A Look Back at 2024

I don't always do an end of year retrospective; some years I'm on vacation, while other years, I just don't feel like it.  But today, reading the retrospectives of other people, I've decided to put one together.  It's good to remember that there were good times and bad, goal met and not yet met and abandoned, books read, that kind of thing.

Teaching

Let me begin with teaching.  I've continued to teach online and in person.  I've had days when I thought, this is what I was put on earth to do!  There were plenty of days when I wondered if I'm too old to do this anymore, but mainly because there are so many cultural references I'm not going to get.  But my overarching feeling is that I am ready to step into my wise elder shoes--I'm much more assertive about forbidding cell phone use in class, much more willing to assert that some experiences are important (we will create a communal poem, we will describe a tree that we've spent 20 minutes observing, we will continue to assert the primacy of literature).

Seminary

I continued to take a wide variety of seminary classes in a wide variety of modalities.  I am still really enjoying this work.  In the past year, I took 9 classes, no small accomplishment, particularly in a year of a devastating storm that made life very difficult (no electricity for 2 weeks, no internet connectivity for 4 weeks) for an online student.

Writing

Much of my writing focus has been seminary work and writing a weekly sermon.  It's been delightful, but there are times when I feel odd about how much poetry writing I haven't been doing, along with other writing.  But I did write 30 poems of varying degrees of completeness, along with at least that many fragments.  I have continued to blog daily throughout much of the year.  I have kept an offline journal and sent e-mails to friends, along with letters.  Writing is still one of the ways I figure out myself and the world.

Sketching

I have done some sketching on a daily basis.  As I looked at my sketchbook, I'm struck by how I'm trying to capture the mountains in sketching, with varying degrees of success.  I've written more about my year in sketching in this blog post.  

Fabric Arts

I have continued to stitch, although there have been too many weeks in the Fall when I did not touch fabric.  At the end of the year, I have a new quilt top almost completed, a quilt top I didn't even have in my head at the beginning of the year.  I have loved being part of a group at the local Lutheran church that makes quilts for Lutheran World Relief.

Reading

I have done a lot of reading for seminary class, which means I haven't done as much other reading as I would like.  I read at least 70 books, including some rigorous academic books outside of theology.  I would like to read more poetry in 2025.

Theatre and Museums

We saw great theatre, but it was in our home, which may be one of the better ways to see it (it's cheaper, and we can see more).  I went to one special exhibit at the Columbia Museum of Art, which I wrote about in this blog post.  I also went to the Smithsonian, back when I was in DC for the seminary onground intensive, which I wrote about in this blog post.

Music

We had great musical experiences at camp during Music Week.  We had plans to go to a concert or two, like the Violent Femmes, but Hurricane Helene disrupted those plans.

Health

I continue to work on solid practices that will situate me for an easier old age:  more walking, more vegetables, more strength training, more gratitude, more creative time, more friends, less alcohol, less sweets, less screen time.  Most months, I'm partially successful in most areas, and most of the time, I think that's about all I need to worry about.

Hurricane Helene

One of the things I will remember most about this year is Hurricane Helene, the fact that we moved 900 miles away from our South Florida house in a flood zone, only to be impacted so severely by hurricane remnants, from a hurricane that came ashore hours earlier and hundreds of miles to the south.  We are 2000 feet above sea level, and the damage to the geography was much worse than any hurricane damage I've ever seen with my own eyes.  Happily, our home was not damaged, and we did not lose a single tree.

Home Renovation

We made progress on home renovations.  A year ago, we still didn't have much in the way of internal walls; now we do.  A year ago, we didn't have any bathroom restoration done; now, we have two bathrooms that have been modernized.  There is still work to be done, but there will always be work that needs to be done.

Politics and Other Major Events

The presidential election had lots of surprises, which shouldn't be a surprise.  But I am guessing that in some future year when we look back, across a space of decades, we'll be surprised at what we all missed, what huge historical event we didn't see coming.  If the more deadly form of bird flu mutates to become transmissible from human to human, that might be the story.  If it's a war with China or that Putin detonates a nuclear bomb, that might be the story.  Or maybe it will be an unexpected human rights advancement.  I think about January of 1989 when no one would predict that this would be the year that the Berlin Wall came down and dictators across Eastern Europe would be deposed. 

Remembering Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter died yesterday, and far greater minds than mine will weigh in.  I was 11 years old when Carter was sworn in as president; I was roughly the same age as Amy Carter.  I was a kid who was interested in politics, so I paid attention to all sorts of news stories.  But of course, I was a kid, so I didn't understand everything I read or heard.  Throughout Carter's presidency, I head a lot of adults who were upset with Carter, the man, the president, and all the policies.

I am old enough to remember when people hated Carter, especially as he was leaving the White House and for a decade or two afterward.  By now, many of us know the good work that he did post presidency.  If you want an article that explains why Jimmy Carter was not a failure of a president, as you may have been taught, this one in The Washington Post by Stuart Eizenstat does a good job.  You should be able to read for free:  https://wapo.st/4gwS2JW

And again, I realize that many people, especially younger folks, are aware of the good work he did after his presidency--and so much good work, in human rights, in global health, in helping to protect natural resources, in building houses for those who had none, in continuing to be part of the community, on and on the list could go.  I was always astounded at reports of how he continued to teach a Sunday School class, for example.  I am grateful for how he showed us such variety in ways to live a life faithful to one's core values.

My favorite article of the morning reading, the most comprehensive assessment, an article in The Atlantic by James Fallows, has this quote, and I'll leave the spacing intact:  "Whatever his role, whatever the outside assessment of him, whether luck was running with him or against, Carter was the same. He was self-controlled and disciplined. He liked mordant, edgy humor. He was enormously intelligent—and aware of it—politically crafty, and deeply spiritual. And he was intelligent, crafty, and spiritual enough to recognize inevitable trade-offs between his ambitions and his ideals. People who knew him at one stage of his life would recognize him at another.

Jimmy Carter didn’t change. Luck and circumstances did."

Here's a great closing quote that I found in Heather Cox Richardson's post:  "President Carter said, 'When I was in the White House, I thought of human rights primarily in terms of political rights, such as rights to free speech and freedom from torture or unjust imprisonment. As I traveled around the world since I was president, I learned there was no way to separate the crucial rights to live in peace, to have adequate food and health care, and to have a voice in choosing one’s political leaders. These human needs and rights are inextricably linked.'"

