I listen to audiobooks sparingly, and I don’t particularly like reading books Everyone Else Has Read. The Chaplain got Becoming, by Michelle Obama, on his audiobook app. I eyed it, noting that it was 19 hours long. That is a long time. And Everyone was reading it.
I’ve been struggling with writer’s block lately. I’ve only been posting about sewing and reading because those things are easy to write about. How did I make this thing? I can tell you. What did I think of this book? I’ll let you know.
The other things on my mind are much harder to articulate.
Sunday passed with news of the two newest mass shootings, one of which appeared to racially motivated. (I say appeared because I have not gone back down the rabbit hole of news articles related to the shootings since I read two initial NPR articles).
I felt like I couldn’t just post as usual the next day, but what could I say or do? I wanted to load my kids in our truck and drive down to Washington, D.C. I wanted us sit as close to the White House lawn as they would let us and remain in silent protest until someone DID something.
This is a choose your own adventure post – for posterity, I’m going to include the instructions for how to make this skirt in the post, but if you aren’t interested in the details, feel free to scroll for pics instead.
We had a wedding to go to recently, and Three asked me to make her something. I’d picked up some traditional African block print fabric this spring and thought it would be the perfect thing to use for a skirt for her.
I kept this pretty simple – it was an afternoon wedding, and I started the skirt that morning.
My third read by Richard Rohr was Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. It came to me at around the same time as Rowing Upstream, by Mary Pipher, and as they both dealt with aging, I wanted to combine them into one post.
What did they have to offer?
There are a lot of stories white people tell themselves to feel better about race.
Stories like, my ancestors were Quakers and abolitionists, the unspoken conclusion being, so we weren’t/aren’t part of the problem. Or, I live in New York State, and our part of the country wasn’t complicit in the slavery of the South. Sometimes something happens that pulls the pants down on your story and exposes it as fiction.
Enter The Comet’s Tale.
