what I'm doing now

November, 2024:
Of course I think about leaving the country - I spent nearly 20 years living outside the US prior to 2015, so the possibility of doing so again is never far from my mind. I think about Jordan, which I wrote about after a very short visit, where there could be excellent cultural and relief/volunteer opportunities, as well as a chance to immerse in Arabic and really learn. I’ve been plugging away at Duolingo and some old Teach Yourself recordings, in an effort to improve and also just to hear and affirm this language with a depth and intricate wisdom that has so many iterations across the globe, and which has been relegated in the US mindset to negative associations. I won’t write the negative, misleading words, because repetition gives them weight. Instead, I listen to music and poetry from the Levant, and explore the small ways I can discover what Arabic has to teach me now, with my limited capacity.

Sunrise at Salt Creek Campground - S’Klallam and Chimacum and Coast Salish ancestral lands.

And elsewhere there are several weavers I would love to sit near and learn from for weeks or months, in Laos, in Mexico, in Japan… 

Japanese maple in my friend and neighbor’s garden.

And I understand the outrageous privilege and freedom of movement these possibilities attest to, which is another aspect of my reluctance to just go somewhere else. I found a piece I wrote in 2020 about travel, and have added it here because the reflections are still true.

Heart of the Hills Campground, Olympic National Park

Heart of the Hills Campground, Olympic National Park

The main thing is though - all the images here are things I’ve seen during the second week of November, when I took off camping alone - here with my own senses, not far from where I’m actually permitted to live, to own a house that is not currently being bombed or flooded or set aflame…. I have the grace of this natural world around me, willing at every moment to interact and teach, and so I only need to remember to listen and be available to it, and since this is my greatest benefit in life right now, it feels like a responsibility, one that I take seriously and with joy and gratitude.

(you can stop reading here if you’d like to end on that note)

Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park

Now: All of that was written in November, soon after the photos were taken, and it has taken me a while to catch up. In the meantime, I self-published a book of poems whose title conveys the topic: Breathing Rubble Dust. Some of these poems have been published on this blog or the poetry page already, all of them written between October 2023 and February 2024, which is already so long ago.

Book cover: Breathing Rubble Dust, Tracy Hudson

Back cover: Poems for and from occupied lands

I know the poems are heavy and hard to read. They are for me, too. Because they reflect my waking awareness that a rogue nation is slaughtering innocents on a daily basis with the full support of my own country and an utter lack of impunity, despite worldwide efforts at condemnation.

How can this not be heavy? Given that my experience as mere helpless observer pales in comparison with anyone who lives there or has family being relentlessly and unpredictably targeted and bombed, their lives set aflame….. this reality is my breath, blood and bones, it’s part of my own body and yours as well, whether you realize it or not. This human collective, this earth’s skin in which we live together - each drop of poison affects the whole.

The gap between my posts is me trying to summon the sense that it is worth it, that I have anything to say that can matter. At the same time, the message and purpose of printing these poems is that our individual and collective creative voices matter, that we mustn’t stop speaking about how we are all affected by the reverberations of what happens in the world.

At the moment, I’m distributing these chapbooks personally. Contact me or comment if you’d like to know more, acquire a copy, or help spread them around. 

stitching together

Sewing a seam to join handspun, backstrap-woven wool striped fabrics.

As soon as I began to stitch a figure-8 seam with alternating colors, these bits of weaving seemed to become a legit textile. This decorative joining stitch made my weaving look a bit like the handwoven textiles I brought home from Damascus and Doha.

Joining stitch detail of a handwoven, handspun camel hair rug made in Raqqa, Syria, and purchased in Damascus in 2011.

Damascus in February, 2011, just because

Bedouin and other nomadic weavers using ground looms tend to weave narrow cloth in long strips that are cut to the right length and sewn together. I’ve always admired the alternating colors on the joining stitches, and knew it required extensive care and time to make these figure 8 stitches so close together. It wasn’t until I started sewing that I understood that alternating colors has a structural function. If you alternate colors, you’re adding strength and protection, because if yarn breaks in one place, it’s surrounded by the opposite color yarn and won’t simply unravel. Traditional methods almost always have a practical, structural reason behind them, in addition to beauty.

Joining stitch detail of an Iraqu Bedouin weaving, purchased in Doha in 2013

Bedouin weaver Noura Hamed Salem Shehayeb working on a small frame loom in Doha, Qatar, 2011. This weaver is interviewed in a film from Qatar Museums: https://qm.org.qa/en/stories/all-stories/women-of-the-desert-video/

Souq Waqif in Doha, Qatar, where I bought the Iraqi weaving and saw many others from Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and the Gulf, 2011

Even this tatreez on linen, a Palestinian fragment that a friend identified as possibly from Bethlehem, shows the dense alternating joining stitches. Makes me wonder if this is a case of a popular technique being used in excess of its structural need. I’m sure this join is stronger than strictly necessary, but it’s definitely beautiful. The artist experimented with another type of joining stitch in the area on the left.

Palestininan cross stitch panels with intricate joining stitches

Now I'm noticing joining stitches everywhere. This is a nice join on an embroidered bag from Gujarat, which I've been using to hold a writing project. It's more of a double blanket stitch, maybe similar to Van Dyke stitch…. I don't know how it's done.

Meanwhile, I carry on stitching my panels together. Looking at the joins on these various traditional pieces, maybe you can see why my own weaving feels more like the real thing when it’s sewn together with decorative joining stitches. And it feels good to make narrow strips into a wider cloth (although I still can’t say what it “is”, besides handwoven wool cloth.) There are times when ‘putting in stitches,’ as my quilting mentor Mrs Graham used to say, feels like the only way to hold it together. I mean that in the widest, most global sense.

How it looked when I first began. The two sewing yarns are both in action, and the yarn is threaded behind to begin the next section of stitching.

I could say deep things about ‘joining together’, but I think the metaphor is already obvious. I continue to not be able to get enough of Abdul-Wahab Kayyali’s oud playing, which moved me to poetry when I heard him live with Les Arrivants last month. Just learned about this powerful project combining music and poetry around themes of survival and devastation (Mafaza project, through Henna Platform). Wishing for more beauty, less bombing.

Another detail of this wonderful Palestinian embroidery, known as tatreez. Check out this website for more: https://www.tatreezandtea.com/

Nostalgic Doha photo of someone fishing, 2008

le guin onion skin all of a piece

A rainbow halo around the sun, over the Pacific Ocean at Kalaloch. Here, because somehow I need to share it, and the focus of my wonder keeps shifting like this, from the vast and epic to the miniature and daily - expanding and shrinking, but continuously stimulating wonder and amazement. (And I saw another one again today while composing this post, a rainbow halo around the sun, following a rain storm on an otherwise warm and sunny day.)