As so many others have said, we were lucky to have a man like Jimmy Carter.  May we all find inspiration as we try to figure out way to live according to our values.

Lessons and Carols and Theology, both Ancient and Modern

Many churches today will do a Service of Lessons and Carols.  It's a great way to give church folks a lower-key Sunday, after the work-intense week that includes Christmas Eve and perhaps Christmas morning.  Musicians already know the music, and if pastors don't want to preach, the lessons do the work.  Many churches won't have communion, so more people can take the day off--after all, pastors have families too, and many of them haven't had much holiday time with those families.

When I was younger, I loved this service.  Of course, when I was younger, I loved everything about Advent and Christmas, and I wondered why church services throughout the year were no match for Christmas Eve.  Even today, the Christmas Eve service seems the most perfect to me.  I know I should love Easter best, but I don't.

One of the gifts seminary has given me is an appreciation for various theologies that have been squashed throughout church history--and not just appreciation, but hearing about them at all.  I will always wonder what might have happened if Pelagius had become the go-to theologian, not Augustine.   Just imagine it:  a church based on God's love of all of creation, not a church based on ideas of a fallen, unworthy creation.  What if the idea of sin took a back seat to ideas about the beauty of creation?

Alas, most of us aren't living in that world, which is one reason why Easter isn't my favorite.  Even though we have an empty tomb at Easter, we also get a lot of substitutionary atonement theology in an Easter service, lots of references to that old rugged cross.  And if that's true in ELCA Lutheran churches, I can only imagine how much worse it might be in more conservative churches.

But Christmas Eve is different.  We might want to lean into Christmas Eve as a story of God vs. Roman empire--well some of us pastor folks/social justice folks might.  But Christmas Eve is about beauty, about a Divine love so huge that God comes to be with us, to experience all of human life.

I've often marveled at the idea of God who is willing to be a baby, willing to be a teenager, willing to experience pain the way we do.  Again, I think of a different way that church/theology might have helped me frame this differently:  a God who wants to experience the exquisite wonder and awe of being human.  If I had it framed this way, earlier, preached from the pulpit, maybe it would have taken me less time to feel wonder and awe at being human, less time feeling trapped in my body, my fallen body in all of its femaleness (the way the Church has framed it through the ages). 

I write today, surrounded by Christmas beauty, lights and decorations that will soon be packed away.  It's a good day for thinking about ways to keep this wonder and awe going throughout the year.  Now that's a new year's resolution that makes me happy.

All Our Little Women and All Their Prairies

Yesterday was much more chilly and overcast/drizzly than the weather forecast said it would be--in short, a great day to stay inside.  Plus I'm still fighting off a cold, and even though I know intellectually that getting wet and chilled won't give my cold an advantage, on some level, it's a hard folk tale to shake.  Plus, I'm feeling lazy this week.

I have had a yearning to see Little Women for several weeks now--almost any version would do.  My spouse seemed open to possibilities, so after I did some syllabus work with The Great British Baking Show re-runs on in the background, I suggested it.  We watched the superb 2019 version, which I last saw in a movie theatre on a Friday night just before it left town in January of 2020, which I wrote about in this blog post.

There's no need for another review.  I loved the movie yesterday every bit as much as I loved it 5 years ago.  It was great to see it after spending part of the morning prepping for the American Lit survey class I will be teaching (the 2nd half, my favorite half).  It did inspire me to get back in touch with my writer self, who has not gone away but has been doing much more seminary writing and sermon writing in the last few years than poetry writing or fiction writing.

Seeing the movie made me miss all the people I know, women mostly, who have loved this novel/story/movie, and so I made this Facebook post:

"Watching the 2019 version of "Little Women," which makes me want to tell all my female friends and all my creative friends and my childhood self how very much I appreciate and love us all!"

I wish that there had been a similar remake of the Laura Ingalls Wilder material.  I don't count the TV show, although I've grown to appreciate it more as a grown up than I did as the target audience when it aired in the 1970's.  Back then I had read all the books, very recently, and I was shocked by how a weekly TV series deviated from the text.  When I watch now, I'm grateful for the ways that the series stayed faithful to the spirit of the novels.

I think the material would make a great movie.  Or a reality TV show . . . oh, wait, they've done something like that already.  I remember watching the PBS show about Frontier Valley (Frontier House was the actual name of the show), where three families compete to see who can do the best at living the way pioneers would have lived in Montana in the 1870's (give or take a decade).  They were there in the summer, and it looked idyllic.  The conclusion of the series ascertained that they all would have died because they hadn't chopped and stored enough wood to get through the winter.  Sobering.  And even more sobering to realize that most pioneers died or went back east--life was just too hard, even if the opportunity seemed great before the pioneers set out.

I finished the day by working on the annual report that faculty have to do each year at Spartanburg Methodist College, an interesting task after spending the afternoon watching Little Women and sewing small scraps of fabric into larger strips for a quilt.  There must be a metaphor here, or a poem percolating.  Stay Tuned!

The Success of Adopting a Tree in a Composition Class

Before I get too far away from the teaching semester, let me record what went well in English 101 at Spartanburg Methodist College, here in one concise post.

I began the semester with a lot of ideas, but the one I was most committed to was the idea of adopting a tree.  I had in mind we'd choose our tree in early September and that we'd return to it throughout the semester and describe how it was changing.  In the last week of August, we went outside to choose our tree, and I wrote a blog post about it here.

I decided to have us do a few more experiments--once they chose a tree, they wrote directions to it, and then we tested them.  That experience gave us a great way to talk about precise language.

I wanted them to read the work of others who had adopted a tree.  I had saved one article from The Washington Post, and it led me to another article.  We wrote about which author did the better job of convincing a person to adopt a tree.  We talked about the proper way to refer to these two outside sources, and over several class sessions, we talked about how these skills are transferable to writing a research paper.

I didn't realize that I was going to combine all these efforts into one paper.  I thought about having them choose one approach (description/describing a tree, process/writing directions to the tree, using outside sources in arguing that everyone should have a favorite tree, and maybe a creative approach) and write it up.  But I decided that it worked as a larger paper with parts, so I created a handout that told them how to take the informal writing that we'd been doing and turn it into Essay Two.  They also had to write a reflective piece about all the pieces they'd been writing.

