restingmotion

Prepwork

Today is all about prepwork:

Parties, sewing projects, travel...

Perhaps, when I find time to catch my breath, I will tell you all about it.

An Update on Ongoing Projects

 

PINK SWEATER

There are many reasons it is not wise to knit when one has a sinus headache, especially the severe prolonged kind that lay one low for several days.  The body of the sweater has been completed and assembled and I was pushing to finish the knitted-on cowl  but I realized I had made a mistake, more than one mistake in fact, and somewhere I crossed the line bordering tolerable and unacceptable.  First, I neglected to twist my knitting, allowing the cowl to lie properly, although it took me a few rows to see this, and my head hurt enough that I decided I could live with that.  Until I noticed that in my pain-induced haze I was often failing to switch from knit to purl and back again at the row marker.  Knitting garter stitch in the round is a bit of a pain, and apparently too much for my headache-addled brain. So much for mindlessness.  Yesterday I ripped the cowl out and began again.  This was sad because I was about half done with the cowl and ripped a full skein of yarn before starting again.  On the other hand, the odds are high that I have missed this year’s window of wearing opportunity anyway.

 

GARDEN PLANNING

 

We are rapidly moving into spring and I have as yet to start playing with a rough plan on paper.  I do not need to stick to said plan, but I do need it as a starting point just to sketch out some broad coherent form to the evolving garden, and to help stem my magpie instincts when in nurseries and browsing plant catalogs. 

Admittedly my ability to plan was dependent on completion of certain bigger projects. The raised beds for what, at least at this point is planned as vegetables, or perhaps mixed vegetables and flowers were completed in late January.  And at the moment I am having more fun thinking about what I can plant here than I am in terms of drawing up rough plans for the landscaping.  Partly this is good because it is time to start planting early spring crops and start seeds, and bad because I also need to start thinking about perennials and shrubs, even though I know I will be able to completely finishing planting all the beds around the house this year.

In December the ornamental trees were planted, and the wattle fence was finished in the front yard, which helped me to start to imagine the space, although I am only now realizing that although this photo was posted to instagram, it never made it here.  

 

The general plan was that January and February would be devoted to research and getting some plans on paper.  To that end, I read two useful books, both of which have helped me refine amorphous ideas.  The most useful of those, may well be Michael Dirr’s  Hydrangeas for American Gardens.  I adore hydrangeas, and loved the hydrangeas that were initially around the house, even as I acknowledged that they were too large to be situated as close to the house as they were.  Now I have the opportunity to replant, and my goal is to have a variety of different hydrangeas in the front space making this book both a good source of inspiration and practical information. I am also reminded that planning is important and that it is sometimes better to work slowly with intention, than to quickly fill a space.  Expect the front garden to develop over the course of a few years. 

 

The other garden book is less focused on a single type of plant, but possibly more practical. I suspect Tracy Disabato-Aust’s 50 High-Impact, Low-Care Garden Plants will end up being one of those books that I reach for again and again when I need to solve a problem, or feel at a loss for ideas.  It actually sits on my garden shelf next to a book I’ve had for ages, Nicola Ferguson’s Right Plant, Right Place, a book that has proven its worth in my gardens.  I hope this book does the same, but even in the short term, it is helping me with refining ideas.  If this garden is going to work long term, I have to admit that the energy of the young gardener is long gone, and I must balance my love of pretty things and unusual plants with my actual ability to work in the garden.  Low-maintenance plantings are also critical to success.

 

As February is coming to a close other projects are competing with garden and knitting.  I have yet to do my taxes, and I my need for clothes will become critical once the weather warms up.  I am also going on another sewing retreat, but although I have worked in the studio and done hand work and embroidery, I have not looked at garment sewing since the holiday evening pants.  As usual, I haven’t even started and I am already behind. And so goes life, always fun, never dull.

 

 

 

 

Standing in the Doorway, Perhaps Passing Through, Perhaps Still on the Threshold

It has been two weeks already since Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door opened at the Knoxville Museum of Art, part of a celebration of native son Beauford Delaney.  I have been to the exhibit three times and still I feel like I haven’t seen it.  I’ve looked but i haven’t seen.

