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Elizabeth McMurtry

  • quilts
  • fiber drawings
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  • mending
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Accepting resistance

July 10, 2023

I'm trying a new thing today, writing here. Whereas I would typically skip trying to write about last week, because I have been in my studio not at all, because the design wall is empty, because I am feeling deep in a lull, and full of resistance — instead I want to make a note of the lull itself, feel more ease in my aversions. Take short notes, make a record of what I would typically view as unworthy of record.

Life is busy, which is like saying the air contains oxygen. My little chosen family faces hurdles, shifts and changes, struggles; each of us struggling alone and together, we pack boxes and cars and we apply for jobs and we keep trying to keep things clean, nothing is ever clean, we tend pets and we practice saying no or we give in and say yes and we apologize over and over to each other for our foul moods. And sometimes, we sit outside as the evening cools down and eat takeout, or an egg salad sandwich, and we drink a beer and stop struggling — or we try to, just a bit, for an hour or so. 

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This summer has not proven to be full of work, full of quilt-making, full of productivity, as I'd hoped. I have been battling myself, unable to sit down (or sit with) even the pieces I feel ostensibly excited about bringing forward. I'm doing my best to accept the resistance, rather than resist the resistance. I listened to two artists talk about just this idea. How can there be less resistance to the resistance. “It is my resistance to the resistance that causes my suffering.” I am begrudgingly trying to extend myself this same grace. I have not been in my studio in what seems like weeks.

Instead I've been sitting in a cafe corner, reading and writing; I've been putting fresh sheets on the bed only to crawl into at 2:30 in the afternoon, backdoor open so the dog can come and go. I've been listening to an abysmal audio quality recording of Harriet Lerner's The Dance of Anger, while I knit, or while I walk; I’ve been texting everyone to recommend Harriet Lerner’s The Dance of Anger. I watch an old tv show about drug cartels. I listen actively to the quiet. I eat an enormous, beautiful, oily square of focaccia for lunch, and nothing else.

I've feverishly picked up knitting again, after a few year's hiatus from what used to be a constant companion. But I am finding it agitating, as I attempt to navigate working only from stash, a practice I have always loathed with yarn (though not with fabric) as I try to bend my desires into some distorted shape of themselves producible through the material already on-hand. I routinely consider de-stashing; then I imagine the labor involved, and am discouraged. My stash exists primarily as a result of gleaned odds and ends from my time in the yarn industry, and as such is even more complicated to cobble together — very few SQs ("sweater quantities") of any one thing, despite many huge, overflowing bins of wool.

My nails are a chipped bubblegum pink. For a few months now I have not been carefully tending my manicure on a weekly basis, as I mostly did for the last two years, a strange new habit of color riot and my explorations in self-presentation, and self-preservation. I picked up four May Sarton books from the library; am currently reading A Journal of a Solitude and The House by the Sea. I'm carrying around Mary Ruefle's My Private Property like a security blanket. I am reading about the gift economy, thanks to Grace Rother. I am daydreaming of moving away, away, away. I spend too much time on zillow.com.

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Friday morning I woke to the news that Sarah Ryhanen of Saipua, and World's End Farm, has been diagnosed with breast cancer. I don't know Sarah, though I have admired her from afar via the internet for more than a decade, since the early days of her blog, since before the farm, before her lionhearted world-building, before even The Castle. I have often promised myself that when the money and time exist (ha!) I would treat myself to her residency, up there in Esperance. I've never done that; I've never so much as applied, to any residency. I wonder, sometimes, where did that time and money go instead. Then on Sunday, speaking with a new friend, I learned for the first time of their terminal diagnosis, and short life-expectancy. All the signs in my universe now seem to be a sort of push; not quiet whispers but fully illuminated, flashing marquees. Clarify, clarify, clarify.

I've been talking with someone frequently about prioritizing our own needs. (Harriet Lerner has been talking about this in my ears, as well.) Do you find it difficult, to know what you need? Looking back on my life — statistically, now half over — I realize that I have spent it, thus far, wholly unable to prioritize my needs. As a larger symptom of that very question, it seems I also often struggle to even identify my needs — typically an important first step, when assessing priorities. It seems, in this moment, perhaps I need to not drive my work forward in a march, with a whip. My attentions are elsewhere; the chariot won’t go. It seems I might need, in fact, to sit at the side of the road a bit. Clarify, clarify, clarify — my resistance to the resistance causes my suffering.

These may sound like two different mantras, but they are feeling more like two sides of the same coin.

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oh, hi.

Writing has always been a part of my process and my processing. Thank you for joining me here.


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