July 2013

sensing and feeling…

A week passes…
and still no needle and thread put to fabric for me (unless you count the mending of three pair of my husband’s summer shorts…which I do not).
 
But I am joining in with Peggy again, because I did put iron to fabric and have been learning much in the process. Especially today, when I found something in my current Read that helped me to understand my reluctance to get sewing…the reluctance I have had for months now…
 “Clarissa Pinkola Estes believes that, “to work in organic matter, one simplifies, stays more toward sensing and feeling, rather than intellectualization.” She continues, explaining  that throughout Mesoamerica spinning and weaving of cloth were ways to invite or be informed by the spirit. “There is serious evidence that the making of thread and cloth were once religious practices used to teach the cycles of life and death and beyond.”
-Joan Anderson
A Weekend to Change Your Life

I’ve been working with paper and paste this week, organizing and creating some simple, handmade systems to help me find more time for rest and recreation this summer. But what I begin to see is that some of what I am making time for is the deep work I have been shying away from…

…tho’ I didn’t know that to be so until reading those words. But it is almost always work of the intellect that I have been choosing, for quite awhile. And most of my sewing projects…and what I have been wanting to write here…the ancestry work I keep dancing around…it all leads back to my mother and what her loss has meant to the fabric of my life. 
I spent quite a bit of the late Winter with it all, but see that I have lost the thread since then. I suppose I was hoping I had done all the work I needed to for awhile, but I know now that I have just been procrastinating, or perhaps taking a break. But it is time to get back to my untangling and reweaving and to hope that in the quiet hours that I am finding for myself, I will find the courage I need to use those hours for whatever “sensing and feeling” I need to experience…
*photos from some of my posts at Wisteria & Sunshine this week*

a nudge…

…is what I seem to need to make a start on many things these days, except for staring at the lushness all about me, or reading on the porch sofa, or working on my creative businesses. But all work and rest make Lesley…hmmm…not a dull girl, but a slightly discontented one. 
So I am using Peggy’s new gathering to be my nudge towards something more. 
Something to read, something to create, and the sharing of both.

First I read some of my July issue of Country Living (British Edition)…
…which reminded me…no…for I had not forgotten this one of my many plans to weave my mother’s things into this rest-of-my-life without her…no, I hadn’t forgotten. But I keep putting it off, for reasons both deep and not. 
But as pretty as the little stack her handkerchiefs is, it will be that much prettier…and will be a step I need to take along this path…if I get started on making the bunting with it…the bunting I’ve seen in my mind’s eye, over and over, hanging amongst the beams of her room, which is now our room.
And while I wait to start with the ironing of the handkerchiefs-tomorrow-when it is supposed to cool off a bit, I started a new book. I read it many years ago and believe it to be the book that started me on my quest for brown and white china. I haven’t reached that exciting bit of the book yet, but am steeped in sheep and haystacks and dairying and wonderful characters. 
Work and rest and reading and making…threads, when woven together, that make for a contented summer’s day.