Inevitably my eyes focus on a few paintings, the same few paintings that struck me initially that first viewing, the evening of the VIP preview reception.  Of course I was unable to focus amidst the crowds and general hubbub.  There were over 100 people in the rooms, and I would dash into one of the exhibition rooms, become overwhelmed by the energy in the paintings and drift back out to the reception, my nerves already tingling from the melee.  And melee is the apt term here: The art vibrated at its own frequency, and usually I find the energy of a social setting exhausting in its own flow, but this night the energy of cocktail hour conversation seemed placid next to the vibration of the art, and what felt like almost clashing energies where art met social scene in the galleries.  But perhaps I was simply too wired to my social self, and my quiet side needed to take in these paintings in peace.  And, rare for me, I usually want at least a small opportunity to take in the works before listening to a curatorial discussion, I wished for some kind of talk about the works, something to focus my scattered attention.  I find it overwhelming, and I struggle with my inability to absorb, my inability to focus or to articulate, although images of the art continue still to drift through my sleeping and waking mind.

 

I met the charming and fascinating Dr. Monique Y Wells, whose blog Les Amis de Beauford Delaney, I have since begun to read.  Therein lies more information about Delaney and the exhibit and events in Knoxville.  I actually did not speak to her as much as I would have liked.  In my normal fashion, I flit at parties and am not good at striking up conversations with new people.  I do occasionally regret this, my lack of small talk, that on-spark that might lead to further things.  Instead I listen, and I flitter about. I dance around, occasionally looking for a place to land and what is, for me, the repose of a deeper conversation, but more often carried around on the energy of the evening.  And as friends ask me, “did you meet X?” I sometimes regret my skittishness, my introspection combined with this restless social instinct and failure to connect on a broader scale, but I also realize that the key to this is something I consider essential to myself, and so I am content.

 

I returned to the exhibit two days later for a brief visit with the paintings.  I had hoped to spend more time, but I found  myself overwhelmed and unable to focus for more than a short period.  I do wonder about that sometimes, my inability to spend time in museums, my short attention span and inability to focus, to absorb, to transform my thoughts and reactions into a coherent flow of words.  Or perhaps I want to absorb too much, to crawl inside the painting and find my way out again, and each such experience drains me and I retreat.  This act of articulation remains a problem.  In fact it seems I look at art, perhaps in all its forms, music, painting, writing, in much the same way I go through parties.  I flit and alight to stay and absorb something.  I miss much, but occasionally I see something.

 

Of course we are all that way.  What we see isn’t really so much about where we are or even what we are looking at, but about us, about how openly we are able to engage, and then about our own personal histories with all their biases and vulnerabilities.  What art does of course, is strip all that away and cut to something deeply essential beneath the layers we have padded onto our souls over the course of our lives.  It doesn’t really matter what the art is — it is the way it strips us bare and brings us to a new viewing and understanding of ourselves and the world.  

In fact I was having a conversation with a fascinating woman about just that, about the power of art, and about how sometimes we do not really want to be cut and bleeding, our hearts laid bare, we just want to look.  And this is true about painting but also about words, and music, they all tap into some essential melody of life.  Fitting I think for an exhibit about painting, but also about words, about Delaney and Baldwin, in an exhibit that captures the way painting itself has its own rhythm and melody, like writing, and music.  Fitting I think also because I was speaking with Carole Weinstein, sister-in-law of the late James Baldwin, although our conversation was cut short as others sought her out and I drifted away.

