All kinds of clean up requires clear ground. Eventually the insurance adjuster and spring will arrive!
I’m home and warm and writing today.
Pattern and Outrage : Dee Mallon
cloth, justice, writing, and food
All kinds of clean up requires clear ground. Eventually the insurance adjuster and spring will arrive!
I’m home and warm and writing today.
Been thinking about you … even a bit worried. Your words and picture’s bring to mind that saying. Home is where the Heart is …. your work warms my heart … big thanks to you for being you.
Hi Tina. Thanks for your warm support. I left a bunch of comments hanging this week. Not a good practice. But in two days: I helped my sister with signing the lease on her new place and saw it (it’s gonna be so nice for her!), got this year’s bone density scan and finished several cloth projects. Oh, and edited four chapters for a friend. So. Only this morning starting to make the blog rounds.
Very happy for you and your sister …
A whole extra room, more light, two additional closets, at a fraction of the cost! it’s great.
Love the close up … hope you’re soon done with snow
I toured your garden and lands this morning and I’ll admit to being a little jealous.
(((Dee))) I read these thoughts on home last night in “The Operating Instructions” by Ursula Le Guin in her collection of essays and talks on the writer, the reader and the imagination “The Wave in the Mind (p208)
“… Home isn’t where they have to let you in. It’s not a place at all. Home is imaginary.
Home, imagined, comes to be. It is real, realer than any other place, but you can’t get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it – whoever your people are. They may not be your relatives. They may never have spoken your language. They may have been dead for a thousand years. They may be nothing but words printed on paper, ghosts of voices, shadows of minds. But they can guide you home. They are your human community.
All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught those skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.
…
Nobody can do anything very much, really, alone.
What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen.
Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence.
Reading is a means of listening.”
thank you for making this welcoming home in the web of light to read, to really listen and respond
Mo your words … thank you for them.
Thank you Mo. I just posted something very dispirited (elsewhere) that I may come to regret. I wish I had read this first. A balm. A salve. Thank you for being a piece of my home— two seasons and half a globe away.
(((Dee))) you are a treasure!
Dee~ Yay!!!!!! I’m so happy for your sister (and you). Something about the fact that you are a maker of homes (cloth) and for family…love that! I’ve just learned about sigils, and now here you’ve made one! Ha
i never do the damp stretching thing. i guess i love how the cloth finds it’s way. mostly it drifts off course. the snow is fluffy here. and there was no wind.
It finally started coming down here sometimes after three (I was up). I don’t damp stretch all the time. The wonkiness created by machine stitching holds less appeal, somehow.
A reader here,,–you help fill out my circle of life, I am always amazed at the beauty found in your words or pictures shared. The sun Will shine.
Thank you, Peggy. Your words are food. If you ever get onto Instagram be sure to let me know (much easier than blogging).
Hello Dee–I read you quite often but never had anything even slightly relevant to say in a comment. This last storm (Maine) wasn’t much and I am thankful as I am TIRED of it. No trees down here and for that I am thankful. Sending you good cheer–love your work–makes me smile.
Well hello back. Thanks for the note. This fourth nor’easter we barely got any snow at all. If you blog, could you leave me a link?
Ooohhhhh…so there is that ‘like’ button thingy!! lol But you have to have a wordpress account. I’ll just keep commenting! 😉
I forgot that you needed to be on WordPress to access the button and yes! Keep commenting.
The storm is mostly gone from Manhattan. There were no outages that I heard of around town except transportation which shut down starting Wednesday at noon to let the plows do their work all through the night into Thursday. It’s almost 1AM Friday morning and I spent Thursday napping every few hours. I’m sleeping a whole lot of the time…have been for quite awhile.
The value of the internet is that it’s 24/7 and doesn’t care how or when I come and go. It’s always open as long as the electric holds and so long as I can pay for the expensive connection which was free at first thanks to generous neighbors with a router they didn’t mind sharing, then, when they moved the cable fee started at 29.99 and has crept up to 75.88 with no help from me. It’s outrageous really but I’m hooked though I can’t afford it on my ‘how close to the bone can one get before one is in the marrow?’ resource of Social Security and tiny Pension. Since I’m not doing business here, it’s just a luxury that feels like necessity. One day I will be gone, but that’s an existential reality we all share.
Doesn’t Mo have a magical way with words! Home as imaginary. How true. We make it with every breath and step wherever we are, yet isn’t it poignant the longing which persists? I feel I’ve been searching for home all my life. An Imagined ‘home’ of course since it was within me the whole time, but only recognized in glimpses along the way, through momentary attachments to a person or circumstance, in sudden griefs or joy.
Well, now I’ll finish my blog rolling and maybe get back to the ‘Garden’ piece I promised a friend I’d write until exhausting myself and going down for another nap.
(((Michelle))) those thoughts on home are from “The Operating Instructions” by Ursula Le Guin in her collection of essays and talks on the writer, the reader and the imagination “The Wave in the Mind”(p208)
I would hope, Michelle, that you would put out an “ask” before going off line. Have you ever thought of installing a donate button or launching a modest gofundme? Just saying. Wanting to belong is, I think, one of the most elemental of human drives. I am so glad that we are connected! Have a nice weekend (with lots of nice naps!)