Hazy Days of Summer

So I am feeling pretty scatter-brained at the moment. This is my first afternoon off, just by myself to do whatever I want in I don't know how long! Almost always when I have a day off I'm a) outside the house doing things with other people or b) traveling. It seems like such a luxury, but I earned it by working extra hours last week. I have lots of projects I have been dabbling at for a while.

A friend had a big celebration (after the fact) for her 50th birthday. She invited a group of us to her farmhouse out in the countryside. Where we celebrated, crafted, and generally had a blast together.

The photo at the top of this post is a view of A's gorgeous stretch of mountain meadowland.



And the next photo shows a friend knitting our collective Great Mother Stole project. This bright red Stole is intended as a gift to A to mark this new phase of her life and to give her strength and warmth from the group. Half a dozen of us donated yarn in not only red, but a few other colors. At the weekend event in the mountains, four of us have variously knitted parts of this pattern based upon one in a juicy book called, The Knitting Goddess by Deborah Bergman.


So in addition to the Stole and a memory book about our country weekend that I'm putting together for A, there are a few other knitting projects in various stages of creation.



A big "Hello" to some crafty ladies gathered at the Society of American Archivists' conference in Washington, D.C. last week. Just to sit, knit, and chat with you was a welcome respite from the total concentration of listening to presentations at the conference. Due to the conference, I am getting rather farther along on my Monterey Bay Sea Lettuce Scarf which you see a picture of here on the right. This Lucy Neatby pattern was a perfect one to take along in my tote bag and grab between sessions.

My great news is that last Sunday, I finally knit my first modular pattern: a simple entrelac design (looks like basket weave). Thanks to Sue at Lovelyarns in Hampden, Baltimore for an excellent class. Here's my first swatch attempt to show you what it looks like.

Don't you love how the dark yarn contrasts with the vibrant red and purple variegated yarn? I think I'm going to get a lot of mileage out of this technique.







Finally, I have dabbled a bit with mixed media projects, my collage-covered boxes. The Spanish Box posted in June is getting additional features and elements added to it. Stay tuned for another post when it's further along and other theme boxes are in progress.

How Do We Know? Or, Thoughts on Learning in the Digital Age

Learning is a reoccurring theme for me this past week. It has been made abundantly clear that learning is a huge component of my job. In fact, one of the reasons I haven't been updating Pull of the Tides is that I've been expending mental energy to absorb all I need to know about the job I started last summer. This past week I began to learn new software that will enable me to complete some very important assignments during the summer and beyond. I am also learning the larger lessons of how to work within the assigned parameters, whether or not I agree with the methods executives choose to use. And now I'm training two young people for their summer internships, and mentoring has always been a way for me to learn and to grow.

The fact is that I cannot imaging a life without learning. I thrive on it. If my work includes a component that allows me to learn new things and constantly, I'm as happy as a clam. I'm just doing my job to filter through the information, and hopefully the water I output from my shell is clearer than it was before.


I have also encountered the theme of learning in my women's group meeting last Friday. It was one of the dominant themes of an otherwise playful and fun gathering. I remarked on the fact that of the ten women present, nearly all mentioned that they were (or had been) a teacher of some kind or the other. It's remarkable because we came to the meeting from diverse backgrounds and disciplines and lifestyles and, yet, teaching and learning were such common threads that united us and our discussion.


Several women mentioned how the Internet has changed their ways of thinking or processing what they have learned. They talked about how communication and learning walk hand-in-hand and how the Internet brings communities of like-minded people out there together to solve problems or answer questions. The Internet can also be sensory overload -- too much information thrown at you in a small space of time. Like most tools, the Internet becomes a resource and inspiration, but it can also bring on a kind of madness. For me, Facebook has been a fascinating experiment that I have found to be a tool of connection to people in my distant and not so distant past. It's also a site that can play amusing games with the viral method of transmitting fads, mini-games, and trends. Sometimes I find it's traffic so overwhelming I cannot visit it or begin to respond to all of the "pokes" and insistent "requests" from friends. And all because a friend who lives 500-miles distant invited me to join.