When I was talking to Carol she was sitting in front of the painting shown above, Dark Rapture (James Baldwin) 1941. One of the paintings that drew me, even though I struggled against its pull as it was such a bright beacon in the room simultaneously deep and dark and filled with light — the depths of human emotions and potential captured in a painting.  Not the only one, of course, but still.  I was held. There is so much in this painting, much beyond the obvious, the glowing naked boy.  Baldwin was still a teenager, Delaney was in his 30s.  This was early in a lifelong friendship.  Was Delaney “in love” with Baldwin?  Perhaps.  That sense of potential, of eros, of both the sexual and the romantic is there, the way the world glows and simultaneously retreats back, the way the body of the boy floats above the surface of the painting, a body in all its complex erotic potential.  But being in love is as much about the self as it is about the person one loves, perhaps more so. What I find fascinating about this painting is that it is both about the yearning and objectifying of desire, but also about moving beyond that, about coming to a somehow greater communion of two minds, a conversation that blurs the understanding of self and other, making each better at seeing themselves. This painting comes from an awareness far beyond that first flush of love. Both Delaney and Baldwin, at least the young Baldwin, struggled with their sexuality.  Both were sons of preachers.  Both were black, gay, artists in a culture that truly accepts none of those things.  Still.  We pay lip service to art, admire it even, put art and artists on a pedestal, but do we treasure our artists? Love our artists? Care for them?

The problems with photos of paintings is that you cannot capture the depth of the color, the way color deepens, and reveals itself, leaks out like little flashes of light.  You cannot see the brushstrokes, feel the energy, the movement of the work. Notice the depth of contrast and color in Baldwin’s flesh.  The complexity, the wonder, but also the struggle of both beauty and despair, the desired and yet the forbidden.  The colors are strong here, the feeling as well, but it is not feeling without struggle.  And yet compare it to the background. Swirling and wild and yet happy, as if this sitting, this relationship painter with sitter, is the source of something greater than either. Notice the changes in the direction of the brushstrokes, they way thy create a small gap around Baldwin, giving him the appearance of floating. The way the struggle, the relationship, which I will say seems to initially speak of something physical but is actually something greater than that, the burgeoning awareness of a communion of souls, the way a deep friendship can grow and make each participant more themselves than they would be alone.

Look at the contrast between head and body.  I am not an art critic.  i regret deeply that I never took Vassar’s acclaimed art history class, never studied art, and often feel adrift trying to put words to feelings. But look at the way the face is surrounded by pastel light, the face itself in contrast to the body, a body that speaks of struggles for selfhood and understanding, and yet a head also filled with fierce intelligence, with light of spirit, simultaneously young, yet filled with sight and yearning beyond its years. Mind and Body. Head and Heart. 

 

I still do not understand this painting.  I think the eyes are important.  Baldwin’s eyes, Delaney’s eyes.  I need to study the portraits.  Sometimes, although the two individuals are quite distinct, the eyes confuse me, as if they are twin mirrors.  But I have no photos of Delaney’s self portraits, yet.

 

Look at this portrait of James Baldwin made 16 years later.  Baldwin middle aged now, and the portrait softer, and yet still intense.  The same eyes.  Deeply seeing. The same fierce, deeply seeing, intelligent face.  But also contrast the portraits.  The whole portrait is at the top of this post, James Baldwin 1957.  Baldwin is now middle-aged.  And yet in this portrait too he floats above the background, in a similar position, except this time more contained within himself.  Do not fool yourself that this portrait is less powerful, or has less energy.  The young Baldwin is blistering with the energy of youth, of unrestrained potential and its power.  The older Baldwin seen here, clothed, more pulled into himself, legs crossed in a more enclosing way, is just as powerful, with just as much energy, but this time more controlled by self-awareness, perhaps even more powerful due to its control.  I still see explosive power here, but it is a power lurking behind the veneer, leaking out like layers of colors in paint.   In fact I think I need to go back and look at this painting again.

 

I haven’t even gotten to the second painting that seared itself into my memory that first night.  But the exhibit will be here until May, and I, like a moth to a flame, will undoubtedly find myself returning again and again.  If you have any reason to be near Knoxville, please come take a look.

A reading mash-up

I went to a book group meeting this week, one of a couple of book groups I have suddenly found myself attending after several years of famine, and that meeting as well as the book we read, reminded me that had I promised to subject you to another catch-up post, a discussion of books read in January, simply because I had, and unimaginatively at that, already consigned the books to some kind of mental dust-bin.

