We have a little spring cold here. Illness, it seems, makes me get very philosophical. This time, these questions came to me:
Do we think ourselves fragile, easily disturbed, hard to recover?
Or do we think ourselves strong, believe deeply in our innate ability to heal?
The questions go past illness, to our very Selves, I think. Do we trust that we are innately good, or do we feel a need to keep ourselves tightly reined?
Just some spring thoughts.
Poetry Month is nearly over, and I did want, at least, to share this favorite of mine.

Late Fragment
by Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Notes to self:

Next time you want to do some sewing, declare it your Only Goal for the day. It will happen.

For that matter, having one goal is always helpful. Don’t panic, other things will happen, too.  Or they won’t.  There will be another day.

Next time you wonder how so many dirty dishes multiply, even in this small family, the answer is this: We live here. We actually live in this house, and make three meals a day here. That means dishes. Take it as a blessing, a sign that you are living the life you want.

Eggs from your own hens never grow old, never get less beautiful.

Also beautiful: naps. Especially on rainy days.

Also beautiful:  inspiration like this.  And this.

Note to self: beauty is everywhere.  Take the time to see it.

Wow, you all sure know how to cheer a gal on!  Your comments were so sweet about my Fair Isle, you inspired me to get a move on it.

Most exciting of all, the winners (chosen by random number generator) are:

#20 Amy said:

I’d love to win the copy of Fix Freeze Feast

# 14 Caroline said:

Wow, what a wonderful book giveaway! I’ve been really wanting to learn to knit two-at-a-time socks, so I’d love to be entered into the drawing for that book.

I love reading your blog – checking for new entries is one of the highlights of my mornings.

#23 Katie said:

Wow, that looks to be rather complicated knitting. Good on you for tackling it! I’m hesitant to try Elizabeth Zimmerman.

Thanks for the chance at the giveaway! If I am one of the lucky chosen, I would love to have Toe-Up 2 at a time. Thanks so much!

Thanks for entering everyone!  Winners, please email me at wheatberryma(a)gmail.com with your mailing address.  Katie and Caroline – we may have to toss a coin to see who gets the sock book!

Have a great week, everyone.

I’m thinking about this:

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” – Rumi -

and also, this:

“. . . a Hassidic story [tells] of a wealthy man who invited his Rabbi over for dinner. The man brags that he eats only bread with salt and drinks only water. The horrified rabbi urges the wealthy man to eat rich, nutritious meals and to drink wine. Upon telling his disciples of the encounter, they are puzzled. The rabbi explains, “Not until he eats meat will he realize that the poor need bread. As long as he himself eats only bread, he will think the poor can live on stones.”"

I’m thinking about all your responses to my post on striving, and about how going to extremes can isolate us, from our communities, from joy itself.  Thinking about how as we’ve journeyed these past ten years to bring our life in line with our values, it was truly exciting as each step fell into place (local humanely raised meat!  eco-friendly washing detergent in bulk!  get rid of the second car!).  At a certain point, though, we made all those big changes, and then we looked around for more.  Instead of satisfaction, I found myself driven to make any effort to do right – and I think this is the tipping point that takes us away from what we really want. Do we ask ourselves to live such ascetic lives that we resent those around us?  That we no longer follow our path with love?  I think that if we don’t enjoy these blessings we are given, it’s just as bad as squandering or hoarding them.

If you’re interested, I think it would be fun to look back on the last decade on talk about some of these steps we’ve taken – to help those of you who are still struggling with the Big Ones.  Let me know – and don’t forget that the Giveaway I posted yesterday is still open.

** Comments are now closed – thank you everyone who entered!**

Hello everyone!  First, I want to say that your comments on my last post have been so amazing to read, and I hope everyone takes a moment to go back and read through them.  I find myself both a little sad that so many of you share this struggle, and also so hopeful to hear how many of you are similarly naming and moving past this urge.

