drought tolerance - notes from August

(from 20 August 2023, during a time of practice encouraged in the book Poetry as Spellcasting)

In the smoke of so many wildfires, I still light a small flame, to honor the element of fire, to acknowledge my relationship with this inscrutable source of heat and light, this relationship that does set humans apart — the ability to invoke fire, tend and use it. And will humans ultimately be destroyed by an excess of heat, having become too greedy with this knowledge and ability?

Is there any way to dial it back enough to simply live well, in some mode of harmony? That is the prayer in this candle and practice — a wish to be able to live well in relationship to everything around. The daily offering of water and flame activates an observance of our interdependence, these elements and the life I call me.

The smoke and drought make everything feel stark and struggling.

Breath and moisture are life, and 

drought-tolerant means 

knowing how to rest, 

how to slow essential processes 

to wait for the 

right conditions for flourishing

Rilke: “Künstler sein heißt: reifen wie der Baum, der seine Säfte nicht drängt und getrost in den Sturmen des Frühlings steht ohne die Angst, daß dahinter kein Sommer kommen könnte. Er kommt doch. Aber er kommt nur zu den Geduldigen, die da sind, als ob die Ewigkeit vor ihnen läge, so sorglos still und weit.” To be an artist means not to count or reckon but to ripen like the tree that does not force its sap and, trustingly, stands through the storms of spring without fear that summer will not come. It will come. But it comes only to the patient ones, who stand there with eternity stretching around them, quiet, vast, and free of worry. (Letters to a Young Poet, 23 April 1903, Barrows & Macy translation)

For Rilke, summer is the rich and ripening, fruitful time, whereas in my forest garden, the summer (from July onward) is drought and the time of patience.

The notion of drought tolerance, learned from observing mosses, combines with Rilke’s poem from the Book of Hours (II,1): “jetzt mußt du in dein Herz hinaus/ wie in die Ebene gehn” — now you must go in your heart out, as into an open plain.

It’s a going inward and an opening out, the open plain is found in the heart. There’s a deliberate sinking into the interior, a dormancy that is not sleep or shutdown, but activated choice, exploration. It is Kevin Quashie’s sense of surrender: “a giving into, a falling into self” and Audre Lorde’s “when we begin to live from within outward…then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense,” and the guidance I took from them to “surrender to the vastness of inner fertility.”

Forest shapes, trees inside out

The edge or seam (der Saum, another favorite word of Rilke’s) of the senses, which is the overlap of interior & exterior, where we balance to gauge what is needed for flourishing.

Speaking of seam, I’m working on the last two seams joining these narrow backstrap-woven pieces.

Handspun, handwoven cloth made of joined strips

Current weaving, cotton and hemp cloth for the kitchen

Dormancy     as skill of waiting

and also actively sensing

             heightened attention at       the border of

inner and outer                der Saum, like a sewn seam, overlapped

what is the balance of interaction at that seam, what needs to flow

in or out, open pores or close

    breathe in or exhale

                       or hold   that    breath

                                                            protect and/or immerse

my waxy coating and stomata can do both

attuning across this         in/out

                                                  passage, adjusting equilibrium 

to close up          when opening is a danger

       and to risk expansion when

                the scent of beloved invites                         (August 2026)

Evening light and wind making broken rhododendron shadows on the wall

Poppies - ok, this happened before August, but their shapes and colors, against the grasses…!

Rilke: “in deinen werdenden Tiefen zu tauschen,/ wo das Leben sich ruhig verrät” - to plunge into your developing depths, where life quietly reveals itself (Book of Hours I, 14, my translation)

sinking, submerging, pooling, — entering into the silent space of potential with open receptiveness …also related to ‘sich sein eignes Dasein ausschöpfen’ - to scoop out one’s own existence, oneself, to the very end (Letters to a Young Poet,12 Aug. 1904)…. the open resonance within, ‘Geigenleiber, von murrendem Dunkel voll’ - violin bodies, full of murmuring darkness

The waiting that is not only waiting, although patience is paramount — one is participating in growth and unfolding, invisibly. It’s going on at the depths, but not without attention, deliberate and conscious surrender (to the vastness of inner fertility).

So dormancy, patient waiting, is a skill, and the living being has to be attuned to the subtle shifts in external conditions as well as the pace and processes inside. It’s a balancing on the edge, the hem, the seam, of one’s own senses, learning to know the interaction of interior and exterior, what is needed for flourishing, not just in terms of given conditions but also action, commitment, when to burst forth or flow, or reach and stretch. 

(24 August, 2023)

Where the liberated Elwha River meets the sea (I’ve visited and mentioned Elwha many times, and was surprised to see that the last time also included notes about Kevin Quashie’s book.

Banana slugs mating and making the sacred symbol of the heyiya-if, from Ursula K. LeGuin’s Always Coming Home

about texture

Receding wavelets’ shimmering smoothness

Walking on the winter beach a couple of months back, I was thinking of previous experiences and what I wrote about them. I went to search for these writings, by typing in the title of my website and the word ‘beach’. (This is the easiest way to find something in here, if you can remember key words - pair them with ‘einesaite’ in a search, and it will find posts that include the keyword, or that use that tag.) This time, I forgot to add “-ai” to the end of my search, which removes the automatically generated AI results (and, I can only hope, reduces the environmental strain by a drop), and so I got the following overview: ‘“Einesaite” appears to be the name of a blog/website focusing on nature, poetry and textures (forests, landscapes etc.) not a specific beach itself.’ Of course, I hadn’t realized it looked like I was searching for a beach named Eine Saite. What intrigued me though, was that this machine-guided language hunting determined that my blog is about “textures.” No mention of textiles, or weaving, which is interesting, but - textures. Yes, this is a blog about textures, more often than not.

