Quotations from Vacation

"What if we saw attention in the same way we see air or water: As a valuable resource that we hold in common?"

Matthew B. Crawford, quoted by Ruth Gaskovski in You Are Who You Meet: A Geography of Common Ground (July 16th)

"Walking now amidst silence and spaciousness, I became absorbed in the landscape and was consciously grateful that I lived in a country where undisturbed engagement with the natural world is possible. It is something I have never taken for granted."

Dougie Strang, The Bone Cave, page 75.

"How would it be to live a balanced life, filled with meaning and ceremony, in a place where you were from and where your culture's stories told you that you had always been from - and then to be severed from that?"

Dougie Strang, The Bone Cave, page 39

"If, in response to whatever image the world throws at us, we look at our hearts, we can see instantly if peace dwells there, or something else: anger, rage, righteousness, distraction, even joy. If it is not peace, then something, or someone, is leading us astray."

Paul Kingsnorth, All the World is Myth (July 15th 2024)

"A'Mhoine is deemed ideal for a spaceport because of its "emptiness" and lack of light pollution. Lying in my tent in the dark, I thought about the difference between "empty" and "absent," about the loss of settlements and homes that the Moine Path once linked, and about how loss is carried forward, is inter-generational, like a weight on the cultural consciousness, pressing down whether acknowledged or not." 

Dougie Strang, The Bone Cave, page 108

"In space, a black hole has an "event horizon," which is the point at which nothing, not even light, can escape the pull of gravity. There are similar horizons in ordinary life, edgelands of new experience that can pull us out of our habitual orbits with irresistible gravity, and plunge us into areas that we never knew existed."

Peco Gaskovski, The Event Horizon: Lessons from Anatomy and Hiking Shoes (July 20th 2024)

"There's a notion that stories are eternally present in the landscape, that Diarmid is always hunting the boar on the hill, that a roe deer fawn is always slipping into the birch wood and finding Hamish Henderson asleep there."

Dougie Strang, The Bone Cave, page 118

"We go to the woods because we must. No cathedrals without towering trunks, no books without trees, no crops without clouds, which are the outbreath of forests. We go to the green to remember what community really is, how interdependence underpins all life, to see through the myth of the lone protagonist once and for all."

Caroline Ross, A Walk that Never Ends (July 22nd 2024)

"My heart is like a paved street, covered by asphalt-shaped wounds and such. But the potholes that appear allow the earth of my soul to breathe and flowers to spring forth, ever-renewing."

Fr. Stephen, What to Do When God is Everywhere (July 29th 2024)

Very alternative lifestyles

I am mostly thinking about creative projects these days, but the hot temperatures in the past week have meant more sleepless nights and podcasts, so I have one more controversial topic.

Last night I listened to 

an interview with self-declared pronatalists Malcolm and Simone Collins. The link takes you to the description, so I won’t bother with introducing them.

These were my 3 main takeaways:

1) Many times throughout the podcast, I decided that Malcolm and Simone were batshit crazy and that I would never listen to anything else they had to say again. But then one of them would say something interesting or perceptive and I would find myself intrigued or starting to like them.

2) They happily described their lifestyle as weird and admitted that it is part of their parenting approach to teach their kids to be weird. The children are different because more is expected of them than of other people. If nothing else, this sparked recognition in me: My family growing up was also more than a little bit weird and I also learned to accept it and even take a certain amount of pride in it.*

3) At the end of the interview, Malcolm says that his and Simone’s approach to family life is based on a hypothesis, and if they are wrong, they want other people to be right. He emphasizes that he wants other people to take a different approach to family life and to share whether it works. This improved my opinion of them and their sanity. It’s so rare to find people who are humble, especially when they are claiming to solve the world’s problems (of course this is a hubristic claim in and of itself).

* I do have a complex relationship with weirdness. These days there are so many labels, and everybody is busy “identifying” as this or self-diagnosing as that. That was not my experience growing up: I was just weird. I knew it; other people knew it. (The polite people told me I was “creative.”) So when Malcolm and Simone described themselves (accurately) as weird it was bracing and even gave me a pleasant feeling of nostalgia.

On the other hand, as a young person (teens to early twenties) I felt a great deal of shame over the weirdness. There were a couple of main reasons for this. One, I didn’t feel like I was given a choice as to how weird to be.  I suppose if you have a choice it isn’t genuine weirdness, but play acting. But I still wanted the skills to not be very weird if I chose, and as soon as I figured out how to get them I set about doing so.

The second problem is that the kind of weirdness I experienced as a child, even when it had arguable benefits, didn’t seem to scale up. It worked in our family but I couldn’t see a workable model for a weird life in the larger community. And I wanted that life. I experienced enough isolation as a child to know that I had to find resilience and connection.

But there is always an ambivalence here because I don’t actually mind being weird; I like other weird people; and overwhelmingly, they like me.

I also have, perhaps, a higher than average openness to ideas outside the respectable norm. In real life, I pass  as a middle-class progressive professional. (All those years learning how to be normal!) I say that only to give a shorthand of what’s considered respectable opinion most of the time among friends and colleagues. However, I don’t necessarily accept that the things that most people believe are correct (which nowadays is just as or more likely to be meme- or trend- influenced than the product of experience, tradition, and/or careful thought.) Every now and then, fringe ideas are correct. Not the majority of the time, perhaps, but it’s a non- zero chance.

In other words, part of me, while I quietly go about my conventional, enjoyable existence, is wondering when it is time to abandon it and fully embrace weirdness. I know I can do it after all: it’s a question of whether I want to and whether it’s the best choice. I give the weird people some attention because I think they are in many ways more perceptive in certain circumstances, than my comfortable, conforming peers.

For now, we proceed as normal with occasional adjustments. Next time, something completely different. (Maybe.)

