Suspension

On Sunday I hiked up the gorge downtown to enjoy the fall colors. It was sunny, with no breeze. Beside the bridge, little yellow leaves drifted to the creek below, their changing silhouettes distinct aginst the arch of blue sky outlined by the girders.

I enjoyed the unhurried fall of the leaves, their moment of hanging aloft, without attachment. I counted those seconds of suspension before the leaves fluttered to the ground. As they fell, the leaves, untethered, seemed to breathe out all that had come before--the spring birth, the summer of sailing on the swells of warm breezes, the autumn display of their true colors, their final days of catching the slanting rays of autumn sun and collecting fat raindrops.

As they fell to the creek and were caught by the current, they hung suspended on the water, carried along by the rightness of what--or whatever--was to come.

I hope you are enjoying your fall, this brief bridge between summer and winter.

Color bursts before fading

Every year I forget the colors.

The long, green summer feels like it will last forever. The brief, gray weeks of September and early October numb my senses.

It's the breeze that awakens the memory. The leaves shiver in a sudden strong gust, clatter against each other in a decisive manner.

The gray curtain lifts briefly, the weak sun revealing the lemon-tart yellow of the twin trees across the street. A night of rain and strong wind, and we wake up to a ragged blanket of tan, yellow, red, and light purple covering the driveway and the forest path.
 
Thank you, fall, for the visual wake-up call.

Home Is . . .

. . . where my pictures sit, framed and waiting to be hung.

. . . where a linen cat and silk rabbit perch on bookshelf ends.

. . . where the books rise up in staggered piles.

. . . where the sunlight lights up a trapezoid of yellow on the wall.

Home is . . .

. . . a dry place to wait out the storm.

. . . a place where gratitude swells.

"This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" by Talking Heads

Truth and Its "Magical Dimension"

"Reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying."

                                                                                               — Isabel Allende (Eva Luna)

Over lunch with my writer friend Zee early this week, we talked about truth and fiction and the limits of memory. How it's possible to write memoir with perfect veracity and yet still lie.

A couple of years ago I wrote a story about a trip to the beach I took with my family. I was struggling with the conclusion, worried that I didn't remember whether it was my mom or dad who waded out to the sandbar to collect sand dollars. The details I remembered and wrote down evoked the experience well for me, but my memory lapse forced me to fictionalize the conclusion. It was a true reflection of my parents and me at the time, even if it wasn't a literal version of events.

I value truth-telling, but I think there are a number of narrative ways to accomplish it.

After all, no two people experience reality the same way, and our own senses imcompletely take in what's going on around us. My own carefree experience of that beach trip and the magic of finding dozens of sand dollars differs from that of my mother, who bore the responsibilities of packing up all of our food and camping gear and keeping the tent clean and feeding our family of five. 

And there is of course the weakness of my own memories in recalling events from the past in all their technicolor detail. Journaling helps with this, though I have to confess that I am an inconsistent recorder of daily events and observed details.

For me, taking my camera along and focusing it on something I might not otherwise pay attention to opens up a whole new level of awareness of a hike or other experience. By looking at the photo below, I can remember that moss-covered drum of a stump and the kernel of a story about who might be gathering around it on a moonless light, and for what magical purposes it might serve.

That's why I like Isabel Allende's take on reality, that of going beyond the surface truth to tease out the mystery and magic in the mundane. It transforms life, as we live it and recall it, into poetry and essential truth.

Coming Home

My family and I have just moved back to our home in upstate New York after a year's sabbatical. We have been welcomed by cool temperatures and blue skies like the Sky Blue in the Crayola box. Sweet breezes blow through the opened windows, and I find myself pausing by them to take long, deep breaths of the fresh air.

Our trees are in full leaf, and I see a curtain of greenery when I look out the window. Our backyard, neglected for a year, is growing a crop of chest-high weeds that the neighborhood wildlife are enjoying. On Tuesday I spied a young doe, her legs curled under her, nestled in the tall grass while five turkeys pecked for seeds around her.

Moving--and transitions in general--stirs things up for me, in ways good and bad. It makes me question the idea of home, of permanence, of belonging. In so many ways--in time, in space, in emotional connections--I am far from my own home: the place where I grew up and where many of my friends and my extended family remain.

Yet this old house in a Northeastern college town to which my family has returned is home now. My family has settled into its cozy nooks, tuned their ears to footsteps on creaky stairs. My older kids have trudged up the hill to school for six years, checking the hole at the base of the tree next door for the snake that once made its home there. They have learned to ride their bikes and navigate the steep roads. My youngest was born here, took his first steps and formed his first words here. He'll be starting his own journey up that hill for kindergarten soon.