Rock surface and bark surface interacting

I wrote in November last year, “Today every detail looks sharp and eloquent, each texture speaking its richness, particular and wise.” I think about texture most of the time - it’s inherent to fiber work and collage, and garden work, also just the work of seeing, noticing, differentiating.

I think about how a lack of texture is presented as a good or desirable thing, especially in this time of digital enhancement, the increased capacity to erase anything considered faulty or blemished in a surface or image. Something Bayo Akomolafe said about industrialization in an interview on the Emerge podcast comes back to me: the land “was smoothened and flattened, and all the sacred & bumpy and groovy places were rejected and pathologized.”

This process continues, with newer products smooth, slick, frictionless - as our bodies are also supposed to be, advertisements tell us: no snags, no ripples, no bumps or wrinkles. A perfection of limbs based on Barbie doll ideals and supermodel svelteness, all of which denies the reality of growing, which makes marks. Bearing children, being chldren, interacting with a tangible world that leaves scars in undramatic ways - a stray spark from a fire, a brief moment of inattentiveness in a kitchen, a young animal’s scratching, biting exploration of their world - all of this makes marks, leaves behind a language of experience which the digital ideal would smooth away. Give you instead the countenance of an anime hero, large-eyed, pale and smooth, sword-wielding and scarless.

Lap view of quilting in progress… large appliqué hands reach out

Textured winter estuary, Skagit Bay Wildlife Preserve

This comes up for me when reading or watching futuristic fiction, where people in outer space live in rounded, smooth-walled spaces and plant or animal fiber clothing is a thing of the past. I can’t help thinking it’s a textureless fantasy promoted by those who would “smoothen and flatten” all surfaces. Never mind the kitchen, the laundry, the garbage, the need to rake leaves or shovel dirt - your texture-free existence spares you all that! But how would that actually work… and is it any wonder that people disassociate or feel untethered when faced with this so-called ideal? We need grounding in those textured activities, the scratchy and crumbly and ragged-edged reality of the natural world. I’m not going to cite studies or expert analysis - you know this. You know that to get your hands dirty in soil or sand or clay, to simply hold a stone, or a cat, or a ball of yarn — it helps. Something real asserts itself, and you feel more alive, and more a part of everything (rather than apart from everything). You feel the texture of something, and you feel the texture of yourself.

Mossy firewood stack, speaking its own language

The friction of your interaction with the world — even against the air, or in water, or walking on asphalt, that point of contact is never utterly smooth or frictionless. (I remember in Physics class, our teacher had to specify that certain things were occurring on Frictionless Pond, in order to use equations that could disregard the variables caused by friction. The point was, it doesn’t exist.) Friction is always there, it defines our participation as a body. Your texture is your language of interaction with all that surrounds you.

Tide trails on the sand, like tiny rivers.

Another quilt in progress, quilted lines furrowing the surface

Your texture is what I love about you; it is who you are.

Pablo Neruda, in “Toward an Impure Poetry,” wrote:

The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things — all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the word that should not be underprized.

In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substances, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.

Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand’s obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.

in which things become (more) cosmic

I’m weaving “jakaku sisan”, that is, an Andean weaving pattern with a pickup technique, worked on 16 pattern threads, which takes a basic narrow pattern and doubles it. The doubled pattern is also rotated in this case, so that the two sets of pattern move in opposite directions (I say move because it looks like a wave, and I feel a movement in the direction toward the spiral part.) What mesmerizes me about this pattern, though, is the completeness of the intertwining, the way the shapes made by the contrasting colors cannot be separated. Particularly in the simple band, the width of one unit of the pattern - the two colors are identical interlocking shapes. The doubled pattern introduces another shape formed by the rotation, but it still feels utterly inseparable to my eyes and mind. What I mean is that this mind which is trained to see ‘figure and ground,’ which tends to interpret many Andean patterns that way, even though that’s not how they’re seen within the weaving culture - that mind is overridden or bypassed by this pattern. It sneaks behind my consciousness and says “look, there’s no shape + background, it’s all just one, integrated thing.” This pattern has always been compelling to me for this reason.

The basic curl (sakas) pattern, woven recently with spindle-spun wool

Jakaku sisan, woven more than ten years ago (YouTube link to a former self) using a chart, with Tahki Cotton Classic yarn. This is one band, folded and stitched to make a backstrap - the pattern is the same with colors reversed on the back. Here’s a closer video, although the quality is not great.

In a teaching packet from a weaving workshop, Abby Franquemont describes the pattern like this:

A jakaku is a bird, like a hummingbird. They like to go for the sisan part of the flower, and for flowers where you see the sisan. It has curly bits. And a jakaku will stick its beak right in there.

Which I may have seen before, since the workshop was in 2018, but I did not read or really take in this bit until recently. Like a mystic poem or a koan, it struck me just when I was ready, ringing loud with gleeful resonance. The bird and the flower, interlinked and reciprocal - yes, the pattern says just that! And not just bird & bees & flowers, but this highly evolved, very particular type of bird, the hummingbird with the long beak and long tongue and the flowers that court this bird’s attention with their complex shapes and curls.