Gathering promise from Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned and Lola Olufemi’s Experiments in Imagining Otherwise

A glimpse of the table. (Handspun continuous cord from cat’s cradle textiles, a bit of fiber magic)

Daily practice of writing, reading, painting, sitting and watching carries on. Interactions of poetry, paper, paint, birdsong, water, weather, war, wisdom and the lack of it, wrangled through arrangements of objects, words, and thoughts.

I’m reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s Always Coming Home, a rich, indulgent tome of her brilliance and insight. So much resonance with the backwards-headed people, for those who know this work! I don’t have the capacity to get into it, really - the post title was a working title, but I like it so much I’m just going to leave it at that, with hopes of revisiting the LeGuin when I can be coherent. Let your own mind make the necessary connections in the meantime…

Having cooked two more stitched salvage sketchbooks with onion skins, I once again took an indulgent number of photos while opening them up. The unrolling is the most exciting part, because the colors are most saturated when wet. Each segment has its own serendipitous story to tell, and the unexpectedness of it makes each book a thrill (as I’ve mentioned before). Above and below are all unrolling images from the same two stitched books, as I gloried in the effects, both bright and subtle.

Spiraled to dry in my studio, they look like like a huge rose, and I hate to even move or fold them….

The books, these stitched rolls of paper that are colored and folded and written and painted, keep shifting and growing, in the manner of lichens: multi-textured, slow, subject to weather, force, accident…. One thing I love is the way paper changes when it gets wet, and the way these books can accept water, unlike most books. The texture will change, and things may get very blurry or mushy or require reinforcement, but that’s part of the never-ending assembly project that they are.

The focus on slow growth in silence and solitude is my way of being with the world right now. With offerings of awareness and acknowledgement to Arab women and everything being asked of them. It’s a couple of years old, but I’ve just seen a video highlighting Bedouin women, which features an interview with my weaving mentor from Doha. I knew her as Umm Hamad, but she introduces herself as Noura Hamed Salem Shehayeb in this film. It’s wonderful to hear her stories - we did not have enough language in common for me to hear them when I was there.

Working on a handwoven camel halter in Souq Waqif, Doha, Qatar, 2011

I believe the film accompanied an exhibit at the Qatar National Museum:

Qatar Museums film Woman on the Move

Spinning sheep’s wool in Doha, 2011

And another beautiful Arab woman whose work I know and admire was interviewed here (Instagram link - the Lebanese film maker’s profile on Vimeo is here). Widad Kuwar’s Tiraz home for Arab dress has been much on my mind, given the continuing destruction of Palestine. Memories of visiting Jordan and seeing the bounty of textiles ten years ago…. there was definitely a sense of needing to preserve and hold the knowledge, history, and beauty of these things, but it did not feel as desperate as now. Nothing from a few years ago feels as desperate as now - is that the right word? It’s a feeling of having the wind knocked out of me, a kind of continuous shock, where it’s impossible to accommodate the understanding of what is actually happening.

But, given that I have the unutterable privilege of peace, home, food, love, and solitude, I make use of it to grow on behalf of all of us, and as I wrote at the beginning of some time alone in February, “The details of things gather around me like patient friends, offering supportive gestures in their mute beauty.”

moss energy

What I love about the picture above is that I really can’t tell you what is going on there. I still don’t know yet. But the alchemical invitation of combined elements feels activated, there is potential for an emergence of some kind, however small and searching. That’s the nature of my studio space these days. It holds and pools and mixes together images, textures, acts of mark making and folding and tying - possibly generating amulets, or maybe the assemblage itself is the amulet, a protected and protective space to hold thoughts that wish to heal and halt destruction.

This rock also felt strongly of healing and wholeness. Such a wise and soothing design, so smooth and comfortable in the hand. I carried it along the beach, my first time back since an incident of local violence, and I left it there to mark the site with its calm assurance, another hope for healing and reparation.

I only feel capable of temporary offerings these days, momentary indications of care and tentative hope. I gain reassurance from these ancient forms that don’t need us humans, really.

A cedar showing me the beauty of a difficult life.

In preparation for a moss walk with the land trust study group, I was thinking about two aspects of mosses’ being. First, their extreme delicacy and sensitivity: with leaves only one cell thick, mosses have no protective layer filtering the outside world. The environment permeates their cells, making them highly susceptible to toxicity and air pollution. At the same time, many mosses are drought tolerant, can essentially go dormant until conditions are suitable to flourish, and when land has been depleted through mining or deforestation, they are often the first to come in and begin to find ways to grow. As some of the oldest plants on the planet, mosses have an ability to make soil habitable for other organisms. So they are simultaneously more sensitive, and more likely to create the conditions for communal thriving. These sound like the kind of characteristics the world needs, and it’s encouraging for those of us who have the experience of being too sensitive, feeling too much and too easily, to recognize that we also may have the capacity for encouraging better conditions for everyone, for starting over with small-scale care and attentiveness.

I roll it around in my mind as I visit the mosses and watch the birds and handle fiber: slow, gentle delicacy as teaching and strength.

Cotton from Traditions in Cloth, leather-whorl spindle by Allen Berry

Recycled paper stitched together and dyed with onion skins.

Maybe that’s where hope resides - with those of us who are unable to tolerate bombing of children, hospitals, libraries. Maybe our very intolerance, our inability to harden against this unacceptable reality, is what will create conditions where more of us can grow together.

A Bigleaf Maple offering shelter & embrace.

Small, persistent offerings feel small, but also crucial, as so much is being wantonly destroyed. Like the stitches in this Palestinian embroidery, creating meaning and preserving an attentiveness to life, to identity and place.

Palestinian cross stitch, found by chance in a local consignment shop. Someone tells me it has West Bank motifs from the Bethlehem area (thank you, Dot Ranch!) Along the right side are cedar/cypress trees of life.

more listening

I find myself again listening to the beach, and as with the previous time, I feel like letting the place speak for itself. Only now more so.

Words seem frail, as do individual humans.

Often, my photos follow a stem thought, a particular noticing that compounds on itself, in the form of a series. The thought on Rialto Beach, which is an astounding place to beach-listen, came after attempts to transcribe the waves….

shoo-aaah …. hmmmm-wah …..

ooooorr - rehhh …. brrrr-oh…wa …

prrrr-woh ….. sheeeeeeeeee ….

kraaaah …. kssshhh …. kraaaaaw

And the thought was, that all my countless written syllables, in all my notebooks, in English, German, French, or attempted bird-tree-sea-wind-wave languages, are nothing to the simplicity of stones in sand, the sea’s soft drag ever again recurring, whose writing was expressed all over this wide morning beach with an aching delicacy of line.

My wish is only to make/craft a response that says I am listening. This may be the whole point of all my writing and making: to say I’m listening, to immerse in the learning that is available to me, surrounding me in nature and textiles and all these living beings.