And me? The transplant? I guess I've put down my own roots here as well as I've seen my little saplings grow and thrive. It's been a slow process of adaptation to a cold climate. Of navigating social nuances that seem foreign to me sometimes.

In my year away I have realized that maybe I've leafed out a bit myself, formed some new branches that have reached out to connect with the big blue sky here. My new old home. It's good to be back. 

A Forest of the Heart

"The city is most fortunate in possessing this park containing part of the deep, romantic, wooded ravine called Balch Canyon. Few people know and love this beautiful sample of the magnificent timber which formerly covered all the hills and ravines in the city. Aside from the luxuriance of the woodland vegetation there is the added charm of seclusion to a degree rarely found in a public park." John Charles Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., Report of the Park Board, Portland, Oregon, 1903

On the last day of a hectic visit to Portland, Oregon, my husband, daughter, and I enjoyed a short hike in an unexpected oasis of an urban park. Just west of downtown, a hilly neighborhood street of close-built homes dead-ends at Macleay Park. Donated to the city in 1897, the wooded trail forms part of the 5,100-acre Forest Park, which ranks as the U.S.'s largest forested natural area within a city.

We walked (and skipped and dawdled and photographed) along the park's dirt trail, which winds along a creek and beneath a leafy canopy of old- and second-growth trees. Sunlight filtered down the steep slope of the ravine, backlighting a spiderweb strung between fern fronds and cottonwood fluff littering the creek. Green was all around us. Sycamore leaves waved fanlike above the trail. Clumps of moss clung like cloth patches to rough bark; lichen added a green patina to wooden railings. My daughter noticed a slime trail and discovered slugs the size of fat cigars resting on leaves in the undergrowth.

It was one of those perfect, soul-soothing walks, a much-needed rest after a very busy summer. I have been taking out little memories of that walk over the last few weeks. The moments of peace gathered in those green woods have helped me get through packing and moving back to our home after a year-long sabbatical.

I hope that you are all enjoying the last bit of summer. I'd love to hear how yours was, and if you managed to find a place of the heart that inspired you as that little moment in Macleay Park did for me. 

Alpaca Who?

Alpaca up the blog for a while.

I did something bad to my shoulder on Sunday, and I'm trying to give it lots of TLC--ice packs, NSAIDS, and rest. I thought I could sneak in a little blog post yesterday and some blog visits this morning, but the shoulder is starting to tighten up again.

Which means I'll be resting my "mouse" hand that connects to said shoulder and reading Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

I look forward to blog visits and email catchup once I return.

Everything's Green Again

Without my noticing, the tight leaf buds have completely unfurled. The whole neighborhood is green again. The colorful clouds of flowering trees have passed, replaced by full green canopies with a carpet of fallen blossoms beneath them. The laggard dogwoods are still in bloom, but fading. The azaleas, Southern charmers, started blooming last week. Their intense reds and pinks vibrate with the energy of the summer that will soon be upon us.

A happy chorus of birds and the early morning light helps me greet the day a little earlier. The busy-ness of spring activities helps me fall into bed early and drop into immediate sleep.

I'm feeling a little scattered, like the fallen blossoms. And though the green is welcome, it is also making me feel a little lost.

Yesterday I took a hike in an unfamiliar park, and I got completely turned around. Beside the asphalt path was a mulched trail through the wet woods, which I followed. The broad leaves of skunk cabbage were growing  next to fiddleheads about to unfurl. I was enjoying the green in an unconscious way while I listened intently on my iPod to the talking heads dissect the news of Osama Bin Laden's death.

Without paying much attention, I followed several forks in the path until I realized that I couldn't orient myself. The dense green canopy blocked out the sun and the view of my original path. I tried to retrace my steps, but every trail looked the same. I kept walking and eventually reached a private road to homes nestled deep in the woods. I followed that to a subdivision of gracious homes, and then to a narrow country road that led to the main road and back to my car.

Being lost was a strange feeling after following my familiar paths for so long. One moment I was sure-footed and confident, and the next moment I felt alone and hesitant, reliant on very rusty skills. (And isn't it funny that when you're lost, suddenly there is no one around to give you directions? And my smartphone with its navigation app was back in the car.)  It forced me to follow my instincts and to take a zoomed-out view of my situation to figure out where I was. I think I may apply that lesson to my creative wanderings, and to my life as a whole.

I hope you are having better luck navigating your wanderings this spring.

Thank you, Craft Bloggers and Wordpress!