It makes me think of the astounding specificity of adaptation, how it’s almost an act of love, how a creature so intricately responds, over time, to a plant and vice versa. How one organism reveals itself to be part of The Organism, this wholeness, in its intimate adaptation to a particular curve of shape or attitude of presentation… Like dancers who bow to one another, implicitly saying I know we are different and that I will make minute adjustments to fit myself to you for this movement… we belong together but we do not exactly match, and so I will be alert and responsive to our interactive shape, brining enough of myself to enhance the sum - the sum of our meeting, which uplifts and exceeds each of us. This dance, continuous in the extended, fractal details of nature, giving promise or potential to each mutation, each irregularity a possibility for transformation into something “fitter”, that is to say more suited, more at home where it lives.

So yeah - that image took off for me, and fits precisely with the wholeness of my perception of the design, the inability to separate the interlocked shapes. This is how the world works: all together.

Although I have close relations with hummingbirds these days, I don’t have photos. I was thinking forest stump life demonstrates a similar level of reciprocal co-evolution and intertwined existence.

Jakaku sisan band, woven recently with #10 crochet cotton, without using a chart, shown as a band on my handwoven bullrush hat.

It’s like going from writing to storytelling or singing, the difference between weaving from a chart and knowing the pattern by heart. I knew when I first started that this was an essential step in weaving Andean pickup, and traditional techniques from other cultures as well. The weaving is learned with the hands in communication with the heart/mind, and while using a chart helps us make the correct designs appear in our weaving, it does not give us the same kind of learning. This understanding made me resistant to charts, but I also didn’t have the patience to weave dozens of bands with the basic patterns again and again. I am a reader and a writer and, by my placement in the world and time, a dabbler in weaving rather than an integral element of a living tradition. No one is relying on me to weave a thing so they can use it, to learn the patterns of my village or clan or lineage correctly so that I can represent us with skill and pride in the clothing I wear. So I had the freedom and luxury to try various patterns before I had technically worked up to them, to use charts and “book learning” to skip ahead of the language I had memorized. But I did not forget the value of, or my desire for, the type of learning that moves through the body, that embeds itself in the joining of hands, mind, eyes, fingers, memory, recitation.

When I say I’m weaving this pattern now, I mean I’m learning it by heart, weaving it until I know it.

Jakaku sisan, woven with spindle-spun wool. This band began without reference to anything but my memory. Update Feb. 2026: I just made a video of myself weaving this one, since the previous video is so old and grainy.

It’s fitting that I’m working this way as I learn and memorize Persian poems, as I reiterate those of Rilke I know from memory, finding the ‘king lines’ in both and carrying them with me. (The shah beyt, the ‘king line’, is the part of a Persian poem that resonates, that carries the most compelling message, worthy of memorization and repetition like a mantra.) The jakaku sisan pattern has its own shah beyt for me, a point at which the numbers (of light and dark pattern threads) balance perfectly, in a mirrored sequence, like a hinge where the movement rotates and radiates. It’s not an actual rotation point of the design, what is known as an “eye” (ñawi), but it speaks to me of the spiral intertwinement of the curls, the balanced reciprocity of color, woven thread structure, and cosmological patterns. In short, it feels like the secret of the universe is in this pattern, which makes weaving it feel like devotion, and learning its language by heart an essential participation in the reciprocity of all things.

More stump life, from Quinault Rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula.

at the same time

Knitters will be familiar with the phrase “at the same time,” which indicates that while you are knitting a section according to the pattern, you also have to keep in mind an incremental increase or decrease every few rows. (In my case, this phrase almost always indicates that I’m going to lose track at some point. Holding multiple sets of instructions with staggered moments of crucial attention is not my forte, especially since I like to knit while reading or watching a program.)

In the context of this post, the phrase has a more sinister and dangerous meaning, because it refers to the multiple contradictions we are required to hold, or at least parry and dodge, or simply observe in disbelief, if we are trying to pay attention at all to our world.

Detail of the skirt panel of a tatreez dress I bought in Aswan, Egypt in 1994

I came across this video on YouTube, with the description posted below: Tatreez exhibits at the Victoria & Albert

“This video is made to coincide with the exhibition 'Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine' at V&A Dundee which runs until Spring 2026, and the 'Tatreez: Palestinian Embroidery' display at V&A South Kensington until May 2026, curated by Jameel Curator Rachel Dedman. The exhibition and display are free to visit.”

The curator’s video tour of the textiles does not mention the Nakba, or contextualize the garments in historical and political timelines, merely admiring and narrating their material characteristics and mentioning their origins in location (gratifyingly repeating ‘Palestine’ many times.) At first I suspected that it was a timely gesture toward uplifting the beauty of a ‘lost culture’, with objects decontextualized in a manner similar to that described by Wafa Ghnaim in her essay for the Met last year. However, the exhibit itself does not avoid or gloss over historical and factual information, as is evident from its iteration in Saudi Arabia, and also from the resources page of the current exhibit in Dundee.

It is the V&A’s first collaboration with the Palestinian Museum, and there seems to be a sincere effort at respectful education and honest highlighting of Palestinian culture and history. Notably, comments on the video are disabled, which is atypical for V&A’s YouTube channel, and The Guardian decided to print a letter to the editor calling for increased ‘plurality’ in the exhibit’s representation of Palestinian culture, complaining that Christian and Jewish Palestinians were not included (not linking to that one). That’s a small "at the same time”: the fact that highlighting of Palestine predictably elicits a complaint that Jewish voices are being ignored.

Shoulder detail from the tatreez dress I bought in Aswan.

