintaining that circle, about lighting a fire of hope and love, and holding what is important close, be it creativity, friends, family.  Our longhouse is always full and crowded, the busyness of the world always around us.  But within the circle there is love.  What is in your circle?

 

 

 

Can Construction Be A Metaphor For Life?

I've been back from Texas for two weeks and it somehow feels like I am just beginning to get my bearings again.  I do feel like this has been a particularly hard "landing" although I can't really say why.  Perhaps it was just that I felt stressed and a bit frazzled when I left, and returned to some kind of sense of too muchness.  Perhaps I've over-filled my dance-card, with multiple parties and social events every week. Perhaps it is just that everything seems to be suddenly moving forward quickly on the house, and there are all kinds of changes and decisions.  After a long period of waiting, it feels like I've tripped over some kind of ledge, and although I don't actually feel particularly stressed, there is a bit of a lull in any creative energy.

Last week Frances wrote about being "swallowed up" by normal life upon reentry from a trip, and I very definitely felt swallowed, swallowed by a great big whale.  I keep hoping to integrate the various aspects of my life but I also realize that my efforts will continue to prove inadequate as long as I continue to let myself be swallowed, I need to be firmer in defining the boundaries of my own space and of saying, to myself, "this is enough".  Saying no to others is proving to be easier than saying no to my own greedy impulses, my natural tendency toward too-muchness.  But even then perhaps the issue is not so much about defining my boundaries but about accepting them, about thinking of my experience, and what I chose to do or not do, not as a a tug of war, me against the demands of the world, but of a piece.  Perhaps instead I should be thinking what do I want the fabric of my life to look like?  What will make that fabric whole?  And then accepting that my fabric is my own.

Well, all of this is a bit too vague, but then I am feeling a little on the vague side as well.  

At least the house is shaping up.   A mock-up of the kitchen cabinetry was put in place this week, with some temporary framing and some foam board.  This is helping as we refine choices for cabinetry and layout.  Already, walking around in the space, as opposed to looking at it on paper, a few seemingly minor, but I suspect important, modifications have already taken place.  

 

Although the cabinetry mock-up is temporary, the space increasingly feels like it is becoming something.  Friday I could stand in the corner looking out the window, imagining where my expresso machine would be, imagining making a cup of espresso, as I watched  workers digging the footings for the new deck.  By the time I actually make that espresso the deck will be in place, but the boundaries of the space have been defined. Increasingly, I can see what it will become.

I suppose that is actually what is happening here as well, in my life.  I have not been swallowed, I am just building the foundations, the substructure, and eventually the fabric will take its own shape.  We start on a path, with a goal of course, but the path itself can often be confusing and not well marked.  We start with intentions but don't really know where we are going until after we have arrived.  I can't be what I want to be until I have built my own framework, and there are bound to be modifications along the way, but just as each house has its own character, shaped by its physical space and the lives that share it, so do we humans have our own fabric, shaped by our experiences and the people who touch our lives.  We can't control the world we live in, but we can control what we hold close.

 

 

Not many words this week.

Just a few snippets:

 

Windows went into the addition:

You can also get a better sense of the scale of the addition, just a small bit of additional space but it will change the flow greatly.  The exciting thing is that I can now stand in my new kitchen space and begin to imagine the kitchen it will be.  

And the framing is in place for the new master bathroom and closet.

I've been to at least one holiday party and shared a few meals with friends.  Spent too much time in frustration over syncing problems with my phone, only to decide that I was better off doing other things.

Like wrapping sweet potatoes in bacon for a party this evening.  Perhaps time in the kitchen calmed my nerves, and so of course, once I was finished and cleaned up the phone decided to work perfectly.

 

I hope any glitches that show up in your life this week also fall into place so nicely.

 

 

 

 

 

Reading Update

It still feels like I am reading slowly.  That is not necessarily a bad thing.  I don't yet know if it is a good thing.

 

I finished five books in November; none of them were difficult.  One was a cookbook. I was looking for a recipe.  I found it in Marcella's Italian Kitchen, which I checked out of the library.  The recipe, for a fruit sorbet, helped clarify my thoughts on the use of acids to bring out the flavors of fruits.  Then I spent some time perusing the book, which was fun, but more like a trip down memory lane than a new discovery. 

 

The book I enjoyed the most was Dervla McTiernan's The Ruin.  I suppose some of what I found most appealing about the book would be aspects others might find annoying.  It was well-written and tightly plotted. I found Cormac and Aisling to be well-drawn. I found them both believable, even in their inconsistencies., although liking the characters is not something I find necessary in a novel.   In fact their inconsistencies were part of what I liked best about the novel.  The intellectual part of me wants a hard-hitting super-detective but humans aren't really like that.  The people who do well and get ahead aren't always the smartest, aren't any different than you or I; they work hard and learn how to play the game.  We all do that. We want our heroes to be superheroes. We also tend to think we are somehow inferior because we have to learn to play the game to succeed. McTiernan plays on that in this novel.  Cormac is also in a difficult, liminal period of his career, and is not sure which steps are the right steps.  He stumbles.  He has a blind spot.   He cannot see the true nature of an old friend.  But again most of us are like that in the same way.  I was rooting for him even as I was cursing his missteps.  I will read the author's next novel when it is released.

 

The novel I liked the least was Kate Atkinson's Transcription. Juliet's combination of naiveté, cunning, and obtuseness made her a bit of a cipher, which was the point of course.  I suspect, as historical fiction, it hits close to the truth, and to the pettiness of most of life.  Is that what made me uncomfortable?  I'm not certain.  Perhaps I wanted Juliette to become more self-aware, not that I've managed any such thing. Anyway, that is no fault of the novel, merely of the reader. Although the novel was beautifully written, and carried me along while I was reading, it is already fading away in my memory.

 

I enjoyed the other two novels.  I wrote about The Gunners here, albeit only briefly.  The characters are marvelously complex.  And although the plot wends its way through very easy themes and simple storytelling, there are moments when I think it is brilliant and might appeal to more literary readers as well.  I found it satisfying.  

 

Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects is a very different kind of novel.  Even thought it was written before Gone Girl, I found it both more satisfying and more troubling.  The writing in Gone Girl was much tighter and the narrative more compelling, but for this reader at least the humanity seemed missing.  But then I felt Amy's journal read like a contrived piece of artifice from the get-go, and I suppose I never got as angry at Nick as was intended either, as he reminded me of too many hapless young men of my son's generation.  Although I felt no sympathy for either Amy or Nick, Camille was very compelling even if also completely maddening.  But that is the thing, people who are caught in psychosis, who are the victims of abuse, act in ways that to the rest of us seem incomprehensible.  Our towns and cities are full of such people, people whom we usually do not even deign to notice.  Flynn is very good at uncovering the darkness that can lie hidden behind a veneer of civility and the comfortable stories we tell ourselves about our lives and our neighbors.  I suppose this novel also gave me some insight into the later one, in that similar themes are explored, but here we have the softer, more vulnerable underbelly, and in the later novel, a harder shell has been formed.  In Sharp Objects there was much that made this reader squirm in both frustration and discomfort, but there was also hope, a hope that had already been sealed off in Gone Girl.  You can see where my preferences lie.