What was really cool is that it seemed to deflect plagiarism.  It's hard to have AI write the description of the tree, such a specific tree.  It was the first time I had done this, so there weren't lots of essays floating around, the way there are if I ask students to write about a social issue.

I had a vision of other modules we'd do, perhaps a birding module, perhaps a photohaiku module, along with a research paper where they would find some outside sources to go with ones that I would hand out.  But there was a hurricane, and we got off schedule in all sorts of ways.

We still needed to do a research essay.  I decided to do an abbreviated experience.  Instead of sending them out to do research, I collected materials.  We watched this TED talk by Suzanne Simard about how trees talk to each other.  Earlier in the year, I found an academic journal article that she co-wrote that covers the same subject, but in a much more scholarly way, and I brought that in, along with an article about her that appeared in The Guardian.  We talked about the differences and similarities between these sources, and we did an annotated Works Cited page--part of it we did together, and the analysis of the works, each student wrote on their own (nothing complicated, just a sentence or two).

Then I brought in some additional sources that covered the same topic, including Simard's larger book and a children's book that covered the same topic.  I had them write a small research paper that analyzed which source covered the topic best and/or which was their favorite.  They had to refer to at least three outside sources, and because we had run out of time, I didn't require them to find other sources, although we did talk about how they would do that in future classes, if they had a more rigorous research assignment.

I do realize what has been lost, in our semester long focus on trees.  I love the idea of students choosing a topic and diving deep and learning a lot.  But through the years, I'm less and less convinced that happens, except for one or two students, who have probably been doing that on their own anyway.

In this time of planetary destruction, teaching students how to notice the world around them seems more important than ever.  Exposing students to the ways of being a naturalist in the world, even if they're not going to be scientists--that seems very important to me.  Along the way we did creative approaches too, which I wrote about in this blog post, and I think those experiences helped some of them realize that they do have creative skills, that these, too, can be learned.

December Fragments from a Wonderful Life

It's been a lovely two weeks since I turned in my last grades for all the classes that I taught this past semester.  It hasn't been a complete time off:  in the last two weeks, I completed seminary work (by Dec. 14), applied for a scholarship (by Dec. 15), and continued to preach at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee.  I've already written some blog posts celebrating parts of the past two weeks, but I want to collect some fragments that didn't make it into those posts.

--I had been reading Ina Garten's memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens, and I was about to take it back to the library when it took hold of me.  The first few chapters weren't compelling, but then suddenly, I wanted to know what happened, even though I already knew the large outline.  The book was overdue, so one morning when I was up very early because my spouse had been coughing a lot, I made myself a mug of tea and read the book before I did any work on the computer.  As with every time I read a physical book, I am reminded of how much I still love to read a book and how relieved that makes me.

--In the Spring of 2023, one of my professors, Rick Elgendy, had interesting insight into the idea of powers and principalities.  A few weeks ago, I saw the announcement of his new book, Life among the Powers:  A Political Spirituality of Resistance and I ordered it, and I got a discount.  Happy Christmas to me!  I've read a bit and scanned a bit, and it looks like the book I hoped it would be.  If you would like to order it, go here.

--I had wanted to watch the movie Civil War since it first came out, and the price came down enough that I was OK with renting it.  There were enough good parts that I don't regret the $4.99 we spent, but by the end of the movie, I was a bit bored.

--I have been stitching small scraps of fabric into larger strips.  And lately, the small scraps have gotten even smaller--why is it so hard to throw them away?

Here's what I was making earlier this month, and yes, the even smaller above fragments will eventually end up in these kinds of strips (and these strips are smaller than the strips I was creating in the summer):

This process delights me.  It also will lead eventually to a larger quilt, and a benefit that I had forgotten:  if I'm stitching, I'm not eating, and any drinking that I'm doing goes much more slowly.  I remembered this benefit after drinking three eggnogs in 8 minutes and then realizing I had consumed about 1000 calories and still wanted more.  There's a reason I'm not a skinny woman.

--Another reason I'm not a skinny woman:  we are such good cooks.  I've been baking lots of bread.  On Monday, I wanted a bread recipe that was festive but not overly sweet for people who are avoiding sugar.  I didn't want to experiment with alternate natural or human made sugars, I just wanted less sugar.  And I found a perfect recipe on the King Arthur flour site.  I was baking at 4 am, so I went with what I had.  I didn't have nonfat dry milk or potato flour, so I just used a bit more bread flour.  I didn't have candied orange peel or time to make any, so I went without.  I am glad that I had a tangerine so that there could be orange zest.  Because I was going for a low sugar option, I didn't do the white drizzle.  But I wanted something more festive, so I did an egg wash before baking.  It was so perfect that I didn't even think to take a picture as we were gobbling it down to the crumbs.

--We also did a bit of deep cleaning of the house before the low sugar visitors came.  It always amazes me how much cleaning progress I can make in a short amount of time and how much calmer I feel in the house when it's less grungy.

--We made a perfect turkey--yummmmm.  And now we have leftovers, the way we did not at Thanksgiving.  And room in the freezer for when we are tired of leftovers.

--One reason why cleaning is a challenge for me:  I'm extra annoyed when we start to get the house dirty again, often through cooking (turkey juice dripping off the counter--sigh).  It's also a reason why I don't mop the floors more often.

--We have continued to enjoy watching plays through our subscription to National Theatre at Home.  I haven't heard of many of the plays we've been watching, so there's the thrill of discovery, mixed with the thrill of theatre.  It's British theatre--wow!  The sets continue to amaze me.  And I'm intrigued by how they do the filming.  I would say it's like being there, but it's not.  If I sat in the audience, I'd miss much of the facial expressions.

--I've been rediscovering the joy of hot tea with honey.  In part, it's because I'm fighting off a cold, and this old remedy helps.  But often, as I take the first sips of my first cup of morning coffee, I think, can I switch to tea now?

--I have not walked as much as I thought I would walk, in part because I am fighting off a cold.  But it is good to stay inside, especially on cold, windy days, good to read, good to sit still for a bit before the next semester cranks into start mode.