 

Fear not, for that is not exactly where I am going with this post. I will clean up some lose ends, and write about books, recent and past reading, but this will not, by any means be a full accounting.  

 

But to start, what was I reading this week, and why?  The book was At Briarwood School for Girls by Michael Knight, who is local and who was attending our meeting in order to talk about his book.  Truthfully, I would probably not have picked up this book had it not been a book club choice, and had I not wanted to hear what the author had to say.  The marketing description of the novel read as more a coming-of-age story about a pregnant teenager at a girls school with the addition of a ghost and a planned Disney theme-park.    

 

I was mistaken in my initial impressions and i am glad I read the book. The novel is well-written and well-plotted, and the prose is elegant and spare, with a lack of sentimentality that functions at a remove while still being sympathetic to its characters, all of its characters.  Neither Disney nor the Ghost are the main points of this novel, except in that this is a novel about history, about how history flows around us — our own personal history, the personal histories of those we encounter and who influence us, often in ways we do not even recognize, and how even the greater historical currents of our particular time and place play out in the small details of our lives.  Everyone in this novel is haunted. History is ever present, rippling outward, although rarely recognized.   Knight does not shy away from the way pivotal changes often come in quiet, almost stealthy moments, easily missed. 

 

All that said, I liked the book but did not love it. I must admit that I have enjoyed writing about this book, and meeting the author, more than I actually enjoyed reading the book.  The novel appeals to more to my head than to my heart, and i am a reader who wants to engage both my head and my heart.  For me it was a novel more of shallows than depths. That doesn’t mean it is not good, or that the person next to me at book group didn’t love it.  

 

And this brings me to the catch up portion of my post.  In writing about At Briarwood School for Girls, I found a way to write about the other novels I have read recently, the orphan novels, the novels that I don’t want to write about in and of themselves, or that do not tie into another theme, another potential post.   Some of them I loved, others I enjoyed, and at least one not so much.  

 

Why don’t we start there, with the not-so-beloved book.  Ken Follett’s Jackdaws was another book club choice, different book club from the one above, about which I remain undecided. Apparently I am trying out book clubs.  

 

Anyway, Jackdaws gripping and fast-paced. Follet is a master of his genre and his protagonist, Flick, is sharp and spunky enough for modern readers to project into while at the same time being bland and never fully developed as an independent character.  But the plot was tenuous at best and the story forgettable.

 

 

Lisa Jewell’s I found You was a more tightly drawn story, and I thought Jewell managed the structure, alternating between three narrative voices, quite well.  The story was engaging and entertaining, and quite well played.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, although once again it is quickly forgotten. No memorable characters but a great bit of occasional entertainment.

 

Then last week I also reread Stephen King’s novel Mr. Mercedes.  It was the most satisfying of this group of novels.  I read it a few years ago and picked it up again because I had been watching HBO’s series The Outsider while knitting.  I know the HBO series is based on a novel of the same name, but Holly from this novel appears, and I wanted to reacquaint myself.  Brady  continues to give me the creeps and the sections written in his voice still make my stomach churn, Holly makes me smile, and reading this novel was more satisfying than a few episodes of The Outsider.   King is a master of plot and suspense, of balancing intensity with moments of calm, even false calm, and I find his characterizations compelling, even in characters I dislike or find annoying.

 

Perhaps I will slowly work my way through this series before moving onto The Outsider as well.

 

Playing In The Kitchen With Fennel

Saturday I went to the Farmer’s market.  It has been a warm winter and there has been a lovely crop of greens and cool-season vegetables. 

I didn’t actually buy these, although they looked lovely and I may wish otherwise.  I bought more carrots, admittedly mostly for the gorgeous greens, which I have chopped, washed and frozen for future soups.  i will use the carrots too, probably mostly roasting them and they are handy for flavoring dishes especially soups and stocks, but these are so fresh and young and lovely, then deserve to be eaten and enjoyed, even if they are not my favorite vegetable.  Perhaps I am just a greedy person and the carrots are the price I must pay for a love of the greens.  Although the thought of a curried carrot soup sounds nice as we face another rainy week.