And P.S. - the sinuous lines of trees, also taking my breath and words away…

what I can do is try to write

Power hungry men

make rules

      make decisions

                 make war

from within their hunger

       not from deprivation,

        but from excess

More is never enough,

hungry since their power

           is not valid

          comes not from them

but is grabbed and claimed

           and vapid and fragile

Real lives in the balance

people hungry just for food

             and water

earth, fire, air -

            enough to live,

to call into relationship 

            with praise

People only want to live

in places without fear

but power hungry men

           like hungry ghosts

cannot be satisfied

           by just enough

enough to sing and sit

        and watch the clouds

        and hear the birds

        and touch the soil

these simple, sacred dreams

              are only fodder

         for the scavenging

         ideologies that serve

to drive the threshing machines

   that flatten all resistance 

          into stubble

broken stalks of

         things that might have grown

if power meant

         the way we know ourselves

         the way we show respect

         the way we humbly learn

         and carry teaching

© Tracy Hudson 2023

affirmation of faith

Quilt made by Florence Mallory of Prescott, Kansas, circa 1960

It occurred to me as I sat wrapped in my great grandma’s hand-stitched Double Wedding Ring quilt, and again as I contemplated an intricate tribal embroidery from Gujarat - these hand crafted things are expressions of faith.

Sleeve fragment of an embroidered blouse, purchased in Kutch, Gujarat, India, in 1994

Not necessarily a particular religion’s faith, although handcraft is often aligned with prayer and a sense of service to the divine. What I feel from these textiles is faith in the craft itself - the belief that it matters that we do this, that something is made with a person’s full attention of skill and years of practice.

Lakota tent lining, hide and beads, Plains Indians Museum in Cody, Wyoming

The way people carry on making beautiful things in difficult circumstances shows me this faith, and also hope. It was almost an overwhelming feeling, seeing multiple collections of Plains Indians textiles in recent days. The care, attention, skill, and faith in oneself and one’s community traditions held in these objects, large and small, is breathtaking.

Beaded band, Indian Museum of North America, Crazy Horse Memorial

Horsehair bridle, Indian Museum of North America, Crazy Horse Memorial

Sewing/beading kit, with work in progress, strands of beads, and sinew thread, Plains Indians Museum in Cody, Wyoming

Even when exiled onto a reservation and given ration cards to receive food from the US government, people made beautifully decorated bags to carry the little piece of paper.

Beaded bag and ration card, Plains Indians Museum in Cody, Wyoming

This devotion to craft tells me it doesn’t matter who gets it (since so many people nowadays don’t), —that there is value in the doing, in the joining of heart and hands and materials, even if you’re all by yourself. That in making a thing, something is given and received, offered with love, in contrast to the hurry and press and hard bargaining that surrounds us.

Embroidery of nomadic Banjara people, purchased in India in 1994

The faith spoken by these exquisite offerings sustains me, and encourages me to keep offering my own stitched and woven and handspun affirmations.

city moss thoughts

(This observation was written in an Airbnb that seems invested in the minimalist, urban professional look, in the otherwise moss-rich city of Portland, Oregon. The view directly out the window is what matters most to my early morning musing.)

Outside there is a small patch of (unidentified) moss and lunularia liverwort, at the edge of the manicured sod, accidental. A mini garden of forest vibe, quietly asserting itself in the unnoticed dirt under the stairs. Unconquered by gravel or mulch, it’s a welcome mat for my feet, in this otherwise very linear and grey built environment. The moss and liverwort form at the interstices, where the careful arrangement of planted lawn, gravel, and dark mulch laid out in square-edged strips, gives way to curve and slope. I hope they will be welcomed and encouraged once they are seen.

Lunularia cruciata liverwort

And I’m thinking about how we sometimes have to assert ourselves surreptitiously, quietly claiming what we know as our nourishing substrate, in spite of not being part of the design or the engineered layout of a place. We find what we need and grow, quietly and beautifully, offering our softness to those who can honor it with their own soft hearts and bare feet. The threat of distrust or misunderstanding never goes away, unless we are embedded in a large, conducive ecosystem of forest. Someone may decide to pave over or remove us any day, heedless of our contribution because they’ve been taught that we signal damage, neglect, rather than restoration and source. But there is hope and promise in our chloroplast-rich cells, our tiny leaves and lobes, our ancient adaptability.

ancient junipers

So many new textures, on a cycling trip in the high desert lands, wide open dry spaces to the west of volcanic mountain passes, so different from the forested, coastal place that I live in.

And an evening walk through a grove of junipers, some centuries old, gave me a little more time to listen closely. The voice of the old junipers, so quiet in the still desert air, enigmatic but open - this is their contradiction. They have nothing to hide, nor do they speak plainly.

Their language is simply their own, contained and elder, looping through the rounded clusters of their berried needles, or pointing gracefully up, the persistent reach of growth no matter how slow (the growth I can perceive, anyway - sinuous roots rose along the sandy path, exposed and smooth, reminding me of their reach, their strength so different from the visible branches.)

The junipers’ sense of movement is stillness - all these curves and curling lines, the flex of centuries, held in this form that is yes very old but not done growing. The languid lines convey this continuity of living - the movement is not trapped or stilled, just slow enough that our time scale sees rest.

And the way each one balances its own form, the space between them granting an integrity to each individual, space enough to be the shape they become.

marks on paper

At first, I was captured by the idea of reusing paper from old notebooks and elsewhere in my studio, recycle bin, ancient book pages, bags, receipts, collage stock, etc, to make long scrolls that fold into concertina/accordion books. The inspiration and guidance comes from India Flint’s beautiful online Salvage Sketchbooks workshop. Ever since I saw the foraging list, I’ve been digging up papers here and there, remembering bits I’ve been saving, (like the sweetly erratic first-grade writings of my partner’s students on the classic school paper,) and ravaging old notebooks (like the journal that became a nest in the last post.)

Painting with lichen on a stick and watercolor. Also shown is walnut ink (brown) and black sumi ink. India Flint makes use of all kinds of natural tools, which has encouraged me to try found feathers as quills - some of the scribbling at lower right is early feather use.

I got so caught up in the joining and decorating of papers, some of them have very little room left to write or paint in - but they make entertaining story books as they are, feeding my morning reflections and chatting with other drawings and paintings and sets of words.

The top is the Hamlet pages (see below), bottom left is the inside cover of the Hamlet book. Bottom right is my first handmade bound book, just a few signatures stitched up with no cover - also part of this current exploration.

It was exciting to have a couple of very old books ready to dissect and reconfigure: a 1912 edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that my grandfather and his brother both used in high school, and an equally old and brilliantly battered and ink stained Seat Work & Industrial Occupations, a book full of ideas for classroom creation which I scored from the free bin at the used bookstore in town. The old paper, especially in the Hamlet, is very delicate, so it’s just as well I painted all over these pages and saved other methods for newer papers. The fragility gives me a good excuse to use collage, and encourages a lack of attachment to any end result - although I’m taking lots and lots of pictures.

