A lot can happen in a week

What I know right now is that when I walk through my neighborhood: people are mobilizing. We voted for Zohran Mamdani! The neighbors are doing massive food bank collections and distributions! The neighborhood group chats are filled with flyers and resources for all the places to get food right now. At least in my small corner of the world, we are saying, “I will not watch my neighbors starve.”

Maybe you have noticed a flurry of activity in your local neighborhood, too? While we have an actual monster living in the White House (and several more monsters in Congress). We have real people right next to us jumping in to build our own safety net.

Sharing a meal with your children, elders, friends and neighbors is the most human act in the world. Politicians withholding food benefits as a chess move in their grab for power is deeply depraved. I am so angry and disappointed that it’s hard to put into words. More than anything, though, I feel hope when I look around at the people nearest me.

I know that our current power structures can’t hold us down forever, there’s more of us than them. We need each other and we are here for each other.

Last week I took a class broom making from Cynthia Main and wow! Sometimes a process just clicks right away. I ordered an additional ten pounds of broomcorn. The only thing stopping me from making ten or more a day is my sore arms. I need to build up some specific muscles and tendon strength (it feels like the early days of learning to rock climb).

What I’m loving about it: the tactile feel of the raw materials and how that feeling changes throughout the weaving process, the scent (it’s intoxicating), the fact that once you start you must see it through to completion because the whole thing relies on tension.

• Blocks for my schoolhouse quilt

  

• Blocks for a project with no finish line in mind

  

• Cooking through Samin Nosrat’s Good Things book (check your public library for a copy!)

• Halloween costume

  

• Boatloads of baskets

• Almost getting scammed, but catching it just in time. Here’s the reddit thread that saved me! My gut was sending up red flags from my first interaction, so glad I listened to my intuition here.

• Voting for Zohran Mamdani!!

• The N.K. Jemison Broken Earth Trilogy on audiobook (not sure how to share Libby links, so that’s a link to buy the books if you want!)

That’s it for now!

Talk soon,
Bekka