Stew of Emotions: 100 Days (90)

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Tying Up Loose Ends

Day 90:

The Inspector checked my seams this evening, and pronounced it snuggly. 

There’s such a strange energy to school at this time of year. Everybody—students and teachers—is ready to be done already. Still, I also dread the end, dread saying goodbye to those who won’t be returning. And also, I’m so excited to see this crew of seniors spread their wings and fly. I love spending my days with teenagers. And I look forward to the gentle rhythm of summer, without having to be “on” all day everyday. Such a stew of emotions.

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Grit: 100 Days: (89)

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Tying Up Loose Ends

Day 89:

Feeling a project coming together can be like feeling the pieces of a life coming together, watching how the plans and ideas begin to work together to create the final garment. Sometimes when I am nearing a crucial point of a project, I kind of give up. I get that feeling that it isn’t going to look the way I envisioned, so I get cranky and put it down, hoping I will get the inspiration to make it work another day, and then it gets set on a back burner and ignored. That’s what this 100 Day Project is about for me, pushing through the frustration, or unraveling and starting again. Never too old to learn some grit and resilience.

Speaking of unraveling, “ravel” means “to unravel.”

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Regulating the System: 100 Days (88)

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Tying Up Loose Ends

Day 88:

More slow and steady progress today on the cardigan. It’s hard when I have evening events. Tonight I helped with a Singing Resistance support of community members in York Township urging  their Police Department to reconsider the 287(g) agreement that they entered into with ICE.

It is so easy to get dysregulated when protesting. Singing is one way to strengthen community while regulating our nervous systems. Crocheting is one of the ways I keep my system regulated in these days. Praying the rosary. Grounding every morning. Doing mindfulness meditations. Checking in with my beloveds. I wish you a well-regulated nervous system, and safe, brave spaces to rant and cry, to sing, to plan, to organize, to build community.

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Names: 100 Days (87)

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Tying Up Loose Ends

Day 87:

Most of the directions I have read about how to put together a granny square cardigan suggest putting them together in rows one direction, and then stitching up the perpendicular seams. Today I crocheted one of the two longest sets (14 pairs of squares from end to end).

I think it’s about the length of the black rat snake that slithered through the garage this afternoon as I was going out to help Jon bring in the groceries. I think I will call her Rabia. I’m going to call the jumping spider who lives in the mailbox Tagore. And the Oriole who sings from the top of the sycamore is simply Firebird.

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Habit: 100 Days (86)

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Tying Up Loose Ends

Day 86:

Fewer than fifteen days to go! I’m ready to be done, but I feel as though I’ve developed the habit now. I do have more project ideas, but I am also committed to finishing up, giving away, or dismantling the ones that have been lying around for ages. This summer is going to be projectful!

I started putting squares together this evening, but I was feeling uneasy, worried that I hadn’t taken a good photo of my final layout, concerned that I was going to get them all mixed up, so the cats and I set them up again, and I used some of my cut-off yarns to “baste” it together. This putting together phase may take a while. I’ll shoot for finishing it in the next fourteen days. 

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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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