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Whether It Feels Too Soon or Not (Day Light Savings Time Is Arriving)
It still does not seem right to have daylight savings time start before the equinox. I remember it used to be the first night I cooked outside. Now it is always too cool and not quite light enough, and my morning meditation goes back to finishing before it is light. Whether it matches with the weather or my mood, though, it is here this weekend. I’ve had a much more intense work week than usual, which is resulting only partly from having been out of town for the previous week. The coming weekend promises to be very full (assuming all goes as anticipated) with teaching my own class and studying with Ross Rayburn up at Willow Street both Saturday and Sunday, trying to go out to see some friends dance Saturday night, going to the contact improv jam on Sunday, and then having dinner with neighbors.
To try and not get too off cycle by getting a socially induced equivalent of jet lag, I am starting to get ready for bed an hour early tonight and planning to get to the office before 8 tomorrow morning. Try doing the same things you would do if changing time zones. Get plenty of rest, drink lots of fluids, keep down the caffeine intake and if you really want to have caffeine, make sure you stop drinking it earlier in the day than usual; have any protein in the morning and then dine lightly on grains and vegetables in the late afternoon or early evening. Don’t eat anything heavy at night. That way you will have energy when you wake up too early and be sleepy when it is time to go to bed way before you think it is.
And most important, use the change in time as an opportunity to celebrate the respective joys of shadow and light by having extra attention brought to them whether you will it or not. It is always exciting the first night, particularly if it is warmish and bright as is in the forecast, that it stays light unnaturally late.
Sauca (and the blanket)
There are lots of ways to clean out a closet. Partly, it depends on what is in the closet. Per my earlier post about freecycle, I think that part of the practice of sauca or cleanliness, is making sure that the hidden parts of our homes are not overfilled with stuff we do not use. Cleaning out the closet, does not mean throwing everything out. It can mean creatively rethinking where things should be and how we should use them. It also means for every artist, cook, crafts person, periodically making use of all those things you picked up or saved because they would be of use in something.
I was raised to save things that possibly could be used later, and to try and make every scrap usable. I was taught this because my father was born in 1929 and my mother in 1936 of Jewish peasant immigrants. Now, we are re-learning how to maximize the use of objects and minimize waste for ecological, rather than financial reasons, though the two are inextricably intertwined. As the recession progresses, it will be interesting to see whether financial constriction will foster more environmentally conscious living.
About four years ago, when I was engaged in a periodic review of what was in the hall closet, I came upon my big box of leftover yarn. In the late eighties and early nineties, I traveled extensively for business, and spent many hours in airports and evenings in hotels. I found it comforting to have a lapful of mohair, homespun, or other delicious to touch yarn. Airport security was less invasive, and it was possible to knit in the airport and take knitting needles on board the airplane. As I love working with multiple colors, that resulted in a leftover skeins from each project. Over a 10-15 year period, even with only a couple of aborted projects and no yarn bought for imagined future projects (unlike a really serious knitter), I ended up with enough yarn for a queen-sized blanket (shocking, really). As you can see, I designed it like a crazy quilt. It took an educated sense of color and line — imagine this as a painting or pastel and you can see the influence of the Washington Color School, but it did not require much in the way of knitting skills (the whole blanket knit in panels of “mistake rib” — (k2, p2), end k2, p1 — about 50,000 times). The patch of fire engine red and the grape juice purple next to it, came from my friend Sara, who is a fabulously talented knitter. I felt the need for those colors, so we swapped for some of the teal and green that I had.
The blanket took almost four years to knit because I only did it in fits and starts. Finally, last year, I decided that I needed to finish it in time for Becky be able to curl up on it. As you can see, she thinks it is great. Now my closet is not stuffed with a big box of yarn, I have an extra warm blanket that helps me keep the house just a little cooler, I made a thing of beauty where I might have been tempted to go out and buy something new, and Becky has a new happy spot.