Just Maybe

I always hear “Just Maybe” in Cookie Rankin’s voice.

Anyway. I wrote a while ago about how I don’t call myself a feminist anymore. I say that not being completely confident I ever did call myself a feminist in the first place. However it certainly was part of the environment I came of age in. So the beliefs and assumptions are all there in my awareness, able to be acknowledged and interrogated.

Sometimes I read something that does so in a usefully provocative way. After some years of reading mostly male writers, I seem to be finding interesting female writers as well.  Mary Harrington is probably the one I read the most lately, as well as Caroline Ross, Freya India and Ruth Gaskovski. But there are others too, and this piece by Emily Hancock was enjoyable and thought provoking today.

Femina Machina

I try not to over-focus on whether I’m a This or a That, or whether I’ve found a Way of Thinking that Explains Everything. I find such stances annoying, as in they annoy me in other people and sooner or later they annoy me even more in myself. But, I always have one ear open (two as often as I can spare them) for anything that will help me explain certain thorny matters to my daughters.

Mary Harrington calls herself a “reactionary feminist” and I’m not sure what if anything Emily Hancock calls herself. Anyway I’m not seeking another label. But if there is a kind of feminist who explores how to be a fully embodied being, how to find self-awareness elsewhere than consumerism, who can be ruthlessly honest, well maybe I could be that kind of feminist. Just maybe.

Edit: I have to add this quote from another of Emily’s essays:

“I don’t want to be a foremother who passes down a legacy of avoidance and disembodiment, I want to be a foremother whose legacy is one of facing hard things head-on, roaring reclamation, and tenderness for our innate female qualities and experiences.” 

—An Ungovernable Pain

Flora

I think I learned to crochet around age eight or nine, and since then I’ve gone through periods of crocheting a lot or not doing it at all. It’s something I know well enough that I don’t have to focus energy on how to do it; the skills and knowledge I have just flow outward through the intention and physical motions. It feels like a kind of superpower.

People ask me if it’s hard: not usually, but words like that don’t really apply. They ask me if it’s hard to learn and I say adults tend to over-intellectualize things. The basics are not complicated and for most projects all you need to know is a couple of different stitches (often only one) and how to read and count. The rest is muscle memory and learning how yarn and crocheted fabrics feel in your hands: what feels right, what needs adjusting. I’ve seen people try to learn to crochet and get frustrated because they can’t do what I do after a couple of hours. Well, it’s not the kind of thing you learn with your brain in an afternoon, especially if you have little experience with handiwork. You need to give it time and attention. (Ah there’s the real challenge.)

I say this like I have some kind of superior knowledge. Of course I don’t, at least outside of crochet. I make the exact same misapprehensions in other areas of life.

The other thing that is funny is when people ask me how I have the patience to complete a project. I don’t need patience for the things I enjoy; I need patience for the things I don’t.

I get it though. Crochet is not instant gratification, at least not of the sort where you go shopping and have a Thing in your hand immediately. It’s a slow drip of gratification. Which is healthy for me, as I quite like instant gratification and I need to practice an alternative.

I have to say though, the internet has stimulated my recent increase in crochet, and that’s partly by increasing the instant gratification factor, thanks to Etsy. I avoid Ravelry, due to the social media aspect. But I love Etsy for finding patterns. Being able to instantly find high quality patterns has made me more excited about crocheting, and more likely to complete projects and move on to new ones. I am ok with this. I don’t mind spending a small amount of money to support other creators, who are women much like me making a little extra money on their small businesses. Not everything needs to be or should be free. And the patterns I buy are really wonderful and have been put together with such care. I would much rather pay for an excellent pattern than struggle with a poor one.

People also ask if I make up my own patterns, and the answer is yes I can, but it takes a different kind of energy. When I’m improvising I often have to re-do things that don’t quite work. Sometimes I’m in the mood for that, sometimes I’m not.

My latest project involves a pattern is from the wonderful Ukrainian designer Galina Veremeenko, and you can explore her work here. When I followed her pattern to the letter, this was the result:

I created this doll for a silent auction last January. She did her job of parting people from their money and has gone to her forever home with one of my lovely classmates. I thoroughly enjoyed this project and had a bit of separation anxiety when she was done, so I knew I wanted to create another doll.

So this spring I re-visited the pattern but did some modifying and improvising. I wanted the look to be reminiscent of the costumes our adult group wore this year for our repertoire dance.  See here for a photo of our costumes.

This is my hot rod:

I changed the embroidery on the blouse to resemble the flower embroidery on our peasant blouses, and I added crocheted lace to the collar and cuffs. I kept the poppy headdress as it is so beautiful and iconic and makes the doll immediately identifiable as Ukrainian.

To create the poyas (sash), I experimented with a six-strand braid. I made some mistakes but was happy with the result and decided to not be a perfectionist.

I couldn’t exactly recreate the floofy skirt and crinolines we wore with this texture of yarn. But, I added a lace trim to the petticoat.

The skirt happens to naturally curl up in the back, offering a peak at the lace and resembling how our skirts would fly during our dance, which is perfect.

I also added a bun in place of the braid on the original pattern

Now what’s in her basket?

This is all my invention. All of our dances this year involved something to do with baskets, either going to the market with a basket or taking presents to a wedding in a basket. So I had to give my doll a basket. In it are two items: a scarf and a bunch of radishes. Scarfs were featured prominently in the dances, and I had to practice throwing a scarf dramatically (not so easy haha). I created this mini-scarf from  a granny square template and just kept adding rows and alternating colours.

The “radishes” are a little pun on our group name: an in-joke only the ladies would fully get. I had a lot of fun figuring them out:

So, that’s my latest, and now I just have to figure a way to display her, which is still a conundrum. And last but not least, the name “Flora” was chosen by my eldest daughter.