Dear friends, family, fellow travelers,
We are reaching another mid-winter solstice and as the days grow shorter and darker I don't know about you but I am really relishing the time for rest and regeneration. For many years I worked retail and on the academic timetable which meant the solstice and advent season was sandwiched between the frantic end-of-semester and holiday shopping on one side, and the frantic start-of-semester and January sales on the other. At the Massachusetts Historical Society, this is one of our slow seasons and that means that both at work and at home December can be a time for slowing down, tying up loose ends, and getting some much-needed rest.
Image: Hanna's hand cutting out tiny gingerbread figures from a rolled out sheet of cookie dough.
This year, Hanna and I have managed to set aside two weeks of glorious paid time off during which we plan to do a lot of sleeping, crafting, reading, writing, baking, and snuggling with one another and the cats. Hanna's Christmas present this year was a full set of Lykke driftwood knitting needles -- on which she is already hard at work making Christmas gifts -- and my present was a longarm quilting class at one of our local crafting stores. The longarm quilting machine will allow me to complete two large quilting projects -- a queen-sized and a double-sized quilt -- that have been waiting for over two years for me to make time and develop the skills necessary to finish them.
Image: Bright orange quilt top with a square pattern of purples, greens, and blues. This is one of the two quilts I hope to finish with the longarm quilting machine.
I'll be sending out the first Persistent Stitches annual report on January 1, 2019 and as I prepare this personal newsletter the "funds raised" number is steadily climbing toward $4,600 with two weeks left to go in 2018. So far we have raised funds for 72 organizations through creating and distributing 237 hand-crafted items to 77 individual donors. I say that's cause for celebration! I've said this many times throughout the year, but when I posted the first two cross stitch pieces on my personal crafting website on January 1st of this year, I thought we'd be lucky to raise a few hundred dollars. That so many crafters have gotten excited to contribute, and so many donors have come forward to participate by giving to awesome social justice causes and delighting over their handcrafted items has been a deeply therapeutic, healing thing in a year with a lot of tough, exhausting truths to cope with.
Image: Three books on reproductive rights and justice, along with a coffee cup and a notebook and pencil on a coffeeshop table.
I read lots and lots of books this year and so many of them were good and important. As I mentioned in the last newsletter, over the winter holidays I'll be pulling together a review of three titles on reproductive politics for a medical humanities journal as well as a collection development essay for Library Journal to appear in the spring, on queer history since the Stonewall uprising, which will mark its fiftieth anniversary this summer. Some of the most healing books I have read this year, though, are romance novels and as the year draws to a close I've been revisiting some favorites and discovering new works. In the past month I read Jude Lucen's first historical romance, Behind These Doors, a cross-class m/m romance set in Edwardian London and featuring two protagonists each of whom have complex established intimate relationships within which their newfound love finds room to grow. More from this author in 2019 please! And I Was delighted to learn that another historical romance author whose m/m and f/m stories I have enjoyed -- Lily Maxton -- recently published an f/f novella: A Lady's Desire. Childhood friends separated by marriage, a widow's return that rekindles their relationship, the challenges of survival for women with no independent access to financial resources, and a relationship that involved much more than hand-holding and gazing soulfully into one anothers' eyes. More of this in 2019 also!
Image: Silver and gold cards with handwritten messages in black ink. Text transcribed below.
We were asked at work to put New Year's wishes on cards to hang in the front lobby. I decided to begin as I mean to go on.
We are reaching another mid-winter solstice and as the days grow shorter and darker I don't know about you but I am really relishing the time for rest and regeneration. For many years I worked retail and on the academic timetable which meant the solstice and advent season was sandwiched between the frantic end-of-semester and holiday shopping on one side, and the frantic start-of-semester and January sales on the other. At the Massachusetts Historical Society, this is one of our slow seasons and that means that both at work and at home December can be a time for slowing down, tying up loose ends, and getting some much-needed rest.
Image: Hanna's hand cutting out tiny gingerbread figures from a rolled out sheet of cookie dough.This year, Hanna and I have managed to set aside two weeks of glorious paid time off during which we plan to do a lot of sleeping, crafting, reading, writing, baking, and snuggling with one another and the cats. Hanna's Christmas present this year was a full set of Lykke driftwood knitting needles -- on which she is already hard at work making Christmas gifts -- and my present was a longarm quilting class at one of our local crafting stores. The longarm quilting machine will allow me to complete two large quilting projects -- a queen-sized and a double-sized quilt -- that have been waiting for over two years for me to make time and develop the skills necessary to finish them.
Image: Bright orange quilt top with a square pattern of purples, greens, and blues. This is one of the two quilts I hope to finish with the longarm quilting machine.I'll be sending out the first Persistent Stitches annual report on January 1, 2019 and as I prepare this personal newsletter the "funds raised" number is steadily climbing toward $4,600 with two weeks left to go in 2018. So far we have raised funds for 72 organizations through creating and distributing 237 hand-crafted items to 77 individual donors. I say that's cause for celebration! I've said this many times throughout the year, but when I posted the first two cross stitch pieces on my personal crafting website on January 1st of this year, I thought we'd be lucky to raise a few hundred dollars. That so many crafters have gotten excited to contribute, and so many donors have come forward to participate by giving to awesome social justice causes and delighting over their handcrafted items has been a deeply therapeutic, healing thing in a year with a lot of tough, exhausting truths to cope with.