The pages were removed, and the covers are used to hold the accordion books, made from the removed pages and other papers. In the case of Hamlet, one accordion book is glued to the cover, but others are just packed in and tied up. The pages turn perpendicular to the spine of the book, as you can see in the photo above.

I love the view of the ends, with all the variety of pages showing their enticing edges.

Hamlet pages on top, with reinforcing collage in progress. Lower papers are being handstitched in preparation for dyeing. Unused pages from notebooks, bits of a book on insurance which I love painting over, and a printed image of Rilke’s handwriting from the Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek website of collected letters. Coffee filters are coming in handy as collage material (hello, Sarah!!)

Then came the simmering of books with leaves, which I had never tried before. The first one I did folded, and not much happened in terms of printing (not leaves, but cedar sprigs - I think they may also have been too dry.)

First cooked book drying. The process changed the color and texture in interesting ways, even though the printing was not great throughout.

First try at printing with Western red cedar (Thuja plicata). The distortions of the ink on this page, and the hint of plant print make me rub my hands with glee.

The next one was rolled with eucalyptus leaves throughout. I took advantage of a road trip to Northern California to gather Eucalyptus viminalis and California bay (Umbellularia californica), both of which smell wonderful while cooking. My studio is strewn with paper, in piles and small bits, and sewn together in lengths, and I’m definitely not tired of this yet. Thinking of putting poetry into some of these books. (And onto this website, actually. I may have to work up to it a bit more, but I’m pushing things around to make room.)

Some excellent clouds over the Golden Gate Bridge.

Unrolling of the eucalyptus book after cooking. (Eucalyptus viminalis from California was used)

Eucalyptus book drying, draped over a ladder.

A book in a box. This one was machine stitched

I think there’s something about how the paper transforms after getting wet, buckling and revealing its own fluidity, that makes the book feel more imbued with possibility. It’s on the edge of transformation, could so easily return to pulp, and this very tenuousness invites the writing of secrets and spells, codes and invented scripts, messages to offer the forest or the sea.

Another expressive low tide.

Today I unrolled the one with California Bay leaves, and it has some very subtle and exciting shapes and movements in it. This reminds me of doing stitch-resist dyeing, seeing the patterns and influence of water as it interacts with materials and their color properties. So unpredictably lovely!

Unrolling the Bay leaves……

Image is extra blue because it’s morning, shady light, and still wet.

The blue-green here is seeping from the ink of the printed page, which is actually only the one left of the stitching. The text printed onto the next page, along with the leaves.

Suffice to say, I now look at all papers differently, and have the capacity to make endless sketchbooks, notebooks, poetry books, treasure books, magic tomes, that I won’t feel precious about using up (although some of them feel significant to me already, as receptacles of transformative practice.) The stitching, by the way, is a great use for weaving thrums, which I’ve always vacillated about keeping. So many elements are integrated here - and the stitching and interleaving of accordion books gives material form to the kind of looping and circling and joining I’ve been doing in my journals already. There’s this big, multilayered book of life that I keep delving into, surfacing somewhere and lashing thoughts and experiences together, usually in a flurry of flipping pages. Now I’m seeing them seep into one another more like the colors of print ink or fallen leaves.

Can’t let you go without today’s rocks. I mean… really! These two left me breathless.

one of my stranger efforts

I had an image, of a nest made of my own writing. The nest I envisioned was lofty and soft, made from tissue-like paper - because it was a place to fall into, falling back with trust… just an image, a nebulous idea.

But then I also had an old journal, ready to shred. I’ve kept journals since I was 10 years old, and they’ve been progressively thrown out as I go back and realize there’s nothing more for me there. This journal was from the end of my college days. Important times, but apart from a few excerpts that I saved, not compelling reading or archive-worthy at this point. I wondered if I could cut it into strips, and weave the strips (using the term very loosely) into some sort of nest shape.

Strips are too wide, and much stiffer than in my imaginary nest.

That picture is from when I basically failed to keep it together, joining paper to paper with no glue or anything - I teased it all into the spiraling nest shape for a photo, but it was not an actual structure on its own. I found some flexible wire, and made an armature in a cross-hatched basket shape, to give the paper something to hold onto. Learning the properties of this paper, how this specific width and weight of material behaves, was the bulk of the exercise.

And then I spent more and more hours working strips into the nest. It was never really going very well, but each piece secured was gratifying, and the process gripped me such that I didn’t want to stop.

Yes there’s a quilt on the wall. Suddenly that happened again, too.

One side of the shape was relatively stable, the other side flaring out and constantly on the verge of falling apart. Somehow this always-almost-failing was part of the appeal to keep going. Each time that section had to be pulled apart and rebuilt, I just started over without any frustration - it was the nature of it, barely balanced, ineptly interlaced, as if I were coaxing a cloud into a shape, knowing it would shift a moment later.

I’m glad I used different colors of ink back then - made for more interesting nest-making.

Metaphorically, I think this manipulation of sliced up writing from thirty years ago was a way of holding and caring for the scattered bits of myself contained in them, seeing how they can be worked into a new arrangement, as part of the knowledge basket of now. Spending time with them rather than just shredding or burning gave me the chance to integrate what that time gave me and taught me, and to see more clearly what of it I’m letting go.

Calling it done because I used all the strips.

Also, the constant state of cascading failure may just be how things are sometimes… the patience it takes to just keep starting again with the falling apart areas, to recognize where it’s not working and let that part collapse instead of constantly patching and hoping and propping it up fruitlessly. The chaotic, untamed bits have to be seen for what they are, and maybe I don’t have the skill yet to tame them, maybe their refusal and anarchy are teaching me something that I need to listen to.

At any rate, I made this thing, over several days. Now I’ve moved on, but wanted you to see.

you see, I want a lot

That is really one of the best opening lines of a poem, isn’t it? Du siehst, ich will viel. (whole poem and my translation below)

The next line is Vielleicht will ich Alles: Maybe I want everything.

This is the selfishness of the seeker, compelled and uncompromising in the use of attention and time. I’m feeling a similar impatience, wanting it all, wanting everyone to Get It, uninterested in doing things that do not feed into this river of learning and listening, wishing to be more and more with whoever can share it. I feel it, in the demands I put on people (in my mind, at least), to bring their fullest selves into whatever we are doing. I know it’s irrational and unfair, but it’s me trying to will expansiveness into being, to support the opening we all need.

That last sentence shows the paradox of our situation - how and why can it be unfair to expect people to bring all of themselves to an interaction?   hmm….pause….

Because it is assumed (since it’s usually true) that we are all spread too thin, that portions of our attention are being rationed out among various, compartmentalized (if we’re good at this) areas of our lives, since we can’t possibly have room in our schedules or minds to devote to Just This One Thing Here Now, unless maybe we are getting paid to do that one thing, in which case we try to focus but only because someone is buying our time…?

