yarn

Tying Up Loose Ends

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I have finally managed to get my brain-squirrels at least running in the same direction. I think.

I had a wild and unmanageable list of exciting and interesting possibilities for #The100DayProject, lots of potential for daily dopamine sparkles, but a couple days ago as I was vacuuming the rugs (I do that occasionally), I had a brainstorm: What if this year’s 100 Day Project would be about tying up loose ends? What if I made a list of all my Unfinished Projects, and pledged to work on one of them every day for 100 days? The daily dopamine hit would be less sparkly, perhaps, but the satisfaction in the end could be immeasurable.

So here’s the plan:
1. Spend 10-15 minutes every day on an Unfinished Project. If I have an occasional crazy busy day in which I am simply running all day from thing to thing, I can give myself a short break and do five minutes.
2. I must work on a project from my project list, and not create a new project mid-stream. I can still work on things off the list, just not as a fulfillment of this project.
3. I will take a picture of my progress on whichever project every day to log on my social media for accountability’s sake.
4. I do not have to finish one project on the list before picking up another–it’s about making progress on the things I begin but haven’t finished.

Here’s the List (for now–I may tweak it in the next two couple days before the project begins on Sunday, February 22):
1. The crochet shrug
2. The Alone Together Sweater (second attempt)
3. The Granny Square Yard Sale Cardigan
4. My Tanzania 2024 Book
5. The Rosary Zines
6. The Words Collection
7. The black Granny Squares–whatever was I doing with them?
8. 100 Hearts and Flowers for Pride
9. 20 more Little Protector Dolls for Radiance
10. Nisselue–the knitted and/or crocheted Norwegian Resistance Hat
11. Mending
12. The Red Thread Embroidery
13+ I feel like there are some more that I listed in my journal the other day, so I might add a couple from there.

I have a little cheaty thing going on in my brain right now. I have been inspired by a crocheter who makes elaborate neckpieces of different yarns and stitches, mixing knitting and crochet and different sizes of hooks and needles. If I were to begin one before Sunday, then it would be an Unfinished Project. . . Hmmmm.

I chose the name Tying Up Loose Ends for the project because I am trying to free up my mind for other projects. The image I am using is a crochet circle I am making. As I cut off ends of yarn from projects, I knot those that are longer than five or six inches to a ball of loose ends, and then I crochet them onto my circle. When it’s large enough, I will use it as the top for a beret. I’ll keep adding to the Ball of Loose Ends throughout the project.

The project begins on Sunday, and lasts until June 1. Go to #The100DayProject web page, if you are intrigued and want to join. My process is to:
1. Do the Project every day
2. Photograph or video it
3. Post on Social Media

At school, we are encouraging our middle and high schoolers to join us if they want, for the sake of creativity, mindfulness, or focus.

You can be very creative about your project choice: Try a new dance every day, give a compliment every day, do a watercolor a day, a Zentangle a day, doodle a face every day, do a breathing exercise every day, write a haiku a day, research a different animal every day, sing a song a day. . .

Hawk and Heart and Hummingbird

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Heart

Working with gratitude helps me to situate myself in time and place.

During these times of reflection, I am often hyper-aware of being here in this moment, right here, where I listen to the birdnews of the moment, the sounds of the day waking up, the thumps and bumbles of the smallfolk upstairs waking up.

This moment, where I look around to see the way the sun leans in or yawns behind grey haze.
This moment when I sit in expectation of the bright yellow falling leaf, the flash of birdwing across my window, the way sun sparkles on spiderweb.
This moment, in which yesterday’s movement is written in the aches and quirks of my muscles, the curve of my spine.

From the anchor of this moment, reflecting on the list takes me backward and elsewhere, to the color and shape of yesterday, to the shining white pebbles of moments past. I can pick them up and examine them, say, this one and I remember. I can watch how those pebbles are spun into golden strands sustained over time: The presence of a tiny impossible bird in this span of days. The season of the tang of tomato and the sweetness of basil. The long lazy days spent with the exploring feet and minds of my children.

The dailiness of the list also takes me forward into time. This has become my homework, the job I carry with me into each day. It is one of the anchoring ropes which I hold as I step into uncertain future, feeling my way in the grey mist as I go. Stepping forward with the search for gratitude on the agenda means I must go with an open heart, an open mind, searching not only for things, for items to check off my list, but for connections. It means walking into the future as into a puzzle, looking for five pieces of the coming day that will help me to shape the meaning of the picture that surrounds me.

I have been wondering lately at how this has become a habit, how I feel anxious and unmoored if I miss my daily list. For years, it was a thing I would do on occasion, as the mood hit, but in the past several months, it has become a deeper spiritual practice. I shift it from time to time, asking myself questions, or writing the list as a poem. Still, instead of becoming boring or tedious, it has become ever more a place where I can talk to myself, remind myself who I am, where I am, what I am doing here.

Gratitude List:
1. Getting into the “zone,” that headspace where you get so wrapped up in the work that you don’t notice time passing.
2. Situating myself in time and space.
3. Hummingbird. Please bear with me, but this lives with me as a constant thrill of electric delight in this season. Almost every time I walk outside my house these days, I see her. If she is not on her nest, I can wait and watch quietly, and I will hear her dzipping a zigzag through the air, or I’ll catch a flash of movement through the bright spaces between the leaves of the sycamore. Always. My heart is so full of hummingbird.
4. Hawks. The youngster who lives here in our hollow has begun to settle down and accept her emergence into independent adulthood. Her cries have become more purposeful, less demanding and sulky. She’s finding her way. At the same time, friends of mine on temporary sojourn in a hospital hours to the south of me have been watching a hawk from the hospital window. She has become the Guardian, the One-Who-Watches. In these days, when my heart is here in this place and also in that place, I find comfort in our taloned watchers, a sense of the thread that crosses distances. My heart is full of hawk.
5. The powerful truth of thread, of yarn. How ideas and love and dreams are spun like yarn, twisting people and thoughts together, expanding and lengthening through time and space, connecting, always connecting. How threads are woven and knitted together to make cloth, unifying, incorporating different people and ideas together, connecting, always connecting. How diversity of color and texture within a cloth is part of what makes it beautiful. The image that keeps returning to my mind these days from Madeline L’engle’s Wrinkle in Time, of the distance from one end of the thread to the other, but how a wrinkle brings the ends together–I think this applies to distant hearts as well as to tessering through space. When we tune our hearts to each other (an act which I call prayer), we create a wrinkle that brings us together, no matter what sort of distance in time or space or belief separates us.

May we walk, always, in Beauty.