Sweetness and Steel: 100 Days (85)

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Tying Up Loose Ends

Day 85:

Bring Joy! Bring Whimsy!
Let peace and comfort and tenderness
radiate from within you.
Let Love come into your eyes. And Fierceness, too.
Be Fabulous! Be Ferocious!
Be Sweetness and Steel.
Go into your garden and out into the streets.
Shake things up. And stay calm.
Be a well-regulated earthquake.

I finished the blocking of the squares, laid them out with Thor’s “help,” shuffled them around a bit (taking care for the claws—he thought it was a game), and stacked them and labeled them for putting together. Then I took the four extras and experimented with how I plan to construct them, and put a finishing edge around that in order to practice finishing. I made some hearts and flowers during church. And I mended the dog my grandmother made—Grandma’s squares.

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Earthquakes: 100 Days (84)

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Tying Up Loose Ends

Day 84:

Today I finished the seven I started yesterday. I accidentally got an eighth from a previous day mixed up with the stack. Tomorrow I finish blocking this batch of about thirty, and then I’ll start putting them together.

One of the images I have been working with lately in my magic//spiritual practice/prayers is that of the patriarchy and white supremacy and christian nationalism as structures. Towers and fortresses and cities. And we, who are creating the New Thing, are the Earthquake that will bring those structures to rubble.

So every women’s group (book club, moon circle, coffee klatsch) is a little earthquake. Every support system for queer folks, every community-building experience, every mothering or teaching task, every group using a bartering economy, every fiber arts and make your own club, every act of Resistance—it’s all earthquakes. What are your earthquakes? How are you shaking up the patriarchy? Rattling the white and christian supremacists? Undermining the heteronormative agenda? I want to put my intention into everything I do.

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Fidgeting and Focus: 100 Days (83)

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Tying Up Loose Ends

Day 83:

I’m going to have to buy more black yarn tomorrow. I made seven pieces of squares today, which will all need the black outer layer. I crocheted while keeping an eye on students in the cafeteria during dress rehearsal and the performance for the all school play today. Watching me crochet and playing with some of my yarn scraps kept two of the littlest fidgety ones occupied and focused when they were waiting their turn to go be oompa-loompas on stage.

I set today’s squares around a photo of my family in 1967 in Tanzania (my sister wasn’t born yet), and on the wooden car my dad made for me (a model of the car he owned when he and Mom got married), and a little red box of Grandma Weaver’s recipes.

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Windhound: 100 Days (82)

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Tying Up Loose Ends

Day 82:

Before I started this recent mindfulness course, I thought of my scattered brain as a house full of squirrels. It was an apt metaphor for how I sometimes am, but maybe not so helpful. In this mindfulness course, Brach and Kornfield talk about gently bringing the wandering puppy of my attention back to the breath and the focus of the moment.  I have decided that my attention puppy is a little silken windhound named Iris. (I wrote this yesterday, and when I made my little reel on IG, I forgot which day I was doing, and titled the reel Windhound. I found a lovely little piece of music to accompany it, called “Windhound.”)

Five more Squares today. Maybe this weekend I can steam/block them, and then start patching them together. I’m going to have to buy more black yarn.

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Roaring: 100 Days (81)

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Tying Up Loose Ends

Day 81:

I have been thinking a lot lately about my younger self, the teenager Beth, who was loud and chatty and attention-seeking, who even in the loud and talkative moments was a little bit asleep, already subverting her desires. 

What was the spindle she pricked her finger on? What was the tower she fled to? Was it hormones? Was it religion? Was it the desperate search to be perceived by, to perform for, the gaze of others?

And then today I read the headline by an Elayne Kalila: “Perimenopause is Your Second Puberty,” and even before I read it, I’m feeling that. Deeply. And maybe not just Peri, but the Meno that follows. And I’m aware how the eyes I perform for now are my own. The tower I flee to isn’t for sleeping, but for fermenting the ideas within me. The spindle is the constant  craving to create. While the maiden fell asleep, the crone Awakens. Roaring. Great gratitude to the Goddess for this Second Puberty. I mean to make the most of it.

