Happy Birthday, Nanou!

 Dear Nanou,

I have arrived! And, as you said, it is much colder here in the Maryland Piedmont than in the South of France. But I must assure you that my acorn hat and polka-dot coat keep me warm enough.

Look at all the buds in the tree! Signs that spring will be here soon.

Please tell all the Critters that I am well, and that my handsome profile is much admired here.

For your birthday, I am sending you a video of the Toon Tellegen story, "The Elephant and The Snail," which I know you will love. Isn't it funny how an offer of hospitality (like a friendship) can have such unexpected consequences? It involves risk, but also the potential for growth and beauty.



Happy birthday, dear Nanou, and tell all of the other Critters in their faraway lands that I am thinking about all the stories of the Forest, and dreaming up new ones as well. 

With all my love,

Brin

Are You Feelin' It?

At the beginning of February, I gave myself an assignment. A little nudge to focus my often scattered attention. It was to write a series of love letters to explore the many faces of love.

Love wears the face of my grandmother and my mother. Those letters were easy to write.

Writing a love letter to myself was harder, even knowing that self-love is one of the foundations for all of the other kinds of love.

But as I was writing about love, searching for the words for love in many languages, I felt that something was off. I felt like a hypocrite, chasing love with my head while my heart felt as cold as the February days. I got irritable and cranky, out of sync with my loved ones.

And so I stopped writing. If I wasn't "feelin' it," I thought, then I sure shouldn't be writin' it.

Then, after an argument with a loved one, I started noticing some things.

Maybe you could call them love practices. The instinctive impulse, after being awakened from a deep sleep, to comfort a child awakened by a nightmare. Getting out of bed after a late night and making breakfast. And not just a breakfast of cold cereal, but a hot meal with protein and veggies and a little bit of spice and a fresh fruit smoothie to start the day off right. (Some mornings it was a love practice to just get out of bed and tell the kids to get their own cold cereal.)

Noticing itself became a love practice. Noticing when the boys played peacefully through the morning of the umpteenth snow day (OK, maybe it was just the fourth snow day :)). Noticing that my son never fails to say "thank you" and "please." Noticing the growing confidence of my once-cautious daughter as she took a flight all by herself for the first time. Reminding myself to acknowledge these acts with a word or smile became a love practice.

Even though I wasn't feelin' it all the time, I was practicing love in little ways, as were the people around me.

I think I'll keep on practicing.

Love Is a Person

"Love can't be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can't be proved, any more than anything else important in life can be proved. Love is people, is a person. . . . It also has a lot to do with compassion, and with creation."
Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, The Crosswicks Journal, Book One (1972)

Happy Valentine's Day, friends.

Self-Love

I am fighting the intense urge to sleep through February.

It's requiring a whole lot of maitri, a Sanskrit word that can be defined as unconditional friendliness towards oneself.

Maitri means accepting yourself just as you are are, warts and all. It's a form of self-love that generates a wave of loving kindness that spreads outward from the self to others. It rejects the idea that we have to reach a state of perfection (which is unattainable for humans, of course) in order to love others fully or carry out our responsibilities in the world.

For me, the Buddhist practice of maitri is a gentle voice in my head that tells me that I can keep going, and that I should. It means not beating myself up about my missed days of exercise or for a bout of emotional eating. It's a guiding voice that tells me to be brave and face the things that make me anxious.

It means constantly pulling myself into the present with a simple act or gesture--a kind word of connection, a smile, a cuddle, a long chat with a friend--rather than checking out mentally as I go through my day.

It also means facing this set of letters on the computer keyboard every day and trying to write through this February funk I'm feeling. Lately when I sit down to write I start off with one idea, and the words take me in an entirely different direction. It's a sign of my muddled mind, I think, and maitri tells me that I just have to accept that that's where I am right now.

Hitting "Publish Post" on this little love letter to myself and to you is also a form of maitri, a way of saying, as Madeleine L'Engle does in The Summer of the Great-Grandmother; The Crosswicks Journal, Book Two:

"'This is how it is for me. How is it for you?'"

Philios (Friend Love)

I love my friends. They saw right through yesterday's musings about how a space affects creativity. I am so busted. My craft space is a mess, and I haven't been able to get anything done in it lately. I'll start a project and then spend most of my limited craft time looking for thread, paper, glue, or whatever supply I need. Then the unfinished project sits in another messy pile on my craft table, adding to the chaos.

So I can sit on my a** and philosophize all I want about what inspires, but I just need to get off said a** and clean up my room. (My mom would so approve.)

And I love my friends because they are producing glorious art in their not-always-inspiring spaces. Check out:

:: Lisa's birch heart necklaces and felted brooches, inspired by and distilling the essence of the natural world.
:: Jackie's papercutting composition, a balance of solid home and ethereal vapor.
:: Joanie's textiles, which bring together vintage treasures with careful, loving stitches. (And her organization tips as she has been diligently organizing her craft space. You're my hero, Joanie!)
:: Nanou's cards, with their palette and grace straight out of a French paperie, and her Critters that she has brought back from the forest to play with us.
:: Margie's crocheted pieces, which stop me in their tracks when I see them--the natural world encased so lovingly in delicate, lace stitches.
:: Sonia's pincushions, which combine vintage textiles and fabric patterns that make me feel very cozy indeed.

And, from the warm kitchen:
:: Natalie's winter comfort food, which makes me salivate as I am reading her recipes.