Christmas Eve Report

At the end of the day yesterday, when I realized I was very tired (a good tired, but tired), my spouse said, "Of course.  You spent the whole day getting ready for the Christmas Eve service."  My first response was, "No I didn't."  But then I realized that with the exception of some grocery shopping and a short walk, yes, I did indeed spend the day getting ready for the service, experiencing the service, and then coming back across the mountain.

It was a great day.  

I spent several hours making angels from fabric, only to get to the church to remember that we don't do a youth sermon on Christmas Eve.  Ah well--I'll use them later.  And it might work out well, because my little angels won't be competing with so much for their attention.

The church was beautiful, as was the music.  If you'd like to hear/watch the sermon, I am happy to be able to say that I've downloaded it to my YouTube channel, and you can access it here.

Everyone was in a great mood, which is one of my favorite aspects of Christmas Eve.   I've baptized three babies since being at Faith Lutheran in Bristol, TN, and all three were at worship last night--I felt a bit awestruck by it all.  I didn't expect to get a second Christmas with this congregation, and I felt overwhelming gratitude to be there.

I was also grateful that my spouse was well enough to be there.  It's been a tough autumn, and part of what made it tough is that my spouse was struggling with pulled muscles which led to extreme pain (happily resolved by bed rest, which was also a struggle) and then for the past 3 weeks, he's had a cold.  

I expected heavier traffic, especially during our trip over--we left at 2:30, and the traffic was more like Sunday morning than what I thought Christmas Eve afternoon would be.  When we travel through the mountains at night, I'm always startled by how dark it is, but happily, my spouse was nonplussed.

After the service, everyone took pictures by the Chrismon tree.  When the organist asked if we'd like her to take our picture, we said yes.

I'm not thrilled with this picture--who are these older people?  I want to believe that we don't look like this in real life.  We're both carrying extra weight, and I feel like I look even frumpier than usual in this photo.  But I'm also at the point where I care less.  Yes, I am heavier because I'm not spending several hours each day trying hard to keep weight off.  Keeping weight off takes extraordinary focus and rigidity on my part.  But despite extra weight, I'm healthy, and for that I am grateful.

Today will be a quieter day--we have a turkey to roast, and I think it's defrosted.  It will be not as cold this afternoon (52 degrees for a high), so I hope to take a walk.  Our families are far away, so there won't be extended family time today.  So today won't feel vastly different from other days, the way that Christmas did when I was a child.

But I am grateful:  grateful to have survived this tumultuous autumn mostly unscathed (but not unchanged), grateful to have several jobs which I love and which nourish me, grateful for health and a new roof over my head (bought and installed just a few weeks before the hurricane) and water that comes out of the tap that I can drink again.

Christmas Angels for a Youth Sermon

Soon I will begin today's creative task:

This morning I got an idea for angels that I want to have to give out with the youth sermon.  And because it's a service at 5 p.m., I have just enough time to make them.  Here's what a finished one will look like:

And the message of the youth sermon?  Remember what the angels tell us:  "Fear not!"  Take this angel as a reminder.  Don't pack it away with the Christmas ornaments.  Carry it with you, so that you remember to listen for the angel message of Good News.

A Wonderful Advent 4 Sunday

Yesterday was the kind of Sunday where I found myself wishing that I was already ordained, that I could stay at Faith Lutheran Church to be their pastor.  Of course, being their permanent pastor might change things, and it's important to remember that.  If they called me as their full-time pastor, I would need to move.  I would be held to different standards.

It doesn't really matter.  I am not ordained, and ordination is realistically years away.  But let me delight in the ways that yesterday was wonderful:

--Last year, Christmas Eve fell on the 4th Sunday of Advent, so we didn't do a morning service.  We did a 2 p.m. Christmas Eve service.  I was happy to have the 4th Sunday in Advent to luxuriate in the season a bit longer.

--I loved the music yesterday:  a chance to sing both "Oh Come, Oh Come Emmanuel" and "Soon and Very Soon."

--I felt like both my children's sermon and adult sermon went well.  What a treat to focus my message on Elizabeth and Mary and their babies in their wombs.

--We got home to find out that our tech person had figured out a way to record the sermon and posted it to the church's Facebook page.  I can't figure out a way to download it to my YouTube channel, but if you're on Facebook, you can view it here.

--I finally did figure out how to post it to my YouTube channel!  It's here.  And of course, if you'd prefer to read my sermon, I turned it into a blog post.

--We had more children in church yesterday:  2 toddlers home to visit Grandma and Great Grandma.  They were interested in everything we did, including communion.  Delightful!

--One of our members got a Christmas present for everyone, so we stayed seated after worship so that the older youth could assist in handing out Christmas gift bags.  

--Then we all did the final decorating for Christmas, which involved tall metal candleholders attached to every other pew and gold ribbons around them.

--On our way out of town, we took communion to a parishioner who is too unsteady to make it to church.  We will likely start doing this every Sunday.  I was really happy to be able to do this.  

I even discovered that the church had a kit stashed away in the sacristy, so transporting the wine was easier than I thought it might be.

--The drive across the mountains was so beautiful, with parts of the mountains frosted with snow.  In some spots, it reminded me of that flocking snow that people used to spray on indoor Christmas trees.

--We finished by watching Civil War, not a Christmas movie, and not as compelling as I thought it would be.  But it did make me think about what would happen if one paired it with Salvador, two movies about photojournalists.  I am not likely to have a class where I would have time to do that, but let me record it.

--It was an early night to bed--a good day can leave one worn out that way. 

Another Solstice Sketch with Lines that Might Transform to Poems

Yesterday, I got a book about Harriet Tubman out of the library.  I have yet to read it, but it sparked my imagination when I sketched:

Here's what the lines say:

May you always find 

Your north star, your way forward.

Follow the drinking gourd.

-----

Here is the inside:

Here's what it says:

May you always know

that you have resources,

an underground railroad,

an enchanted forest,

a moonless night,

and stars by which to navigate.

Happy holidays!

Love,

Kristin

A Sketch for Solstice

Last night, after creating a sketch for a notecard for a friend who is having a difficult December, I made a sketch for me, while we were watching that old stop-motion animated show, "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town":

I hadn't planned to create a haiku-like thing, but it emerged;  in case you can't read it, it says, "Winter turns her back / On this foresaken season / Autumn of our woes."  I didn't realize that I had misspelled forsaken until I typed it out just now.  Intriguing! 

