windthread

a very good day

very close to finished.  a few more thread bead stars,   but the stitches through the weaving are complete.

this whole "room"....many stitches.  Many.

and all the while,  stopping to look, think.   How much do i want to make the buddha uhhh, clearer?  i can see her so easily,  through the Glennis window, out into the Pure Land.  but that story is in my head.  does it matter that no one else might see her?,   she might look like just a brownish mark?   Thinking.

and we might notice an addition to the picture.    yesterday, i finally remembered to take the cutters and brought home some really perfect and beautiful salt cedar sticks.  beautiful in that they are that perfect brownred color and perfect in that they are beautifully straight ...... in case a cloth would ever need a hanging stick.  all sizes.  and there are more.  i have found the perfect clump.  between the ditch road, the road road and the railroad tracks.  who'dve guessed.

 

almost Everything

these are Desert Willow seeds.  each tree makes Many pods.  each pod contains Many of these seeds.  there are probably zillions out there.  a few will find the perfect condition to take root.

this morning,  Jude  placed things.  the cloths hold them.  i had been up during the night looking at this.  the stone is from Lake Superior in the Upper Penninsula of Michigan, 1987.

[ the Spiral is Valerianna's work...Raven Wood Forest      the small woven piece is Jude's ]

i have reached a point on the Diaries Cloth where everything i "know" is in place.  for a couple days, there seemed to be a standstill of some kind.  this morning i knew that from this point on, there is no need to know anything.  just stitch.  however it goes. 

what i thought was a mistake

turns out to be ....  something different....and i don't know yet, but no longer feels like a mistake.

i did one more line of stitch through the thick stems in the center with that neutral silk weaving thread that i'd found in the waste basket at Martha the weavers house that i clean.  it's very very thin.  and then, those stems that seperate and lean to the right in a "clump" that i thought was wrong, is not.  this is the part i don't know yet.  they lean to the right of that awkward blue square.  i began stitching more stems over the blue square but, no.  will wait.  i don't know what it's for.  and i am being drawn to the eye a lot. 

it's late.  these two pics are with the flash so the color is distorted but i wanted to see what they looked like anyway: seeing

and it's funny,  it seems like a long time since i looked at the Cloth as a whole....have been intent on the grasses.  this feather grass, really.  it needs to be as right as i can get it.    and to that end, what i noticed tonight is that the stitching there is really really thick.  i look around the rest of the Cloth and don't see anywhere else that this might happen.   ?

 

continuing ....... a good clue

i'd said to Cindy in the last post that i was going to try to keep going with this dilemma of mine and try to get someplace with it.        this morning, while twisting some pages of the New York Times that a friend in Albuquerque brings me to make winter fires,  i came across the Style Magazine, fall issue.  first impulse was to pitch it in the recycle...can't burn that because it's glossy color.....but then, thought i'd look at it for colors.  good thing, because it provided the perfect clue.

it made me remember where i was headed  some years ago, before i got waylayed.   

i can't undo the passing of that time, but maybe i can salvage the Intention in a different way?

a little later, ONE MORE CLUE

my kitchen counter

working to correct impatience.  i had wanted to use 3 strands of floss for this grass because there is a lot of it.  but, it's not right.  so today, tried to correct, with single strand.  ?maybe?,  maybe not.  but i DID see how to correct the pucker....it can be pulled to the kantha tree, held there.  did not try that yet.

Blue grama.   i have always called it eyelash grass in my mind.  above, you can see where i OH SO laboriously took out the stitches of that little lizard that i had thoughtlessly put there.  it took FOREVER.   i left its tail, and think i will leave the tail.  i'm not sure why.

so, now i am going to feed myself.  it's been a BIG DAY.

a strange day

i remember posting a while ago about Meaning         and          Purpose.

           

sometimes i feel like i really am without either of these.  and i think about it.  sometimes i wonder about whether i have/had/ever will have    any Real meaning or purpose in this life.  i feel small and really, kinda "nothing".

it looked like this, this morning.  a frozen air.  a surprise, to both me and the world out there.

 Oddly, today i watched the entirity of Whitney Huston's funeral.  how strange.  i watched it here, on the computer screen, well, a few inches of the screen...maybe 3x5"?   i don't have a TV.

so.  i watched 4 hours worth of her funeral.  the funeral of a woman much younger than i.  a woman that though i never saw any of her movies, never watch any TV, never really ever listen to the radio even, ..........i knew.  i knew her because of the kind of world i live in.  stuff comes to you.  one way or another.  and i knew Whitney Huston to be a voice like no other in our time.  i knew her to be a gentle kind of beauty,  so beauty Full  and all so flawed and weak.   a woman.

BUT a woman who had an incredible gift.  a gift that allowed the possibility of Meaning and Purpose.  but here she was.  dead.  in a baptist church, in a casket, dead. 

many people said stuff.  her young daughter sat somewhere , out of the eye of the camera.  as, it seems she was all along.  this child of such a blinding light.  i wondered what she thinks about meaning and purpose

so

i stitched the SideOat Grama and listened and thought.

and i remembered the conversation i had with my son some days ago about the word .......mediocre........that had come to me in my thought wandering.  that there was a certain kind of freedom coming with the thought that i am just a mediocre person. 

how interesting.

But...i am what i am, like Popeye says.  and being that, i must be what i am, what all or little i carry through the days.  so...i stitch sideoat grama on a Diaries cloth.  ok, then.