At the same time on a larger scale, dozens of people are being arrested for showing support for Palestine Action in the UK. The organization has been proscribed as a terrorist group because some people vandalized military equipment with paint. Read that sentence again. This designation causes the UK government to feel justified in devoting resources and police effort to arresting large numbers of demonstrators of all ages, even if they only sit with a sign saying “I support Palestine Action.” I’m having a hard time holding the museum exhibition and the police action in London simultaneously in my mind as the stance of a coherent state, and it’s only the very tip of the mass of crystallized contradictions, most of which have much more dire consequences than museum exhibitions or protest arrests.

Grafitti in Bergen, Norway

Some days later: I wanted to say more, the so-called ‘news’ keeps barreling ahead, with no palpable change in trajectory, and we continue to be required to hold multiple contradictions in mind, just in order to live. The confusion of all this is helpfully addressed, to some extent, in this William Shoki article on attention as freedom, and the corrosion of cognitive ability by the digital information realm. He begins by talking about how the genocide in Gaza carries on and yet becomes less real to the global public, then analyzes this process incisively, saying:

“This is not simply a media problem. It is a crisis of subjectivity. A slow unravelling of our ability to perceive clearly, feel coherently, or act collectively in a world saturated by images, algorithms, and engineered doubt. This disorientation is not incidental to moments like this, but is their background condition. What we are seeing is not only a political struggle over Gaza and how it is understood, but a deeper transformation in how reality itself is mediated and experienced.”

It’s a long article, and I recommend reading the whole thing, with many thanks to Josiane who sent it to me. As someone who is committed to studying how the mind works, I take this analysis very seriously, and seek to protect my own and others’ independence of thought and freedom of learning. Rebecca Solnit’s latest newsletter addresses this as well, noting the human meeting ground that books provide, a humanity that cannot be replaced by technological stunts. My favorite part of this newsletter might be the images of books. They give a comfort and reassurance, as my own bookshelves do, that there is a record of deep human experience and thought which is accessible and present, wise people who can be listened to at any moment.

A small selection from the nearest shelves.

I’m also reading the poetry of Fady Joudah and Andrea Gibson, a recent and scintillating Rumi translation by Haleh Liza Gafori, and expanding my Rilke world with the Mark S. Burrows translation of the Sonnets to Orpheus. Without losing sight of what is happening, without pausing my ability to feel and continue to speak about Palestine, I find ways to tend my mind and heart that will not disable or dissipate, but strengthen the base of care.

Stitching a sketchbook from repurposed papers - a small and practical pleasure

On the ground, in the face of the deliberate starvation of those in Gaza, World Central Kitchen is doing their utmost to provide meals, and so is Gaza Soup Kitchen.

tending textiles: lingtse edition

I often end up feeling like the pictures speak for themselves, so that once I’ve added a few images, there’s not much to write. And words feel thin and flimsy these days…. overly manipulated like an old piece of paper gone soft, without stability. Words can be twisted to mean the opposite of what you might have thought they meant, then flipped back suddenly, reappropriated, thrown into the air and caught like a juggler’s sword - all of which is too fast for me, over here chewing on hundred-year-old poems in German. It may explain why writing has gotten harder, why listening to the birds makes more sense than any human speech, why I’d rather share some detail photos of handmade textiles and just say “Look.”

These are woolen textiles known as lingtse, from the region of Zangskar, the southern part of Ladakh in the Indian Himalayas. Lingtse are capes that women wear and make from panels of handspun, handwoven wool. The resist-dyed patterns and tied fringe are distinctive. The colors and tying of motifs are personalized enough that a young Zangskari woman I knew in Leh recognized a piece I had bought, knowing who made it. I have several of these because I find them deeply stunning, and they were on offer in the market while I was in Ladakh, between 1994 and 2006. I’m conflicted about “collecting” textiles now, but I have them and I wish for them to be seen and to be educational or edifying in some way, so here, look.

I was airing them out on the balcony. The sun highlights the texture of the twill weave, and the patina of use on the folds and seams. When I look closely like this, I can see the handwork, the particular care that went into the steps of spinning, weaving, sewing, and dyeing each piece. I can sense the human touch of the making and the daily use of the cloth. I wish you could smell them - they’ve been vacuumed but not washed, and they hold the smell of Ladakhi farms and livestock. These are not just special occasion garments - women typically wore them to work in the fields, tend animals, or whatever. They were just worn. They each have that feeling, of having been worn for a while. I’m hoping that they were sold because they were old and had been replaced with freshly made pieces, and not out of either desperation or disdain. I don’t really know - the textile marketplace gives me plenty of consternation, but my original motivation for buying them remains true: because I love and admire them, and I intend to treat them with respect.

I sometimes dream of having an educational textile gallery, a space where people can linger and appreciate the skill and wisdom radiating off of works like these. For now, I suppose this platform is that space, and while you can’t touch or smell these glorious Zangskari ambassadors, at least they will be seen and allowed to speak.

(I will add more photos to the lingtse page in the textiles tab, linked above. It will probably grow over time, as the ‘research’, ‘works’, and other tabs tend to do.)