I was trying to create some sort of winter fairy-like creature.  As I often did, I drew the creature from the back, which allows me to avoid my lack of skill in sketching faces and hands; I drew the creature in a flowing dress, which allows me to avoid my lack of skill in drawing shoes from the back, and my difficulty with perspective (more specifically how to draw legs and arms in proper proportion to the body).

The gold marker for wings made me think about a star, so I drew one.  I wanted to draw a forest of Christmas trees, but I ran out of room on the page, so one tree would have to do.  I liked the ambiguity of the sketch.  Is that a winter witch or the angel Gabriel or some stray angel who stayed home from choir practice and so could not appear to the shepherds?  Is that the star that guided the Magi?  Are those ornaments on the tree or the red berries that are on some bushes this time of year?

The whole process delighted me and reminded me to return to this sketchbook more often.  I bought it about a year ago, thinking I wanted to create a daybook of sorts, a place to record sketches and haiku-like responses to the day, a place to record inspirations.  As I flipped back through it, and as I've been flipping back through my sketchbook that I use predominantly during my morning meditation time, it's good to remember how many sketches I made.

In the two sketchbooks alone, I made roughly 80 sketches.  I also made some individual sketches, which I then turned into notecards to send to friends.  That's a lot of sketching, and it's taken place in less than 30 minute increments.

When I met the family member of the friend who had a stroke, she said, "I wanted to meet this person who kept sending these delightful cards--you're so talented."

I don't think of myself as talented at sketching--I can't draw humans in a realistic way that would please me, the way I can sketch a tree or a flower.  Maybe I should change that:  I can't quickly draw humans, I can't consistently draw humans.

Let me record this idea, which is not a commitment at this point, but more of an idea that inspires me:  if I did a quick sketch of a human, a daily sketch, would I improve?  Or maybe if I saw my drawings of humans on a more regular basis, maybe I would get more comfortable with the quirky/imperfect way that I do it.

Haunted by Color, Soothed by Stitching

I turned in my last seminary paper on Saturday, and I turned in my last batch of grades a few days before that.  But yesterday, Thursday, was my first truly unscheduled day of this winter break.  On Sunday, I spent a good chunk of the day attending to my preaching job, on Monday I went to Columbia, on Tuesday I came home, and on Wednesday, I had a holiday lunch with the local church quilt group and an evening Zoom session.  At one point, my spouse said, "Did the Little Engine Who Could have a name?  Because you remind me of an Energizer Bunny in the way that you keep going."

It's a mix of metaphors, but I understand what he was saying.  Even when I'm on break, I'm not really on break.  I still have my part-time preaching job, and there are upcoming classes that start on January 7, onground classes where I need to create syllabi still.  And even though I know that I'm done with the fall semester responsibilities, both as teacher and student, I still wake up in the middle of the night feeling fretful.

I still did a bit of chugging along; I wanted to get to Michael's to get new sketchbooks while they were on sale.  So after rounding up the last of the recycling before the arrival of the trash collectors, I headed out to run some errands.  We did a bit of cooking, and then settled in to watch some plays by way of the National Theatre at Home.  I had to subscribe for a class, and we've been enjoying watching good theatre.  Yesterday we watched two plays.

I still felt fidgety, so I pulled out my basket of fabric.  I've been creating a quilt out of scraps of fabric--you may say, "Yes, that's the very nature of quilting, correct?  Scraps of fabric?"  But I began this project by thinking I would put the scraps together in a less organized way.  I thought I could pay no attention to size or color of each scrap and just put them together as I pulled them out of the basket.  Here's what I have so far:

Clearly, I'm not putting this quilt together in the random way I first envisioned.  But I'm having fun assembling my scraps into longer strips.  Here's the one I worked on last night:

And then I did a few quick sketches for notecards that I'm always creating.  You can see one nestled in the cloth:

Today I'll do a bit more writing than yesterday, a bit more shopping than yesterday (4 x the fuel points at Ingles!).  But I plan to keep doing some sewing each day.  It reminds me of this quote that I saw on the wall of the museum on Tuesday:

When We Became Modern

While I was in Columbia for a brief 30 hours, I wanted to get to the Columbia Museum of Art for their special exhibit.

I wasn't sure what to expect--would it be works I've already seen?  Would I discover new artists?  Do I want to discover new artists?

The advertising said it would be over 50 works on loan from the Brooklyn Museum.  I have been there once, but I remember it for "The Dinner Party" by Judy Chicago, not for seeing Impressionists.  So, it didn't feel like the once in a lifetime opportunity to see rare works from France.  But still, I'm in a part of the world where it feels like I should seize a chance to see these works while they're close.

So, off I went, and I'm glad I did.  I was only familiar with one work; I gasped when I turned a corner and saw it on the wall, by itself:

But I loved the rest of the exhibit, even if it wasn't familiar.  I took this picture, because I thought it would be fun to try to sketch, this cottage on a hill by the sea:

I took this picture because I wanted to have a meal or tea in a setting like this one:

I took lots of pictures, in part because I liked the work, in part to capture the range of it all, in part because I wondered if I could create something similar.

I also explored the rest of the museum, the second floor.

It was a bit bewildering, with one entrance and various galleries leading to other galleries, and much of the work arranged by theme, with two or three galleries containing art because it was made by people still living.

There were groups of school children, being led through the museum by a guide who asked lots of questions and everyone seemed enthusiastic.  That was delightful.

And then I went back to see the special exhibit one more time.

I am so intrigued by the wide variety of picture frames--not intrigued enough to do research, but still:

I didn't stay long--I was in the museum about an hour.  I was worried about parking.  I fed coins into a meter, but the meter didn't tell me how much time I had.  I think the meters were designed for people paying by smart phone.

I'm glad I went, parking aggravations and all.  The space is wonderful.  When I was in grad school, the museum was much smaller and closer to the USC campus.  I'm glad that the community supports art in this way.

Conversation in Song

Yesterday, I went to visit a friend who had a massive stroke in July.  She's in a skilled nursing unit still, with lots of physical therapy each day.  I knew that she had improved, but I wasn't sure what to expect.

