#joy

Sweetness and Steel: 100 Days (85)

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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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Skylark: 100 Days (73)

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Tying Up Loose Ends

Day 73:

To a Skylark
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
(stanzas 1-2 of 21)

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

This evening I walked to the top of High Point, where I met a twittering horned lark. We regarded each other for a bit, and then it took off and climbed the sky, higher and higher. And then it sang. Just like the lark in the fields outside Bolanderhof so many years ago.

You might want to go read all of Shelley’s poem. You might want to walk up High Point just before dusk and watch for larks, smelling the green of the meadows, and greeting a carpenter bee buzzing around your car like a tiny flying puppy. There is joy to be found.

I steamed two more stacks of squares today. One more stack to go tomorrow, and them I’ll lay them out to see if I am ready to construct the sweater.

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Into the Woods: 100 Days (30)

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Tying Up Loose Ends

Day 30: On Which I Pivot Into the Woods

This year’s fundraising Gala theme for my school is “Into the Woods.” My fearless colleague has worked her magic with a group of students who designed, cut, and laid out a quilt to be auctioned off. This is powerful pedagogy, having students collaborate, learn design techniques, work with fine motor skills, and feel the satisfaction of a job well done.

They’ve begun appliqueing, but the process is taking longer than we expected, so for tonight’s project, I brought the quilt home so I could catch up on some of the needlework. Here are some elements of the quilt—the final reveal will be the night of the Gala.

This too is resistance—to apathy, to indifference, to control—to enable children to create a thing of beauty, something they can take pride in, a way that they can give back to this community that has given them (and us, their teachers) so very much.

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#The100DayProject Day 6

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Day 6:
“The best reason for a knitter to marry is that you can’t teach the cat to be impressed when you finish a lace scarf.” ― Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, At Knit’s End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much

Actually, my biggest knitting fan is my cat, and I think he can’t wait until I am finished with The Alone Together Sweater, so I can wear it and he can sit on me.

Today is another day of Parent Teacher Conferences. I’ve never taught at a school that brings me such joy during PTConferences. We do team meetings, and we sit around and talk about how the student has grown, strategizing ways to make learning easier and more effective. The high schoolers attend their own conferences, and they participate in the strategy sessions. Today at the end of a session a student gave an impromptu speech about how much Janus has supported their personal and academic growth, and their parent had everybody getting teary talking about how proud they are of their student’s persistence and kindness and creativity.

Today I got to the ribbing at the wrist of the sleeve, and made nine little hearts for Pride, holding onto that beautiful and loving energy of my students and their parents and my colleagues. May we all See each other with such gracious eyes.

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#The100DayProject Day 3

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Day 3:

It’s harder to see the progress in only a few rows today, in about 15 minutes of knitting. Long day.

I’ve been wanting to write a little bit about Art as Resistance. My husband and I have both been enjoying creating thoughtful and artful signs for protests, so that’s one kind. Poetry which calls the dictator and his toadies to account is another kind. You see it everywhere sprouting up on the internet: reels of fierce new protest songs, comics and collage and editorial cartoons and posters and t-shirts and buttons. I want to keep pushing out my own art and poetry in active resistance to cruelty and evil.

Also, simply doing art of some kind is, for me, a powerful resistance. Bring me beauty! Bring me joy! Set my feet to dancing! We’re in this thing for the long haul, and we need all the art, all the music, all the poetry and dancing.

Recently, knitting and crocheting have been extremely regulating for me. The Files and the evil they uncover have me quivering daily in fury that dysregulates my nervous system. I feel like I am dissolving into a red haze. And so I take up the yarn, repeating the same stitches over and over again, watching the stripes of color appear, feeling the softness of yarn sliding over my fingers, listening to the swish and click of yarn and needles. I am going to need to stay grounded and regulated if I am going to stay in the fight. Making art is part of that necessary medicine.

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