I also bought fennel.  I was having some friends over dinner Sunday night, and thought I would roast the fennel wedges with local garlic and Belgian endive which was not local.  I would like to grow some endive, and it might be a worthwhile project considering how much I love endive and its price in the store.  I know it is a two-step process.  Perhaps next winter I will be able to eat my own home-grown endive.  I will have to figure out the frost date and work backward.  Even though I have lived in Knoxville for eight years now, I am still a little more vague on the weather than I was in Hyde Park.  Having a garden and working in it will tie me more closely to the seasons over time.

 

But back to the fennel.  I knew I was roasting the bulbs, and I also knew, from experience that these local fennel bulbs were often tougher than the tender bulbs often found in grocery stores, so I knew they needed to roast at fairly low to medium heat, allowing them to caramelize slowly, a technique that also works well for both endive and garlic. 

 

But what to do with the rest of the fennel.  Look at those gorgeous feathery green fronds.  I knew I could cut the stems off and make a batch of broth with them, the basis for a lovely fennel soup, or perhaps even a seafood stew.  I had chopped and frozen my stems from my last farmer’s market foray, including the tender green fronds.  But somehow these fronds were so generous and so lovely it seemed that turning them into stock would be a waste.

Two weeks ago I made pesto from tender young carrot greens, and it was delicious.  I wondered if I could do the same with the fennel.  It certainly couldn’t hurt to try.  I stripped the tender fronds from the leaves and tossed them into the food processor with a fairly traditional mix of a fruity olive oil and pine nuts.  I added a little salt, but later, deciding it needed more, I added some goat milk feta, also made by a local farmer, and it was the perfect thing to round out the flavor.

I was so excited, I had some fennel pesto on a simple plate of scrambled eggs yesterday morning.  I might do that again today.  Apologies, I was apparently also so eager that I forgot, and took a bite before I took the photo.

 

This whole process makes me happy, happy to support local farmers, eager to grow and produce some of my own food, even if only a few small bites, happy to use as much as possible of what is offered with less waste.   The chicken bones from last night’s dinner are in the freezer waiting to become stock, along with the onion and garlic peels and those aforementioned fennel stalks.  Increasingly, it seems that what I think is important, balance and connection, seem tied as much to my relationship to this earth of which I am a part, as it is to other people, who are of course equally a part of this earth.  I worry that in our quest for convenience, and in elevating our lives outside of our basic dependence on the very earth of which we are a part, we have lost something essential to ourselves.  And of course this adds tension because I live a modern American life and I love my life. Well, life is an evolution after all.

 

Now if only I can weed myself off ziploc bags.  That seems to be a goal worth pursuing, but it is a task that has proven to be more complicated than I initially assumed.  A freezer filled with bags of vegetable peels and stems and bones is a testament to that.  At least the bags that contain vegetables can be washed and reused.  I am not sure that is true for the bags that contain bones.

 

Breathe

Yesterday I took a Sabbath day of sorts.  The day started out fairly normally.  I went to the gym, stopping to admire the camellias that had suddenly burst into bloom after a warm rainy week.  This in and of itself is not surprising, this particular camilia tends to bloom sometime during February, March, if it has been a cold winter, which it has not.  I posted a photo to instagram, the same one as seen below:

Upon my return I started upon normal household chores:  a little vacuuming and dusting, for example. I took the leaves out of the dining table, only to decide I needed to put them back in for a dinner party tomorrow.  I fully intended to write a blog post.

 

But then I sat down to knit and realized that is what I needed to do more than anything else, and so I knitted and puttered for the bulk of the day and well into the night.  There was an interruption for a fabulous violin concert, a concert that left my heart vibrating with song and fueled knitting late into the night.  I am still working on the pink sweater, the only day I had to work on it for over a week, and I finished one sleeve and made a good start on the second.