In the Digital Age, we see to learn information about events and people in oddly incomplete ways. We may know the latest tragedy or scandal the instant after it happens, but try to find reliable sources for the background on a news story and you really have to use your research skills. It's not easy to find reporters who aren't all quoting the AP wire or a single source or two. This is not to denigrate the work that journalists do, but rather to comment on the fragmented and two-dimensional ways that "easy information" comes to us.

As an archivist who works with primary sources every day at work, I understand all too well how important it is to choose your information sources carefully. A personal letter might tell one side of the story for a family tragedy that results in a court case, while the official record may record very different perspectives and collate a variety of local opinions on the case. Which is true is a question that the scholar has to decide. What case will she make? Whose side will she be one? People write about themselves differently than others may write about them. And what is "Truth" anyway? My graduate education in the humanities has taught me that there is no one version of the Truth. It changes depending upon who you are, what information you have at hand, and the cultural lens with which you see the world.

This brings me to a final way that I've been learning in the past week. Reading is a huge pleasure for me and has been ever since I acquired the skill in early childhood. I read both fiction and non-fiction for fun. At the moment I am reading a book published several years ago by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich named for a phrase she had used in a graduate student research paper that she wrote in the 1970s: Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. In the book she explores the odd ways in which her "radical" phrase has spread through poplar culture since a reporter quoted it in an article. Women and men have interpreted her phrase to mean quite a different set of values and concepts over the years and Ulrich catalogs many of these uses. To her mind some are quite positive and life-affirming, while other uses of the quote have been negative, destructive, and even copyright infringement.

Yet Ulrich does not stop there. She then selects three literary women who made history: one in the wake of the Renaissance in Europe, one in the years of Suffragette struggle in the United States, and one modernist author very dear to my own heart (and past research). I find it fascinating that Ulrich can find threads of meaning between such distant personalities. I find it thrilling that she explores both their struggle as feminists and their struggles to find their own voices. If you are looking for a radical departure in scholarship, you will not find it in this book. You will find -- if you dare to look -- a sense that history has a way of repeating itself, of moving forward slowly. Some battles have been won, but the very popularity of Ulrich's phrase suggests there are still a few to be fought.

I'm still reading this book and still considering Ulrich's arguments. I am swayed by her argument that historians don't control history. Individuals do have the opportunity to make history themselves. Historians can sway opinion, but often they are the servants of history and their own cultural world-views. You can learn all you want about the past, but the knowledge you gain make teach you as much about the present as it has about history.

How to Build an Earth Oven

Do you remember your teachers asking you on the first week of school what you did for your summer vacation? Well, if I were still in school, this would have been a story to amaze my teacher and classmates.

My friend, TH, is an amazing baker and cook. She is also very wise in the ways of crafts and organizing activities that bring diverse people together.

Her great ambition has been to build and use a wood-fired oven in her own backyard. TH is not someone who merely dreams big -- she builds! She did her homework and found a book by Kiko Denzer called Build Your Own Earth Oven. She also found a website showing a group of masons who built an oven of the type she wanted using Kiko Denzer's model. Here is another website I found of a group of Australian gardeners built a similar oven.
Then she and her dad cooked up a scheme to build a test model in his backyard as a practice version. Her two teenage sons helped their grandad build the test oven. This was very wise since they notice a water-seepage problem because the test oven had no drain. So, they knew they had to make drainage holes in TH's oven.
TH's Dad drew plans up for brick foundations to be built in her backyard over the course of several summer weeks with the help of his grandsons. Then, the next step was to create the inner oven wall, made entirely of cobb, that is, clay from a local source, plus sand, mixed with straw.
And that's where I come into the "Earth Oven Project 2008," because TH invited me and a group of her friends and neighbors to be a part of the oven's creation.
It was an extremely hot (mid 90s F) day in mid-July, but not so humid as Maryland suburbs can be in this season. When I arrived on the scene, the boys were mixing cobb, as the English settlers to North America called it. Cobb is the blend of clay, sand, and straw that forms the bricks to create the earth oven. Here's an image of the boys pounding it out by foot and testing its moisture content.

