a-story-i-will-never-write - Tumblr blog

[a-story-i-will-never-write]

I return to the ancestors

I walked along a local reenactment

A pioneer heritage site

I happen to walk by the spinners

Weavers and creators of yarn

They're selling spindles

And wool

And fibers

I buy one

I go home

I feel the weight of my ancestors hands guiding me

As I begin to spin my first yarn

A craft long forgotten but an ancient foremothers chore

My last name means shepherd

Maybe it's in my blood, maybe my grandmother's are guiding me

Either way my hands itch for more

I join the group.

They offer me a broken spinning wheel if I think I can fix it.

I do.

My friends and I fix it

And yet again I feel the hands of maybe a more recent foremother guiding my own hands,

Centuries of tradition guiding the present.

My hands still itch for more.

A walking wheel sits in the cabin

Years it has been untouched.

We fix it, my great great great grandmother's hands guide me as I walk back into my family's place of history

It's not enough.

I learn to forage and soon there is a pot boiling over the fire

Walnuts and woad and weld and false indigo and berries bubble with white homespun yarn floating in the pots

I hand it off to a weaver who teaches me in turn, guided by the hands of both our great heritage of mothers

How wonderful it is to guide history to life again with my own hands

Guided by a long line of grandmothers

How wonderful is it to have this connection

[a-story-i-will-never-write]

An open letter to love:

I painted her because i loved her so much i wanted her immortalized forever. My works are novice level, not near the masters of the past, and may never end up in a museum, but i hope maybe a thousand years from now someone will dig up a painting, or a piece of the plate i painted with her name and favorite flower flower across the front (her grandfathers lilac bushes still decorate our front yard) and display her beauty, her name, her essence again for the world, or even maybe in a hundred years a painting will find its way to a thrift shop and find a place above someone's fireplace, or in their kitchen, or maybe in a local library. I became an artist to immortalize the things I love most. Back then i didn't know i could love someone so much as I do her

The bad part about this plan is that no one will actually Know her, they'll see her for her beauty but not her intellect (especially on the plants littering the yard), or her charm, or her smile when the snow is especially thick and looks like a fairytale. They won't know she is an avid history nerd, or that her favorite book was Dracula of all things (will Dracula be around in a thousand years?) Or how she loved that jabberwocky poem from Alice in Wonderland and could quote it word for word (it's nonsense but sounds so lovely falling from her lips that i can't help but be engrossed by every word)

But her face will live on, and maybe our not yet existing descendants will find this, buried in her hope chest in the attic, with her name scrawled on the back, and go oh, that's our family history, that's where my nose or my hair or my eyes are from, or that's who the heirloom ring came from or that necklace in grandpa's dresser

Out of everything of her, I hope they have her smile

[a-story-i-will-never-write]

"Is there a God?" The children whisper quietly. "Perhaps but perhaps not" who are they to say? Little children learning of the world, leaning on each other in ways only children knew how. With all the religions they learn about in school - after all, that ancient egypt book sits tantalizingly on that bookshelf all dressed in gold - is there a God?

Years pass by and the children grow and a question remains the same. As adults they debate religion with each other - far more advanced settings than the playground discussing what their parents told them. "Is there a God?"

And I watch as they sit and whisper and chat, bringing up religions of old and new and in my age and wisdom I have gained I must sit and think

How can there Not be a God? Maybe not one infinite being, maybe not a hundred infinite beings but God in the sense of something other and something bigger with mayhaps a guiding hand?

After all, nature provides and nature cares. Perhaps it is her gentle guiding hand, who am I and who are we to say?

I know not and I doubt the children do too

But how else could you explain that the wild plant with anti itch properties- well, it only grows during mosquito season