 

I had trouble going to sleep, and I realized that I this too is a part of who I am.  When I can devote days to myself, to my “work”, I am happy and calm and at peace.  Then I can go out in the evenings and be all buoyant due to the effects of that balance.  And I tend to do that.  There was a fund-raiser for the YWCA this week, another fabulous party for the opening of the Beauford Delaney exhibit at the Knoxville Museum of Art, (which I will have to write about another time), the aforementioned violin concert, and one whole day filled with meetings, and that same evening as well, a day that simultaneously inspired me, exhausted me, and caused me to question whether a particular cause, much as it is close to my heart, is really the place where my talents can flourish.  

 

I realized that this day (work, meaning creative exploration) evening balance is essential.  That the social feeds the contemplative, but the obverse is equally true. That I go out and then sleep well, and that if I start creative pursuits in the evening I loose all track of time and space and am likely to work far too late.  I am likely to tumble into the slough of despond, but this may equally be due to lack of sleep as to an excess of alone time.  I realize, well have long realized that I am not the “sew a dress in 10 minutes a day” kind of person.  I need long blocks:  the social block, the creative block — be it writing, cooking, playing with needle and thread in all its many permutations, even gardening — the cuddle with someone on the sofa block,  wait, that one is on sabbatical, so the social fills a bigger and more important role.    But life is like that too, ebbs, flows, sometimes even tidal waves.

I like sitting in my breakfast room in the early morning, catching up with news, or a book if I feel the world is too intrusive, looking out at the flow of hellebores. I can open the window and hear the birds.

 

I am only a few pages from the end of the first volume of William Manchester’s life of Churchill, The Last Lion, continually fascinated by Winston:  his obstinacy, his brilliance, as I said earlier sometimes his naïveté, by the very complexities of the man in fact, strengths and flaws.  I also enjoy Manchester’s prose, and his own comments and comparisons, contrasting time and culture, his and Churchill’s, each with its own biases and blind spots, each population confident in its modernity, its a self-assurance that their own beliefs are the path of the future.  I have long wondered, and this book feeds that wondering, what future generations will think of us, looking backward 100 years from now.  I suspect each and every one of us would be surprised.

 

I like the way Churchill needs to keep busy to fight off his own battles with “the black dog”, the way we all have gifts, and strengths, but also weakness.  The way he plays with his children, determined they would not be lonely the way he was lonely, but equally never around.  I admire the determination to make the most of those times he was around.

 

And I am reminded also of a smaller book.  One I read this week in a fit of early morning insomnia.This would have been Kreis Beall’s The Great Blue Hills of God, a book that I believe is in the small pantheon of books having one of the most perfect opening chapters I have ever read.  But even this is subjective, and I suspect that what I see and love in this book may not be what everyone sees.  But that is the good thing about books, good books, that they speak to us on different levels.

 

I am reminded of a conversation at the art opening, about how art, literature, music, dance as well, cut through to the soul, wiping away the fogs and shadows we drape around our lives, and how most of the time we do not want to be impaled, do not want to see the depths of our souls.  Some of us are better at the shallows than others, some of us, having fallen into the depths find we don’t really ever want to return to the shallows.

 

After reading that first chapter, I was impelled into Beall’s book, and it think it was gracefully written, reporting the stages and struggles of her life, looking back with a kind of distance and humility, even though it has been an accomplished and in many ways enviable life, that can only come at the cost of great personal unraveling and reknitting.  This is the woman who I found admirable and fascinating.  And odd for me, because I too have been guilty of always being busy, of wanting to make things look perfect in a mistaken belief that they will then be perfect, of searching for love and peace through shadows and trappings, I found that I felt indomitable sadness for that younger Kreis, for her own self-described lack of options, even as her life was in many ways charmed. I suppose I am saying I find it odd, because my younger self would have been awed and intimidated by the younger Beall’s accomplishments, but my older self finds this less important than my enormous respect and admiration for the woman she has come to be.  But then, none of us, if we allow our hearts to break and mend, are the people we once were.

 

I shall leave you with the last sentence from that “perfect” first chapter:

Only when I let go of perfectionism and learned to sit with devastation, and from there slowly breathe in meaning, did I discover that what I had built was not a picture-perfect life, but a real and beautiful one, stronger for the breaking.

