Happy Earth Day!

Michele Savikko Bilyeu:

"I was 20 years old for the very first earth day and a thousand miles away from home and family in college. Much was happening all around me. It was incredibly new and exciting.

Every single day, every single moment was alive and breathing with so many, many new things, new experiences, new emotions and most of all new acceptances and learnings.

To be this very quiet, very deep and happy and always smiling young person--still a girl truly-- and not yet feeling the beingness of coming into womanhood. To be alive and welcoming and so very excited by even the newness of tiny things was surreal yet always just my "new normal" for then.

Because the next day brought newer experiences, newer new normals. Normal didn't mean anything at all even if i knew what normal was supposed to mean for me. It was easy to accept that i was not anyone else's "normal". I was me and i loved the blessing of this huge huge gift of going off into this very, very different new world.

Growing up in an isolated and land locked part of Alaska where just flying south to the lower 48 was like entering a different world and flying in was considered the most dangerous approach and landing in the U.S. with only the pilot's visual abilities providing access to conditions below we just did all things bravely.

One didn't question or really even fear the experience just the roar of things coming to life and taking off and into new horizons We would just do, just cope, just accept each and every new experience as it was.

I should have been afraid but it didn't enter my awareness. I was raised with challenges and obstacles and the unknown--even death simply by riding "out the road" with my dad in his rattle trap old company truck was that day, the best, most exciting thing in the world. Especially if he had the money to buy us each a frozen treat out of the freezer chest at the grocery store!

We had 25 miles of road to to get to the end of what i should have seen as the end of my world. But i didn't. We reached the end of that old gravel road and it was exciting and accepted and enjoyed that as 25 miles was considered a huge amount of driving.

Then we turned around and came back. There was only one way to do that with no alternate roads of any kind yet available. Yet the ride back gave me a up close and personal view of the other side of the road so even that became new and exciting!

I realize now how amazing that life was for me. My whole world was based on the earth, my earth as i knew her. It was living and thriving and surviving but without fear in nature. We were taught where the bears came out, where we had to be alert and careful and what to do if one charged us or attacked us.

I was never afraid to go there with my family as we did every 2 weeks. It was where we picked wild blueberries and the only place we had to legally dispose of the family garbage.

Doing brave things in nature and relishing and being excited and filling myself up with her breathing, living, ever changing energies just was. Feeling the existence of other earth beings as alive and part of me and all there was - - that "just was".

I was curious about ancient burial grounds of the old native ones and felt them around me. Now i can see and feel the emotion known as fear that i should have felt, should have not perhaps been drawn to or not chosen to open to. Nothing bad happened when I did. 

It was just very very curious and different and i wondered if it was "real" or part of my amazing inner life of my own creative imaginings!

The earth was a part of all of us. The winds and the sky and ocean seas and rivers and lakes and waterfalls and the mountains rising on both sides of my world in between all things - and absolutely all and nothing else just all of life as one and a glorious, happy one.



To celebrate "Earth Day" at age 20 (54 years ago!) wasn't a blip on the radar of my life in my memories.  I probably just wondered why people in the "south" needed to to create a specific day to our earth, celebrate what always just was!'

Happy Birthday Great Mother. Happy Birthday yesterday, today and all of your tomorrows!

Happy Mother Earth Day.

Note:
My homemade "earth day" pins are my versions of the original symbol from the first Earth Day flag

 from that era. Felt with a safety pin backing.

I handed them out to friends and family when we marched down around the Salem Capitol area a few years ago during one of our big marches for earth day, science and women.

A lady my age came up to me, recognizing my pin and said "I remember those! Never thought I'd see that again! Haha!

I was delighted - so delighted that I forgot to offer her one of 3 spares in my pocket! Ah youth and memory. 

Wherefore art thou? Happy to remember as much as I do and still be able to write about them and blog on a cell phone without a household wifi system!

And yes, I made my embroidered peasant blouse in the top photo as well. Sold it for a couple of dollars at a garage sale at my kids elementary school "Covered Playground Sale" many decades ago with another even nicer long sleeve one I'd made. Oh how I wish I had them now.

