On Spring

Life gets hectic. It happens. I will stop making excuses for my sporadic posting and just revel in the sunshine, the natural winding down of the school year into the relaxed summer months, the lazy mornings meant for a french press of coffee and a challenging knitting patten, afternoon rainstorms marked by a glass of bourbon and an hour with my spinning wheel.

Springtime in Chicago!

But life is hectic. Settling down into a job that will last more than a season, an apartment with a re-signed lease, forming and nurturing new relationships and friendships are challenging and sometimes seem to defy the simplicity in life that I strive for. It's hard to remain grounded in simple values when I'm working 60+ hours a week with two incredibly dynamic nonprofit organizations, nurturing a long-distance relationship, training for a 200 mile charity bike ride, and a 12 year old dog to play with. Phew. But hectic is sometimes good.

For the past few months I've been hunkered down. Nose to the grindstone. Powering through. All those phrases that mean I've shut down entirely and done nothing but work but now that spring is here my creative juices are beginning to flow again. The notebooks have taken backseat to my spinning wheel, the computer used to stream podcasts and prime-time TV rather than write proposals. It's a welcome change, although finding that balance between work and play remains difficult.

Spring also is a time of creation for me. Not only is my house immaculately clean right now, I have thrown myself wholly into event planning for my nonprofit group. However, the events become more creatively focused and more in line with my passion for fiber arts, sewing, and women's crafts, bringing me to an exciting place of equilibrium. Spinning along with activism, sewing in order to change the world. How can you not like that?

beauty from discarded clothes...

But at the end of the day, it's still the simple act of creating something beautiful and new from something old. I've revisited my recycled yarn to update my Etsy shop, and churned out recycled market bags during meetings.  I've created recycled art for my walls at work and my bookshelves at home, piecing together scraps of fabric into vibrant crazy quilt squares, and unraveled never-finished knitting projects to work them into something new and useful to me.


Spring is a time for creation. For me that means spinning, knitting, producing, and continuing to seek that elusive balance.