Skip to main content

The Grey Bonnet

Image
By
Some dreams aren't much of a challenge to interpret...

I dreamed that I was working to make myself a grey coal-scuttle shaped bonnet. In the dream, it was clear to me that this was a Quaker bonnet I was sewing for myself. I was having a couple of problems: there was some kind of metal stay built into it to hold the shape. I kept trying it on and taking it off and making small adjustments to it, because the metal piece squeezed against my temples uncomfortably.

I was interrupted in this work several times by people walking through the space where I was. Each time someone came in the room, I would awkwardly hide the bonnet in my lap... sort of the way I keep turning the title of Lloyd Lee Wilson's book away from people when I have it out in public to read. Essays on the Quaker Vision of Gospel Order is actually a really cool book about Quaker worship and community processes... but, oh, that title is a painful squeeze!
Labels:

Comments

Hystery said…
Cat, just wanted to leave a note. I'm actually trying to find a way to buy or make a gray coal-scuttle bonnet for a performance I'll be doing later this summer. I found it funny that when I googled it, I found your post. Of course, I have the goofy twisting of plain/historical/Christian/Pagan threads right now in my life and often feel the urge to awkwardly conceal or downplay some of my Quaker Pagan passions from my "bright" (in the sense of atheist) colleagues, the need to be careful about my Christian interests when with my Pagan friends, and the need to guard my Pagan interests from my Christian friends!
11:05 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fame

By
(Note: there were so many thought provoking comments in response to this post that it generated a second-round of ideas. You can read the follow-up post here .) I have a confession to make. I want to be famous. Well, sort of. I don't want to be famous, famous, and ride around in a limousine and have to hire security and that sort of thing. I just want to write a book, have it published by somebody other than my mother, and bought and read by somebody other than my mother, and maybe even sign a couple of autographs along the way. Mom can have one autographed, too, if she wants. It has to be a spiritual book. A really moving and truthful book, that makes people want to look deep inside themselves, and then they come up to me and say something like, "It was all because of that book you wrote! It changed my life!" And I would say, no, no, really, you did all that, you and God/the gods --I'm a little fuzzy on whether the life-changing book is for Pagans or for Quake
41 comments
Read more

Peter on Grief and Communities

By
Well, that was unexpected. For the last year, ever since my mom's health took a sharp downturn, I've been my dad's ride to Florence Congregational Church on Sundays. That community has been important for my dad and the weekly outing with me was something he always looked forward to and enjoyed, so I didn't mind taking him there. It meant giving up attending my own Quaker meeting for the duration, but I had already been questioning whether silent waiting worship was working for me. I was ready for a sabbatical. A month ago, my dad was Section-Twelved into a geriatric psych hospital when his dementia started to make him emotionally volatile. I had been visiting him every day at his assisted living facility which was right on my way home from work, but the hospital was almost an hour away. I didn't see him at all for three weeks, and when I did visit him there, it actually took me a couple of seconds to recognize him. He was slumped forward in a wheel chair, lo
4 comments
Read more

There is a Spirit Which I Feel

By
I was always a "rational use of force" gal. For most of my life I believed that the use of force--by which I meant human beings taking up arms and going off to war to try to kill one another--was a regrettable necessity. Sometimes I liked to imagine that Paganism held an alternative to that, particularly back in the day when I believed in that mythical past era of the peaceful, goddess-worshipping matriarchal societies . (I really liked that version of history, and was sorry when I stopped believing in it as factual.) But that way of seeing reality changed for me, in the time between one footfall and the next, on a sunny fall morning: September 11, 2001. I was already running late for work that day when the phone rang; my friend Abby was calling, to give me the news that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center in New York. So? I thought to myself, picturing a small private aircraft. Abby tried to convey some of what she was hearing--terrorists, fire--but the mag
22 comments
Read more