We had a long chat. As we tried to speak in sentences, there was frustration, but we carried on.  She would get a sentence out, but then it was like something got stuck.  Then she gestured at me and looked expectant, which I took to mean, "Tell me about your life."  So I did.

Here's what was interesting. At one point, my friend said, "Sing me a word." Unsure of what to sing, I went back to that old standard from "Sound of Music"--I sang "Doe, a deer"--and my friend picked right up, and we sang the whole thing, word for word, all the way up the musical notes, back to "That will bring us back to doe, doe, doe, doe"--she knew every word.  Not only that, she could sing them, still, perfectly hitting each note.

That seemed to make her happiest, singing together. We tried, "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," but we weren't singing the same version--and then it was like all other Christmas music left my head.

Then we went back to trying to talk in traditional ways.  I do wonder what would have happened if we had tried singing our conversation.  But I'm only just now wondering it.  Something to think about for next time!  I could try singing a conversation in familiar music or just something I make up as I go along.  I'm a drama school kid--I'm game!

I hope our visit wasn't more exhausting for her than happy--but she seemed happy.

I know the brain can heal itself in amazing ways, and I know that she is still doing as much as she can.  I can only imagine how frustrating it is, so many magnitudes larger than my own occasional inability to recall a word or a name.

I need to think about songs we might be able to sing together.  I know she loved Les Mis, but I don't remember much about that musical.  Hmm.  Time to put on my thinking cap.

Writing Goals in the Waning Year

Soon, I hope to return to more regular blogging--this week, in fact.  Over the week-end, I turned in my last papers for seminary classes for fall semester 2024.  My grades are done and turned in.  So far, I have not caught all the colds and viruses that seem to be affecting others.

I not only want to get back to blogging, but also some poetry writing and submitting.  The places where I submit are getting fewer and fewer--submission windows are open and closed more quickly, and there are fees I'm not willing to pay (and more and more journals asking for more and more money).

Let me record some of the poetry ideas I've had.

--I've thought of my series of poems about Noah's wife who has made life changes after the Flood (that flood that required Biblical Noah to build an arc); one of my favorites, "Higher Ground," appeared in Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States, and you can read it in this blog post.  I have also written poems about Cassandra, as a way to talk about climate change, and one of the more recent ones I've written imagines Cassandra living in the mountains.

Revisiting these characters in light of Hurricane Helene seems promising.

--I've also been contemplating my Facebook feed, which is full of people constructing gingerbread houses alongside people rebuilding houses wiped out by Hurricane Helene floodwaters.  My commute to church in Bristol, TN takes me through some severely devastated areas, where nothing is left of homes but rubble, and I can't imagine they will be rebuilt.  It seems there should be a poem there, but I'm not sure I can pull it off.

--I'd also like to get back to a daily practice of shorter poems and observations.  I need to train my attention again.  Happily, I'm teaching literature classes this coming term, which always helps me return to poetry roots.

--I also enjoyed writing for one of my seminary classes--it was mostly memoir, a very short piece.  I'd like to do more of that, more fiction writing.

--In short, I want to get back to the writing that feeds my soul, even if it never gets published, never leads to larger work.  I've been doing a lot of seminary writing, which feeds my soul in a different way, and so much grading, which doesn't feed my soul at all.  It's time to remember the reasons I wanted a teaching job in a 4 year, liberal arts school--time to read and write.

The Feast Day of Santa Lucia

Today is the feast day of Santa Lucia, a woman in 4th century Rome during a time of horrible persecution of Christians and much of the rest of the population, and she was martyred.  The reasons for her martyrdom vary:   Did she really gouge out her eyes because a suitor commented on their beauty? Did she die because she had promised her virginity to Christ? Was she killed because the evil emperor had ordered her to be taken to a brothel because she was giving away the family wealth? Was she killed because a rejected suitor outed her for being a Christian?  We don’t really know.  

She is most often pictured with a crown of candles on her head, and tradition says that she wore a candle crown into the catacombs when she took provisions to the Christians hiding there.  With a candle crown, she freed up a hand to carry more supplies.  I love this idea, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that it isn't true.

Truth often doesn't matter with these popular saints like Lucia, Nicholas, and Valentine.  We love the traditions, and that means we often know more about the traditions than we do about the saints behind them, if we know anything at all about the saints behind these popular days.

This feast day still seems relevant for two reasons.  First, Lucia shows us the struggle that women face in daily existence in a patriarchal culture, the culture that most of us still must endure.  It’s worth remembering that many women in many countries today don’t have any more control over their bodies or their destinies than these long-ago virgin saints did. In this time of Advent waiting, we can remember that God chose to come to a virgin mother who lived in a culture that wasn’t much different than Santa Lucia’s culture: highly stratified, with power concentrated at the top, power in the hands of white men, which made life exceeding different for everyone who wasn't a powerful, wealthy, white man. It's a society that sounds familiar, doesn't it?

On this feast day of Santa Lucia, we can spend some time thinking about women, about repression, about what it means to control our destiny.  We can think about how to spread freedom.

It's also an important feast day because of the time of year when we celebrate.  Even though we're still in the season of late autumn, in terms of how much sunlight we get, those of us in the northern hemisphere are in the darkest time of the year.  It's great to have a festival that celebrates the comforts of this time of year:  candles and baked goods and hot beverages.

I love our various festivals to get us through the dark of winter. In these colder, darker days, I wish that the early church fathers had put Christmas further into winter, so that we can have more weeks of twinkly lights and candles to enjoy. Christmas in February makes more sense to me, even though I understand how Christmas ended up near the Winter Solstice.

I always thought that if I had a more flexible schedule, I'd spend December 13 making special breads, but that will have to wait.  My schedule is flexible, but much of today and tomorrow will be spent working on my final papers/presentations for three seminary classes.  

You could do baking though! If you’d like to try, this blog post will guide you through it. If you’re the type who needs pictures, it’s got a link to a blog post with pictures.  Enjoy.

Fall Teaching Tasks Complete, but Writing Yet to Do

I have posted my last set of grades.  I am not done with all of the work from Fall semester, but all my grading is done:  5 Spartanburg Methodist College classes and 4 online classes for Broward College.  For the online classes, I don't have to do some of the more time consuming work:  the curriculum is created and standard for online classes, and the course shell is the same from term to term--in many ways, I am the grader and the person who answers questions and encourages and sends reminders.  Still, it takes time, and it takes up a lot of space in my head at certain points of the term, like the end. 

