A personal reaction to current events

So, the hand dyed ruanas turned out quite well. I'm pleased. One of the three is already off to its new home, and the other two have been listed in the Etsy shop. (https://www.etsy.com/shop/tangibledaydreams?show_panel=true) I've already got yarn in for the next batch, so I'll be started on those right after I finish a commission for a couple pairs of socks.

Wow, is that a boring entry. 

Now...about this blog. As you can see, I've been pretty spotty in updating it. The thing is, I've made this into almost exclusively a crafting blog, with pictures of projects and how-to's when I have something new to share. And, I'm going to keep doing those. But... I'm bored with sharing only this professional side of my life here. I've been keeping this pretty focused, and in so doing, I'm losing my actual personality and voice here. I've decided that I need to give myself permission to blather along about the other neat things in my life too, even if they're not directly art related. Things like, my husband has a band. My other husband has a neat trip to Italy coming up. Oh yes...the fact that I have two husbands (only one with paperwork), and am polyamorous. I've danced around that here, and I'm not sure entirely why. Fear of offending? Fear of being visible? Fear of driving off clients if they knew who I was? Well, that is cowardly.

And yet... I'm rocked by the results of the US election last night. Was that just last night? It seems like forever already. A man that I see as encouraging intolerance, hate, bigotry, misogyny...he was elected. And already I seem rumblings that some of his followers have taken that fact as permission to act on their baser sides. We're better than that, folks.

But I get it, in some ways. The world has been changing. A black president. Gays marrying. A woman running for president. The job market has been morphing, and those bedrocks of an American Dream 'normal' life are shifting. Folks want normal again. They want things to go back to some idealized past, where hard work and following the rules could give you and your family a place to thrive and belong, among people who were like you and had the same ideals.

Normal. Where I grew up, white was normal. Going to church on Sunday was normal. Middle class was normal. Mom and Dad and 2.5 kids and a minivan and a dog was normal. Straight was definitely normal. When I got out into the world and found that folks who didn't look like me weren't actually scary thugs, they were just people? That was an eye opener. It took awhile of deliberately pushing my comfort zones before I could see other faiths, other races, other relationship choices, etc...as normal. It took gradually being exposed to different, and different becoming part of my everyday landscape. And since then, I've read viewpoints from some of my classmates, who didn't fit the suburban dream normal mode, and how difficult it was for them. I was blind.

Normal. So, in recent years, I've chosen to be out of the closet about the fact that I love more than one person, and that we've chosen to bind our lives together the three of us. I've found that when people see me and my family and get to know us, it gradually gets to be a part of 'normal' to them. Their world widens a little bit, too. It doesn't match up to so much of what other people go through, but it is my own bit of different to share.

But I've been so 'professional' minded here, that I locked away whole swaths of my life. And, that has felt restrictive. So, I think from here on out, this blog needs to widen up a bit. I'm going to be a little less afraid of offending by letting people see who I am, what I do, and who I love. My life feels normal to me. But, I think I have a need to speak up a bit more than I have been doing, and share more than the surface here.

So.... More to come.