Sport Guest Blogging

A good friend of mine sent me a broom for the winter holiday. She wasn’t commenting on my housekeeping, since she has never been to this home; she, in fact, lives over 1700 miles away. No, the broom was made in North Carolina, my former home and a current halfway point between this friend and me. The Friendswood Broom artists craft brooms from local materials; for our piece they used Bittersweet vines from along the Awannanoa River near Asheville. The broom connects me to those mountains, where I first lived alone.

I found myself attempting to draw the broom recently (I doodle in meetings). As a metaphor, it reflects a number of themes swirling around my life. My friend is sweeping a bad relationship out of her life, and finding a new place to establish a hearth. I am learning to focus on my new home and to be connected with the ground there –beyond cleaning it. The new year encourages me to sweep bad practices away and clean up my psychic spaces for work and home living.

Of course, my partner, DocMara, has been curling competitively, recently. His relationship to brooms grows weekly, and with it my understanding of them. In fact, his holiday gift from curling teammates was a broom of his own. We both appreciate the weight and feel of brooms in new ways when on the curling sheet.

And my faraway friend is a pagan with subterranean understanding of relationships and power. The broom, displayed proudly in our home reminds me of DocMara’s and my pursuit of connecting unfamiliar and overly familiar beliefs, lifeways, and people.