State of Away

Happy Thanksgiving weekend! I thought I'd made the slow return from the Land of Too Much Travel and was pretty much Back, but perhaps not completely. It's entirely possible, I've found, for my body to occupy one space and my head (or whatever it is that dreams up and posts blog posts) another. For example, almost post-factum I was reminded by Carole's self-care post that for many bloggers November is NaBloPoMo, the goal being to blogpost (at least) once a day for a month. Gentle readers, aside from the meta-ness of a reminder in a self-care post, in a previous life I knew that, yet in this life it's the last day of November and this is "only" my second post of the month. Sigh. No, not really Sigh. Even in a previous life I've never participated in NaBloPoMo; for me the task is shedding NaBloPoMo FOMO. Er, by posting a confessional of sorts... on the last day.

Let me atone move along with "Everything to Lose," a powerful spoken word poem by Wyn Wylie (he/him) as Pattie Gonia (she/her) about the plastic crisis, a particularly dreadful part of our climate emergency.



(For gentle readers interested in more, there's also a compelling companion documentary that shows Wyn Wylie doing the research in Hawai'i, a beach clean up with Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii, and how designer Angela Luna made the dresses from found objects – plastic fishing nets hung up on the reef, single-use plastic bags floating in the ocean, and bright, brittle bits of plastic found on the beach.)

Plastic reduction has been a public goal of my knitblogging life pretty much since Year One, more than 10 years ago. Not tremendously successfully, despite concern, intermittent effort, and occasional blogposts. It would seem I'm in good company: the township is finally banning single-use plastic bags, although with many reasonable exceptions for small businesses. Even that small step has been difficult, not least because of the perceived imbalance between the many immediate benefits of plastic and its dreadful long-term impacts. A throw-away culture depends upon an Away to throw on, but it turns out there is no Away, not really, just different headspace.



So this Thanksgiving weekend I'm here, if not quite Back, and pondering the state of Away, and knitting a bit (and marveling at how frequently I used to blogpost). I have a singleton sock, Simple Skyp, to show off. While it's DNF on time for SKA, that's OK. I've been Away, and am still coming home.