Just a quick note of thanks to all of you activist-crafters who got the word out about the intellectual property theft experienced by Cassi of The Crafty Crow and many of the craft bloggers who have had tutorials posted there. Many of you complained directly to tugatnature, the blogger who plagiarized material, and lodged complaints with Wordpress.

Wordpress has responded by suspending tugatnature's blog for violation of Wordpress's Terms of Service. (Etsy, take note!)

Thank you Susan of Slow Family Online for alerting me about this latest development.

Keep vigilant, and keep crafting!

Spring Beauty

Last week, on our hike at Mt. Pleasant Farm, my sons and I noticed the most delightful little wildflowers growing beside the trail. The plant with the tiny pink five-petalled flower is known as the Eastern spring beauty (Claytonia virginica). It's a common early-blooming perennial and thrives in a variety of habitats.

Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist whose scientific naming convention is what we use today, chose the spring beauty's binomial Latin form in honor of John Clayton, the English-born botanist and Virginia county court clerk who collected specimens in the American colonies and sent them to Europe for study.

Clayton's well-preserved specimens are stored at the Natural History Museum in London. You can see a digital version of his original specimen of Claytonia virginica here.

We saw the spring beauty growing in dense patches near a downed tree. The wildflowers grow from underground tubers that Native Americans and early colonists used as a food source. Wild-plant foragers continue to enjoy the potato-like root, which reportedly tastes like chestnuts and is a good source of Vitamins A and C. The spring beauty's leaves are also edible.

I don't think I'll be foraging and eating the wildflower's roots. I'll just enjoy the spring beauty as a sweet consolation for missing wildflower season in my home state of Texas this year.

I wonder what wildflowers have been popping up in your neck of the woods?

Celebrate World Intellectual Property Day

April 26 is World Intellectual Property Day, and this year's theme is "Designing the Future." "Intellectual property" is writing, music, design, photography, and other creative works made by and therefore legally owned by an individual. The text and images on a blog, the original design of a ceramic or stitched piece, an illustration or art work, a recorded song--these are all examples of intellectual property that are legally protected from being reproduced.

Cassi of The Crafty Crow and Bella Dia just let me know that some of her blog posts (and a friend's and her sister's) and one of my tutorials had been copied almost in their entirety on another blog. The blog author included the photographs and word-for-word the instructions written by other authors. There was no link to the originating blog or any other indication of the original author of the posts.

I was stunned. The Crafty Crow provides a way to share free tutorials written by craft bloggers, and it's an amazing resource. But the site clearly attributes the source and links to the originating blog. Cassi had generously linked to my tutorial on the site. I had spent many, many hours taking the photographs, writing the text, and wrestling with Blogger on the formatting of the photographs so that the tutorial would be clear and easy to understand. I published the tutorial so that others could use it. I didn't publish it so that it could be stolen and passed off as someone else's work.

Cassi let me know how to get the stolen post taken down. I contacted the Wordpress blogger directly but also filled out a form through Wordpress that got the offending post removed. If you encounter this problem, the major blogging platforms provide a Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice. This notice allows bloggers to report stolen posts that originate by Wordpress, Typepad, or Blogger (etc.) users. If you see a Wordpress blog that has stolen your work, you can report it on this form. The Typepad form is here. Blogger's is here. Google "Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice" and the blogging platform to find the notice for other platforms.

I appreciate Cassi taking the time to let me know about the theft of my creative property and a way to address the issue. As a craft blogger, I feel that I am part of a generous, creative community.

I have looked into copyright issues a bit as a result of this incident. I found out that a published work such as a blog is automatically protected by copyright. A copyright notice, which I have added to the bottom of this page, is just a reminder to others that this work is protected. I have also added a restrictive Creative Commons license detailing how I'd like to share my text and images (as non-commercial links, and with attribution).

I urge you to educate yourself about intellectual property rights. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has several online publications that explain copyright issues. The World Intellectual Property Organization has an especially helpful pamphlet geared to kids (just my reading level!) that explains copyrights and what we can use from the Web in our own work. The U.K.'s Intellectual Property Office has some useful links related to protecting designs.

I know that this sort of stealing happens all the time. It's so easy to cut and paste someone's digital work. I also know that whatever measures we take to make copyright explicit will of course be ignored by the unscrupulous or uninformed. I hope that we can all use World Intellectual Property Day (and any opportunity we have) to spread the word about intellectual property rights. To stand up for our rights as blog creators and designers and artists as owners of the things we create.

Celebrating Spring

Between the spring rainstorms, the sun shines as bright as a floodlight. Spring light limns the masses of petals on the flowering trees, creating technicolor explosions in each yard around the neighborhood.