What would it be like if ‘showing up’ were the norm, if each person were resourced sufficiently to bring themselves fully into the spaces they inhabit for work or play or daily necessity, if they could bring their emotions, their children, their pains, their broken hearts, their wild dreaming, so that the explorations we engage in together could be part of life and not a separately cloistered thing?   …end interlude….

I mean, this ROCK! I left it there, but kept thinking about it later. Love you, rock.

I’m working my way through Rilke’s early collection Das Stundenbuch, the Book of Hours, all written when he was less than 30 years old (!!). The title refers to medieval Christian prayer books, and the first section containing this poem is called The Book of Monastic Life. So “God” is there, but not always in a strictly Christian sense, and my favorite poems are when the idea of the divine is luminous and unbounded, seeping wide and woven into all life, and also an intimate listener, the you in “You see, I want a lot.” (In another poem he says “My God is dark and like a web / of hundreds of roots silently drinking.” Oh yes.)

And I’m actually undecided whether the ‘you’ in this poem (the 14th in the first section) is God - an easy assumption since much of the Stundenbuch is, as Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows call their translation, ‘love poems to God.’ With this one, though, he could be addressing himself, or the reader. The final stanza especially seems to be speaking to himself or fellow humans, although it could still be addressing the divine - possibly the object of his address shifts, but I’m happy to leave it amorphous.

Beach curve, showing how the tide sculpts around this point.

Later in this poem he says,

Du freust dich Aller, die dich gebrauchen /wie ein Gerät.

You love all who need you like a tool. This is beautiful to me, if you get past the negative sense of 'using someone like a tool,' in our extractive and exploitive discourse, and see a tool as essential.

One of my favorite tools, a low whorl spindle from Peru. Spinning Manx Longtan wool

People who have a real, felt need for this, as for a tool; that is, the thing needed to open something or create something. A tool is what gives us access, beyond what we can do on our own. It's also an extension of our bodies, an extension of our will, something we learn to work in conjunction with to do or make a thing, to make possible our own expression and learning.

Needing someone, divine or human, like a tool is intimate, and tender, and sweet, and vulnerable, and fundamental - dear Rilke! So right and true - and also how I want us to need one another, with that real recognition of here is what I want and need, and you are the unique being to help me with that, and I commit to learning how to properly work with you, so that we can do this thing together.

Honoring others as tools, which brings the tool back to its rightful place of trusted, essential collaborator, not just an inanimate object.

Was I saying something about the heiroglyphs on the beach? These worm tracks on driftwood look like script.

I was talking about this with my Rilke study partner (yes!! beyond thrilled to have one, especially a native German speaker, especially someone who Gets It,) and we both wish for this approach when we are teaching: to have people know that they need what we have to offer, and be committed to engaging themselves in the work of learning, so that teacher and student are in it together, sharing an experience that enhances the abilities of both. Students who need the teacher like a tool are exciting students, not passive recipients, but moving toward something with intention, and gathering what they need with active curiosity.

Still weaving black wool… nearing the end of the warp.

The desire motivating this poem, the thirst and serving (jedes Gesichts,/ das dient und dürstet) show Rilke’s mystic affinity. He is fundamentally a spiritual, mystic poet, his writing a form of seeking, and I find his words in conversation with those of Rumi and other mystics. In Coleman Barks’ translation, Rumi says “There are guides who can show you the way. Use them. But they will not satisfy your longing. Keep wanting that connection with all your pulsing energy.” With the simple, straightforward opening of this poem, Rilke claims that longing, and offers it with such intimacy that I can hear the word ‘beloved’ in the margins.

Du siehst, ich will viel. You see, I want a lot.

Vielleicht will ich Alles Maybe I want everything:

das Dunkel jedes unendlichen Falles the darkness of each endless descent

und jedes Steigens lichtzitterndes Spiel. and sparkling play of light of each climb.

Es leben so viel und wollen nichts, So many live and want nothing,

und sind durch ihres leichten Gerichts encountering only smooth

glatte Gefühle gefürstet. and superficial ease.

Aber du freust dich jedes Gesichts, But you are happy with those

das dient und dürstet. who thirst and serve.

Du freust dich Aller, die dich gebrauchen You delight in all who need you

wie ein Gerät. like a tool.

Noch bist du nicht kalt, und es ist nicht zu spät, You are not yet cold, and it is not too late

in deine werdenden Tiefen zu tauchen, to plunge into your becoming depths

wo sich das Leben ruhig verrät. where life quietly reveals itself.

• R. M. Rilke, Das Stundenbuch, I 22

beach listening

I used to think that as an artist, I needed to DO something when I saw and felt a beautiful or powerful scene. That I needed to make art from that specific view or immersion or feeling.

But now I know that it’s more important to just be here with whatever is going on, to pay attention with all senses, which today felt like listening.

At some points, it was actually sound-focused, as when I reached the outermost curve of the point, and the gentle waves approached from my right, passed in front, and continued to my left - a wraparound sound of sea caressing small stones.

Or when I heard a distant peeping on the water, higher than gulls’ voices, and could see lots of tiny bird shapes in the distance. The app on my phone suggested they are Marbled Murrelets, a few of whom I did see close enough to recognize. Yes, they are as sweet looking as their names sound.

self portrait in wet rock - this one almost came home with me - those lines!

Generally it was just a form of attention, the sounds joining the light on water, the shapes in the sand, the language of the tide and the shore, and I listened to see what it might teach me.

the color and texture of the sand are striking me now, whereas when I made the picture it was a neutral ground for the shell and stone

In addition to reminding me that I don’t have to do anything ‘with’ this (but who can resist taking pictures when the colors and textures and shapes are so cool), the teaching today was that wherever I am is the view that matters. I’m often seeing the bay from up the hill, and thinking oh I have to get down there! But the truth is, I can only see the angle of light and reflection, for example in the first image, from just that point on the hill. So I stopped there long enough to appreciate that this view is unique to this spot, before continuing on. There’s some broad lesson in there, that the view from where you are now is unique and most important. It makes me slow down, which has to be a good thing.

I can’t claim to understand the heiroglyphic messages in the beach debris or the designs of rocks, but I have a priority these days of listening to wise language, whether I know what it means or not.

bonus spindle content, with green rocks to swoon over

winter plans

I’ve got big plans for the next couple of months. They do not involve any travel, but possibly lots of walking. They are not about getting out, but going in. Digging around in my house and studio and digging on what I find there. Given that I’ll have a decent amount of time at home (if all goes as planned,) I hope to share some of what I do and find. Like this little piece, for example, about which more detail in the Akha page (under the textiles tab - I know, lots of pages, that’s how it is around here. Kind of like my studio space.)