For Yarn Along today, I thought we’d do something a little different – a book giveaway!  I have three lovely books that Storey Publishing sent me over the last six months, and I’d like to pass them along to some of you (the book is thanks to Storey, and I’ll cover the shipping costs).  So, to enter the giveaway please leave a comment below (if you get this blog via email, you’ll need to click through to the Fields & Fire website to leave a comment).  And let me know which book would be your top choice – I’ll choose three random winners!  Comments will close on Sunday morning.

As for knitting, I am very very very slowly working on the Fair Isle yoke I mentioned – an alteration to the Hourglass Sweater pattern.  I’m using Zimmerman’s yoke pattern from Knitting Around – all I changed are the colors.  So, I’ve had to learn how to knit with two, sometimes three colors at once (ack!) and this is not something I can do while doing anything else.  So, it’s slow, but I think it’s coming out nicely.

Here’s the pattern chart – I made the colors a little more extreme so you could see them.

And there you have it!  Have a great week, friends.

This week, a brand new washing machine arrives at our house.  Many of you know that I’ve been washing all of our clothes by hand for the past year (with a few exceptions, when I’ve been sick or otherwise overwhelmed, and I went to the laundromat).  Last fall, I sold our old noisy washing machine and dryer, and rejoiced at the space in our kitchen.  Those of you coming here from my Rhythm of the Home article may be surprised, but I’m pretty darn excited to bring in a new, super efficient washing machine.  I’m grateful for the experience, but I’m ready to move forward.

If my miscarriage last month made anything clear, it was that I needed to chill out.  Probably a lot.  I am a classic Type A Overachiever, a perfectionist, a “I don’t want to be perfect, I just want to be at least as good as everyone else, preferably better” type of person.  Not consciously usually, but that is, if I am brutally honest, what lies beneath.  And isn’t it that way for many of us?  I look around myself and I see so many people trying so hard, striving so much, that we are neglecting our most basic needs.  We live in an age of crazy luxury, and yet we don’t even feed ourselves properly.  We feel too stressed and harassed to show kindness, to ourselves or strangers. The most odd thing about this is that we think it’s our strength.

I know I did.  I could say, laughingly, Oh haha, I’m such a perfectionist.  But I thought that was my advantage.  I’ve been thinking about trying to slow down, trying to create peace and space in my life for quite some time now, but I didn’t really get it until this past month.  I didn’t understand that what I thought was my secret weapon was also torturing me.

Partly, our success blinds us.  Striving hard can bring good things into your life, but if you can’t slow down a bit and enjoy them, what good is it?  Sometimes our striving can work in the exact opposite of what we’re trying for.  I’m thinking of environmental activists who fly around the globe talking about climate change (flying creating a lot of CO2 emissions, of course).  I’m thinking of farmers, or even ourselves when we first opened our cafe, who are working so insanely hard to make real food for people that they can’t make their own dinner and order take-out.

Sometimes, these things are a phase, a period of craziness in our lives that we need to accept and get through.  But can we let go of the adrenaline once the need is gone?

Here, I’m trying to strive a little less.  I’m ready to believe that I don’t have to be the world’s best ecological citizen to be a good citizen.  Or the world’s best mother to be a good mother.  On and on.

I bought a washing machine.  I didn’t like my patchwork rug, so I ripped it out, and I didn’t feel bad about it, I felt free.  Some days the floor is clean, some days it isn’t.  I am trying to breathe a little deeper, to ask myself to remember what I’m really working towards – raising a healthy, loving family, serving my community in a positive way, being able to find time to roll out my yoga mat or pick up my knitting needles, and just enjoy.

And you?  Are you ready to be simply good at something, instead of the best?  Wishing you some peace this week, friends.  Thank you for taking these moments here with me.

What’s that you say?  It was five degrees outside Saturday night?  Well, if you ask Ella, it is officially spring, and therefore we should all be wearing sandals and no sweaters.  Preferably, just ballet tutus, as you’ll see.

