Earlier this year, I had an aura portrait. It was a a radiant kaleidoscope of yellow and orange, purple and pink. But in the middle was a small dark smudge. The photographer pointed to it and said it was a mental block; that something was troubling me. I thought about it afterward. My shoulder had been hurting for days, off and on, and I realized (through some journaling and card pulling and observing myself) that I was walking around hunched in on myself, trying to protect my heart. I rolled my shoulders back, lifted my chin, and journaled through what was bothering me. The pain went away. At the end of last month, the week that I would normally begin writing and scheduling posts for the upcoming month, my jaw began to hurt. Intensely. I prodded around and located the source as being in the soft space behind my jaw. There wasn't any swelling or visible problem. I wasn't in pain while I slept or when I first woke up, the motions and activities that triggered searing flashes tha...

There has not been a whole lot of knitting this month, but one project that I did make time for was some washcloths for the kids' bathroom. The Bigs recently discovered showers and have been going through washcloths at an astonishing rate, so I grabbed a couple hanks of Blue Sky Fibers Cotton in colors that coordinated with the new shower curtain (we didn't have one in the bathroom since the tub was previously only used for baths and the curtain was getting in the way). I found a curtain with potted plants on it, which is great in that the top third is white so it doesn't shrink the bathroom too badly, but an unanticipated downside is now every time I walk down the hall past that bathroom I jump because it looks like there's a kid standing there in the dark. I also finished the Bindle Bags  that I started a couple months ago. I've already tied one onto the little tiered cart I use as a nightstand/put by my desk during the day, and gotten yarn to make another one. St...

One of my favorite jobs was the time I spent as a library page. In the basement where the giant conveyer brought all the returned books, once the machine sorted everything by area, we would manually sort them into more specific categories, while alphabetizing them. Then they would go on carts and we would heave them onto the elevator and up to the stacks. Some things were loosely organized; both picture books and paperback romance novels were sorted by the first letter of the author's last name only, while board books weren't sorted at all. Biographies are alphabetical by the last name of the person they're about. Nonfiction, on the other hand, is categorized by up to three digits on either side of a decimal, with further alphabetization within that. Still, there is a lot of variety within each section. A manual on how to operate Microsoft Excel and an expose about aliens in the US government can be next to each other in the 000s, and "adult fiction" covers almost...

#attunedpracticetuesdays: where we share the rituals and routines that are aligned with our sense of peace and wellbeing During The Dark Years (circa 2004-2019), I recall joining someone in wondering why "those people" feel the need to make queerness "like, their whole personality" (probably over some hapless barista with a small rainbow flag pin on their apron). I was a practiced asshole, a closeted queer person trying to survive in a context that condemned my very existence. (As a side note, I think I have apologized to everyone I need to from that time period, but if I overlooked you, please know the omission was not intentional). At the time of that conversation, I wouldn't have considered it odd for someone to have verses of Christian scripture wrenched from their context and plastered on every conceivable household item and accessory. It wasn't the identifying that was the problem, it was the specific identity . But as someone who is now never out of ...

For most of my life, I tried to be who other people told me I should be. They arrived with pretty boxes that had labels like woman, daughter, wife, mother, or Christian,  and said that the only way to be good/happy/accepted was to get into the box. So I did. After all, I wanted to be accepted and happy, and seen as good (I was also a child). But while there are probably people out there who are the same shape as those boxes, I am not one of them. The only way I fit into a box of any kind is in pieces, and even then a lot has to be left out. It's very difficult to function, much less be happy, when you're like my four year old's Mr Potato Head toy, which is missing the match to every pair and (most critically) the potato body that they go into. But I'm not a Mr Potato Head, and I finally gathered my component parts back together and put the boxes into the recycle bin so they can have a new life as something else, hopefully something less oppressive. And I've found th...

July felt very long, and very slow. Not necessarily in a bad way, just like time didn't really matter or exist. We stayed home and inside a lot, ate a lot of ice pops, and splashed in a kiddie pool on the back porch as much as reasonably possible (when the humidity wasn't pushing the heat index well into the triple digits). A lot of days I looked back at the end and wondered what I had even done that day, especially to justify feeling as drained as I did. But I kept everyone fed and in clean clothes. We listened to several audio books (the kids went through the entire Bunnicula series for the first time). There were crafts and knitting and reading and journaling. We all worked on our emotional development - Middle knocked a sibling over by accident and voluntarily went back to check on them, and the little one threw his stuffed animals out of his crib at being told it was time to lay down, but when I came back from tucking in another sibling said he was feeling kinder and asked...

First off the needles this past month was a shop sample Myrtlar tee, knit with Noro Uchiwa. I hadn't worked with Noro yarn for years, and it was a pleasant experience, watching the stripes form. It felt like it took forever, but I realized near the end that because the panels (it was knit in two pieces, front and back) were so wide, my concept of how long they were was skewed. I finally finished it though and I think it came out nicely. Someone contacted me about making an eyelash yarn square for them to sew on their kid's lovie to stop them pulling their own hair as they fall asleep at night, and after blithely agreeing I visited three different craft stores and discovered that eyelash yarn fell out of fashion and only found this ball in a clearance bin after I was beginning to despair. It was an afternoon's effort, and I hope it helps the little one (and eases their mama's mind, as well). Not knitting but fiber, I wove a rock. Not that I necessarily know how to weave,...