Dragonfly Dreamz Crafts

So, after some inspiration from our wonderful pianist at church (Mary Ellen Broge), I have created a product.  You know (and I am sure either have, love or would love to have) a microwaveable heat pad.  You know the ones that are filled with rice, or beans or corn?

Well, I have created one designed for people who get bad headaches.  The design is heart shaped so that it will sit on your face (with the heart upside down) and rest comfortably over the major sinus cavities and of course over your eyes, with your nose fully exposed.

(This is my Microsoft Publisher illustration of the proper use of a heart shaped therapeutic heat pad.)

I call them Therapeutic Heat Pads.  I am playing with two other designs for these, but they have not reached fruition yet.  I will keep you posted.

At this time I offer a heart shaped Therapeutic Heat Pad, made out of Flannel in a variety of 5 patterns.  They are filled with rice (as it has the least prevalent smell of the three fillings that I know of) I am asking $10.00 for these.  If you are interested, please let me know.  You can contact me on Blogger, Facebook or through my email.  Enclosed are photographs of the Flannel patterns and two that I have finished at the moment.

My current flannel patterns:

Detail on the rainbow/yellow butterfly print:

Detail on the green spotted Flannel:

The Finished Product!

I can do solid print (same pattern for the front and back) or you can mix and match any of the flannel patterns.

 Each Therapeutic Heat Pad is embroidered with a red heart containing a dragonfly, which is my symbol/signature.  I can do green, blue or brown dragonflies.

I will be adding more "boy" prints hopefully soon...I just have to have the money to buy the flannel...

(Front and Back of my business cards for this product)

Anyway, I am curious to see who would be interested in this.  If you are, please let me know!

Thanks!

It's that itch again....

Why is it that periodically I get this great urge to run away.  Literally.  I want to move to ridiculous places.  Places that either have a LOT of water like Canon Beach, OR or mountains like Black Mountain, NC...and most recently, Bayfield, WI. Which I guess could have a little of both, since it is near the Porcupine Mts.

I guess the most current one is not incredibly ridiculous.  Ever since I visited there last summer with Jenny and Annalynn I felt that I would like to live there.  It is an artsy, touristy town, right on the shores of Lake Superior.  It has the ferry to Madeleine Island, and is in general...beautiful.  What better place for someone like myself?

Well, that itch to run away has roused its head again.  I've been thinking to the future, and the big questions.  You know, the ones that ask: Where will I be in 5 years?  What do I want to be doing in 5 years? Those questions that right now I have absolutely no answer to.  Everything hinges on one things right now.  One, incredibly important thing... My Father.

And maybe that is partly why the urge has reared its head again, the urge to run away from things which hurt, and frighten me.  The get away and pretend it isn't happening.  I don't know.  But, the desire to live in Bayfield is a true one.  Maybe I'll try to find a job there next summer (during Duluth's slow season).  I could always come back on in October, just in time for Peak. Maybe I'm just crazy even contemplating this.  I don't know.

I'm re-reading "Blue Castle" by L.M. Montgomery and parts of me really feel like the Heroine of the book, Valancy.  Valancy is 29 when the book begins, a confirmed old maid with no prospects.  (this part I don't feel is like me) she lives with her mother and a second cousin who do not love her and has had to know-tow to her relations all her life.  She is a cowed, sad little creature.  Then, she finds out she has a fatal heart condition.  Her reaction changes her forever.  She decides to live for her self and stop worrying about everyone else.  She runs away to keep house for the town drunkard Roaring Abel, to take care of his daughter who is dying of consumption.  From there she starts a whole new life.

I envy her the boldness to take her future (which she believes is limited) into her own hands and to take charge of her life.

I really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts

So lately I have been reading Madeleine L'Engle's book "A Circle of Quiet." It is one of her non-fiction books, more of a responsive journal/letter than anything else.  Her reflections on teaching, writing, life, love, death, God...etc.
It has been speaking greatly to me, and ministering just as greatly.  For those of you who don't know, my Father has Pancreatic Cancer.  I came home from Indiana last Tuesday, after a week of vacation with my girlfriends, to find that he was in the hospital.  They drained 4.8 litres of fluid from his stomach and he didn't come home until yesterday.
Mom and I had a good cry together last night.  In many ways it was good to let the cap off of the emotion and release it.  Anyway, a lot of what I'm dealing with/going through right now, Madeleine has been talking about with grace and humor and I am longing to share a little of it with you.
One of the words she uses a lot throughout the book is Ontology, which is the word about "Being."  She spends a lot of time talking about her Ontological self, her real self, herself when she is most herself.  She also talks about a seminar that she taught for 2 weeks at Ohio State University.
Another time she was doing a seminar with High School students and one of the girls, named Una asked her a question.  I'm going to quote that section:

"A winter ago I had an after-school seminar for high-school students and in one of the early sessions Una, a brilliant fifteen-year-old, a born writer who came to Harlem from Panama five years ago, and only then discovered the conflict between races, asked me out of the blue: "Mrs. Franklin, (Her husband's name was Hugh Franklin) do you really and truly believe in God with no doubts at all?"
"Oh, Una, I really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts."
But I base my life on this belief.
Una kept pushing me, wanting to know (I think wanting to be reassured) if I really believed in God.  One day she brought it up at the beginning of class, and the others seemed to want to talk too, so I plunged in: "There are three ways you can life your life - three again - remember that the great writers almost always do things in threes.  You can live life as though it's all a cosmic accident; we're nothing but an irritating skin disease on the face of the earth.  Maybe you can live your life as though everything's a bad joke. I can't"
They couldn't, either, though for some of the kids who sat around the table that day not much had happened to make them think that life is anything else.
"Or you can go out at night and look at the stars and think, yes, they were created by a prime mover, and so were you, but he's aloof perfection, impassible, indifferent to his creation.  He doesn't care, or, if he cares, he only cares about the ultimate end of his creation, and so what happens to any part of it on the way is really a matter of indifference.  You don't matter to him, I don't matter to him, except possibly as a means to an end.  I can't live that way either."
Again there was general agreement.
"Then there's a third way: to live as though you believe that the power behind the universe is a power of love, a personal power of love, a love so great that all ofus really do matter to him.  He loves us so much that every single one of our lives has meaning; he really does know about the fall of every sparrow, and the hairs of our head are really counted.  That's the only way I can live."

