Bring poppies for a weary mind That saddens in a senseless din. — William Winter
One of the most fleeting of things… my poppies… and yet, perhaps I love them so much because they are so fleeting.
One thing I hope is not fleeting… our outrage at the gun violence of the last two weeks. May our fervor burn red like my poppies and light a fire under those who think doing nothing is our best choice.
I will be back on Monday with my May word update.
Hello, Gentle Readers.
I had a completely different post planned for today and then the world fell apart. I am sorry, but I feel publishing that post is rather tone deaf in light of what happened at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas yesterday.
Hug your loved ones… but more importantly… write a letter to your elected officials and tell them NO MORE.
NO MORE!
Maybe if we all speak out, change will finally happen.
The best laid plans of bloggers… sigh. I had planned on giving you all a May Word update today. But Carolyn posted this weekend that word update would be next Monday.
Okay… that works, because it gives me a few more days to contemplate Four Thousand Weeks, which I will finish up this morning. I am enjoying it and I am adding bits to my Word Sheet for May. Last month, thanks to Kym’s encouragement, I signed up for Ali Edward’s One Little Word Year Long Workshop and I spent much of April catching myself up. I don’t plan on doing a separate Word Journal – a scrapbooker I am not – but I am loving the creative conversations that are inspiring new ways of thinking.
And speaking of Journals… someone brought this journaling opportunity to my attention yesterday. I immediately sent the link to my daughters… what a fun activity to inspire Genevieve, Winston, and Olivia as June begins. I am going to participate as well…and I am so excited!
As MacroMay is drawing to a close, I continue to learn how to use my pseudo-macro iPhone lens. This week’s wins:
An ant visits the primrose
I’ve got sunshine…
But here we are with another Monday, another week, another fresh page, another opportunity. And thinking about Monday in that way is exciting… don’t you think?
And it was with those thoughts in my head that I set about my weekly list which was not the same as last week’s … no carry overs… a true fresh page.
I leave you with my Beardy Attempts from yesterday… yes, I made two and I might make another one this morning, lol.
Happy Fresh Start Monday, everyone! See you all back here on Wednesday!
It’s been a week, hasn’t it? I have tried and tried to make sense of the senseless and I can find no simple answers… no complicated answers either. My heart is heavy for the citizens of Buffalo and for the Black/Brown/Indigenous American/LGBTQIA+/Non-Christian communities that are integral parts of the tapestry that is America. And so I this week, I picked up James Baldwin to settle into his world and listen for what wisdom he might share with me. And so I started The Fire Next Time….and of course, Baldwin has lots to share.
and
Both of those statements are true, but how do we move away from the first and become the second. And as I said… still there are no simple answers and while there might be some more complicated ones… it will take all of us together to be the complicated, yet simple?, answer.
This week we (America) achieved another major milestone on our COVID journey… one million persons have died (actually, more than a million as of this writing) and if that does not shock you I don’t know what, if anything, might. I think that the WaPo posted an incredible look back to our COVID journey. (I don’t know if this link is behind a paywall…sorry) I spent some time there this week remembering the lives that were.
And because in the midst of our, at times, painful reality…some escapism is needed. This week I settled in with my third gnome clue and watched Operation Mincemeat on Netflix. Oh.my.gosh! It was so good. The story (which is true) was just what I needed to move myself to another space for a bit. If you have not watched it, you absolutely should!
And finally, my above photo is the best of this week’s iPhone Pseudo-Macro attempts! Lambs Ear with rain drop remnants (with a side of again necessary weeding… it just never ends, lol)
I hope you have a good weekend and I will see you all back here on Monday with my word update!
The making this week has been of the “small” variety but I wanted to take a moment to identify the photos for you all from Monday’s post:
Monday the most strenuous thing I did was that blog post, lol. The rest of the day I napped on the sofa and it was early to bed for me as well! However, I woke yesterday free of all effects from my COVID booster and I spent the day catching up on all I did not get done on Monday as well as the usual Tuesday things I do, some of which included some knitting time!
The first clue of Imagined Landscape’s Mystery Gnome came out last Friday and I did cast on over the weekend. Clue Two came out on Monday and I managed to get myself all caught up yesterday. Clue Three drops tomorrow and I am all ready for it! (and no spoilers here… yes, it is inside out!)
I also have been knitting Sam’s sock… I am contemplating an “afterthought heel” but I have never done one of those before. (Or is it a fore-thought heel… I want to do the one with the row of waste yarn…) If any of you have done that heel I’d love your input. My reasoning behind this is that I feel like the striping will be more uniform without the heel flap. Anyways, I look forward to all your knitting insights!
The reading this week… well it is just epic. I finally finished The Books of Jacob, which I deemed to be a 4-star read. I now have a bunch of much, much, much shorter books in my queue and so I think by this time next week I might have 3 books completed, lol.
However, I loved the 2 months I spent with Jacob Frank… it was truly an amazing book!
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I am not sure where to begin with this incredible story, there is just so much to digest and all of it fascinating. If I had read this book in my 20’s I would not have liked it, or even finished it. My much younger self was not as comfortable with thinking about things from all opinions… but at 61, this epic work has much that inspired me. First… by how similar all things are (i.e. religions… Christian, Jewish, Muslim)… much more than I think I realized. I loved how this story of Jacob Frank was true but Tokarczuk took that story and wrapped it in a bit of mystical wonder, as only she can do. I really loved the time I spent in Jacob’s world.
But all that said, this book is long and it dragged a bit for me at about the beginning of the last quarter of the book, however, I am not sure how it could be edited to avoid that as there were important bits in that part, however, all at once the dragging feeling stopped and the ending just flowed beautifully. I loved, loved, loved the page numbering… my gosh that was so fun!
The translation to English by Jennifer Croft is excellent and I am profoundly grateful for her work in bring this book to an English speaking audience.
If you are a Tokarczuk fan, you will love this book!
That is all I have for today… and I am eagerly awaiting your thoughts on afterthought heels!
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