(No, but I do still have a dozen or more of my own home sewn double polyester maternity outfits from 1975 instead! All immaculate preserved in our attic!! Hahahaha! The things we remember and the things we save.



Extra - 

Earth Day Background in History and Deed: The Story of Earth Day.

Earth Day With Heart and Hands

https://www.with-heart-and-hands.com/2008/04/earth-day-april-22.html?m=1




Michele Bilyeu Creates *With Heart and Hands*: My Tutorial Link Lists: By Themes


https://www.with-heart-and-hands.com/p/my-own-free-patterns-tutorials-and.html

Michele Bilyeu 

Creates With Heart and Hands sharing an imaginative,magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon and back again. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting and wild-crafting "from my heart and with my hands".

Heron Rises From The Dark, Summer Pond

"So heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wings

open
and she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticks

of the summer pond,
and slowly
rises into the air
and is gone.

Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is

that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed

back into itself--
the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,
the turtle,
the fallen gate.

And especially it is wonderful
that the summers are long
and the ponds so dark and so many,
and therefore it isn't a miracle

but the common thing,
this decision,
this trailing of the long legs in the water,
this opening up of the heavy body

into a new life: see how the sudden
gray-blue sheets of her wings
strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing
takes her in.

Heron Rises From The Dark, Summer Pond 

by Mary Oliver

2021 Reflections by Michele Savikko Bilyeu:




Oh the absolute joy for those of us who both believe in and protecting the gardens of our lives through love and compassion of our natural world holding faith in those who help our world not seek to harm her and all who abide within her in all ways.


Oh the deep love for family, both immediate and extended. Oh the dark sorrow for those lost or those left in pain and suffering and grief.


I think of and pray for all of you. I hold you in my thoughts and share compassion and empathy with you all.


All things grow and all that lives or causes change will pass. And so shall all of us when our time and our cycle of change is with us.


Take care of one another and feel the warm and radiant love of all there is, and ever will be.


Take care.
Love,
Michele
April 2021

Michele Bilyeu Creates *With Heart and Hands*: My Tutorial Link Lists: By Themes

https://www.with-heart-and-hands.com/p/my-own-free-patterns-tutorials-and.html

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting... from my heart and with my hands

Poisson d'avril: Happy April Fool's!

 

First published March 31st, 2007

Blogland is a strange place, indeed. In Blogland, you break rules, talk to strangers, show pictures of your children, the rooms in your house, the things you love to do and create and talk about your aches and pains, your illnesses and whether you get along with others or not. It is a virtual reality like no other. And strangley enough, it is a place where you can be told off one moment and lovingly accepted the very next.

When I tell my friends that I have a blog, their very first question is 'what is that?' You either know or you don't. It is a place of seriousness, of absurdities, of honesty and of illusion. And I enjoy it all, tremendously :)

Today, I am reposting a close up of the babel fish quilt. Strangely enough, not one person commented that the quilt was upside down..well, it was either the fish or that person's legs. I chose the fish. The quilt had butterflies mixed in with fish...and it lacked a colorful binding that it truly needed. It was made in a matter of hours during a quiltathon out of a tableful of mixed up fabrics, as quickly as four of us could possibly make it. We finished it in three or four hours..which is pretty good. It went to survivors of Katrina, back in 2005, and I am sure, someone is lovingly sleeping under it now, which makes me feel very happy!

I chose to re-post a close-up, because today is "poisson d'avril"...the day known in France as 'April Fish'. There, a paper fish might be placed on your back to ridicule you. In Scotland, some of us will be 'hunting the gowk.' A gowk being a cuckoo bird. I have heard that in the Netherlands it is celebrated for entirely different reasons, I would love to hear about all of your various customs, it is so much fun to learn from each other!

Here, in America...it is called "April Fools", and we are all fools in many different ways. It's an awful lot of fun to laugh at one's self, and even more fun to laugh with others. Today, I place a paper fish on all of our backs, call out 'skewiff', 'cuckoooo', and 'quilt on.' We are, if I must say, a wonderful group of fools and I salute you all!

The Origin of April Fool's Day by Michele Bilyeu  www.with-heart-and-hands.com