Hello, my dears, and I hope you and yours are staying safe and feeling well. These days our strategies for this are all over the map, from being able to shelter in place to having to navigate a potential dangerous landscape daily in order to keep body and soul together. I hope whatever you have to do to stay safe is working out okay, and I hope we all can keep it up until better days come…
For myself, I’m kind of a mixed bag. I still report to my workplace, but far less frequently, and I’m kept abreast of things more and more by online communications. When I’m physically at The Jade Mines I channel my inner Howard Hughes with disinfecting, washing, masking and gloving. Everything I touch gets wiped down, or I wash myself, or both. I never talk to another coworker without a mask on, and most of them have masks too. A few days a week we have fun online lectures about art in the galleries, newsletters from our director and our personal department, and a handful of coworkers keep reaching out to me to see how I’m doing, and vice versa. Eventually we’ll reopen, and I’m still trying to picture what that’s going to look like for us. I try not to let the uncertainty and fear get the upper hand, but I won’t lie, there are bad days. I worry about my friends, my family members, strangers I admire, and everybody still out there holding things together as best they can. And I’m going to keep worrying as long as this goes on, because that’s how I’m wired…
So what do I do when I’m not at the Jade mines? I’m trying hard to keep busy. There’s a lot of new yarns to put up in the shop now, and I’m so grateful for the kind folks who have stopped by for a look. I’ve been making embroideries too, and am surprised both by their happy receptions and by how fun they are to make. (So far all the ones I’ve finished are spoken for, but there’s a few ideas for embroideries to offer in the shop soon.) I’ve been painting a bit, and sketching a bit, here and there. And like just about everybody else, I’ve been baking. One thing I’ve expanded this spring is my garden–I have a large garden trough to keep tasty plants away from ravenous wild beasties, and I’ve been growing little scraps of veggies and fruiting plants in the kitchen…
I’ve also been hand sewing things, with helpful Youtube tutorials from loads of helpful people, and hypnotizing my friends with short videos of my spinning on a support spindle…
All these activities, besides being soothing and interesting, are actively helpful right now. All those handsewing tutorials helped me make masks for myself and for my family and friends. (Also I can now whip up a decent skirt and repair my clothes when I need to.. Thanks, Bernadette Banner!) The baking has it’s own rewards. (Lemon pound cake? Yes, please!) The spinning wheels help with my exercise routine as well as help me plow through my fiber stash, The embroideries lift my mood and help fine tune my fingers. The gardening comforts me and feeds me a little. (Right now it’s a very, very little. It’s still chilly here in Minnesota. But I’m looking forward to salad and eggplants, hot peppers and lots and lots of onions in the garden.) and I’m also glad to see other people doing the same thing I am; trying out older skills and fine-tuning them to help get through an increasingly worrisome modern world.
I hope we all get through okay to the other side of everything. And I’m taking everything I’ve been learning with me to the world on the other side of the pandemic, whatever that will look like. I hope you will too. Stay safe and be well…