Happy Winter Solstice

 

 

"The Guest House"
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
-Rumi ///

Christmas is One Week from Today

How can a whole year have passed so quickly?  A turbulent, wind-tossed year fraught with angst and calm, of love and hate, of fun and pain, of joy and sadness, and for some, total devastation---as if in the blink of an eye, it has passed like a creek flowing under a bridge.  Sometimes raging as though from a deluge in a storm, other times slowing to a trickle as in a drought.  Life in this human form is a strange thing indeed. 

I must fess up to not feeling the least bit jolly this particular year.  Too many catastrophes world-wide that are wrapped around my mind like a heavy, wet wool blanket on a hot, humid day.  I feel the urgency of time running out, and yet it mires me in place, rather than spurring me into movement and action. 

Winter Solstice is only a couple of days away, a time when the light of the day will begin to increase slowly again each day.  Yet I have drawn inward, and need longer than just a few days to begin stretching for the light again.  I am comforted by the shorter, darker Winter days right now, although I have felt the shorter days weigh heavy at the beginning of the time change this year.

I chose not to put up our traditional big Christmas tree this year.  Saving those spurts of energy for some baking and sewing.  I am enjoying those two things the most this Season.

 
                   The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

This quilt has waited patiently for a very long time for the quilting of it.  This Winter may be the time for some hand-quilting.

Charm Square Trees without their trunks :D

3-1/2 x 6-1/2" Flying Geese made from thriftstore shirts