Image: Three books on reproductive rights and justice, along with a coffee cup and a notebook and pencil on a coffeeshop table.I read lots and lots of books this year and so many of them were good and important. As I mentioned in the last newsletter, over the winter holidays I'll be pulling together a review of three titles on reproductive politics for a medical humanities journal as well as a collection development essay for Library Journal to appear in the spring, on queer history since the Stonewall uprising, which will mark its fiftieth anniversary this summer. Some of the most healing books I have read this year, though, are romance novels and as the year draws to a close I've been revisiting some favorites and discovering new works. In the past month I read Jude Lucen's first historical romance, Behind These Doors, a cross-class m/m romance set in Edwardian London and featuring two protagonists each of whom have complex established intimate relationships within which their newfound love finds room to grow. More from this author in 2019 please! And I Was delighted to learn that another historical romance author whose m/m and f/m stories I have enjoyed -- Lily Maxton -- recently published an f/f novella: A Lady's Desire. Childhood friends separated by marriage, a widow's return that rekindles their relationship, the challenges of survival for women with no independent access to financial resources, and a relationship that involved much more than hand-holding and gazing soulfully into one anothers' eyes. More of this in 2019 also!
Image: Silver and gold cards with handwritten messages in black ink. Text transcribed below.We were asked at work to put New Year's wishes on cards to hang in the front lobby. I decided to begin as I mean to go on.
- Decarceration
- Expansion of voting rights and meaningful access to the vote for all citizens, no exceptions.
- Progress toward making bodily autonomy and reproductive justice a reality.
- Progress in dismantling white suprenacy and misogyny as organizing forces in our society.
- Agreen new deal. Real progress in addressing climate crises.
- Advance of the Fight for $15 agenda. One job should be enough.
- More welcoming the stranger; an end to violent xenophobic immigration policies
- Open minds, open hearts, and open hands.
On a similar note, last week I pulled together some thoughts about the year past on Twitter, that I'll share here. I've been thinking a lot about what I learned or had reinforced in my life this year. I'm not into New Year's resolutions but I do like reflecting on where I have been and where I hope to go as we descend into dark, generative midwinter. The below reflections are in no hierarchical order; take what you will and leave the rest to me.
- I really had driven home how important it is in this political moment not to be reactive to (or even know) every twist and turn of every news story. You can get the work done without it.
- Focusing on the world we want to build and finding people already doing that work whom I can support, learn from, collaborate with has been invaluable. I've had hammered home that hope is less about my emotional state (often terrified) than my actions.
- Some big lessons this year have reminded me that your employer is not your family, and that the central goal of institutions and systems (and their human agents) is to perpetuate themselves. I actually don't feel betrayed by that knowledge so much as I feel that it clarified emplyer/employee relations in useful ways. Understanding that helps us move forward strategically and honestly. It's a healthy reminder that it is rarely a good idea to allow your work to define you, your value, your personal priorities.
- I've been sitting a lot with the knowledge that the future is truly unpredictable, and that the terror of uncertainty is something humans of every era have had to cope with: The very real human condition of needing to make plans knowing any moment something could upend them.
- For the past fifteen years I have thought a lot about the fact that as a culture we celebrate pain as more meaningful than pleasure. More worth attention, artistic treatment, more worth our time. I've thought a lot this year about how fucked up that is.
- I've been thinking a lot about our bodies, about how bodies hold knowledge, experience trauma, express pleasure, exist in social relationships, are granted and denied rights based on how we constitute ourselves and how we are constituted. Who is deemed a legitimate body, and why? What happens to those of us whose embodied citizenship is open to question or challenge?
- Another piece of knowledge that isn't new but has been cast in stark relief this year is that some people do not mean well. That some harms are not accidental and some roads to hell are not paved with good intentions. I don't need to withhold basic human rights from those people, but I can oppose them, fight to curtail their power, and not waste my efforts courting their favor.
- I have been valuing quiet times and solitude this year, remembering the gift of time to read, digest, reflect, and work silently with my hands. As someone in a public-facing job I can forget how much quiet time is optimal for my soul.
- I think I've made some progress in understanding how Whiteness operates in my life and the spaces and systems I move through. I realize the work will never be done.
- Part of this progress (and a part of the above reflections taken together) is a better, deeper, understanding that anti-oppression work, the work of making our communities and our world sustainable and sustaining, is a life-long project. We need collaborators and we need tenacity.
- I've grown more thankful of a childhood that allowed me to develop confidence in my own ability to learn, create, and adapt in new or changing situations, and to make change when something in my life is not working.
- I have been convinced that there is real and useful meaning in the term "neoliberalism." Shocking, I know.
- At age 37 I am finally, however grudgingly, accepting that "Millennial" and it's many misuses and abuses are here to stay. (I'm happy about avocado toast tho!)
- I am learning how to say NO to work that will only lead to resentment. And I'm grateful to have the financial and workplace security to do so.
- Attending church has had the side benefit of bringing back to communal singing which I loved in both sacred and secular settings for many years.
- This year has brought several dissolving marriages among my inner circles and it makes me both grateful for the marriage I have and sad that we have so few positive ways to mark a marriage both for the good it gave and the good that comes with its ending.
Image: Protest sign held at a Families Belong Together rally on the Government Center Plaza, Boston, in summer 2018. Sign reads: "More LOVE is ok."On the second Sunday of Advent we sang this song by Pat Humphries and Sandy O. of Emma's Revolution and I haven't been able to stop thinking about the lyrics, which read in part:
We are born, in the dark
We are fed, in the dark
We connect, in the dark
Through the veil
We are held, in the dark
We are healed, in the dark
Mysteries, in the dark
We reveal
I hope all of you are able to find ways to connect and heal as we pass through the winter solstice and join the new year ahead.
With love,
Anna
We are born, in the dark
We are fed, in the dark
We connect, in the dark
Through the veil
We are held, in the dark
We are healed, in the dark
Mysteries, in the dark
We reveal
I hope all of you are able to find ways to connect and heal as we pass through the winter solstice and join the new year ahead.
With love,
Anna