Tuesday I uploaded all of the components of the final project for my Preaching class: Race, Gender, and the Religious Imagination.  I had to write an academic paper, then I had to create an event that would address some of the material the paper revealed, and I had to create/preach/record a sermon that I would preach for the event, along with a sermon manuscript.  It was one of the more complicated final projects, with lots of parts.

I still have three papers to write, but they feel doable:  one is due on Friday, one on Saturday, and one on Sunday.  The end is in sight!  I want to get as much done Thursday as possible.  My spouse has been fighting off a cold, and I worry that I'll wake up sick.

I thought I would get more done yesterday, but after getting up early to get grading done and get the Rogue in for new tires, I was tired by afternoon.  I took a nap and then got up to finish the gingerbread in the late afternoon.  I started the recipe in the morning, but the dough needs time to chill.  They were wonderful fresh out of the oven, but this morning, they are a bit crisper around the edges than I'd like.

As I look at my history in gingerbread, I am realizing that this is one cookie that almost never turns out the way I want:  soft on the inside, but with some resistance (but not overly crispness) on the outside.  It's usually a delicious cookie, if I didn't have my preconceived idea of what it should feel like when I bite into it.  And yes, I do see the life lesson there.

Let me bring this blog post to a close and actually post it.  I first started writing it yesterday and got sidetracked by the day's tasks.  And then let me get to my seminary writing.  

Sermon Recording and Remembering Nikki Giovanni

I was sad to hear of the death of Nikki Giovanni.  The Washington Post has a great article celebrating her life;  you can read it here, and this link should be the gift article link that gets you behind the paywall.  Even if you know the outline of her life, it's worth a read, because she's had such a rich and varied life.

I have had a fondness for Nikki Giovanni for most of my adult life.  She's one of the first living poets I ever read, one of the first poets I discovered on my own.  It was the summer after my first year at college, where I was a counselor at Congaree Girl Scout Camp.  We had a staff cabin which had a small bookshelf, and it was there that I found a copy of Giovanni's My House.  I read it, and because it was in the staff cabin, I came back to it several times throughout the summer.

I had been experimenting with writing my own poetry for several years before reading Giovanni, and others who were part of her generation, like Marge Piercy, Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton, and so many others.  It was that Giovanni book that made me want to do more with my poetry, which was fairly simple and short.

Those were the days when poets could be visiting poets on campus and make a decent chunk of money; those days are long gone.  I knew that Giovanni had been at Virginia Tech for a long time, and I wonder if her students had any idea who was leading their classroom.  From everything I've read, she was the kind of professor that anyone would want to have.  She's an inspiration.

I'd love to spend the day rereading her work, but I have a noon deadline for a project for my seminary class, Race, Gender, and Religious Imagination.  Part of that project involves recording a sermon, and it's a sermon that's supposed to be part of an event that I would create (if I had money, time, place, support) in response to my critical reflection paper.  Yesterday, I did that part of the project, the video sermon.

I had written about the event, a retreat on the nameless women who helped shape the ministry of Jesus, a retreat to remind us that if nameless women can have this kind of influence, maybe we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss our own agency and power.

Since I live at a retreat center, I thought about all the places where I might record my sermon.  Yesterday was fairly warm for December, and the rain had held off, so I decided that an outdoor location wasn't an issue.  Plus I knew I wouldn't be in the way, as I might if I tried to use one of the indoor spaces around camp.  My spouse was willing to be the controller of the camera.

We went over to the lake, where there's a gorgeous outdoor space, and it's fairly quiet.  We experimented with filming several sentences, a few times, and then we made the recording.  You can view it here.

I thought about doing several more takes, but I know that this attempt is probably as good as some of the other attempts we might make.  I don't have fancy editing software or the knowledge of how to take the best bits and pieces of recordings to make a seamless whole.

Once I uploaded the video to my YouTube channel, I uploaded the video to the dropbox for my class.  And now I need to make the final polishings to my paper.  I am to the point where I need to do some final revisions and call it done.  I've been immersed in this project for days, and I'm probably not able to see it clearly, at least not before the noon due date.

I am always aware that I might be able to create something better, but my experiences as a writer, or as any kind of creative, reminds me that it's always the case.  And what else is always the case:  even if it could be better, my efforts are likely good enough.

Seeing the trajectory of a life like Nikki Giovanni's reminds me of this point.  Our best work in one year will not be the best work in a different year.  The important thing is to keep doing the work.

Semester's End: Now and Not Yet

A quick note here to say that I have not forgotten this blog.  The semester's end is here, and yet it's not quite here.  How very Advent, it's now and not yet.

I have had grading to do.  This morning, I turned in my grades at Spartanburg Methodist College--hurrah!  I have one more online class to get done, in terms of grading and turning in grades, but that can happen tomorrow.

Over the week-end, I looked up due dates, as I always do, just to be sure, and one of my bigger projects is due at noon tomorrow, not 11:59 p.m. tomorrow.  Happily, I figured this out on Saturday, not today.  I have most of the paper written, but I still have to create an event, a sermon manuscript, and a video of me preaching the sermon.  Happily, I have most of today free to work on that.

However, I do have class tonight, so I wrote myself notes so that I would remember.

In later years, when I wonder why I was doing less writing, less reading, less baking, less creative work of all kinds, let me remember. 

Friday Fragments: End of Semester, Beginning of Christmas

I feel a bit scattered this morning.  Let me record a few bits on this day, the Feast Day of Saint Nicholas (if you wanted a more focused meditation on the Feast Day of Saint Nicholas, go to this post on my theology blog). 

--One reason why I'm feeling scattered:  I need to be working on some of my larger seminary papers that are due soon, but I'm working on shorter assignments and grading.  It's work that needs to be done, so part of me thinks that it's fine.  I'll feel better when I actually get some pages out of my head and onto paper.  That's my goal for today:  get some work done on the paper that's due Tuesday.

--Yesterday I went back to the church that's hosting Return to Bethlehem.  I created the Inn, the stop just before the stable.  It is probably more luxurious feeling than an inn in first century Palestine would have been.  

--Throughout yesterday's work session, I kept reminding myself that we just wanted people to suspend their disbelief, not to be schooled in first century history and to be impressed with our verisimilitude.

