Sunday 22nd March - Lent 5 - Tiny Changes

 BE KIND, TO OTHERS AND TO YOURSELF

I never really did like 'The Water Babies' by Charles Kingsley. I read it when I went to stay with my grandmother as there weren't many children's books on her shelves, and the ones she had were all from her  own youth (She was born in the 1890s and educated by her much older sisters at home). 

So I read Hilaire Bellocc's 'Cautionary Tales', Rudyard Kipling's 'Jungle Book,', 'The Just-so Stories, 'Stalky and Co', and the dreadful, terrifying 'Strewelpater' which still gives me nightmares.And Charles Kingley's 'Water Babies'. a deeply moral story about Tom who became a waterbaby.

I've always remembered the two ladies, Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby who is loving and kind, and the opposite of the rather frightening Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid who teaches Tom to be good.

This is, of course, Charles Kingsley's rephrasing of the second part of Jesus's summary of the Ten Commandments;

.... to love God with all your mind, body and soul

... to love your neighbour as yourself.

I think in years gone by, people tended to focus too much on 'loving your neighbour', and that denying yourself was good for you.

Now, perhaps, things might have swung too much the other way, 'love yourself' and you should let yourself have anything you want.

Oh the 'Happy Medium'; so difficult to manage in real life! 

I tripped across this poem which makes it all so simple;

 

Small Kindnesses

• 
• 
• 
• 

Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

St Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians Chapter 6 verse 19 says

You surely know that your body is a temple where the Holy Spirit lives. The Spirit is in you and is a gift from God. You are no longer your own.

The last verse of this poem are surely a reference to this?

So, my tiny change this week is to be sure that I make an effort to do the small kindnesses to the people that I meet.

Saturday 21st March - running away!

No, not really,  but that's what it felt like...

We made the most of a cheerful day, driving off to the same Village Stores and Café that we visited last weekend for an early lunch/late second breakfast. It was a bit of an adventure getting there; we turned off the main road into the lane and found ourselves face to face with a low-loader parked o  the wrong side of the road and facing the wrong way! We were wedged between the curb and the driver's cab, with nowhere to go but backwards into the main road. We'll, I'm here now this evening,  writing this, so you can assume we successfully reversed into a stream of traffic, flung the car into drive and got ourselves out of difficulties. 

'I think I know where there's a back road into the village', I said, and it turns out I was right. We wended our way along a twisty turny uppy downy lane, dodging several heavily laden groups of scouts just setting off on an overnight hike across the Downs. Their starting point turned out to be the village hall next to the shop and café,  handy for stocking up on last-minute sweets and chocolate. I hope they had packed warm sleeping bags; the nights are still pretty cold.

We had an excellent meal; the Forge Full Breakfast for BB, the Forge Small Breakfast for he. Basically the same, except his seemed to be two of everything and mine just one of everything.

We had a lovely drive home through little lanes instead of main roads, checking out more possible cafes for future expeditions. 

Many of the trees are in leaf now. In just a few weeks the whole colour palette of the countryside has changed from grey and brown to green and yellow,

Just recently I've starting adding tiny sketches to the page-a-day diary I keep of the day's events. You can tell from the handwriting that they are roughly the size of a postage stamp.

Mothering Sunday crochet daisies 

Steak for Sunday Lunch

A day of paperwork 

I'd forgotten I'd added daffodils to my grocery order

a friend was going away and brought me the bunch of irises she'd been given as they were still fresh

A little posy of flowers for March

I'm enjoying doing them; because they are so small I don't have to worry about details! Thinking back, I did this for a couple of months during the summer of 2020, to keep a record of high points of each day. The pictures were a little bigger, so I was able to include a bit more. I'm keeping these small in order to have enough room for the writing. 

Friday 20th March - my new project bag

 Now that Ang has posted her collaboration, I shall do the same;

I think of this side of my little bag as the front, as the two bottom left patches are the first in this collaboration,  and the two top right patches are the last.

Here's the other side.

I had to stop for a couple of days for Deep Thinking before I began tommake up the bag. I had 12 patches, a blue zipper, and the red and grey fabric that Ang sent me.

I made the bag by piecing the patches together English Paper Piecing style into a strip three squares wide, four long. leaving the sides and top open.  Next, I stitched the red lining to a grey woollen backing, both supplied by Ang, to make a piece of fabric which was the same size.

