“Disrupting the Familiar” is a tag line found everywhere on our Kellogg Sisters website. What does it mean?
First, we acknowledge that disruptions can be negative as well as positive. Disrupting the Familiar of the negative kind is kin to what we call “jolts”. Jolts are those events that send us rushing back and forth between the two ends of an emotional sliding scale with “petrified” living on one end and “ecstasy/ joy” on the other end. Scary jolts are big deals: job loss, a serious illness diagnoses, loved ones’ deaths, losing crops due to too little or too much rain, storm damage due to changing climate.
Scary jolts require resilience, picking up the pieces, assessing the next steps, asking for help and solving problems. These jolts require strength and perseverance. They require bravery. And if we are lucky enough to move past the jolts, we build up muscle memory that gives us strength to face the next.
Jolts can also move us to take big steps. At Kellogg Sisters, we acknowledge these jolts as part of our lives. The deaths of a brother and sister moved us into creating our business.
It was the jolt of our brother’s death that moved my sister to pour her grief and disappointment into fabric piecing and quilting. It was our youngest sister’s death that compelled us to honor her with an artist residency.
Unlike these jolts, Disrupting the Familiar in “normal” times has to do with the way we look at our day, the way we notice zucchini squash’s first yellow bloom, the way we adjust our focus to move beyond the familiar and see the beauty in the mundane. Our eldest sister looks around her world and notices vistas, what she sees on the horizon even if the horizon is the wall in the next room.
My mother, when helping me plan a garden, suggested I always look past the garden to the vista of the brome field beyond and work backwards to create ways the new garden would complement that vista.
My husband walks into a dilapidated hous
e aching to be saved and renovated and sees the possibilities of walls moved and original woodwork saved. He looks past the familiar, the sagging roof or termite-damaged rafters. Part of disrupting the familiar, then, is looking for possibilities in the familiar.
Disrupting the familiar is also about intentionally shaking up life in both big a small ways. That’s it.
That’s what Kellogg Sisters strives for.
Due to the disruptions in our familiar, we hope to disrupt yours. Through our co-creation process, our community events, our in-person classes and our webinars, through our retreats and our give back programs, we hope to support you in adjusting your focus and seeing your world differently.
We hope to do some shaking up. Join us!