Fungus from the Hoh Rainforest National Park, adding its song

One thing…. in writing about the details of textiles, I’m not turning away from what’s going on in the world. I consider it a way of continuing to focus on what is important, what might be wiped out if imperialism has its way. To some extent, I’m soothing my mind with this focus, if only because I don’t have the right words to speak otherwise. Some people are being very powerful with language, and I’d like to recommend Caitlin Johstone and Holly Truhlar at the moment.

wonder and amazement

There’s been a lot of wonder and amazement in the more negative, disbelieving sense lately… as in, I wonder how people can be so insensitive to the suffering of others, to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and continued targeting of immigrants and indigenous folks everywhere. And I wonder how anyone can be so selfish and short-sighted as to prioritize tax cuts for the insanely rich, at the expense of social programs that benefit everyone…. But this train of thought could lead to madness, given the amount of fodder being generated every day. Instead, I wanted to share some wonder and amazement of the more wide-eyed, receptive and enthralled variety, in part because I believe it’s what can ground us in the sanity and compassionate care that is needed, always.

These images are from a visit to the Painted Hills of Oregon, where the various mineral deposits and volcanic action of the land have left layers of unusual color, some of which are only exposed through erosion. The lavender in the next photo is true color - purple dirt!

Against the deep cinnamon hills, the delicate greens of sagebrush and juniper gained potency. And the sky seemed to intensify its blue.

Some of the rocks were also blue, or an interesting blue-green that almost matched some of the sage, and was close enough to my sweater color that I had to pick up a sample, just for a photo.

Amidst all this far-out color and trippy landscape, I was also entranced by the basic, gentle blooming of a cherry tree on the land where we stayed.

A large part of my amazement these days is simply that spring happens, that all these plants bubble over with life in the form of buds and leaves and blossoms and so much outreaching growth it’s almost hard to handle. The giddiness of perceiving what all is going on - especially when the birds are calling, chasing around, busily gathering nest materials. It’s so energetic and happening, and yet so peaceful. The waving of bright green fir tips and flitting of warblers carries deep peace because it’s just so right, so much the way things are.

I have very few words these days, to counter the deliberate destruction going on, but to be still and look and listen continues to feel like a crucial practice.

True emptiness is clear and always present

masked by delusions for reasons we don’t know

how could what is real and what is false exist apart

flowers bloom and flowers fall when the spring wind blows

- Mountain Poems of Stonehouse, 92 - Red Pine translation

PS - I do keep adding to my poetry page, this one posted as a typewritten image on instagram last fall. Still working on the weaving blog post, and the weaving as well.

PPS - I wrote some commentary, added to yet another page. My virtual house of words, it is sprawling. Also just read this please - Arwa Mahdawi telling it like it is.

uplifting play

Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, Montana. A photo that looks like a painting, the texture of the water making brushstrokes somehow… not at all intentional on my part. I love the colors of the Rattlesnake’s rocks, and wanted to keep them with me.

Yes, the sky is falling, and also creative work is rising.

Creative, heart-based truth is leading the way I wish to follow. The performance of Les Arrivants in concert with the Glacier Symphony orchestra was a good example, a nourishing blast of brilliance that I’ve been cherishing and revisiting over the last month.

It’s hard to speak about the music, because it’s such a qualitative experience, so emotionally connected. Of course I have a Rilke quote for this. In a letter responding to someone asking about the influence of another poet on himself, Rilke says the influence is “dissolved in memory and experience… interwoven with it,” and that it mainly “consists in developing one’s capacity for wonder and for work and in compelling one back to nature.” That’s how art works: you can’t point at anything specific and say it did this to me, but it does something. It affirms something you already knew…. it motivates your own work.

Birch with pink inner bark and cool fungus, outside Kalispell, Montana

A bird’s nest with blue tarp strands and bits of my husband’s hair, which I cut out in the driveway and always hoped the birds would make use of it. This was in an Ocean Spray bush, found in winter - I don’t know whose nest it was.

Those of us who watch Les Arrivants perform live tend to overuse the word “amazing.” I say it myself, and I hear other audience members as they approach the musicians afterward or try to express their reactions. I think it’s because this group takes us somewhere new and unexpected, outside of any ready vocabulary we might have. Part of the mind is still chewing on the experience long after it’s over, and in the moment of greeting them it’s still just new and delightful and moving, and we haven’t had time to understand how we’ve been touched. It’s a powerful enough experience that it requires a time of processing, metabolizing new input that goes way beyond any form of mere entertainment or pleasure.

The first time I saw them, all this was true, and they were alone as a trio, in a relatively small venue. This time they collaborated with a symphony orchestra, playing five works in a row that were newly orchestrated, three of them world premieres of original compositions by each of the three musicians. It was like dwelling in a series of multidimensional worlds called up by these unique minds, one after another. Unbelievable.

Low tide on the Salish Sea.

Although they’ve coordinated with an entire symphony and have expanded the sound and texture and grandeur of each orchestrated piece, they retain the sense of intimate communication and responsiveness among themselves as a trio. Even with a full orchestra behind them, the three play for each other and include the audience in the warm-hearted way that defines their music. The more you know their music, the more you appreciate their sense of play and conversation, the way they explore and support each other.

The introduction to Bagelissimo, the Mile-End Tango, was a great example of this. Abdul-Wahab Kayyali and Amichai Ben Shalev indulged in a languid, almost teasing exploration, tickling and caressing all sorts of possibilities before giving the orchestra the gratification of the bright tango beat (which the orchestra clearly loved playing.) Ben, having done the orchestral arrangements for the five pieces being premiered, seemed to be on a justified high, judging by the look on his face as he sat surrounded by the sounds he had summoned from the instruments, and in his own solo work & virtuoso treatment of the bandaneon.

