Germany and Still Knitting to keep Me sane.
Month: April 2014
Germany and Still Knitting to keep Me sane
I am in Germany since last Friday, visiting my mother (85 yr) and I am in the great company of my partner Bill and my son Robin (15 yr) .
Surely and slowly my English dissolves and Courageous Bill, who is a wonderful English speaker looks at me with great concern as I become more and more not understandable .
my mother has minute memories of my school English , Bill does know the polite greetings and phrases and Robin is in theory bi-lingual ( he speaks wonderful German with our friends and there offspring).
I am always optimistic when I back for a visit to my mother; I back books to read, diaries to write, maybe even some watercolour paint and a sketch book. This time there is also a book about Deep Ecology for my MA! The time is spend with my mother, going into town , pottering around, going a bit mad with dealing with two languages , you get the picture.
So what does keep me sane in times like this is Knitting; a project small an simple to keep me and my fraying mind sane!
This time it is a pair of little slippers for my friend Bettina; we are off tomorrow to Minden for three days where my friends Michael and Bettina live with their three quite grown up children !
so the second slipper will be done by Friday night!
Happy Knitting!
P.S. If my grammar and sentence order is ever so slightly odd, read above again !
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Poetry
Sometimes I see something in this strange digital world and it feels someone has put into words,
what I feel. There is a sense of recognition and knowing.
These words from Toko-Pa and the image from Polina Yakovleva went straight to my heart:
Lightening Fires of Affection
‘So many of us are out at sea, looking for home. We try this way and that,
battling the endless march of adversaries, led by cynicism and apathy.
We fight them with every poetry we possess. We are gentle. We yield.
We get back to navigating our crafts.
Every once in a while, exhaustion can turn into despair.
The tiny flame, which takes our every resource to shield,
blows out on an unexpected gust.
Even then, lightless and alone, some of us remount our enterprise.
It helps to think of more than ourselves.
It helps to see the earth workers, the artists, the mothers,
the lovers, the singers, the poets and dreamers as threads in a web.
By ourselves we are fragile strands, songs with no listeners,
but together we are a relentless network.
Wherever there is depression,
there is colour made vivid by the grey.
When I feel this fog rolling in on me,
I light fires of affection in the hearts of others.
I tell them in tangible ways
how the life they live makes me live mine differently,
how precious and important they are to the rest of us.
That fire then becomes like a beacon which burns through
the grey and which I can sail towards.”
Toko-Pa Turner
http://toko-pa.com/2013/10/18/lighting-fires-of-affection/.
One Stitch at Time 