Akha pouch with seed beads and metal discs, mounted on stretched linen, hanging in my studio. Purchased in Chiang Mai, Thialiand, 1998

I’m in my burrow and growing my peace and skills, with the help of fiber and textiles and the many people around the world who have given of their skills, over time, to enrich us all.

Action in the studio ranges from the always-in-progress weaving, to hand stitching, to machine piecing a quilt, to reading and writing and collage and sometimes all of them together. I’ve been modifying an 1895 tome on women’s health as a form of ….. resistance, or therapy, or radical optimism? Somehow it feels right to mark out all but the most positive, affirming words in this book of pompous misogyny masquerading as scientific knowledge. And often, the happy words are very few.

Book page, collaged and marked, with the words “support future friends now” remaining visible.

Book page, collaged and marked, with “CHILD - life - life” remaining.

But that’s an occasional exercise - as with many situations, I find it more fulfilling to engage and uplift the things that move me rather than to try to block out all the enervating, maddeningly entrenched negativity and ignorance. So many excellent people are moving along with their important, responsible, loving and living work. Voices I value right now are Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Tricia Hersey, and Reverend angel Kyodo williams, as well as my forever homey R.M. Rilke, whose Book of Hours I’m moving through very slowly in German, dictionary in my lap and helpful translations nearby.

simmering

And is this quiet life a way of hiding?

I tell myself that this is service, too –

to learn, to see, to read and hear and know

to bring to light my own awareness

and dwell within that knowing,

simmer as others have simmered,

become tender –

this shared tenderness, having

weathered the impact of truth.

This is what joins us, as undercurrent

- it does not flow with words, so

much as tacit understanding, that we

cannot afford to ignore what has

been done and how that formed what

still is done and shapes us now.

imagination

Wanting to write about Kevin Quashie, his book recommended by Leesa Renee often: The Sovereignty of Quiet, which sounded so compelling, and I knew it had to do with Black activism in some sense. But when I got it through interlibrary loan, come to find out it’s a literary studies book - Quashie is a professor of African American literature, and the musings and studies within this book are grounded in poetry, fiction, photography and film. Which fascinated me, as a student of literature and poetry (and, now that I think about it, what caused me to consider art and literature as separate from activism in the first place? That hegemonic education is showing its face again…)

At any rate, the quiet that Quashie is highlighting is a fruitful interiority, every expression of which got me excitedly writing notes. He defines it this way: Quiet is “a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life… the interior – dynamic and ravishing – is a stay against the dominance of the social world; it has its own sovereignty. It is hard to see, even harder to describe, but no less potent in its ineffability.” 

Greeting a huge elder fir near the Elwha River

He later explains that “the quiet subject is a subject… whose consciousness is not only shaped by struggle, but also by revelry, possibility, the wildness of the inner life.” This quiet is not a dampening, not at all the same as silencing, but an inner expansion of potential, an opening within that is not necessarily perceptible from the outside. Quashie calls the interior “expansive, voluptuous, creative, impulsive and dangerous…. not subject to one’s control, but instead has to be taken on its own terms.”

Collage ‘stepping stone’, part of an ongoing series

The examples illuminate how writers dwell in this quiet, voluptuous interior, and how it releases them from performance of expected roles and sentiments. Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, from 1953, gives us a richness of consciousness that exemplifies self-contained power, in the simple truths of her daily experiences, which refuse to rely on a sense of plot, narrative trajectory, or the grand scheme of things. The woman, alive, alert, and perceiving things in her own way, is a lesson in the complexity of human life - something often denied to those being tokenized or asked to represent their community in lieu of themselves. Quashie explains, “The capacity to be animated by feeling is Maud Martha’s agency. It is not so much that she is naive to… social peril…; it is more that the beauty of the feeling, the tender and thrill of the moment, is more meaningful to her humanity.”

Handwoven cloth, being sewn into a Lichen Duster jacket, back of neck seam

The book builds on many other examples, including James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde, with whom I’m immersed at the moment, enhancing the themes of attention, curiosity, self-regard, community, and love, all of which gain flavor and influence in quiet. And then we are able to see how this gives strength for the inevitable struggle, having cultivated interior richness.

“To ask about the freedom within is to reimagine the collective such that the inclination to stand up for yourself is no longer limited to responding to the actions of others; instead, standing up for yourself means understanding your heart, your ambition, your vulnerabilities - it means engaging and living by these. Standing up for yourself is not oppositional, but abundant.”

My emphasis. That last line could be repeated again and again. It’s essentially the main theme coming out of this work, as I see it: the more people realize themselves, truly give voice and faith to who they can be apart from, and in spite of, the conditioned expectations, constraints, and delusions we all face, the richer we can all become, together.

Lichen Duster in progress, using handwoven fabric, resist-dyed raw silk, and Khadi silk. Giving the seams Hong Kong finish. Collage stepping stones on the wall behind.

Done but for side seams and hem

Thus it felt like something coming full circle when I opened Kevin Young’s edited anthology, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, and the first poem by the earliest published Black poet in America, Phyllis Wheatley, is On Imagination.

There are many facts of Phyllis Wheatley’s life (c. 1753-1784) that spark outrage and anger, from the sale of her person at auction before the age of 10, to the disbelief in her ability to write the poems she brought for publication, and later dismissive comments about the poems themselves by the likes of Thomas Jefferson. But apart from, and in spite of all that, she claimed for herself this interior landscape of promise and freedom, and her ode to Imagination is a song to this very possibility, a lyric confirmation of all that Kevin Quashie has been saying.

Imagination! who can sing thy force?

…

We on thy pinions can surpass the wind, 

And leave the rolling universe behind:

From star to star the mental optics rove,

Measure the skies, and range the realms above.

There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,

Or with new world amaze th’ unbounded soul.
…

At thy command joy rushes on the heart, 

And through the glowing veins the spirits dart.

(excerpted from On Imagination)

Waters of the Elwha river: cool, soothing, and free

It felt like some kind of lesson, to have the potency of interiority emphasized, over a span of centuries, from an enslaved woman, nearly denied the truth of her literacy, to a contemporary poet laureate. Urged by Quashie’s study, I’m paying attention and taking this emphasis to heart.

Rita Dove, from Thomas and Beulah:

Daystar

…

And just what was mother doing

out back with the field mice? Why,

building a palace. Later

that night when Thomas rolled over and

lurched into her, she would open her eyes 

and think of the place that was hers

for an hour – where

she was nothing,

pure nothing, in the middle of the day.

Elwha River, near Port Angeles, WA

And yes, I made a jacket using my own handwoven fabric. And that feels good. But I’ve been more compelled to share the poetry and surrounding thoughts. The Lichen Duster and a visit ot the Elwha River provide most of the visuals today, although they are only loosely related to the text.