Wanting to say something about improvisation and weaving, as I attempt to learn double weave, copying motifs from Shahsevan tribal weavings (nomadic Iran). As with a musician’s skill, a weaver’s increased familiarity with a technique and the design possibilities gives more opportunity to improvise and be inventive within the format. I have my hand in too many different weaving techniques to master any one, probably, but I’m working on gaining some fluency in the design languages and the structural rules that inform them. Watch this space for more on weaving & improvisation.

I can’t remember much about the oud solos, except that I wanted them to go on forever. I’ve already been expressive about how much this musician’s work moves and inspires me, and this performance was further confirmation. The emotional intensity of the concert was front-loaded, since the first piece was played by Les Arrivants without orchestra, and the next piece was Shaymaa’s Dance, Abdul-Wahab Kayyali’s piece composed upon the death of Palestinian poet & academic Refaat Alareer’s eldest daughter, months after his own death. The music envisions the two of them dancing at her wedding.

The composition is an imaginary celebration of the simple continuation of life that will never happen for these two, who along with other members of their family, were killed in separate, targeted Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. The grief and infinite pain of this vision permeate the lilting melody and sweetness of this classic, lyrically moving waltz. (A brief excerpt is in the Glacier Symphony link above.)

This image is from the article linked above, from a protest in Cologne, Germany soon after Alareer’s death.

Unfortunately, the world premiere of this work was accompanied by a compromise of its power. Whoever finalized the program for the Glacier Symphony chose to edit the artist’s statement, without consulting or involving the artist/composer. As a result, the description of Shaymaa’s Dance was scrubbed of any reference to Palestine, Gaza, airstrikes, genocide, or even the violent and targeted death of these two individuals. While Refaat Alareer’s name is mentioned, the situation is glossed as “loss,” and thus impossible to interpret unless you already know who he is. 

I’ve been working with Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus lately, and the phrase that keeps cycling through my mind with regard to this music is from the final sonnet of Part 1, which talks about Orpheus’s dismemberment at the hands of the raging Maenads. The German is “aus den Zerstörenden stieg dein erbauendes Spiel”: From among those who would destroy you, your uplifting (edifying) play arose. The word Spiel, or play, is the playing of the instrument, and you could say ‘tune’ or ‘song’, but ‘play’ evokes the improvisation that is so integral to the work of these musicians. Each of them is raising something new and edifying each time they play. The premiered compositions of this concert were ‘erbauendes Spiel’ on a grand scale, but every performance involves this uplifting play, and among the forces of destruction that currently surround us, lifting up an edifying song feels like a sacred calling.

The tatreez-supporting jacket also had its debut at this performance. No photos allowed in the theater, but here’s Abdul-Wahab Kayyali wearing it, speaking with admirers from the audience after the show with Amichai Ben Shalev.

On the topic of censoring Palestinian voices, the response of universities is getting me down… (eta: understatement, and Rebecca Solnit says it way better than I can here. Read, follow, act on her encouragement.)

Despite their evident financial emphasis and power games, all of which was more than obvious to me as an Ivy League undergraduate thirty years ago, part of me still wants the university to be a bastion of clear thinking, a safe place for dangerous intellectual experiments and risky conversations. It must be the part of me that never gave up the dream that being a serious student and an intelligent person was the way to move forward, to achieve lofty aspirations and enhance the world.

I was raised with this implicit ideal: the university was the place to go to exchange thought, to further ideas and creative growth. There was no doubt in my mind about this. And of course, this led to repeated disappointment. I perceived things clearly enough to dissuade me from pursuing academia as a professional. And yet, I see now in my current bafflement, there was lingering faith somewhere in my mind, that universities were the stage where things could happen that would expand and change our society.

And I don’t know why I feel closer to universities, or expect more of them, except that academia is where you’d typically belong if your primary activities are writing, thinking, and comparative study. Doing these things has made me feel close to academia and pay attention to how it works, even though it’s never been my job. My independent study of poetry and textile research also keeps me in the scholarly milieu, so it just feels like the portion of society where I should be most at home, although I haven’t associated with a US university in decades, really.

To see the universities motivating against their own students and faculty, in the service of ideologues, deflates the residual hope. It’s not all universities, of course, but I’m not going to dig through the newsfeeds pulling out names of who is punishing, expelling, and allowing doxxing of pro-Palestinian activists and who is being more supportive of freedom of thought and expression. At the moment Columbia is in the spotlight for the former, and what matters is the general trend.

Here’s a thoughtful conversation about it, at least. And here is a written statement from Mahmoud Khalil, from his unlawful detention, including the sentence, “I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear.”

Clouds, from where I live, telling me about ‘erbauendes Spiel.’

May we keep expanding our minds and hearts, and keep developing the skill and fluency to allow our improvisations to rise up and edify one another.

a tatreez story

There are a lot of parts to this story: the textile, how I found it, what it’s own (partially known) story is, what I decided to do with it, and the work and result of that. This may be a long post, but I think that’s better than dividing it up into episodes. I also hope the story continues, and will happily add updates when there’s more.

Tatreez piece, rolled up and prominent in my studio. For more information on tatreez: Tatreez and Tea, Tatreez Traditions, Tiraz Home for Arab Dress are all excellent resources.

Having found this piece in January, 2023, I will have lived with it for almost exactly one year. The uniqueness of a handmade piece makes it like a person’s face, something you learn to recognize beyond doubt. So the presence of it becomes familiar. I kept this piece visible in my studio for many months before I knew what I would do with it, and its face is precious to me. Even now, I sit and stare at the photos, enthralled, and have to urge myself to work with words… in some ways, the textile says everything on its own.

