The Social Porcupine

 We’d just finished watching the movie Jesus Freaks when Andy asked me to marry him. It was early September… he’d planned to wait until I’d met his family in November, but we were ready to start planning our future. By all legalist appearances, we might seem unequally yoked. I was raised in a niche of an already obscure messianic movement, and he, born in and again recently returned to the church, was a traditional catholic. And yet those who know the two of us well and are able to see past the doctrines of man into the mystical hearts of God and His children, saw the inevitability of our union. Never is the material yoke naturally equalized between the two called to work together, not initially. It takes some sort of supernatural strength to put oneself with another, and in that acceptance is harmony cultivated. Our spiritual experiences, though stemmed out of drastically varying circumstances, have bloomed toward the same aesthetical values. But such matters are not easily seen i...

Do you ever feel you have dozens of dreams begging you to bring them all to life? And you would, if only they might co-operate and become one vision . This is what the Living Room Academy was for me: a culmination of a lifetime of thoughts and ideals. It started out as a flippant invitation that a woman I worked for said, "But why wouldn't you do this?"  Besides seeming initially impossible to undertake, I didn't want to commit to such a project as opening my home up to other young women for a summer... I love my summers and couldn't imagine forsaking all the things I would normally do to teach summer classes to strangers.   I won't go into why I decided to do this as I've already written on this in depth, but I do want to reiterate that I'm glad I didn't choose the convenient, lackluster path of complacency.  I hosted two courses this summer 2023. Six girls came to live with me, although only four of them were able to stay for the endurance of th...

silk tatted lace edging for my wedding dress If you asked me as a young girl what I wanted to do when I grew up, I wouldn't have had some answer that suggested I wanted to labor away for some corporation eight hours every weekday. I had no visions of being a Redcross nurse and patching up soldiers (unless it was for the other side), or of being some schoolteacher (I'd have encouraged all the students to play hooky), or of being the secretary to the President of the United States (nor of being the president).    No, I'd have told you that I would much prefer to make leather shoes and spin yarn for sweaters for my babies... and tat lace. Even now, I can't imagine a better aspiration than to sit in a rocker of luxurious wood on embroidered cushions and tat yards of silk lace with my silver shuttle. We all have a grandmother, or a friend who has a grandmother, who made lace. Depending on their heritage and background, they may have done tape lace, bobbin lace, ...