Stranger Connections Needed
Why some things help me to find connection with myself and the world
How’s January going? I’m realising how dependent I am on my Instagram feed for inspiration because I am seeing way more January resolutions posts than I have in all my life.
This year has started with me feeling a desperate need to find my pace. My procrastination brain is driving my actions, and yet I am doing things. Things that feel like they matter and so my body forgets its aches and lethargy and starts to make things. These 10 brooches were done in a rapid spurt of a day and a half. Here are two of them happily growing out from the soil of a pot.
These pin-backed brooches are something I am making for sale for Stranger Conversations’ fund-raiser to keep their work growing. They function as a third space for people to gather at Pearl’s Hill Terrace, and even if I can’t go there often I believe in the work being done and that we need spaces like these to thrive. Finding community in adulthood is tricky - even more so when we no longer have as much energy for dealing with the finicky steps for deep connection in times of deep unrest. You’ll find hopeful souls here, and perhaps that will help you be more hopeful too in your own capacity.
If you want to get a brooch for yourself, their fund-raiser link can be found here. If you need more details, feel free to message me or them directly to find out more. They are made from salvaged felt, yarn, and some excess threads I have in my sewing stash.
These brooches were inspired by this book - Craftivism: The Art and Craft of Activism edited by Betsy Greer. In it are a plentitude of different ways that people take the tactility of making something and use it powerfully to make people connect and think. I’m stashing as much of my money away for the insanely costly pursuit of adult studies in Art Psychotherapy - so I’ve been searching for other ways of showing care and support of the communities I am in. Craftivism is the word and larger movement I’ve known intuitively but now finally have a more concrete sense of. I want to keep doing and being part of more.
Why does this matter? It paces me out. It structures my rest so that I do not get sucked into other things that drain rather than replenish me (I’ll definitely write about this more sometime…probably after my next counselling appointment…).
Craftivism also helps me respond to my need to get un-stuck from the turgid muddiness that my mind tends towards. Art and craft helps me to reassess and look more deeply at what is in front of me. An object or image that I have to contemplate forces me to pause, and sometimes demands a conversation with me.
One example of this getting un-stuck for a moment happened a few days ago:
Part of this lens cleaning wormed its way into my workspace (in this illustration, it is the office’s computer and my almost-finished cup of teh-o kosong beng). I was trying to face my work fears at the start of the year. I was looking for a new desktop background (new year feels galore it seems) and was thinking about the Windows XP background. It was only because I wanted to draw this out that I went to Google to get an image reference and then stumble onto a bit of information. The history behind this photograph is both wonderful and terrifying.
Napa Valley spent most of the 1990s trying desperately to curb the spread of phylloxera, a microscopic pest that was devastating its grapes. By the time the epidemic had run its course in 1999, some 50,000 acres of fields had been decimated.
Although the cost for growers was astronomical—half a billion dollars in total—the landscape of Northern California had never looked more idyllic. Endless rows of grapevines had been replaced by a lush carpet of grass, dotted here and there with wildflowers.
It was this vision of Sonoma County that flashed by Charles O’Rear’s car window as he drove down Highway 121 in 1998.
This image that is associated with computers taking over our daily vistas is of a landscape that has been re-wilded from human agriculture. This landscape of Sonoma County no longer exists, post 1998 it has gone back to the acres of grapevines. It was a blip of time that gave us this unreal sense of lush greenery and the expanse of an “untouched” landscape.
I’ve just reached the end of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. It feels like a piling on of coincidences that I am thinking so much about ecology and my place in the world. But it is more likely that a book and its ideas have held my attention and have made me more sensitive to its concerns. It is why I know when I am feeling stuck that I need to read or make something. There’s a strange magic in the actions that helps me connect back to myself and to the world I’m in.