here and now

We are deep in the whirls and swirls of this time of year, to be sure (the making, the dancing, the singing, the hoping for snow), but first, to attend to my obsession with the after-life of the avocados in my compost.  I was cleaning off our tree-stand in the back yard this morning while the merry band were off getting a tree, and I happened to spy what looked like a beautiful lush piece of moss sitting on top of the compost pile.  At a closer glance, it was a piece of moss, growing on an avocado peel.  Aw...it looked like a decorator crab.  Or a shy turtle.  It was awesome.  

A little horseshoe crab-ish.   With flair.  It is now living (hopefully) in the terrarium in the bathroom where many of our finds live (well, lived.  The eyelash cup and the greenstain fared all right for a bit, but they apparently didn't have enough rotten stuff to sustain them...).

But on to the rest of it!!  As I said, the making...lots of that going on here.

And the playing, reading, reading, and general hanging out, recovering from several late nights and sleepovers.

The tree is here, the lights are up, and spirits seem to be good and rising...

Navajo Code Talkers and Weavers

Our local museum - the Kennedy Art Museum, attached to the University - offered a homeschool field trip yesterday, the first of its kind, I think.  Yay!! They offered a tour of two of their current exhibits and several activities.

The first exhibit was made up of black and white portraits of the Navajo code talkers, after their secret involvement in helping win WWII was disclosed.  The photos were taken in the 1980's by Kenji Kowano, a Japanese photographer who visited Washington D.C. and wondered where the memorial commemorating the role of the Native Americans in the war was.  He created this archive as that memorial.

After looking at the exhibit, we tried matching words that the Navajo already had in their language that they used to substitute with objects they had no words for - for instance, "2 stars" for Major General, "eagle" for transport plane, "potato" for grenade.

"Tortoise" for tank.

We also tried our hand at decoding some messages, using a translation of the Navajo below and a combination of codes - some using simple words like eagle and 2-stars, and others forming words using the first letter of each word.

In their main hall were hung about 25 of the museum's collection of 700 Navajo weavings.  We searched them for specific symbols and talked about what they might mean.  Some of the weavings were done in natural wool or natural dyes, while others were woven using wool dyed in Germantown, PA, with bright colors.

In what I thought was the coolest activity offered, the kids made a human weaving, using long bolts of cloth.

The person who was the "weaver" would call out "Over!" and those holding the warp would lower their cloth; on "Under!" they would raise it high, while the weaver climbed over and under, carrying their pink cloth.  It was such a great, simple, full-body demonstration of weaving.

Then upstairs to see more weaving samplers and to hear about the process of turning sheep's wool into a weaving.  Many of the kids present have sheep, and spin and craft with their wool, but there were a couple of new things for them to learn - below she is holding a box of samples of plants that are used to dye wool in the SW, and she also had a box of dried cochineal, which are beetles long used for their red or pink dye color.  She also told us that Starbucks was recently chided for using cochineal to color their strawberry frappucinos, but I thought that was so much better than red dye 40!! I guess if I were vegan I might have other feelings about it, but I thought it was pretty ingenious...

And lastly, the kids made simple weavings.  Nothing we haven't done before, but they were all quite happy to sit and process and fiddle with their beautiful ribbons.  For the time we had left, and the wide variety of ages in our group, it was a fine activity to end the day with.

contra-dancing

It's a magical equation: 

music plus movement plus touch equals so much happiness and healing.

We took our dear friend Esme for her first contra dance on Saturday and made a memory that will last a very long time.  We also brought a classmate of Dan's who is staying with us, and she happily jumped right in and danced the whole evening.

This was only Ani's second time, and my first time with her, and I could not believe her level of comfort and ease and her willingness to dance with so many different people (contra dancing involves dancing not only with one's partner, but also with one's neighbor, and the pairings mix and change with every round of the dance).

With neck-ties for the girls who are dancing the man's part, the girls took turns with each other and with our homeschooled teenage friends who come to the dances.

my blurry, beautiful girl

all three of my family - can you see them?

Ani: it is my great pleasure to dance with someone as beautiful as you, Esme.

 It was so filling watching them dance; their competence and confidence, their joy and grace and huge spirit are so full of YES.  I looked down the line of dancers at one point and saw Ani and a Very Tall Man (named Badger) facing one another and jumping like pogo-sticks while waiting for the caller to begin. Boing boing boing...

Our sadness eased, our crankiness disappeared, our worries temporarily abated, we danced till it was time for bed.

raining for days

It has been raining for many days now - not the cold bitter rain of late winter, but the still-warm(ish) rains of late fall.  It has matched my mood. "Haven't seen much on the blog lately..." hints a friend. Ah, well. It isn't that nothing is happening, of course.  

Do you have those times when the relentless energy of Life keeps barreling along (oh, those bright eyes and chatter), when your inner thoughts are just dragging you down and the two can't quite seem to find common ground? Such are the recent days.

It's having good friends move. The stretched out good-bye, because there is never enough time or courage to make it the last-time-for-now. The soaking up of the smells of their home - woodfire and early Christmas cookies - and the storing up of late-night conversations.  The hugs upon hugs upon hugs, just in case it's the last-time-for-now.

snuggling loves

mmmmm. more love.

learning the fine art of baking from Tokarz

Mr. PotatoHead oversees the finer points of the process

It's immersing myself in new history and new stories, in preparation for a trip with my mom to Israel.  My reading list is heavy and intense, absorbing what in my self-absorbed teenage years I managed to ignore.  I grew up steeped in the stories of the Jewish holocaust, visiting camps when we lived in Europe, devouring stories that seemed so unbelievable.  Recently I found myself reading a few books in short succession - Sarah's Key, The Zookeeper's Wife and The Book Thief, all of which deal with various places and perspectives of the holocaust, and realized that at some point I had started to avoid those stories.  I had started dreading telling my children how awful humans can be to each other, how unimaginable the depth of hatred they can carry.  

Now I am reading of the Palestinian holocaust that is continuing to this day and the sadness  is bewildering.  Eliza asked me not to keep reading about it because it is making me so sad.  It is a sadness that carries a guilt for not knowing, for having so much, for being so safe and healthy. 

As usual, my kids are the ones who are capable of bringing me back into some balance.   Eliza exclaims, exasperated, let's learn about a part of the world where there isn't anything bad going on! so we stare at a map, perplexed, until we decide that maybe Greenland? So on to researching Greenland, which was named so by Eric the Red (hm. a conqueror. that was probably pretty bloody) to entice settlers to come there.  We don't get very far into it before we are distracted by a Bollywood move she wants to show me, and from there we are dancing and laughing, and...

Oh, life. There you are. I am feeling the dark part of life right now, which fits messily into this dark part of the year.  I am working on not letting the twinkle lights and holiday music and red bows send me into fits of despair.  Two beautiful girls, a moon that is up when I rise, rain keeping the browning world green a little bit longer...small things, keeping the rest in check.