11 2024 || "Have trust in the nighttime and faith in the day"
Hello!! Here are a few things I’ve been into/spending time on/thinking about lately.
If you follow me on Instagram, you have already seen that I finished my first quilt! I’m trying to figure out how many of the two I currently have in progress I can finish by Christmas. Probably just one. I am still slow, but I got a lot faster after ripping out and reworking a lot of that first one.
A couple related podcast episodes: Under the Influence: The True History of the Trad Wife with Clara Bingham and This You’re Wrong About: The Tradwife Rises with Sarah Archer. The first is a great historical overview, and the second goes into the history of kitchen design (!!!) and left me with a takeaway about creating a strong community that I have been thinking about for months.
My Neighbor Totoro. I know I’m approximately 30 years late to this, but Chad and I watched it by ourselves on a whim and loved it so much that later that same week, it became my kids’ first full length movie. It was too rainy for our usual Friday activities (the beer garden), so I ordered pizza and made a night of it. I’d be lying if I said I weren’t inspired by Austin Kleon (in many ways, but in this case his family movie nights). I’m looking forward to more Studio Ghibli and pizza on the couch.
Inspired by reading this NYTimes article about a year ago, I started organizing reading parties. I’ve now hosted two of these, where I send out an invite via Partiful (I love not using Facebook to mediate all of our social interactions) to show up at a local cidery with lots of seating. We spend a few minutes catching up and chit chatting about the book we brought, then we read silently together in each other’s presence for awhile. The cidery closes at 9, so I can still be in bed at a reasonable hour. It’s been such a nice low stress way to interact with people while not feeling socially overwhelmed. It’s been a couple months since I’ve been able to schedule one, but I’m eager to get another on the books soon.
I’ve so often thought about this essay by Krys Malcolm Belc since it was published: “In this setting particularly — places that are part medical arena, part business, and part worship space, there’s a way in which you’re everything at once: a patient, a customer, a prayerful beggar, the one with the power to decide the course of treatment, the one being given constant commands.” If you haven’t read Krys’ book (and haven’t already heard me rave about it), The Natural Mother of the Child, I also highly recommend.
I’m curious: what are you doing this week and next to deal with ***gestures wildly***? Pretty rude that daylight saving time ends mere days before an election in the US, imo. I am planning a dinner to look forward to on Tuesday evening (a Pennsylvania delicacy my three year old refers to as “hand glove,” and so now the rest of us do too because we’ll all be shattered when he starts calling it by its rightful name), and making sure I have quilts lined up to work on (along with all materials I’ll need to keep them moving), books lined up to read, and friends lined up to hang out with. All of these things will be helpful to look forward to as we spend more waking hours in the dark.
Stay hopeful,
Lisa
Quote credit: Mirah