At the time of finding it, the attack on Gaza had been under way for (only) 3 months, and the sight of Palestinian embroidery pierced my heart. Somehow I felt that it was older, made as part of an original garment, but I didn’t really know anything for sure except “Palestinian cross stitch.” It was in a consignment shop in Port Townsend, Washington, where many of us buy and sell each other’s goods. It had been sewn by machine into a sturdy linen border & backing, which I left on while I contemplated what to do with this piece, apart from posting photos online over and over again.

When I finally removed the border linen and held the tatreez piece by itself for the first time, the voice of it came to life. Handling an old textile, there is a liveliness, a warmth to it, like holding someone’s hand. Being able to touch both sides and to see the back was like a direct communication with the maker, the woman who held it before - a more intimate listening to the language she wrote with her stitched marks.

Then I learned more about this piece. I noted that the three uniform-sized panels are not the style of design used for a Palestinian dress. Reading further into Shelagh Weir’s Palestinian Costume book, I saw that the Hebron area head shawls, or ghudfeh, have three panels, and bands of embroidery along one end. Using ghudfeh as a search term, I found other examples, also identified as Hebron works. Clicking through links, I suddenly found myself looking at exactly the same embroidery patterns, in a portion of a shawl in the collection of the Textile Research Centre of Leiden, Netherlands.

Doing a watercolor painting of a textile is a great way to study the designs, complexity, scale, and color choices, to learn more about the language.

The same! I knew the designs well, having looked closely enough to try to paint them. I still don’t know what this similarity means, exactly - what is the microcosm of shared embroidery vocabulary that would result in such an identical design… same family, or village, or time frame within an area? I haven’t successfully communicated with any textile scholars about this yet, but it’s certainly striking - I’ve looked at a lot of tatreez, and this is the only time I’m aware of seeing identical patterning. The benefit is that I can more confidently place the segment I have in time and place. And the conclusion of the TRC folks, in consultation with Wafa Gnaim, is that their piece is c.1900.

When we talk about old textiles, I know there’s a tendency to glorify age for its own sake - older pieces are more valuable, considered more authentic. Sometimes this is unfair to anyone still making textiles now, and in terms of the marketplace, I believe in supporting active craftspeople and not inflating value based on scarcity or exclusivity of access. (I’m also opposed to the way the textile collecting world mirrors the rest of the fine art luxury market in this way, with artificial fashion trends and status competition affecting the way things are valued. The inherent value of textiles and why they matter has nothing to do with all of that.) When I revere something older, it’s because of the life that is in it, the context that was woven or stitched into the piece itself, through materials and technique and the lived experience of the maker.

In this case, finding out how old this piece is likely to be was emotionally moving, because it places the original maker before so much of the suffering and disruption that her people are experiencing now. These stitches were made before Israel was established as a country, before anyone in this woman’s home environment was being forced to fight for their ability to live there, or flee. Her voice is grounded in place, and the language of her composition flows like confident music. Knowing that this piece was made in the pride and faith of belonging, of fully living her culture, makes it a powerful message from an ancestor, something to pass on strength and integrity of being.

Magnified view of the cross stitch embroidery - the white lines on the side are millimeters.

Which leads me to the obvious need to put it into Palestinian hands. I’d been contemplating this, how to give this on to someone for whom it would have personal, identifying meaning. And after meeting and beginning a correspondence with the musician Abdul-Wahab Kayyali, (whom I have mentioned before) the thought occurred to me: could it be made into a gift for either display in the home, or to wear? I had not yet come up with anything when he happened to mention in an email that he was interested in wearing tatreez while performing. This gave me a concrete goal, and I started thinking about a wearable base that could serve as support for this textile.

Abdul-Wahab Kayyali plays with guitarist Tariq Harb as the duo 17 Strings.

I envisioned a boxy jacket that could go over a dress shirt, with the tatreez wrapping around the jacket body, above the hem. I think I was influenced by Southeast Asian tribal clothing shapes in going for a black, square jacket - but I also found these Turkish fellows looking very sharp, which I was sure the recipient would appreciate, given his musical and personal Turkish connections. The Turkish image gave me the idea to use piping along the neck and front opening. I got some black linen twill from my local fabric shop, and found a suitable silk for piping in my stash of fabrics I’ve dyed in the past. After a few practice runs with making and sewing piping, I took the plunge and cut the linen, creating a piped edge along the round neck and center front, between two layers of linen.

Piping is basted onto one side in the first step

Linen is shifty stuff, so there was much basting. The two layers of the jacket body were basted before cutting the neck, and here I’m basting them again after sewing the piping in the neck edge, before adding sleeves.

I decided on a T pattern with square gussets for the sleeves.

(I’m narrating it slightly out of order. I was already well into the project when I found out the age of the piece. This caused me to [hyperventilate and buzz around going omg and then] be more thorough in my documentation of the textile, especially the back which would no longer be accessible once it was mounted on the jacket. I will make the images and information available to others who work with preserving Palestinian textiles, if they are interested.)

Magnified view of stitches including joining stitch. Millimeters marked at the side.

The back side of the embroidery

Given that the sleeves would be visible, I wanted to add something decorative on the cuffs. In dresses from the 1930’s or earlier, Palestinian women used imported silk taffeta to appliqué onto the skirt panels. A typical design is a rectangular strip with diagonal lines made by reverse appliqué. A slit is cut into the silk, and the edges are turned under and stitched. I knew this technique from other textile cultures, and had done it myself in the past. I auditioned a few different silks and practiced the reverse appliqué several times over, before working it onto the jacket sleeves. The cuffs have a small vent, and are hemmed with lines of running stitch in handspun yak/silk yarn. Running stitch is another embellishment that is seen in Palestinian garments and cloth. 

