Back On Track

At least it feels like I'm back on track with the rails baby quilt. With my additional selections of pinks, I decided to ditch the idea of adding in some blue, particularly because those blues would clash with the more aqua blue of the backing. A small thing but I tend to be swayed by them. Here are all my strips cut and ready to sew into blocks. You'll note that there are more than 4 different pinks which means a few of the blocks will have different combinations of pinks.

Here's a sample block showing the basic arrangement of the smaller 4 strip quadrants. I dithered slightly about whether to press seams to one side or open, ending up pressing to one side and wondering if open would have been better. I don't intend on doing much stitching in the ditch so open might have been better. I have to say, this is going to be a very pretty girly pink quilt!

More tree blossoms along my walks are opening up. I thought they were late but in looking back at a May 10th blog post from last year, this is pretty much when spring sprung then. 

I'd periodically check what I think are flowering plum trees in the little park I sometimes pass through and they too bloomed this week.

The annual Lilac Festival Torchlight Parade in nearby Spokane WA is Saturday, and I thought to check the lilac bush by the abandoned house on one of my walking routes yesterday to see if the blooms had opened yet. Indeed, like nearly every year, they had, right on time. I cut a few for a bouquet and their scent fills the downstairs. My knitting is coming along too, ready for decreases to form the armholes, and echoing the color of the lilacs.

Speaking of walks, I ran across a great article expounding on the virtues of walking. A bit of preaching to the choir but it had many quotations I'd not run across before, including this one which to my long time readers will sound a lot like me:

". . .I’ll first note the Latin phrase solvitur ambulando meaning “it is solved by walking.” The phrase is attributed to both St. Augustine and the Greek philosopher, Diogenes. The sense of it, as I take it, is that when you are stuck on something, you should get up and take a walk. By the act of walking you somehow allow your mind to think more freely and creatively."

I like where the author takes all this, a response to our ever-hurrying world:

"As Watters observed in her essay, “Walking lets you read the world — and much like the slow, contemplative mental processes involved in reading a book, the pace with which one moves through the world while walking allows for a different, deliberative kind of seeing. You notice more. You think more.”

To walk, then, is to inhabit a fitting scale and speed. It is the scale and speed at which our bodies are able to find their fit in the world, and the world rewards us by spurring our thinking and disclosing itself to us. Perhaps this is the deeper fitness we should actually be after.

This principle of proportionality or fittingness is one that we do well to remember and insist upon to whatever degree we are able because almost everything about the human-built world, in its economic and technological dimensions, is bent on pushing us past a human scale and speed, which then denies us the opportunity to cultivate our competence and enjoy its rewards. We are, in turn, sold a series of tools and techniques that promise to help us operate faster and more efficiently so that we may keep up with the inhuman demands. Some will even say that the point is to eventually slough off the encumbering body so that we may keep up with the machines and find our fit within the artificial systems we have built. Only exhaustion and alienation lie down this path."

It's an interesting read - give it a go. And then take a walk and ponder what it says.