While the boys were mixing cobb, it was up to the rest of us to prepare the igloo-shaped sand mound around which the inner oven insulation would be formed.

After we made the sand mound (notice the brace we used to prevent sand from rolling off the edge), we covered the sand with wet newspaper, rather like you would a form for papier maché. By the time all hands had covered the sand mound with newspaper, TH's husband G had laid out a delicious spread for a hardy lunch. I had brought the beer and cider and there were copious amounts of herbal infusions and lemonade available for thirsty workers.

The next phase was to cover the entire sand mound with cobb bricks, so we spent the remainder of the afternoon doing just that. A shady yard and a bit of breeze go a long way to making summer's heat bearable. So does telling stories, laughter, and watching the boys rough-housing. We generally had a merry time at it, despite the heat.

Finally, about 5:00 p.m. we neared the home stretch. Only a tiny hole a the top of the insulation layer remained.

It takes something very interesting indeed to get me out on a 90-degree day, but this project was well worth it. I can remember with fondness mushing mudpies in my hands, but this is the most ambitious "mudpie" experiment I have witnessed. It's also very like molding a clay pot on a grand scale. The end result is larger than any typical potter might attempt on her/his own. The very social aspect of building something like the earth oven as part of a group, including several families, several generations is not unlike our pioneer ancestors did when a house frame or community barn needed to be built.

The outer layer of insulation and the final brick housing for TH's oven will be constructed by her, her family and friends next weekend.

I look forward to coming over to her house someday soon to enjoy wood-fired bread or pizza baked in her backyard.

PS. if you wish to know more about this fabulous earth oven, please contact my friend who runs Dances with Loaves in Maryland.

Knitting and Contemplation

Definition from Webster.com:
contemplation

Main Entry: con·tem·pla·tion Pronunciation: "kän-t&m-'plA-sh&n, -"tem-Function: noun
1 a : concentration on spiritual things as a form of private devotion
b : a state of mystical awareness of God's being
2 : an act of considering with attention : STUDY
3 : the act of regarding steadily
4 : INTENTION, EXPECTATION

It has been six months since I have had the energy to post here in Pull of the Tides, but sometimes the work of a creative mind requires silences and spaces before expression results. Mainly the pause in self-expression on this blog has come from two major sources: from feelings of utter burn-out from work and from my need to ponder what I really want to be spending my waking hours doing. So I have been inside my cocoon for six months, while my mind turned inward in contemplation.

I work for a very small non-profit that is suffering from lack of leadership and a decreasing budget. Organizations like the one I work for often have a high turn-over in staff due to burn-out. There are just enough staff members to keep us running, but not enough to pull off the high rate of activity for too very long before the situation begins to crumble. There were too many 12-hour days this past spring. Many of the things I wanted to do in my personal life suffered from the time I gave to my job.

Like Penelope of Greek myth waiting for her husband Ulysses to return from his voyages, I have carefully unwound my thoughts of anxiety, frustration and uncertainty each night and started afresh with the goal of finding a way to improve my circumstances at work. For a while I experienced great frustration, and felt powerless to change my circumstances or to speak up. In recent weeks things have begun to shift again. There are more "a-ha" moments when I've managed to make a difference. I can now say that I think I have laid the groundwork for a less stressful fall at my job, at least that's what I hope.

I think what has preserved my sanity is that while I was focusing so much attention to work, I was remaining loyal to my desires to be more creative in my daily life. To make things gives me the sense of accomplishment that I often don't feel in my job. Working too hard or too much can create feelings of loneliness. The people around me have helped me to remain grounded to values I hold dear and have freed me to do the creative work I need to do.

So I focused my creative energies these past six months on knitting: knitting alone, knitting with different groups of friends, and making new friends through knitting.

