windthread

ready.

this is my great grandson.  Julian Daniel Ortiz.    he is at Staples.  has his packet of blank pages and a new box of crayons.  he is approaching the check out.

i printed this pic from his mother's facebook page, so it's not the clearest, but nonetheless, you can see something of who he IS.    he is not yet two. 

beside his mother, he is the other Entity who lives where we are being magnetized.   this is who daughter Jenny will live with for the next months.    if you might remember, he is the one who skips.   the other thing i can tell you, to give you a "picture", is that he has taken up running LAPS around their back yard courtyard.  as with the skipping,  no one knows where or why he began this practice.  but he does.  and LAPS.  round and round.  he does not discuss this with anyone.  just does it.   his mother, my granddaughter respects his space and does not ask.  he just

takes off his diaper and runs.

August is the second most significant month to me.   July 31 is always like New Year's Eve.  August however is a              heavy month.    here, the word       fecund            fits.   i have traveled the calendar enough years to be ready for it.   maybe this year it will bring some different surprises?  maybe some distortions of the usual?

 

 

thinking about marks symbols

 

last day of July

and i have company

and FINALLY...two months "late"..... 

and then,

 
 

just to say

this is how it's been and how it will be, even more for the next week.

on this day,  a Wednesday,  next week,  the daughter,  the goats,  the livestock guardian dog,  the father of the daughter, the brother of the daughter,  will be half way to where they are going.  which would be somewhere in Arizona.  when traveling with a herd of goats,  in August,  particularly in the year of 2011,  you can only travel during the night.  so....in the dark, they will be going.  just going...as we have talked about but in regard to cloth, not goats and people.  Continuing.

many Things have been involved.  the center of which has been that her truck just simply Would Not Run.  out of the Blue.  2 weeks...it was towed down here to my local much trusted mechanic and i will put a plug for him here...Rudy's Auto Repair...Lemitar, New Mexico.   and for many reasons, it took two weeks.  during which all of us, including Rudy, experienced what i guess i will just call High Anxiety.  it really wasn't      anxiety     was something else,  but that's close enough.  what was wrong with it was a great mystery and this is the truck she will need as in neeeeeeeed to drive to work and to haul feed for the goats when she arrives at her

new life

but           the mystery was solved and today i met her half way (she's had my little Honda car, Minnow for the duration) at the TacoBell just off the freeway. 

Good things have happened too.  a wonderful woman who lives in Lake Havasu Arizona has offered an overnight for them all.  this woman is the one who sold Jenny her first buck goat.   this overnight is a god send.  another good thing is that again, out of the Blue,  a woman called me who is interested in a goat and heard i had some.  well,  sorta.  but as it turns out, on Saturday, she will pick up Daffodil,  the first doe goat who she plans to breed and milk PLUS the two wethers, DarkWing and Partly Sunny.  the weight of the move lightens.

everything has changed.  that Blue House didn't happen.  the transfer to a full time job turned out to be a transfer to a part time job, no hours guaranteed.  But, she is setting out.  she and her daughter will rent a house in the middle of California for a year.  during that year, the job will hopefully transform into full time and while it is transforming, she will look for a different Blue House up high in Northern California....Red Bluff.  Cottonwood.  Redding.   this uh, interim is not going to be easy for the goats and the dog.   they don't speak english and so can't be told that it is temporary.  i do, speak english, and find it hard.   but i took out the Daughter Cloth tonight from where it has been and patted it.  it's a good, strong, solid cloth.    i also listened again to the audio of Magic Diaries and thought about distortion.  about the word distortion.  wondering.  and i also just sat and thought and thought about Jude saying something about thought catching and how tricky it is.  and looked at this pile of cloth and an image reappeared that has come and gone for the last days of two lines of very small lizards going along, just going,  one line above right to left, one line below left to right              and i caught that thought         about how stuff just goes.  comes back.  goes again   in a never ending process of Continuing.

 

 

 

letting things touch and loving the space inbetween

more fooling around.  can't stop.

over in Magic Diaries,  Jude said this morning: 

"let it transform.  slowly over time.  until it becomes          yours."

well,  i think that i have a deep love of  Space Inbetween.   i think i might want to find a way to honor that love and at the same time figure out a way to create a cohesive cloth.

 i also reminded self that with this cloth, i began by  wanting to put many things i love that may be incongruent with one another,  as  "design elements",   but not as things i love.   things i want to be able to see all in one place.  and that is the strongest  "element" of this cloth.