This was the warp for the fabric for the jacket - it was on the loom for quite a while. I wove about 6.5 yards of 14” wide fabric. The duster pattern is good for backstrap woven cloth, because the pattern pieces are narrow.

flowers, thoughts, carrying on

Time goes by so fast, the photos I wanted to share are already two months old. But I can walk you back through some springtime blossoms that are long gone now - it fits with the theme of life being fleeting, change inherent, and so forth. That’s all we’ve got. An indigenous woman I admire recently posted that sometimes “summoning up the energy to be positive and educational and shit is just beyond me.” When you’re looking at how things have gone down in the past, leading to what’s happening now, it often feels that way to me, too. Case in point: I dug around for my pretty flower photos, knowing they might just be escapist prettiness, and behold the field of Camas above. Which is a single acre of restored native prairie, salvaged from the entrance to a golf course. It used to be most of the land between this hill and the qatáy lagoon, qatáy being the name of the S’Klallam village that was located in what is now Port Townsend. (The lagoon and prairie are spelled Kah Tai in promotional literature - notably when you look up the qatáy spelling, you see that the village was burned in 1871. Even how we spell things changes the history that people see.) I read somewhere that much of the Willamette Valley in Oregon was also covered in this type of prairie, prior to colonization. Anyway, this is the Camas, a flower with edible bulb that was a staple of life for the people - and as Robin Wall Kimmerer notes in some of her essays, the foraging of the people encouraged the growth of the flowers, in a cycle of reciprocal sustenance.

The other pretty flowers came to me from a local farm’s weekly share. It was such a cold, wet spring that the vegetables were late, but the tulips just kept blooming, and we got them four weeks in a row. I had never really gotten the infatuation with tulips, seeing them pop up all tall and bright, then drop their petals. But this year, I actually went to the Skagit Valley tulip festival, since my mom was visiting, and we walked through staggering fields of tulips in bloom and whoa. Then the little bouquets in my home from the farm share showed me how tulips can look like silk, how they have depth and impossible symmetry, and now I’m full of respect.

I also got to pick the colors - purple tulips getting wild as they open

Tulips almost dancing in their bunch of five.

I’m otherwise immersed in Alexis Pauline Gumbs, reading her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, kind of on repeat. It’s the kind of thing you read, and you need to read it slow so you can feel it, and sometimes you need to read parts out loud to yourself or to friends. And then you need to read it again, and go back and find that thing. So I’ve been living with it for months now - but I’m not actually ready to share any excerpts or reflections. I will say that her Stardust and Salt program has also been a part of my life, a stimulation to engage in daily creative practice. Which I was sort of doing, but started a whole new thing thanks to the beautiful words and thoughts and encouragement and love emanating from this awe-inspiring woman. Wow.

Wool warp and weft, above my lap of linen

I also keep weaving, some cloth that will be cloth, that I can use to sew a garment, is the idea. Same yarn, warp and weft (unusual for me), from the deep ancestral stash of my friend Ann. It is weaving up soooo nicely, and I’m eager to see how it snugs up with a good wet finish. But I have many yards to go yet - I made a long warp this time. And I keep getting called outside by birds and green and tree friends.

Also retro - trilliums were in bloom back in early May.

Really just making an effort to be here with some content that is wholesome, loving, full of curiosity and respect, and possibly encouraging to others. On that note, I’ve got a Hafiz poem for you. And one more thing I’ve been doing is watching Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls. It’s related to all of this, believe it or not. What the beautiful Big Girls are giving me is joyful resistance, an assertion of life and love that does not look like what we're typically offered as the ideal. They're blasting open our indoctrination with every episode of the show, to assert the beauty of real, messy, confused, hopeful, determined, struggling people. The things they say to me about bodies and movement and dance and love are very similar to the poem below, and thus it intertwines, and I’m thankful.

(Poem by Daniel Ladinsky, in the guise of rendering Hafiz into English, but after reading this article, I won’t call it Hafiz… nevertheless beautiful.)

Because of Our Wisdom

In many parts of this world water is 

Scarce and precious.

People sometimes have to walk 

A great distance

Then carry heavy jugs upon their 

Heads.

Because of our wisdom, we will travel

Far for love.

All movement is a sign of 

Thirst.

Most speaking really says,

“I am hungry to know you.”

Every desire of your body is holy;

Every desire of your body is

Holy.

Dear one, 

Why wait until you are dying

To discover that divine 

Truth?

taking up space

I’m just going to start with the piece that was conceived for the space, as a way of introducing my art show, which has been up for some time, and has two more weekends before closing on May 1. The show is called Yarn, Cloth, and the Pull of the Earth, and it’s hanging at the PNW Quilt & Fiber Art Museum in La Conner, WA. It’s quite an experience to have a space that I can fill all by myself - an interesting, faceted, space, since it’s the third floor of a historic Victorian house.

One room of the show, on the upper floor of the museum, with me weaving by the far window.

The walls tilt inward, about 5’ from the floor, and this was actually perfect for what I wanted to do. Most of the pieces in the show involve two layers: a woven ‘ground’, hung against the wall, and suspended ‘lines’ of handspun yarn, which need to be higher and a few inches in front of the ground. Without this tilt in the wall, it would have been tricky to figure out, but the space had what I needed, so I could just hang the work. The colored cotton panels with bunches of wool in between make up the one piece that I made specifically for that wall, after visiting the space to scope it out. In this sense, “taking up space” means I used the space almost as a medium for the work, taking it up as one takes up a tool in the hand.

Handspun, handwoven cotton in natural brown and green.

The woven cotton is all handspun, essentially whatever I had ready to weave, supplemented with some new brown and green fiber from Vreseis and Traditions in Cloth. It’s all two-ply yarn, and I plied same colors together until I ran out, then some skeins were mixed, then I likewise wove until I ran out, so the color changes in the weavings happen by chance. They are interspersed with walnut-dyed wool, a gift from Devin Helman, spun rough with no prep and plied back on itself. In several of the pieces for this show, I’ve been exploring the expressive potential of strands of handspun yarn, the way they are like drawn lines or brushstrokes, handmade marks that have unpredictable voices of their own.

Coffee Lines - a handspun yarn based on the theme of coffee, hanging at the top of the stairwell before you enter the exhibit.

Handspun wool lines, with handwoven ground of walnut-dyed commercial 10/2 cotton.

Handspun wool lines (rescue sheep’s wool), handwoven ground of commercial warp, handspun Navajo Churro weft.

Taking up space is the real value of the show for me. Having this opportunity to fill two rooms with my work, my priorities, my ideas about what is important, and hoping to help others appreciate the wonder of yarn and cloth. The nicest moments have been just sitting in there, weaving in the light through the window.

Detail of weaving in progress, all cotton, at the museum.

A special day when I coordinated well with my weaving. Thanks to Dana Weir for the photo.

View from room 1 to room 2, through white lines. Cotton Strips on the right - more handspun cotton, in white and grey.