I think this is something akin to what Betsy Greer has labeled "craftivism." I have building community through crafting. It has made a big difference to me that I have had friends with whom I can knit. I have a pair of friends who are voracious textile-makers and they are truly an inspiration to me. They have taught me that I need one big project and one small project (at minimum) so that I can keep the crafting going on at home and on the move. They literally knit anywhere they go. We went on a field trip to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival and learned that an afternoon is nice, but you won't be able to look at all of the yarn unless you go both days! Knitting can also be a form of reaching out to new friends. I also gave knitting lessons to a woman I met in yoga class to knit last December, and she is becoming a friend. In the cold months of late winter and into the spring thaw I organized knitting circles with three or four friends at a local tea shop or cafe.

Then, out of the blue just a few weeks ago, I had a long talk with a former co-worker. Somehow the conversation turned to knitting and I was astonished to learn that she loves to knit. It had never come up in the past. Immediately we launched into a conversation on our various projects. She introduced me to a knitting store I hadn't heard about that is about 40-minutes from where I live. It's worth the drive, especially on Wednesday nights when they open up the shop for "Sip 'N Knit" gatherings (wine, snacks and good company). So now my former co-worker and her roommate have introduced me to yet another community of boisterous and happy crafters.

It has taken me a while to realize that these crafty friends have been guiding me through and out of my quiet time of reflection, and have helped me to take action. Knitting a garment takes a lot of time, a lot of courage, in fact. Each stitch is small and laid so closely together with others, that I sometimes find myself surprised at how much fabric I have made during one sitting. Focusing deeply on this work is a form of contemplation. For me, it has almost spiritual, maybe "Zen" properties. Combining that with my love of spending time in good company and of enjoying good conversation has been my way of seeing through the rough patches of my life. As one online friend said, "Knitting is a wonderfully constructive way of using up negative energy."

Those rough patches at my job aren't over, but I have made a lot of progress on my blue cotton cardigan. I'm looking forward to tomorrow evening's Sip 'N Knit with the gals.

On building community

This week I'm headed into the homestretch of planning for a retreat to be held in the woods of Adelphi, Maryland, in a sanctuary I have always found inviting and friendly from the bright summer day I first walked up to the building in 1998. When I came there, I was a struggling student who felt out of place and who didn't have many friends beyond my life in the Ivory Tower of Academe. I was on a quest for something that I could not describe on that day, but I soon discovered what I most needed was a place to belong, a sense of community.

Now, eight years later, I am bringing the women of the Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church congregation together for a retreat-in-place this coming Saturday. I have to laugh and remark how much trouble it is possible to get into by being in a conversation with a number of friends and beginning a sentence with, "You know, I've been wanting to . . ." In my case, I said that "I've been wanting to facilitate a retreat about creativity" and the friends are members of this church. From that conversation late last fall, the fleeting idea has grown into solid reality. One of the main purposes of our retreat is to strengthen community among the women of this church and our guests, and in some ways this has already happened before the retreat has even begun.

It seems to me that women are often naturals at community-building. We can become friends over a snag in one's stocking at a fancy party or in the checkout line at a supermarket. It seems an outgrowth of the roles we play as caregivers to family and friends that we create bonds and bring groups closer together. Not all women are like that, of course, but I view it as a quality I've observed in many women around me. I've witnessed how they focus their energy upon and many make it an important part of their life's work.

It's odd for me to see myself in the role of retreat facilitator when I really reflect about my past. I was a loner as a child. I always felt like I stood apart and didn't want to play the games by my friend's rules. I was a bit of a Tomboy and didn't like the make-up, cute-boy talk and other subjects that seemed to be endlessly fascinating to the neighborhood girls. When I got old enough to leave home for longer periods, I found teen friends more like me who liked to escape to "Downtown" by bus and explore cultures and flavors not found in our insular (and we thought, often narrow-minded) suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. I thought I would never really fit in as a teenager, and actually relished the idea that I would be a wanderer of the world. I arranged my life so that I could leave the country immediately after high school on scholarship to a collage in England and planned to never settle down. At that time, I would have been hard-pressed to say that I would even choose to marry someone or live in the same state for more than a decade.

Yet, it's strange how the protestations of youth often make 360-degree turns. Not ten years after I left for college I found myself in my sixth year of graduate school in Maryland and wondering just who I was. My life had changed so dramatically, my teenage fantasies were no longer able to hold up to the life I had created for myself.