I could list so many more, but I will stop here and get off my a**, as promised, and tackle that space so that I can make Valentine's with my kids. Oh, happy Saturday!

Love Your Craft Space?

How does a space affect creativity, I wonder?

Back home, my sewing table sits in a small space that was once a sleeping porch. Sunlight fills the small space throughout the day, bouncing cheerfully off the white walls and light carpet. Across the house, my collage and origami papers are stored in my light-filled office. Downstairs, the dining room, with its long wall of windows and big table, is the place for larger craft projects: basting a quilt; sorting a rainbow of wool roving and crewel-wool thread for Matryoshka stones; hosting a gathering of friends to learn how to knit mittens.

I sometimes feel guilty that my crafting takes up so much prime real estate in my home. But then I notice my daughter knitting a red-and-white scarf for her brother. Or my middle son sitting for longer than 30 minutes (and not in front of a computer or television or Gameboy) to fold origami cranes or paper airplanes. Or watching my youngest move a chair to the filing cabinet, where he gets out paper and markers to make a story book. Guilt, erased.

Here in our rental house, my craft area is in the basement: a dining table tucked between the ductwork for the forced-air system on one end and the washing machine and dryer on the far wall. When the heater turns on, a metal flap clinks softly as the air begins to whoosh through the ductwork. (My son doesn't like crafting there for long; the noises spook him.) A window above the washing machine and one on the outside door let in a bit of weak sun filtered through the outside deck, but only in the morning.

It's wonderful to have that set-aside space, and the mess is conveniently hidden from public view. But it's not a space that inspires.

I'm learning to make the space my own: a slow accretion of small objects. At the end of the summer I added glass jars that hold shells and stones collected on a summer trip to Hawaii. Another glass jar houses assorted buttons. Origami ornaments hang from a wire shelf. Handmade treasures remind me of talented, inspiring friends and whisper stories of connections made across states and continents.

The colorful wall of vintage handkerchiefs that my mom sent me have brightened up the space considerably. A sweet vintage hankie hugs a jar (inspiration and tutorial here) of dried chrysanthemums, which still bear the spicy scent of autumn.

Could it be that it's not so much the space itself that does the inspiring, but the handmade and collected objects that we fill it with?

Box of Love

The box arrived in the mail a few weeks after Thanksgiving. The contents:

1 bag of shaped chalk (a baseball, basketball, and soccer ball)

2 pairs of white socks

3 sets of "Bob" Early Reader books

1 book about spinning tops (?)

1 yard batik fabric

6 crocheted cross-shaped Christmas ornaments

11 vintage hankies

A collection from my mother, of love and faith and memory. Items that we had forgotten at her house on our Easter visit. Books collected during her teaching days and no longer used but just right for one grandson learning to read and another whose voracious reading habit is hard to keep supplied. And crafty goodness she had picked up at yard sales and thrift stores.

I can imagine her filling that box one item at a time, remembering us as she did so.

The vintage hankies she found at a thrift store in the Great Smoky Mountains, where she volunteered on a visit to a Tennessee friend. She bought a whole box of hankies. She washed them on gentle cycle and carefully pressed them with starch.

The handkerchiefs hang like diaphanous flags on the wall of my craft space. The winter light picks out worn patches and shines through the linen. Red tatting edges cream linen. Openwork crosses a blue linen hankie with a monogrammed "P." Brilliantly colored patterns have faded to lovely shades from frequent washings.

  

Happy birthday, Mom!

Love Letter

My grandmother had thick, straight hair when I knew her. It never took a perm, so she kept it short, in a choppy pixie cut. Her hair was iron gray from far away, but up close I could see strands of silver, white, and black side-by-side like interwoven threads.

Her hair was the first thing I noticed as my parents' big boat of a car, their yellow Chevrolet Impala, pulled into the driveway next to her apartment late on a Friday night. She leaned on the doorknob, holding the door open for us, the kitchen light spilling out into the night and making her hair gleam like moonlight.

Small, tired me pushed my weight hard against the Impala's heavy door until I felt its weight catch on its fulcrum, opening up to the Texas night and into my grandmother's country of cicadas whirring in mesquite trees and profligate stars sprinkled like crumbs across a deep velvet sky.

I raced my brother and sister to the door, wanting to be the first one my grandmother leaned down towards and wrapped in her arms, the first to be enveloped in a cloud of spicy Jovan Musk perfume and the lingering scent of sweet powder she patted in a cloud between her breasts.

My little sister with her long braids was my grandmother's Little Raggy Doll. My older brother was "mijito." In between them, I was loved and petted but without a pet name.

My grandmother was famous in her small town, or so it seemed to me. When we went to the Piggly Wiggly with her, or to shop for clothes at the Terry Farris, people would stop her. They would tell her how much they loved the hamburgers she used to grill and the milkshakes she made at the drug store's soda fountain.

A few times before it closed she took us to the soda fountain for a special treat. When she stepped through the double glass doors, people in the booths turned to look.

"Barbie! Barbara! Barbarita!" they called out.

She ushered us to a table of her former customers and introduced us proudly. "Estos son mis nietos."

In that moment I knew she loved us, that she felt intense pride just for the simple fact that we existed. Inside her small apartment, we got on her nerves, played too loudly, argued too much. But there in the drug store, when she told her friends that we lived in the big city or that I made straight A's, she was free to express her joy in our accomplishments. I blushed with embarassment, but also a secret sense of happiness for that knowledge: the sweet knowledge of a grandmother's love.