I’ve always loved it when the thirteenth day of the month falls on a Friday. Friday 13th, despite the negative patriarchal influence, has always been a positive day for me. Maybe somewhere in my DNA, there is the remembrance of the feminine importance of 13. The number of the divine feminine, representative of the thirteen…Read more »
Author: thephoenixgreenstore
Creativity and Black Friday
My email inbox has been full to the brim this last week with Black Friday deals. On books, on haberdashery supplies, on just about anything you can imagine. Those of you who have followed my business for a while, might remember that last year I shut-up-shop for Black Friday weekend in protest against the consumerist…Read more »
Mending Clothes as an Act of Rebellion
I have often wondered when it was that Western society collectively decided that visibly mended clothes were a mark of reduced status. Of a life worth less. Where a patch or a darn was certainly not acceptable in polite company. Many cultures across the globe value and respect the energy that is used to create…Read more »
Patchwork Days
I first learnt to cut and stitch patchwork sitting on the living room floor of family friend Barbara Thompson. Walking into her house, there was always the aroma of cooking spices, books, wool. The walls were covered in bookshelves, almost as though her house was built with stories, not bricks, and the books that didn’t…Read more »
Unpackaging Life
It’s been a bit quiet on the blog these last few weeks. I’ve been struggling to write about the tiny, small efforts we are making at home, because I haven’t felt particularly inspired by them, in the great whirl of Extinction Rebellion protests, and the darkening knowledge of what is happening across the planet. The…Read more »
Winter Healing From The Elder Mother
When I first moved into the house I live in now, there was an elder sapling in my back garden, brought by birds, and shooting up rebelliously between honeysuckle and philadelphus. The garden was very different then – with only two previous owners, both strong independent women who loved to garden, it had neat hedges,…Read more »
The Boy With The Lead Balloon, and The Girl Who Wouldn’t Fly…
Today we walked in the woods. Two buses from home, across the River in the Derwent Valley, under a grim, threatening sky we walked in the woods. We saw a deer, chatted to some rescue horses, tracked prints along the muddy path and paddled in a river full of all of yesterday’s torrential rain. We…Read more »