The night before Easter, a rainstorm beat out a loud staccato pattern on the skylights and drenched the backyard. It brought the Easter bunny inside, where he hid chocolate bunnies and chicks wrapped in foil, lollipops and gummy bunnies and Tic Tacs, and coin- and seed-filled plastic eggs.

Only three children--a teenager, a middle schooler, and a preschooler--hunted for the treasures. The difference in ages melted away as they tried to beat each other to the treats. One handmade fabric basket, made by Amber of Shagbark Studio (more baskets for year-round storage fun available here), groaned with Easter booty.

By mid-morning, after an enormous Easter breakfast, Mrs. Easter Bunny had a minor meltdown and went to nap in a quiet patch of clover.

She remembered Easter pasts with her brother and sister and many cousins dashing around her aunt's yard. Cascarones, confetti-filled eggs, and brightly dyed boiled eggs filled their baskets. Cousins cracked the cascarones over each other's head, releasing the colorful confetti. The tiny paper circles and crooked rectangles--punched and cut from construction paper, tissue, and the funny pages in the newspaper--were carried on the breeze, snagging in the scraggly patches of grass and littering the yard for weeks afterward.

Later, as she mixed the cream cheese batter for a simple lemony cheese cake, Mrs. Easter Bunny remembered an Easter cupcake from childhood. A dozen of them in fact, carried in a plastic carton. Dyed green coconut covered the white frosting; jelly beans nestled in the faux grass.  

It was Aunt Rosie who brought those cupcakes. Aunt Rosie, with her styled auburn hair and impeccable makeup and burgundy lipstick and elegant pantsuit, carried the cupcakes from the car parked in the dirt driveway behind a line of other cars, both hands supporting the bottom of the supermarket carton. A gaggle of cousins surrounded her to ogle the delightful treats, and she greeted them in her feminine, breathy voice. She walked in a cloud of Dep styling gel, Aqua Net hair spray, and spicy perfume.

She carefully maneuvered through the crowd of children and climbed the concrete steps to Aunt Elma's house, opened the screen door, and then gracefully balanced the carton with one hand as she held out a palm to keep the screen door from banging shut.

A dwindling crowd of acolytes followed her into the steamy kitchen, where Aunt Elma was busy mixing a big batch of potato salad. Aunt Rosie put the cupcakes on the table in the storeroom, with the other cakes and cookies: homemade carrot cake, Italian cream cake, Mexican wedding cookies. The children admired how the little landscape of the cupcake jelly beans turned into Easter eggs and coconut became grass, like the thin Communion wafers become the Body of Christ during Mass, except cute and colorful and probably yummy.

                                                                       * * * * *

As Mrs. Easter Bunny dried the fourth dishrack of Easter dishes, she wondered what memories of spring celebrations past you see reflected in spring's bright light.

Montjoy Barn Interior

It is late morning in south-central Maryland. Spring has arrived for certain after several false starts, and the gentle sun-warmed morning cedes to a humid afternoon as we explore Mt. Pleasant Farm, a nature preserve maintained by the Howard County Conservancy. My sons feed the goats before we meander down the grassy path to the stream. The hillsides are still brown with faded grasses. When we walk back up the hill, the sun is almost exactly overhead. We are drawn to explore the Montjoy Barn.

We open the double doors on the side of the handsome European-style wheat barn and peek inside. The interior is lofty and cool. The barn smells like autumn harvest, a combination of the wooden timbers, the dried grasses hanging from the beams, and the hay bales on the floor.

The barn is timber frame construction, made entirely of old-growth oak. Some of the posts and beams are 18th-century originals and bear the markings of the axe that shaped them. Wooden pegs join the pieces, and there are no nails used in the structure.

In the quiet coolness of the barn, I close my eyes for a moment and imagine myself transported back to the days of the Revolutionary War in which the barn was likely constructed. The stone foundation is like those found in German barns of the time, and the distinctive high ceiling and side doors mimic the style of English wheat barns. Right around the time the American war for independence raged, a skilled German immigrant may have directed the construction of the barn. Over the centuries since it was built, the barn stored tobacco and wheat and was later used to shelter livestock.

The silent barn contains the hush of laborers resting after a long day's work. It has done its job efficiently for generations, and now it is at rest.

Wanderings

In my previous post I wrote about Sue Bender's exercise in "clear intention and genuine effort." Just so you know, my life isn't usually like that. This week, as my kids enjoy their spring break, I've been practicing the opposite: some aimless wandering and a little bit of laziness. We're sleeping in (a little, anyway). We're letting the weather decide on our outings. The dishes are going mostly undone, clean linens unfolded, leftovers reheated.