At our house, I’m looking around and seeing a lot of my favorite color – yellow.  We finally finished painting the kitchen (hooray!), boiled our maple syrup (we only put out one tap this year, and just boiled it inside on the woodstove), got some bulbs at the garden center, and our chickens are delightedly scratching at the soil and giving us amazingly orange-yolked eggs.  Wishing some golden color to your days, as well.

Well, last week Ella and I had a go-round with the bug that seems to be knocking everyone out in our fair Valley.  As the old saying goes, A cold will go away in a week by itself, or in seven days with medicine.

We drank endless cups of hot water with honey, discovered Emmalina’s wonderful throat elixir, and used some reflexology.

Mostly, though, we didn’t do very much.  I thought a lot about how much this past month has forced me to be still.  I read, and pondered, this, from Homemaking as a Social Art:

” . . . illness today receives remarkably little attention.  Usually one visits the doctor to request a fast cure, maybe goes to bed, and as soon as the fever has abated, one is up and back to work.  Is is as though we want to ignore any sign of weakness.  We seem to feel the need to be in full control of our destiny and our life style at all times.  In general, we tend to dislike, and even fear illness.

It is interesting to become aware of the reasons behind the fact that one gets ill. It is often when life becomes burdensome in some way that the body reacts by making us feel the need to shut down and go to bed.  We withdraw into ourselves, sleep a great deal, and so at last find the time to do a bit of stock-taking as to the state our life is in at present.  Often, on recovery, if time has been allowed for the illness to run its course, we feel better than we did before the illness struck!  Sometimes we even feel up to taking decisions which prior to the sickness we had neither the energy nor the insight to make.  Illness often strikes us down when we need to make new relationships, either to life, to other people or towards our own inner self.  Our wise psyche places us in an anti-social situation that others are called upon to meet with their social forces of sympathy.  In this reciprocal moment a new balance can be created and old concepts can be reformed.”

Wishing everyone a wonderful weekend.

Hello everyone, and Happy Spring! Today, we have a video that shows our farm and bakery, put together by our friend and neighbor Shalini Bahl.

We talk about everything from using draft horses, the real cost of food, and how to make your love visible.

Enjoy!

AWEtv from Seed to Scone with Adrie Lester of Wheatberry Cafe from shalini bahl on Vimeo.

This week, the weather is all over the place. One day is mild and sunny, the next it’s snowing, or (today) sleeting. I am doing my best not to declare it Completely Awful, but instead, Good Knitting Weather.
I’ve got a big stack of books this week – All Year Round to get ready for fun spring crafts, The Complete Guide to Natural Dyeing to dream about what I’ll do once my yarn comes back from the mill, Homemaking as a Social Art for inner work, and I’m re-reading an old favorite, Mrs. Dunwoody’s Excellent Instructions for Homekeeping (isn’t that the best title ever?).  Mrs. Dunwoody was one of the books I first read about two years ago, which really helped me change my approach to housekeeping – as a way of creating a beautiful, peaceful space for myself and my family, instead of drudgery.  From Mrs. Dunwoody: “Even the common articles made for daily use become endowed with beauty when they are loved.  We must strive to see the goodness or usefulness in all things, taking nothing for granted.  And we must approach every task as a blessing to be received, never as a chore.”

On the needles, I’ve got more projects started then I should probably admit.  This week, I’m finishing this Five Hour Baby Sweater.  I started this, as you can probably guess, when I was pregnant.  After I lost the baby, I buried this in my yarn basket and didn’t think I’d ever want to see it again.  But time passed, and I found myself wanting to feel this yarn and these stitches again.  Now I’m about to cast off at the bottom and stitch up those wee little sleeves, and I was sad that it’s almost done.  It is, I think, a way to remember, and to keep hope.  And then, I remembered Zimmerman’s February Baby Sweater – sure looks like February outside my window.  Time to cast on!