 

What the Mannequins Taught Me

Meet Abigail and Matilda

 

Matilda is the older of the two; the one wearing the evening dress, and Abigail is the younger.  But even she must be at least 15 years old.

 

Both Matilda and Abigail were in storage for essentially a couple of years, since I moved out of the condo and into this house.  Their rediscovery has been revelatory.  First of all, dressing them was a bit of a challenge.  Then, when I looked at them across the room, for the first time really in a long long time, I noticed how long, small and willowy Matilda was.  Both are my height. Both are wearing my old clothes, garments I have loved and worn again and again.  But I never, in my entire life, considered myself willowy.

 

That seems sad.

 

I dubbed them Laurel and Hardy, for reasons I will now explain.  Size and the perception of size are interesting things.  Stan Laurel, for example was not particularly thin. He was of average size but looked small and thin compared to Oliver Hardy who was 6’1” and bulky.  Matilda probably is slender but still curvaceous, as was I at that time, but her smallness, as compared to her height, surprised and almost shocked me.  She is probably closest to an American size 6, if there is any standard.  Abigail is probably closest to an American size 14 or 16, and she looks large compared to Matilda, but she is closer in size to the average American woman.

 

I named them Laurel and Hardy because of the shock factor, of the idea of the terms “skinny” and “fat” which I have come to realize more often than not have nothing to do with actual scientific data and relate more to cultural norms and biases.  When most women say they feel skinny, they mean attractive, and this is triggered by a cultural bias in which women are supposed to be small, take up little space, to be insignificant.  Of course many will argue with me. I know women who consider thinness and the ability to wear towering heels as a symbol of power; I may have been one of those women.  Turning a symbol of weakness into supposed power is not new, but it may also not be helpful. The same is true of the word fat, at least as it applies to women’s appearance.  When I say I am fat, I am basically saying I feel unhappy about myself, and more often than not, that has nothing to do with my actual weight.  I am fairly confident that I am not alone.  These words are the words of shaming.  Matilda and Abigail reminded me of this, and reminded me to stop it.  And we all should.  But I don’t want to go into shaming and shaming words in this post.

 

When I wore that evening dress.  I did not consider myself willowy.  In fact I probably thought of myself as fat.  I was probably a good 30 or 40 pounds heavier than I had been in college, but even then, I never thought of myself as thin.  I did not have an eating disorder, but I was deeply conditioned into the way I thought about myself and if I had not been “fortunate” enough that I could eat anything and everything and still remain unusually thin, I might well have developed an eating disorder.  But eating disorders are not really about weight. And despite the fact that we tell ourselves that “thin” is healthy and “fat” is not, this is belief is based only partially in fact and does not correlate in the way our biases assume. The obverse can just as easily true, and often is.

 

So, if I was shocked to see Matilda dressed, I was equally surprised by Abigail.  I had always planned to pad Matilda out eventually and use her for fitting as I started to sew again.  I knew I would never look like Matilda again.  Discovering I was celiac (a malabsorption syndrome) and having an atrial septal defect (which made my heart work extra hard just to move my skinny self around) repaired, put a stop to that.  But in my head I kept telling myself “if only I can get back to being as thin as Abigail again, I will be happy”.  But there are no conditions on love, including self love.   I remember telling my (step) children that there is no such thing as “I love you, but...” or “I will love you if....”  But did I apply that to myself? to self-love?  Obviously not.

 

So dressing Abigail was a shock.  None of my current clothes fit her.  In fact I could not get them on her.  Abigail is bigger than I am, so why am I condemning myself?  Yes, Abigail’s waist is smaller than mine, but Abigail is eternally in her early 40s and I most certainly am not.  When I say I am fat, I don’t mean that I am obese.  I am not.  A little overweight yes.  But really I am saying that I can’t walk as far as I want.  I don’t have as much energy as I would like.  I have trouble with the first 10 or 15 minutes I walk, and in fact may always as that is a residual effect stemming from my scoliosis.  Some of those things I can change, some of them I cannot.  I honestly don’t believe attractiveness has anything to do with weight.  In fact I think almost every woman, or man, I meet is attractive.  But Abigail and Matilda reminded me that I did not extend the same courtesy to myself.  And this was in large part a big reason that I pulled inward and away from the blog for a while.  Because I know my self-criticisms are not true, that the little girl who was shamed is grown up now, that I only have to please myself.