Monday we slept in and had a movie day. (Go see Rio if you can--we all enjoyed every minute of it. Fantastic animation, great message, and wonderful shots of Rio de Janeiro.)

Tuesday I vowed to get an earlier start to our day and visit the aquarium. But in the morning I had a moment of very un-clear intention and indecision. I had a little wardrobe crisis (it's not winter any more with its sweaters and layers to hide the bulges), and all I wanted to do was crawl right back into pajamas and into bed. I did not want to face the Spring Break crowds at the aquarium.

But I also didn't want to disappoint my kids. So I dug out some comfy capris and got over my grouchiness, and I'm glad I did. At the aquarium we watched the jellyfish floating in their cylinders of glass, puffing out their gossamer bells and trailing threads in their slow ascent. We saw a diver feeding lettuce to a rescued sea turtle, whose missing left front flipper didn't seem to affect its graceful glide through the water. We enjoyed the puffins, who look cute and oblivious and clumsy on land, diving into the water and swimming faster than we expected them to.

Yes, the crowds were awful, and we were all on sensory overload after a couple of hours. So we took a break and walked along the waterfront, across several bridges, and over to Little Italy. At Vaccaro's Italian Pastry Shop ("The Place for Desserts!"), we ogled dozens of kinds of Italian cookies and pastries in the display case. I let my kids have Belgian waffles for lunch (one had his waffle topped with a melting mountain of ice cream). And I had the best sandwich I have EVER had--a veggie mufalato grilled panini-style. It was stuffed with grilled eggplant, artichokes, tomatoes, olive tapenade, and thick slices of mozarella.

We ended the day quietly, the kids building their own Lego Bionicles while I finished reading the epistolary novel Sorcery and Cecilia (another recommendation, if you like Jane Austen and J.K. Rowling). Then, as I read aloud Sharon Creech's Unfinished Angel (yet another recommendation; thank you, Zee, for both of these books!) and we giggled over the language, my youngest fell asleep, exhausted after a full day.

It was a day of small delights in unexpected places, like these fallen plum blossoms floating in a glass jar that I found when I was cleaning house on Saturday.

I'd love to hear what you have worried over and then delighted in this week.

A Cuddle Bunny Family

Last month my neighbor loaned me a copy of Everyday Sacred; A Woman's Journey Home, by Sue Bender. It was a delightful read, a series of vignettes about Bender's search to see and appreciate the gifts that each day brings. "Like the monk going out with his empty bowl, I set out to see what each day offered," Bender explains. In the process, she learns to quiet the harsh, critical voice inside her and accept her unique talents as an artist.

In one section that I particularly enjoyed, Bender describes an art project she set for herself: to draw and paint a pear every day for a whole month. She hopes to master shape and shadow in the process. While she doesn't achieve the skill mastery that she had expected, Bender learns to tap into the joy of the creative process:

"Waking up each day knowing I was going to draw a pear changed the quality of my day. Total devotion to one task, even for a brief period of time--to stop the world--was enormously satisfying. I was carried along by clear intention and genuine effort." (p. 101)

Drawing a pear may seem like a pointless task. Making bunnies might seem even sillier. But there is something very powerful in the practice of completing such simple projects. It is freeing to take a simple form, such as a rabbit, and explore color and pattern through it. Knowing the simple steps I need to take to make a bunny emerge from wool and thread clears everything else from my mind, and the world does indeed seem to stop, as Bender suggests, when I am immersed in stitching. I am also learning to set aside my self-criticism and doubts and just let the joy singing through my heart flow out in the embroidery and hand sewing.

I'm sure that this approach--the "total devotion to one task"--could be applied to anything we do in a day. Writing. Cleaning. Caring for a child. Tending a garden. Crunching numbers or managing people or directing traffic.

Each Cuddle Bunny I make is an expression of love and care. Each one also feels like an improvisation. I gather together my jumble of felted wool, threads, and buttons. As I sort through them and match colors that I like, I take a leap of faith that my skills will bring a pleasing shape together. The personality of each bunny emerges as I embroider a pattern of flowers on its side, sew on the long ears, choose a pair of buttons for the eyes, and finally add a fluffy tail. And I end up with a stuffed animal that can be loved by little hands, or just admired for its sweetness. How satisfying is that?

If you have sewn a Cuddle Bunny of your own from my pattern, please feel free to post a photo in the Flickr Cuddle Bunny group. It will be fun to see a brightness of Cuddle Bunnies collected in one place.