In The Garden Living an RPG Life

With One Thread is the name of my Etsy shop.  There’s nothing there at the moment. The name is all there is of an idea that came from the devastation of 9/11.  I wanted to know, for myself, what it was that I could do to heal the world.  It came to me that the women of the world at risk might be empowered through their ability to process cloth. The idea of the fabric trade comes from the ancient Silk Road. It also comes from hearing an article about someone I like a lot–Kaffe Fasset–who was commissioned by an organization to license his designs to a Third World women’s community.  His designs were to be used in their work and sold to create a viable economic practice.
I wanted to be him, to be someone whose work of the mind would be such that others might find empowerment.

This is the source of my novels’ world. Yes, my novels’ world is also the world I created for playing my Dungeons and Dragons characters. The nature of the breach that 9/11 created in my heart needed more than just a game.  It needed some kind of personal commitment.  I didn’t then and don’t think now that I can serve with my best as I am now.  While I could teach English with the best of the others who volunteer for the Peace Corps (my model for world service), I don’t think that is what I am best suited for.  No, I don’t know what else I can do better.  However, it came to me that the world I want to create as my own reality, the world of fiber, is the world serves the women of the world best.

Writing this now seems to have lost it’s power, somehow.  I don’t think that I have failed my intention, or that I have failed in my intention to serve.  I firmly believe that, given some other impressions and coincidences, that I have only begun the true Adventure of Service.  This last novel presents definitions and suggestions that, without the direction of a world service of fiber, would not feel so powerful.  There is something deeper that wants to speak through my intent, my focus.  I am willing to let it come out; I am willing to be dissatisfied with the appearance of my ordinary life in order for the extraordinary to seep through.

I don’t know what the outcome of The Falyns and its inspirations will be.  I am willing to risk certainty in order to discover the power of the bigger picture, the design that creates opportunities for all.

I am listening to the latest season of Cast-On, the knitting podcast.  It’s referring to the post WWII world of Make Do and Mend .  It’s the closest we have–we of the post 9/11 century–to understanding what to do with what happened.  What do we do now?  How do we go on?

By “we” I don’t really know who I mean.  I identify with creative people.  With knitters and makers and hackers of all descriptions.  I identify with the Rogue archetype, the persona that believes the rules of ordinary life do not apply.  I am the one who steals your ideas and transforms them to serve The Greater Good.

So, With One Thread,  what mischief might I achieve? What might be achieved at all?

Today, I’ll be finishing up my recording for the Huna Training podcast.  I’ve lost the anxiety of waiting for the final production to be posted.  I’m getting more comfortable with the whole process.  Probably, since I made the step sideways to write and record for Cast-On, Huna Training is more like coming home.  One day I will be creating my own podcast.  I like talking–or at least reading–about myself too much to let this kind of thing go on too long without me.

So, what am I waiting for?  Everything else to be slotted into place.  I still don’t have a strong sense of doing things on a regular basis.  I’m working on that muscle.  I can log on and read and respond daily, but creating for myself and publishing, that’s taking a new muscle for a walk.

Thinking of changing my behavior as learning to use muscles helps a lot.  It helps me take my time and work patiently with myself.  I’m taking a Pilates class with an instructor-in-training.  I’m finding out what muscle training feels like in my body and the physical pain I feel, and the frustration I’m experiencing, is not being mirrored in my writing activities.  I’ve forgiven myself for not being able to perform as I think I should.

Instead of making this place look all filled up and just like everyone else’s, or the way I think it should, I am off making new friends.  And learning new things.  And that activity, like going out dancing instead of to the gym, makes me happier and more willing to tell stories about.  In other words, come here and write.

I got an email today, from Brenda Dayne of Cast On. She wants to use an audio essay I sent her.

The essay was inspired by her Summer Camp series, and wasn’t about summer camp. It was about my grandmother and my approach to housekeeping.

I think of this present as being from both of them. Mostly from my grandmother, though. I never got birthday presents from her, my mother’s mother, Mae. I got birthday cards with crisp five dollar bills in them from my father’s mother, Bertha. All I’ve ever had of Mae, or Roachie as I was tole she’d been called, was her only daughter and through her, part of my life. And the knitting.

Bertha didn’t knit, wasn’t a maker. She was a missionary wife and mother. I knew her as someone who managed on her own, in her own house, on an artificial leg. Yes, she fell from time to time and I was there sometimes to help her up. Mostly, though, she did everything herself. I spent part of the year that my grandfather, Sam, died, living with her. She’d wash my hair in the kitchen sink, first covering the burners on the stove before having me lie down under the tap water.

She gave me my first taste of cake batter. And my love for big, bright, open kitchens as well a longing for a real chest freezer. And rolling down lawns and sunbathing.

(this should have been a Google map of Bertha’s house, now my stepMom’s)

Mae only left me poetry. It was a slim volume of her poems that she had published. I have a photocopy of it. I didn’t take the one my mother had and when my grandfather called and asked if there was anything of my mother’s I wanted, I didn’t think to ask for the book. Or the knitting things. Or her science fiction collection. Or the chairs I sat in while I figured out how to knit, that first sweater.

Today, though, I feel I got that birthday present Roachie never sent me.