knit + tea goûter

Yesterday, I went to a tea party. I'd thought I was going to Katie's apartment to learn how to knit (a pastime I surely once believed to be only of old ladies), and instead spent four hours enjoying green-jasmine tea, Earl Grey cake, lavendar scones, clotted cream, raspberry jam, and un gateaux au chocolat. It was basically a little girl's dream come true in the company of six inspiring women.

They proved my entrepreneurial expat theory true again, with new Australian, British, and Taiwanese applications. And as I walked home, coming down from my sugar high, I couldn't help but think how much I've grown into myself since coming to Paris, too.

I have yet to accomplish any great success, at least in my mind, but I recently feel certainty in an "I'm onto something" sense (thesis-wise and not). Just as we can only work with tangled yarn by knitting past the knots, so is true in life. Granted, I'm only familiar with such wisdom grace â word of mouth... but still. We intend to actually knit next time. For now, there's a sweetness to our hopes.

"Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don't even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. [...] Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually becomes the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed." -Alice Walker, Living By the Word