Tuesday, June 05, 2012

Three Words

How do the roses know June is their month?  Just look at these gems strut their stuff...like rubies and garnets, smiling in the sun.

Another tranquil day in the village. I'm weaving an ankle bracelet for my niece's mid-June birthday.  A few years back I gave her a store-bought one, and she still wears it.  That tells me she should have another, but one made especially for her.  I'm a stickler for handmade gifts.  It's a fine day to play.

If you've wondered why I chose Retired Nature Weaver for my blog name, here's why.

Retired identifies where I stand on the Ruler of Life.

Nature sustains my every breath.  No text book can teach a romance with nature like mine.  A child's ears and eyes are powerful learning tools.

Weaver, for me, is as faceted as the prism, reflecting itself in different directions. Childhood hours were spent watching my twin great-aunts and my mom work their big floor looms weaving strips of rags into beautiful rugs.  Their finished products were the desire of housewives in the 3-county area, and they paid to have them on their linoleum floors.  They would bring the rags, rolled into balls, to the ladies for weaving.  With the years, my passion for weaving grew, and I opted to navigate the calmer waters with the simpler, portable looms.  Half the fun was finding ways to adapt my interest to my lifestyle.

Life's loom soundlessly and senselessly weaves the good, the bad and the ugly things that happen to us.  It's like sliding into home plate when we finally realize that the bad and the ugly were the threads that created the most colorful parts of life's overall design.  It's that business of growing wiser, learning that our sorrows are as necessary as our joys.  Easy to say, agonizing to endure.

The art of weaving runs through my veins.  How well I remember the sunny day in Maine when three of us oared our way across a lake to a small island. Seaweed floated in the water.  I reached down and pulled out a string of weeds, and then two more.  Dripping with lake water in our boat, I wove them into one, let dry, and that, my friends, is my cherished souvenir from that visit to Maine.

It's interesting to pick three words to describe oneself.  I'm pretty sure if you'd ask hubby what three words best describe me, you'd get a different list.  The fun is looking inside to find what truly honors our existence.

Ta-ta for now.  I hear the call of the loom.