--The above pictures don't show the roof of the inn.  It took some "engineering," since this space is bigger than many of the others.

--I'd really like to walk through with the lighting the way it will be in the evening, just to see it as others will.  But I don't want that enough to actually go back to do the immersive part.

--I have been looking at old blog posts and thinking about past decorations and trying not to feel sad.  Our Christmas decorations, minimal though they are, have been in boxes for years.  In part, we've been unsettled for the first half of that time.  In part, we're keeping them protected.  In part, it's because we celebrate differently now.  But I do miss having seasonal decorations, even as I do admit that we have a few table top trees and some lights.

--I try to enjoy the seasonal decorations of others.  But they aren't mine.

--I'd like a finished house so that we could actually start establishing some traditions, among other reasons.  But at least this year, we do have interior walls.

--It's that time of day when all concentration is shot--too many hours staring at the screen already, even though it's only 7:40.  Might as well do the grocery shopping:  4 times the fuel points on Friday!

Sorting the Fabrics

Yesterday I made it back to the quilt group at my local church.  Until this fall semester, I had been going every Wednesday.  My teaching schedule this fall made me get there just as the group was finishing, but it did help me feel connected, even if I didn't do much quilting work.  In the upcoming Spring semester, I won't get there at all.

We have just finished a yearly cycle, which means that just before Christmas, all the quilts were boxed and taken to the drop off location where Lutheran World Relief will pick them up.  Instead of leaping right in to making new quilts, we are taking advantage of the empty tables where quilts usually get stacked and we're organizing all the cloth by color.

It's a HUGE task.  For years, when people have donated cloth, we've just put the box on the shelf or added the cloth to the bins that we have.  In the past two years, I've spent a lot of time rummaging through boxes, so I have an idea of what's where, but that's clearly not a good solution for the long term.

We have plenty of bins, so that's a plus.  Most of the cloth is fairly easy to sort by color--most of it does have a single dominant color.  I started a bin labeled "multi" for those that truly do not.

As we sort, I notice how hard it is to throw away fabric.  Some of it is too small for us--but it seems a shame to throw it away, particularly those small squares that were cut for some past project.  It's easier to throw away some of the polyester, particularly the springy knits.  Some of it is heavy duty upholstery fabric, most of which we are keeping for now.  I did throw away a velvet-esque on one side, upholstery fabric on the other side piece, since I just couldn't see how we would use it with anything else we have.

It's also hard to throw away fabric because I know that even if I don't like it, someone else will.  And I feel a sense of the person who owned the fabric there in the room with me.  We often get donated fabric when a quilter has died.  Throwing away the fabric feels like we're not honoring the person, even when I know that's not how most people would perceive it.

We have so much cloth that we could sew for 8 hours a day for the next few years and still have plenty of cloth.  In some ways, it's wonderful--our own cloth shop, right on site.  In some ways, it's overwhelming.

I have a vision of a future generation of quilters, 30 years from now, wondering why on earth we kept what we did.  What fabric now will seem quintessentially 2020's era fabric, the way that some of our fabric is so 1970's?  Will they delight in calico the way that I do or will that be only for women who grew up reading Laura Ingalls Wilder?  Will people still be quilting and sending those quilts overseas?  How will the world be different in 2054?  What will we have held on to?

The Best Kind of Snow Day, with a Return to Return to Bethlehem

In future years, maybe I'll look back and wonder why I didn't write more about a variety of political stuff:  the situation in Gaza, President Biden pardoning his son, the attempted coup in South Korea (South Korea?  Coup?  Not words I thought I would be using this year or any year).

Instead, I moved through the day yesterday in a state of wonder.  When I got up and sat in darkness, I saw a friend's Facebook post about snow that they got overnight, which made me wonder if we had gotten snow.  I could see white patches on the deck, and sure enough, when there was enough light, I could see that we had gotten snow.

It was the best kind of snow, the kind that looks pretty, but didn't stick to the road or turn to ice or even last into the later hours of the morning.  I knew that it would be that kind of snow, so I took a walk in the morning, hoping for some good sunrise shots.  I was successful:

I got some grading done between my walk and my dentist appointment.  The dentist will never be my favorite doctor, but we've found a good one here, with gentle hygienists.  It makes me realize how many non-gentle hygienists I've had, how often I left the dentist's office bleeding and feeling ill for the rest of the day.  And I'm impressed with our dental insurance, which makes me realize how often I've had worthless dental insurance.

In the afternoon, I helped set up for the immersive Return to Bethlehem experience.  I helped last year and really enjoyed it (for more, see this blog post).  Yesterday was easier because I understood what we were being asked to do.  I helped set up the bread stall and the fruit stall:

I remembered really liking the exhibits on the other side of the exhibit space, so I went over to set up the dyemaker's stall.  For this one, I worked alone, which in some ways was easier, as there's not much space in each stall, and the ladder takes up so much space.

I am happy that someone got these pictures of me, even as I feel bad about the weight I've gained. I'm trying to focus on the fact that I could get up and down the ladder and use the industrial staple gun to attach all the cloth to the stage flats.  I'm trying to focus on how happy this prep work made me:

And I'm happy with the outcome.  

Here's last year's dyemakers stall.

Both set ups are different than the picture.  And I realize someone may come along and change things.  The man in charge, whom I've never seen, has strong opinions, and we get to hear about them.  I refrain from pointing out that we're volunteers and that the people coming are not paying admission fees to see the volunteer offering.  I might feel differently if people paid over ten dollars to see our work.  But I might not, because I'm a volunteer.

I am not as sore today as I thought I would be when I told the woman in charge of set up that I would not be able to come today.  I had also hoped to get started on my biggest paper that's due on Tuesday, but I looked at the assignment, and I might need to rethink my approach slightly.  Part of me thinks I should just start and see where it goes.  

Part of me wants to go back to help with set up while these ideas are percolating.  Part of me thinks that I will go tomorrow, and that's plenty of help.  Plus I want to go to the quilt group at the church, so I don't really have as much time as I think that I do. There's other course work that I can do without prep time to free up more time once I'm ready to write the big paper.

Part of me just wants to bake.  

So, future Kristin, if you wonder why I'm not writing about politics, it's because I want to record the things that bring me joy.