 

The plan was always to pad Matilda out eventually.  I thought I would be padding Abigail out as well, but we will see.  She has padding now, and she captures the curve of my spine well because she was made from a cast of my actual body.  The dress Abigail is wearing is a dress I loved and plan to copy.  I still plan to copy it even though it is a bit big now and I am less curvy. 

Abigail and Matilda reminded me to stop fretting.  I had several beloved things I had made but not worn for a while, things I would say that will look better when I am .......  Surprisingly, or not actually, they all fit better than I thought they would.  I cannot wear them in the same way I did when I was 45, but who cares about that?  I have been wearing the cashmere cardigan seen above, knit sometime before 2005, which is when I joined Ravelry.  Yesterday I wore a sweater I knit in 2008.  The photo below is from 2008.  But I am just as happy with the sweater now as I was then.

But this is not really about wearing old things, or trying to regain lost youth.  It is about settling into who I am now without burdens.  This process of settling is physical, is mental, is emotional.  It is time to let go. This is my space.  This is my time.  Here I am.

 

Monday Miscellaney

1. Candles lit at the end of the Celtic Service last night at Church of the Ascension.

2.  I am still reading Churchill.  Nothing else at the moment.  Still impressed at the genius, the impetuousness, the naïveté.  We forget this, that no one is brilliant at everything, that one can be wise and still a child, at any age. But then who is not complex?  Brilliant people as much as the rest of us, except that perhaps their complexities seem more glaring simply because we fear what we do not understand.  This is, was, and probably always will be true — this tendency of humans to judge “as through a glass darkly” without seeing or understanding what they are judging.

 

3. I went to a concert Wednesday night, not so much a formal concert, but a working-through of a piece the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra is commissioning from composer Michael Schachter, titled Cycle of Life The piece will premier in May and is based on a large scale work of the same title by Richard Jolley.  This concert was very much a working through and it was fascinating.  I sat very close, in the front row between the cello and bass and I loved being in the middle of the flow of the music, the working through.  The musicians would play fragments of a work still very much in progress, with alternate selections, and one could hear the differences in the ways the music would take shape, hear and feel the difference in the playing between the musicians, a give and take, sometimes joyous, sometimes reserved, some things working for one musician but not for others, coming together and pulling apart.  

 

I have no real musical ability or talent, merely ears, so this kind of experience was new to me.  I had never been in anything quite like it, well except for that Phillip Glass premier nearly two years ago, that rehearsal and working-through of the final piece with composer and musicians. I wrote about that here.  I loved it but it was also different than this as this work is still at least partially nebulous.   I could hear and feel the tensions in the playing, and of course this is so because even though I do not play, one can hear, and sitting so closely, even feel at times the vibrations of the music, hear the difference in playing with passion or reserve.  And of course this very give and take of conversation, of communion almost — meaning a communal sharing — combined with an antagonism, not meaning that in a negative way, this, this sound of coming together and pulling apart is what I always look for in chamber music concerts, this melding of the music with the person playing the music, structure, abstraction and humanity intertwined. It is an indescribable thing that one knows when one hears it, and misses when it is absent.

The entire evening took on the atmosphere of a great and exciting conversation, with moments of coalescence, and where even those elements that did not work added to the sense of excited tension in the room, the growing of something new and beautiful. I am very much looking forward to this work, filled with eager anticipation and excitement, like a good mystery, I do not know what is going to happen.  But snippets remain dancing in my head, adding to that sense of fulfillment to come.  Above the composer and KSO Music Director Aram Demirjian conferring about a section, the musicians briefly pausing. 

 

4.  From the sublime to the mundane.  I have a large second-cut piece of brisket in the fridge which I hope to start curing/brining this afternoon with hopes of having a lovely piece of corned beef in a few weeks.

 

5.  And now I am running, this post unedited, as the day is about to run away without me.