hope and certainty

WHAT I KNOW

/ janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

The storms come, no stopping them. They also pass.

The wind had been blowing since midnight, and the rain coming hard not down but sideways, off and on. Mostly on. I could see the ocean waves blowing back over themselves and sea and sky are both soft grays with a hint of green in the surf. Two and a half hours till high tide, but all the sand wet from the rain, and we did not get our morning walk. We got out the door for our three miles and had to turn straight back. We don’t mind a light shower, but this was a serious weather front. Storminess predicted to last without a break until Friday, which is not at all unusual for November. I used to count on a solid week of rain in this month—all day and all night without a break. But recently all bets are off. (The days in January of warm east winds and a burst of termites and carpenter ants drowned in the surf has not been predictable for years.) We average about 90” of rain a year—sometimes a mist or drizzle, in a storm sideways like a firehose, not usually coming “down,” and a hundred and fifty inches of rainfall isn’t unheard of. People new to the area are unprepared, friends naively suggest rain gear to walk the sand. Weather reporters in NW cities are alarmed by 45 mph gusts; we are accustomed to 65 mph. There is no rain gear that will keep you dry and safe in a full gale. Stay indoors!

Despite the foam, the ocean looks more tame in this photo compared to earlier in the week. The surf grew and after the rain splattered the glass, an updated photo was impossible.
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ALL TOGETHER NOW

/ janpriddyoregon / 12 Comments

“Yes, sister, sometimes we may be the only one that looks like us walking in that room,” she told a largely Black audience in Fort Worth. “But the thing we all know is we never walk in those rooms alone — we are all in that room together.”

— Senator Kamala Harris of California,
who will become the first woman to serve as vice president
from The New York Times: “With her ascension to the vice presidency, Ms. Harris will become the first woman and first woman of color to hold that office, a milestone for a nation in upheaval, grappling with a damaging history of racial injustice exposed, yet again, in a divisive election. Ms. Harris, 56, embodies the future of a country that is growing more racially diverse, even if the person voters picked for the top of the ticket is a 77-year-old white man.”

She is also the hope for our nation, a smart person capable of finding a fair and just path for our collective future.

We see this bird perched at the top of a snag above the bluff north of us. She’s there most days on our walk, and sometimes a few others too.

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STEP 7: Choice

/ janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

Making choices is exhausting. It is rewarding. It is power but also wearing. Like many things that matter, the creative process pays and pains.

Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me contains an essay about Virginia Woolf and uncertainty. The truth about wandering in the dark. In a journal entry of 1915 Woolf wrote: “The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.” Certainty belongs to the past (and is not so very fixed there), but hope is what drives us toward the future. Solnit writes: “To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and unimaginable transpire quite regularly.”

My friend Madora Lawson is a creative person, as are many of my friends. Madora is my friend who made a career of her creativity as an interior designer. She emailed to tell me that a post where I revealed that I rarely used a pattern prompted her to knit without a pattern. See what she made!

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She cannot even remember how she made that dragon’s legs.

It works like that sometimes. We create something, make a series of choices in color and stitch and a dragon has toes!

The toes up top are from an aging walking group who took a weekend and learned to knit slippers from Madora. Each person had plenty of colors to choose from, stitches to try, closures. Being clever takes energy and courage. The reward is something fun lovely grand and strange.

Painting walls builder’s beige or gray is easy. Following decorator’s advice, copying a style. Even when it works, looks appealing and safe. Where’s the fun in that?

Creativity demands the courage to make another choice. The bright textile on the wall, the yellow button on a turquoise strap, the zig-zag dorsal fin, the peculiar combination of orange and electric blue mohair. It’s coming.

Who knows where one choice might lead? Solnit joined anti-nuclear activists in the late 1980s. They “did not exactly shut down the Nevada Test Site, our most overt goal, but inspired the people of Kazakhstan to shut down the Soviet Test Site in 1990. Totally unforeseen, totally unforeseeable.” It might argue for a certain recklessness, a measure of faith in accident and free choice.

In the mean time, I finished the central panel of BlueToo.

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Fifty-some batik fabrics, five hundred pieces, and going-on two thousand yards of thread. So far.