Caravan handspun, on ground of linen warp, handspun wool weft.

My Caravan yarn got to come out and play, hanging with a new woven ground. The pieces are all interacting with one another, creating something with their crosstalk.

I also included some microscopic images of fibers, taken when I was doing conservation study and using polarized light microscopy to identify fiber content. The images were so beautiful, I wanted them to be shown as artwork - and they emphasize the theme of looking closely. There is more I could say, but it has taken me long enough to post about this show, and I’d like to leave this here today.

about that string

A word about the string. Eine Saite, a string, is the title of this gathering place of  thoughts and images. It comes from a poem by Rilke, Am Rande der Nacht (On the Border of Night), which sets up the speaker, the person experiencing, as a string: 

Ich bin eine Saite,

über rauschende breite

Resonanzen gespannt.

 (I am a string, stretched over rumbling, broad resonances.)

The full poem and translation are posted in the about page. I recommend reading the German aloud, if you can come close to pronouncing it. The rhythms are wonderful.

RIlke loves a wide open space - field of Queen Anne’s Lace and big firs during the heavy snowstorm days.

It has appealed to me to have “A String” be the title of a website that is mostly about spinning, weaving, sewing, textiles. However, I’m feeling the need to admit what German speakers must already know - although have been too polite to bring up: the string in Rilke’s poem is a musical instrument string. The word in German would be different if he were talking about yarn, thread, spun fiber. Strings for instruments are usually made from sinew or metal - a different material entirely. So there you have it, I admit to knowing that the stretched string in the poem is not the same kind of string I have stretched across my studio for weaving.

Beginning of a walknut-dyed weaving. 10/2 cotton warp and weft, mill spun.

And yet. We are in the world of poetry, where meaning is specific and also deep, layered. Any string of any material can be stretched across rumbling, broad resonances. The strings of my warp contribute to the vibrations within a vast space (more so, if I’m weaving outside.)

Weaving linen outdoors last summer.

The poem culminates in the realization: 

Ich soll zilbern erzittern - I must silverly shiver! 

(My translation, my exclamation point) The person who is a string suddenly knows how to participate, how to create something that will cause “everything” to “live under me” - or as I interpret, to enliven in that space over which I am stretched. And this is another parallel - when my yarn is spun, and stretched, and woven, I silverly shiver. I choose my participation, that will resonate around me, through all the enlivened things. 

Handspun cotton catching the sunlight

This is elusive, but it has been deeply known to me since I first read the poem: that there is a way to be in the world, activating your own sound, evoking harmony, resonance, dance, light.

My writing slows as it becomes harder to make the words say what I understand from Rilke - but it’s there in the poem.

In Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows’ translation, they say:

A silver thread,

I reverberate:

then all that’s underneath me

comes to life.

My neighbor finds resonance in shaping found wood sculptures and suspending them.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a long time, and about other things Rilke… so many unwritten Rilke thoughts! But especially lately, I’ve thought about poetry and translation and what words mean, because it’s important for subversion, for questioning what we’ve always been taught.

I learned about and ordered this book, an interpretation of the Therigatha, delving only slightly into the stir that it caused around the question of whether it could be called a ‘translation.’ (The current subtitle, “original poems inspired by…” is modified, post-stir.) Without going into my own reading of the original Pali text and various officially sanctioned translations, I will just say I’m more interested in finding out what a poem can do for you, how it cam make you feel and possibly change. (And this version of the poetry of enlightened women does more for me upon first reading than years of referring to the literal translations.)

And I also tend to think that anyone reading poetry, even in a native language, is engaged in translation to some extent, because we each bring our own history of understanding to all words, and we cannot say or know what a poet “means” with a certain word, apart from how it affects us. (Ooh, intent and impact… there’s another thick topic.)

I truly hope to bring more poetry here, alongside the weaving, since they are intertwined in my body and mind. This pulling of myself in the two directions, from words and intellect to hands and technique, makes me feel that they are two ends of the same string, and that all these meanings are present and vital, if not for Rilke then for me, through the intersection of his words and my life.

that soothing rattle

High on my favorite spindles list is one of several from Peru, a little one-ounce spindle with a captive ring. The loose ring makes a sound while the spindle spins, a rattle that gives the spindle its Quechua name. I’ve heard various theories on why the captive ring, from audible tracking of the spinner, to woodworkers’ showing off. But in wandering around my own neighborhood spinning, I’ve found another, somewhat enchanting role for this chattering sound.

A passel of Peruvian spindles, with the chac-chac on the left. At least a couple of these are constantly in use around (or outside) the house.

We have a lot of birds around my house. Really, concentrated near my house. I can walk for over a mile with my binoculars, and not need them until I’m back within 50 yards of my driveway, where all the birds hang out. During the winter, it’s mainly American Robins and Varied Thrushes, Chickadees (Black-capped and Chestnut-backed), and Kinglets (Golden-and Orange-crowned), with Spotted Towhees, Dark-eyed Juncos, Red-breasted Nuthatches, and Anna’s Hummingbirds year-round. So, I’m wandering around outside with my spindle. This has, I realize, become an essential spiritual practice during pandemic times: walking outside with my spindle. On most days when it’s not (as now) pouring down rain, I tend to get out there at least for a spell, and it helps.

Bare chac-chac spindle, with a low whorl by Allen Berry, wool dyed by Abstract Fibers.

Recently, I was wandering up the hill behind my house, where there is an unbuilt lot full of trees, a band of partial forest very popular with the juncos. They are usually flitting around there, dashing across the open space by the drive, chipping and chucking their rapid, abstract calls. On this day, I was able to mingle quite closely, moving very slowly and standing still for long stretches of time, but never ceasing to use my chac-chac spindle. It rattled along, renewed with each flick, and the birds were never disturbed. On the contrary, I believe (and this is not the first time I’ve had the thought) the spindle’s irregular purr actually allowed me to get closer to the birds without causing alarm.

Orange on orange - love when the spinning matches my clothing!

The gentle sound of wood against wood, natural but irregular, may be similar enough to bird calls to mesh with their soundscape. If I knew the kind of language that had beautifully rich single words to express whole phrases, I would name this spindle “soothing to the birds.” As I stood there spinning amidst juncos and towhees I thought, this is really what it’s all about. This is belonging. I realized in that moment that the work of my life is to learn not how to stand out, but how to blend in.

It has been fun to gather images of soothing-to-the-birds from the various times I’ve taken pictures over the last few years. Lately the spindles have mostly been working toward the weaving above and its future companions, with stripes of Navajo Churro, dark Coopworth, Manx Longthan, and madder & indigo dyed Corriedale. The spinning moves me closer to the weaving I wish to be doing, the people who have practiced before me, and now the birds who share this place with me.

(Sometimes I put my musings about spinning over here in the spinning blog, in case you’re looking for more.)