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Mindfulness: 100 Days (80)

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Tying Up Loose Ends

Day 80:

Twenty more days to go! I managed two squares today. Granny squares take longer than hearts and flowers. I saw more horned larks up at at High Point today.

This is Play Week at school, so often students are called out to practice during class time. Today, I was left with one student for about an hour. What a great opportunity to just listen to what is important to this about-to-graduate brilliant human. I am going to miss this class.

I am taking an online mindfulness course these days, with Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. That, and the mindfulness practices in the wellness app I get through my health insurance, are helping me to inhabit time more thoughtfully and mindfully. The last couple sessions have been like Rumi’s “Guesthouse,” looking at emotions as they arise, naming them, bowing to them as guests, and being present with them.

I think of myself as a fairly grounded and mindful person, pretty self-regulated in general, and still, I have so much to learn about living in the moment; perhaps my sense that I am already comfortably mindful means that I have lots of learning ahead. Interestingly, Rob Brezsny’s post this week was about not getting dogmatic about the mindfulness of the moment, but doing that work in the context of recognizing one’s history of pain and trauma. Both. And. I love when synchronicity brings me messages about the thing I am working on at the moment.

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Love: 100 Days (79)

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Day 79:

More granny squares and a walk up High Point. Great Horned Owl is calling in the woods as I type.

I’ve been saying the rosary most mornings since the summer of ‘22. I created my own versions of the prayers, but I like the structure which, according to Perdita Finn and Clark Strand, likely goes back to prayer and devotional traditions of goddess worship in Europe before the Christians arrived.

Here is my Prayer to Love. While definitely not a fan of old King James I/IV, I am a fan of the Elizabethan turn of phrase:
Oh Love which imbues this garden of a cosmos,
Holy is thy Holy name.
May thy cloak of kinship fall upon us,
May thy reign of compassion rain down on us,
May thy bright bird of heaven sing in our souls,
May thy will be done among us here on the earth as it is in the heavens and within the
sacred wheels of life and beauty.

Give us this day our daily bread and roses, insight and intuition,
imagination, integration, adventure, and peregrination,
magic, marvel, miracle, memory, medicine, and mystery.

Draw us ever in the sacred spiral of the dance,
into the radiant circle of thy loving arms,
and protect us from those who would seek or wish or will or do us harm.

Keep us from walking in paths of destruction,
and set our feet upon the road to transformation,
and deliver us ever from evil,
for thine is the wisdom, the vision, and the virtue,
the promise, the protection, the presence, and the peace,
the hope of healing and justice and restoration,
the glory and the story and the song,
both now and forever.

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Tired: 100 Days (78)

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Tying Up Loose Ends

Day 78: 

Hearts and flowers today and part of a granny square. The bins are where we collect them at church—hundreds of hearts and flowers contributed by people of many generations. We’ve filled one bin and are on to a second.

I pondered trying to write a version of Julia Ward Howe’s “Arise then Women of this Day!” about releasing the Epstein files and destroying the patriarchy, but I am tired. I don’t need to write it. Let’s just do it.

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Tending the Web: 100 days (77)

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Tying Up Loose Ends

Day 77: 

Five more squares today.
Tending to the web.
Visiting the waters.

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Water: 100 Days (76)

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Tying Up Loose Ends

Day 76: 

Yesterday was brimful, and while I did get some squares done, I did not post. One thing that I have done over the years when I learn of the pain of someone I love, is to make everything a prayer, a meditation, a strand that sends my heart to them. So yesterday’s squares were about sending healing and comfort to one of my beloveds who is in the first stages of an enormous grief.

This web that we make between us, in joyful times and in grieving times, in the horror of the present days, and the magic of the moment–this web is what we have.  In some ways, every stitch, every shuttle, every round, all the handwork we do, is emblematic of that web we build between us.

I’m so grateful for so many beloveds on my web.

These are the first five of my last batch of 25 for the granny square cardigan, watched over by Mary of the Streets, and a stone from the Ganges River resting in Susquehanna River water. The same water flows through all of us.


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