Time for More Thinking.

I finangled the zipper next; I wanted to arrange things so that the zip was sandwiched between the lining and the outer, and so that all the stitching was invisible. And, most importantly, I would end up with the zipper on the outside of the finished bag!

My word, that was a Brain-hurty thing to work through, but I got there! 

I over sewed the edges of the lining together, and then oversewed the edges of the bag outer, remembering to include the 2x2 tag 

Finished!

No, not quite, II still needed to sew in tthe tape with our names and dates.

It's now my mending pouch, with room for socks (or one thicker sock), a darning mushroom, Ang's scissor pouch, some needles and cards of mending wool.

Now, what shall we do next? It might be fun to do something that incorporated Ang's experiments in machine embroidery... my own machine is a very basic elna lotus which I bought way back in 1979... but it is possible to embroider with it... I did try once, a very, very long time ago... But what should we make... ?

Wednesday 18th March - Posting in haste

Book club starts i a minute or so; Last month's book was 'The Frozen River' by Ariel Lawhorn -  maybe tooo much information on childbirth and sexual assault in the Northern America in the Winter of 1789 for comfortable reading, but a gripping story, well told for all that. I really enjoyed it.

This month we meet to discuss The Frozen River and choose the next book from

Patrick Bringley's memoir 'All the Beauty in the World', which I strongly recommend and am more than happy to re-read 

Alan Bennett's diaries 'Keeping on keeping on' - I love reading diaries

Evie Woods - 'The Violin Maker's Secret' which I think I will read regardless as it looks good

M L Stteadman - -A Far Flung Life' - family saga, which doesn't really appeal.

I'll let you know!

I ave now got 6 Amaryliis bulbs on the go! Two have finished flowering and are growing ENORMOUS leaves.

The have been moved to an upstairs windowsill o make room for these;

No 1 was packaged in the same sort of box as the earlier ones, left over in the shop from Christmas, no doubt, It was growing out of its box when I planted it.

The others are left over from last year.

No 3 suddenly came to life of its own accord. I hurridly watered it and brought it downstairs. No 4 likewise, and then I thought I might as well water no 2 and see what happens.

Right. I attend the book club via zoom, and it's past time to join. Toodle-oo   

    

Tuesday 17th March - are we nearly there yet?

 Yes! Checking the weather app on my phone this morning, I saw that the days are now only a few minutes less than 12 hours, that is from sunrise to sunset. The spring equinox is less than a week away, oh joy, oh joy, oh joy.

Have all winters felt as long and grey and cold as this one? Probably not. But sometimes they do seem to go on forever. 

However we have tulips and primulas and forget-me-nots flowering in the garden, trees beginning to have the greenish haze of new leaves on the top-most branches, and real leaves on clematis vines and the lilac.

I spent months learning this, a few bars at a time, whenever I visited my aunt's house. Her copy of the music was very fragile and she didn't want to lend it to me, so I memorised the next couple of bars every week.

Monday 16th March - Lent 4 was yesterday

 Tiny changes; 

spiritual; get outside, or at least as far as the back door step. That's going to be so much easier now that Spring is arriving. 

What must it be like for people without access to a view of greenery - our first house was in an area criss-crossed by streets full of near-identical terraced houses opening straight onto the pavement. We had a small backyard, only accessible by going through the house - pause to contemplate wrangling our bicycles and dustbin through the kitchen and living room, tracking in dirt and worse - and with no trees, shrubs, flowers or even grass visible from the windows. This could be our street

Even houseplants couldn't grow in our northfacing front room. I was so glad to move out of the town centre to somewhere more in the country.

So yes, I intend to get out, at least as far as the door step every day.

Tiny change towards a calmer life - leave 10 minutes early. Then you can arrive in time -and breathe! I was in two minds whether to write this down; BB is a great one for leaving early, and I am more resistant. I think this is due to my dislike of having to get up so early for work. I'm not a natural early riser, and he is. Can you teach an old dog new tricks? Can a leopard change its spots? Well, I'm not a dog, I don't do tricks and I'm not a leopard. So, maybe I can change. Would leaving five minutes earlier because step in the right direction?

Madness, 'Our house, in the middle of the street'

This could be our first house together, even to the colour of rhe paper before we painted it.