One of the things that I am enjoying the most from this book is the sense that she makes.  This is a writer talking to a writer, I get her on so many different levels.  In fact, I am positive that if I had the opportunity to meet her when she was alive that we would have been great friends.  As it is, she died in 2007, and I shall have eternity to spend with her.  What Joy.

Later on in the book she talks about forgiveness, which was a hard part for me to read, but it was good at the same time.  A healing pain, perhaps.

' I said that a photograph could not be an icon. In one strange, austere way there are photographs of two people in my prayer book which are icons for me.  I keep them there for that precise reason.  They are people I would rather forget.  They have brought into my life such bitterness and pain that my instincts is to wipe them out of my memory and my life.
And that is murder.
I had, through some miracle, already managed to understand this, when I came across these words of George MacDonald's: 'it may be infinitely evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him.  The former may be a moment of passion: the latter is the heart's choice.  It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the idea of the hated.'

Thank you, Grandfather George.
He has come to my rescue many times, has said to me just what I needed to have said in a moment of doubt or confusion...And he has finally made me understand what lack of forgiveness means. I cannot stay angry; this is not a virtue in me; I am physically incapable of going to bed out of sorts with anybody.  But, although I have not stayed mad, have I excluded?  Put from my mind the person who has upset me? It is this which is the act of unforgiving.
I will remember this, I hope, each day when I come upon those two photographs of two very separate and different people.  So, yes: those images have moved from image to icon.  They have within them more than they are in themselves; in them I glimpse, for at least a fragment of a second, the forgiveness of God.
The Greeks, as usual, had a word for the forgiving kind og love which never excludes.  They call it Agape.  There are many definitions of agape, but the best I know is in one of Edward Nason West's books: Agape means "a profound concern for the welfare of another without any desire to control that other, to be thanked by that other, or to enjoy the process."
Not easy.  But if we can follow it, it will me that we will never exclude.  Not the old, the ill, the dying.  Not the people who have hurt us, who have done us wrong.  Or the people whom we have done wrong.  Or our children.
I wrote out this definition of Agape on the blackboard at O.S.U. I have written it on other blackboards, quoted it in lectures.  It teaches me not only about forgiveness but about how to hope to give guidance without manipulation.

There is more that I want to share with you, but I think that I will save that for another entry, as this one is quite long enough already.  I hope you enjoyed and were "provoked" (as in thought provoked) by the sections I quoted.  All I know is that there is a reason that I am reading this book at this particular time.  And I thank God for it.

I like, Madeleine, really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts. And I base my life on that belief.

The World: Henry Vaughan Published in 1650 as part of his Silex Scintillan, or Sacred Poems

I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
        All calm, as it was bright,
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years
                Driv'n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov'd, In which the world
        And all her train were hurl'd;
The doting Love in his queintest strain
               Did their Complain,
Neer him, his Lute, his fancy, and his flights,
               Wits sour delights,
With gloves, and knots the silly snares of pleasure
               Yet his dear Treasure
All scatter'd lay, while he his eys did pour
               Upon a flowr.

2.
The darksome States-man hung with weights and woe
Like a thick midnight-fog mov'd there so slow
        He did nor stay, nor go;
condemning thoughts (like sad Ecclipses) scowl
               Upon his soul,
And Clouds of crying witness without
        Pursued him with one shout.
Yet dig'd the Mole, and let his ways be found
              Workt under ground,
Where he did clutch his prey, but one did see
              That policie,
Churches and altars fed him, Perjuries
              Were gnats and flies,
It rain'd about him bloud and tears, but he
              Drank them as free.

3.
The fearfull miser on a heap of rust
Sate pining all his life there, did scarce trust
        His own hands with the dust,
Yet would not place one peece above, but lives
                 In feare of theeves.
Thousands there were as frantick as himself
         And hug'd each one his pelf,
The down-right Epicure plac'd heav'n in sense
                 And scornd pretence
While other slipt into a wide Excesse
                 Said little lesse;
The weaker sort slight, triviall wares Inslave
                 Who think them brave,
And poor, despised truth sate Counting by
                  Their victory.

4.
Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing,
And sing, and weep, soar'd up into the Ring,
           But most would use no wing.
O fools (said I,) thus to prefer dark night
                       Before true light,
To live in grots, and caves, and hate the day
           Because it shews the way,
The way which from this dead and dark abode
                   Leads up to God,
A way where you might treat the sun, and be
                   More bright than he.
But as I did their madnes so discusse
            One whisper'd thus,
This ring the Bride-groome did for none provide
            But for his bride.

John Chap. 2 ver. 16, 17

All that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eys, 

and the pride of life, is not of the father, but is of the world.

And the world passeth away, and the lusts thereof, but he that

doth the will of God abideth for ever.