t p e w S y a aw Photo courtesy of Bethany Ridenour
BETHANY RIDENOUR’S BROOMS EMBODY CRAFT, SPIRITUALITY AND PRACTICALITY By Sandra Strieby
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ETHANY Ridenour makes brooms and teaches broommaking, finding deep meaning in a craft that blends elements of the prosaic and the profound. As a young girl living on the streets, Ridenour never dreamed that brooms would one day be her livelihood. But her craft and her business, Bristle and Stick Handcrafted Brooms, are firmly anchored in that challenging past. Her story is one of cleaning and healing, story-telling and craft and root-finding.
GENESIS
“As a young person I had a pretty traumatic life experience,” says Ridenour. From the chaos engendered by that experience, two threads emerged — threads that would become lifelines for Ridenour and lead, eventually, to her current calling. First, she became “sort of a neat freak,” unconsciously striving for order in life that was out of order. Most especially, Ridenour embraced sweeping. “When I was somewhere where I could use a broom, I would pick it up,” she says. “I look at it like I was literally trying to heal my own trauma.” Second, Ridenour found shelter and connection in wild places. As a girl on the run, “the places that I found that I could hide, where no one would find me or look for me, were green spaces, so I tend to think, as I say, I was raised by trees. When other people might have had a safe home or somewhere like that where they felt safe … that 14
was my home, those were the relatives that took care of me.” From that intimate relating with the more-than-human world, Ridenour began learning and teaching ancestral skills — the routine processes that have been part of landbased people’s way of life for millennia: “making fire by friction, building shelters, making baskets, making clothing, tanning hides, things like that,” she says. Hide tanning became a specialty; Ridenour also found herself drawn to hand crafts. As she taught skills, Ridenour quickly realized that the benefits her instruction conferred were multi-layered. Beyond the crafting skill itself lies another way of relating to everyday objects and other people. “Some people have never made something that they use,” she says. “Not that long ago our ancestors made every single thing that they would use on a daily basis. And I think people are really craving that sort of re-connection.” With the process of reconnecting come freedom and empowerment — and the type of healing Ridenour herself experienced through her own connection with the natural world. “I started … noticing how … sitting in the circle with people, doing crafts, making things — just watching how much healing happened,” she says. “I think a lot about how our ancestors did that — they would sit together, they would sing, they would pray, they would put prayers into the stuff they were making.” Imbued in that way, stuff becomes more than stuff, and the makers are changed, as well. A handful of years ago, in Ridenour’s words, sweeping and crafting came together in her