 

butterflies

this

is part of the reason that butterflies are what they are to me.  i am outside, going in/out of the albatros, the giant shed/garage thing out there, loading the truck with stuff that has accumulated for a couple years.  stuff i have dragged home because it's interesting, or i MIGHT need it, use it.  but i haven't and it's all covered with layers of dust.  anyway, so going back and forth, suddenly i become present enough to notice something just to the right of the back and forth pathway.... and it is this Monarch butterfly.  really, quite       .......intact.......    and this would have been at Least through last fall and this winter.  it is lying there...just in the middle of an expanse of sand,  just singularly there,  so exposed to rain, Wind, the elements and so still amazingly perfect.  How can this be?, i wonder?

and i have been looking at the Diaries Cloth while i am stitching the SideOat Grama grass clump.  thinking.  what all do i still want to include?  and i keep thinking butterflies and i keep thinking Many Butterflies but i can't find a way to depict a butterfly that seems right.  but there still remains the desire for Many.  

and in the mail the other day, was the current issue of Buddhadharma mag.  an article in it about a young artist, Ang Tsherin Sherpa who was born in Kathmandu and studied Tibetan thangka painting with his father, Master Urgen Dorje, a renouned thangka artist.  5 years ago, he began focusing on nontraditional Tibetan Artwork  because he is, to paraphrase, curious about how the Tibetan people's culture will maintain while merging with others.  these experiences are explored through the use of his "spirits" iconography.  "In Tibet, it is believed that local spirits are associated with specific geographic regions, its land, and people.  I am interested to know how they continue to adapt now that their original landscape and people have changed or moved on.  I picture them following the Tibetan people around the world. I have them adapting to their new environment just as the Tibetan diaspora must do as they travel and begin to set down roots in new, foreign lands.  Not only will the spirits be exposed to symbols of modern culture but also to artistic techniques that are new to them."  and he painted this:

and i immediately thought that this is how i would like the top of the Diaries cloth to be....SO MANY butterflies....along with the arc of Black birds going east to west, west to east, simply because they can.

 

 

Happy Birthday, Jude

what we love

i use the word love a lot.  i am always saying i love something.  thinking about what Doris said,  i spent some time just now watching the fire and thinking about what all i have loved, if i miss things or not, really.  Really.   Do i wish i had kept things i loved?  skirts, people, places...things.  what do i still love?, that i no longer have?

and i got all vague feeling, so i picked up the drawing board next to the Morning Chair with the paper on it reminding me of what i HAVE to do today, written yesterday,  and just put the pencil to the paper without further thought and this is what showed up.

i tried to get a good picture.  can't because of the time of day...SUN owns the morning here.  but what you can see is a drawing of the creek behind the childhood home.  it was down a fairly steep hill in back of the house.  what i drew first was the enormous old willow tree.  then the creek itself.  then,  the fallen log on the left that crossed the creek,  the two boards that crossed the little spring that fed into the creek, actually hidden in wild honeysuckle.  the apple trees and a pear tree, gone wild  long before.  the arc on the right is the metal culvert thing that went under the road.  which always represented to me "the rest of the world".  and then there's me, walking down the hill although you can't see the hill.

so...yes.  this is what i still love.  this Place,  which no longer is like this and this period of time when my whole life was centered here.  i don't MISS it, but i love it.  no less now than then.  and i am so gratefull that my self grew from this place.   and somehow,  i don't know,  the clothmaking to me is related to That and Then.  i am going to think about this but right now, i need to go to work.

so..here's to love...........

 

 

on the edge of Next

I love how things become.  transform.  morph.  right before our eyes,  if we're looking.  if not,  it happens anyway and at some point down the road,  we notice.  or not.....

My visit with Rene is still having it's effect.    I'm thinking she is like a mordant? ...  < interesting thought >   and,  she is very much a mirror.

I  can't tell it all here,  just some,  which makes these days now open out into the Next.  which i've said the Diaries Cloth is....the cloth of Next.  and without explanation or qualification, I can Tell this:  from an almost incidental moment in our two day conversation:

Our lives feel to us as if having been seperate "movies".  Segmented.  that we were certain selves in each, transforming, morphing (there's that word again) as the "episode" required.  and now, each of us is in the "next".  We are at different points in a human life time~line.  I think she's probably twenty some years younger than i, so has many more episodes to go?  and I imagine fewer for my self, or even that this is my final form?

and THEN,  some events and brief conversations,  co~incidental,  in the subsequent days,  about entirely seperate things, have Presented a really great realization:  That all those episodes, those movies, those periods of time and life are

Complete.

in and of themselves.         That i need not "refer" to any of them to inform each day as it comes now.  it can all be NEW in a certain way.  ~!!!!!!~

a few weeks ago i found this blouse at the Thrift Shop

i really love it.  it "talks" to me.  and i think about the upcoming Contemporary Boro class of Jude's.   clothing.  personal adornment.     Personal Adornment.  and  i am realizing something.  that i really have less an urge to adorn my self than see how cloth adorns my space.  Said a different way,  to just SEE  cloth.  as  an Equal almost "life form" that i share space WITH?

here, the curtain wears the blouse.

and now, the futon.

This post might not make a lot of sense, but remember, this blog is primarily a Cloth Journal.  where i document the story of my growing relationship with cloth.  So,  it's ok.

 

i'm back

but only sort of.  today was replenishing the wood pile. 

so in the meantime, please go see Lynda Merry's blog, which i think is lyndamerry.typepad or i wonder, sorry for the sloppiness of this, but go look at her streetpeople.  they are totally mesmerizing to me.  i LOVE them ....... keep looking at them.  they are REAL in the way she is creating them, they are beauty Full and so as if they could at any moment become animated.