 

 

ok

here's where it is now.   i made a decision, changed my mind and then changed my mind again.   this is the far end of the living room....a wall window.   we need a break from each other.  we need just some not constant looking.  (as i look out of the corner of my eye)  (this window is about a yard from my right shoulder as i sit here at the computer)   this might last an hour or a day or a while.  we'll see.

here is the wall.  you can see how inclined i am to finish home improvement projects.  the naked drywall panels have been this way for...uh...4 years?  but, that's not the point here.  what will happen next ..... is.

 
 

 

talking to self

 

maybe i am just still too  "new" to the cloth thing.    ?

i thought i was ready to work on a large cohesive cloth.  i        want     to,   but  where i still am is just a complete fascination with the combinations of things, how the     cloth     itself,  themselves, "go" with  one another.......and in this moment, how so many individual pieces go  ON  the base cloth that i LOVE...that was a miracle of accidental dyeing luck.  

so as i look and play with small pieces of cloth this morning,  then stand back, sit, look,  i realize i am  all the while  entertaining this undercurrent of thought about      how am i going to tie this all in to a solid quilt like cloth????    in the moment, i don't think i can yet.   that might be yet to come, someday but for now, i might  just have to keep doing it this way????????

 

 

just to remember

moving things around ~ putting things ~ taking them away ~ putting them back ~ wondering why ~ just so i remember, in case.

 
 
 
 

looking~seeing?

yesterday some family was here.  i had taken down things hanging from the ceiling,  cross beam to the Room so their heads wouldn't be bumping into them.    i cleared some surfaces.  vacuumed.    moved piles of fabric onto my bed to clear chairs for human sitting          and this morning, it all looks so spacious.    and looking at the Magic Diaries cloth,  i suddenly see the Grass Person  who is always on that wall to the far left.    but i    SEE   her.   she has been hanging in this house for as long as i have lived here.   the Grass People are the only of the fiber figures that were repeated.  their bodies relatively the same shapes, always one hand holding something, one hand receiving.  they are also the only of the figures that had no human facial features, but rather faces like grass seed.   and i thought how in so many of the cloths i've made there has been strands of grass.   and realized that one of the strongest personal symbols i have is Grass.  and here, i am speaking of wild grasses,  prairie grass,  desert clump grasses.  native grasses.   in other places it might be those fierce tough beach grasses that hold shoreline. 

anyway....actually SEEing her this morning i thought how grasses can maybe tie together these seperate images on this cloth?

am going to do as Jude reminded today...print out some pics and draw on them. 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

to "have in common"

what do these images have in common.  what is it that threads them together in my mind, in my life? 

another rhetorical question.

yesterday,  daughter Jenny and i drove the many miles to East Mountains in th gigunda 4 wheel drive Silverado borrowed from the Old Cowboy.   we took 5 goats to the goat show.  above, is Amelia who won reserve grand champion for junior does.    i wish i would have been able to focus differently and tell you numbers, but i didn't so just can say that there were MANY people and MANY MORE goats than people and a goat show is an  I N T E N S E  event.  it has to "move along" at an orderly clip and if there is anything goats are Not interested in     it's moving along at an orderly clip.  my job was to keep track of 3 or so goats at a time while one was being judged.   so i sat on the ground with a long lead that had several collar clips which made it difficult to photograph everything.  actually, these were the only 2 photos i took.    after all was said and done, there was an enormous potluck barbque and after that,  we hooked up a 2 horse trailer that Jenny bought and

set out for home

here is where the above images begin to relate and i am still watching.   it has to do with life Occuring, with how we all choose from the Myriad Possibilities and  CHOOSE  which will Hold our meaning,   our purpose for particular segments of our life's journey.    i will say here that i was      Afraid  about hooking up that horse trailer, about driving those many miles in a relatively unfamiliar huge truck on this new mexico freeway that is similar to a vehicular rodeo.   before i left home at 5am i had put 2 drops of the Joyous Warrior under my tongue and as i pulled out from the ranch where the show was,  i thought about Cindy's ..Handstories... aunt who was a cowgirl.   and when i got  home, finally, early evening, all of us safe and sound,  Jenny, the goats, the trailer at her house, and me finally here,  i looked long at this large cloth on the wall,  this cape of What's Next and        oddly enough,   saw it all as part of some one very very large Thing.