Slowly over the course of the years I attended graduate school I learned that there were communities of people who hold the values I believe in. There are people who enjoy the quirky culture and intellectual bantering on literature, film, art and international news as I do. And when I met a group of people who attended this wonderful, wooden sanctuary nestled back into a grove of trees along a stream, I found a kind of home. This place became a home like one I hadn't known since childhood, since the world and responsibilities had intruded upon my sense of peace and upon my boundaries. Most of the feeling of belonging came not only from the building itself and from its natural setting, but even more from the people who inhabit it and who make it their spiritual home.

So this weekend I return there, and in a way this retreat is very much a homecoming. I have been able to attend services again and feel a part as we have planned the retreat. Although my life has moved in different directions, and I am no longer a member there, I feel a jubilation in the reunion. I am especially grateful for the opportunity to give something back to this group of people who gave me support in a critical time in my life.

The theme of our retreat is Spring Clearing: Honoring Transistions, Restoring Creativity.

To me it's especially poignant that the women of this church are asking me to help them with this particular task because it is within this community that my skills as a facilitator and leader of spiritual groups blossomed. My participation enables me to fulfill a dream I've had in just the past few years of bringing people together to inspire greater creativity. And now the time is right for me to answer this calling. My tasks were made all the more easy for me by the professional experience I now have as an educator and as an events planner. So the spiritual and the practical roles I play are now nourishing and sustaining each other. It brings me a great feeling of accomplishment. I feel honored and a bit humbled by it all.

Upcoming: A Spring Retreat

It's a very snowy, frigid day here in Maryland. The snow blanketed us in powder on Monday night, but it's so cold that it will not melt anytime soon. It did not, however, stick to the roads or sidewalks, but there is lots of "black ice" on the roads this morning according to the news.

Several friends have invited me to work with them in planning a women's retreat at the Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church, where I was a congregation member from 1998-2003 until I moved to Annapolis. I'm so happy to be back among old friends and having the opportunity to create a meaningful day of activities for the women of my former church.

We had our first planning meeting this past Sunday. Our plan is to have the retreat in early March 2006. We have decided upon a simple, yet multi-layered theme: Spring Clearing: Honoring Transitions, Restoring Creativity. (Yep. The "creativity" part was my idea! *grin*) We have already brainstormed for the basic outline of activities. We plan to have begin with a social breakfast, with very simple and healthy food options (all vegetarian). By 9:30 AM we will hold a Gathering for all participants. The Gathering Circle is followed by group activities designed to get participants thinking about the retreat's themes: how they can relate to the ideas of transitions and how they view creativity. My friend. T.H. will then provide a splendid pot of vegetarian minestrone soup accompanied by home-baked bread and other side dishes and will need a team of women to help her serve and clean up. Two different afternoon workshop sessions will offer some individual choices and allow each participant to choose or experiment with her own creativity. The final activity in the late afternoon will be a Closing Circle of the whole.

I'm very excited by the great number of ideas and resources we are bringing to this retreat concept. We have some women in the church community who we are going to approach about leading a workshop or a part of the group activities. The theme gives me much to think about and much flexibility. I will need to come up with activities that can be done by large groups and by small groups. I've already begun the first stages of planning these activities.

It came to me that my own afternoon workshop on individual creativity will be a collage workshop. I think that collage is an easy way for people who might be intimidated by painting or sculpture to get involved in making visual art. Plus, I'm an old hand when it comes to collages. I've been making them ever since preschool--not constantly, mind you--but I do frequently use collage in decorating presents and other works of art. Lately, I've begun to use new-fangled glue materials and want to decoupage some small boxes. I just painted a round one with gesso the other night and will soon think about what materials I want to paste onto it.

Knowing I have a finite amount of time to hone my workshop ideas is good for me. Deadlines usually keep me to task, and particularly that's important when my "day job" tends to spill over into other aspects of my life. With this coming women's retreat, my dream of being a facilitator is finally coming to fruition. Runningwave Workshop is becoming a reality.