Some of my reverse appliqué samples, with the preferred choice in the foreground.

Image from Shelagh Weir’s Palestinian Costume book showing a dress with taffeta appliqué in the center front of the skirt.

Spindle-spun yak/silk singles, sewn in rows of running stitch along the cuff hem.

The idea was to provide a supportive, wearable base for the tatreez, consistent with some aspects of Palestinian textile culture, while not drawing attention away from the embroidery. It is different enough from any traditional garment that, I hope, it takes the tatreez sufficiently out of context to be essentially honored as an element of traditional culture, and not co-opted in a way that conflicts with its original use. 

Primarily, it is a way to connect the voice and art of an ancestor with the living continuation of her culture, to make it possible for others to continue listening to and learning from the beauty and message and strength of this textile.  I hope that it will provide deep-rooted support for this musician as he expands his creative and expressive potential through composition and performance. Like the tatreez piece, his music is powerful, compelling, and tapped into strong cultural roots. 

Abdul-Wahab Kayyali during a performance of Mafaza, in a screenshot from the Instagram of Majd Sukar, co-composer of the Henna Platform production. Photo by Joshua Best.

The image above was concurrent with my beginning work on this jacket, and I hope I can convey how much it broke my heart. Mafaza is a powerful stage production, involving two Syrian poets, Waeel Saad al-Din and Mosab Alnomire, and two musicians, Abdul-Wahab Kayyali and Syrian clarinet player Majd Sukar. The debut performances were in early November, 2024 in Toronto. I was compelled by the trailers and interviews that Henna Platform was sharing as the performance date approached, and I knew from Abdul-Wahab that creating this work was a strong experience for all of them. What I didn’t know until I saw this image was that the musicians, who were on stage the whole time along with the poets, were dressed and made up as survivors of an explosion, with torn and dirty jackets and dirt-smeared faces. The fact that they performed the whole time in the garb of the bombed, embodying the dehumanizing, targeted status that many would give them, was almost too much to fathom. And the contrast between this and the type of jacket I’m trying to make, the message I’m conveying with it, that this musician is esteemed and worthy of the best, most meticulous efforts - it still squeezes my heart when I think about it.

When I describe the details of the textile and the garment making, I’m trying to be thorough with the information, so I get into report-writing mode. But the feelings are there in the work and care, and the truth is I often had difficulty working on this project and not crying. It feels like the most important thing I’ve done in recent months, and one of the most significant textile projects I’ve ever had the honor to work on.

Beginning to stitch the sleeve detail, while listening to Les Arrivants.

Sewing the hem on Dec 7, 2024, the night that Syria was being liberated.

After the sleeves, and after sewing the hem, the only thing that remained was to attach the textile. I had one of those sudden bright ideas that come while lying in bed, regarding the stitching for securing the textile. Given that the jacket has two layers, if I quilted them together with colorful sashiko-type stitching, I could conceivably stitch the tatreez onto the top layer only, and then the stitches wouldn’t show on the inside of the garment. I basted guidelines for the top and bottom edge of the tatreez placement, and did some decorative stitching in between with (cotton) embroidery floss. (see finished photos)

The tatreez textile is tacked to the jacket body, which is wrapped around a large pillow.

Securing the textile along the top. The tricky part was sewing through the top layer only. The curved needles helped.

For mounting the textile, I needed a support that would hold the body of the jacket in a rounded way. I used a large throw pillow, covered with cotton cloth, and laid the jacket onto the textile, then wrapped it around to the front. After securing in several places with stitching rather than pins, I began to sew along the top edge, with white linen that was darkened with natural dye to match the old linen cloth. This was a chance to bring out the textile conservation needles - tiny little curved needles that are nearly impossible to thread and hold, but that make minimal holes in the textile. After a few minutes, I got back into the habit of holding the wee needle, and this part of the work was calm, reverent, and rewarding. Every moment of looking closely at this piece has been a gift.

Finishing the stitching on winter solstice, with the setting sun lighting up the tatreez textures.

Detail of finished jacket: bound side seam in foreground, interior decorative quilting stitches, and the outside of the jacket in the background, showing piping and textile.

When I finally hung and stepped back from the finished jacket, I was overwhelmed by a mix of emotions and anticipation, barely able to wait for my visit to Montreal and the giving of it.

As it happened, I was visiting Abdul-Wahab Kayyali on the 19th of January, 2025 - the day the ceasefire went into effect in Gaza, so the wild mix of emotions continued, and how could it not? The heaviness of all the surrounding story, of historical and present-day suffering, are bound up in this textile, this garment, and the friendship that has caused me to make it. Even where there is joy, and beauty, and love, deep pain is an inherent texture of it all. It brings Rilke’s phrase from a letter to mind: “Wie sollen wir es nicht schwer haben?” How can it not be heavy for us?

Nevertheless, it makes me very happy to report that the fit is just right, it works well with playing the oud, and when he first put it on he said, “Perfect.”

I’m quite sure there will be more photos of this project, here and there, and I look forward to sharing its public debut when Abdul-Wahab Kayyali chooses to wear it for a performance with Les Arrivants.

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. 

Update: the books are also available through this site, as a fundraiser, and through Camas Books & Infoshop.

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