the rocking chair has been wearing the blouse since i last posted pics.  i can see it every morning over the top of the wood stove.  just draped there.   and over and over i have thought how it's so beautiful but how i would never wear it because of the decorative stuff stitched to it in such beautiful pattern.  which IS beautiful, but also not me.  well….

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and as i was doing that, parts of my dream floated through.  the first, that i had decided to "choose" Stevie Wonder.  in the dream, "choose" meant, marry.  like partner up with.  he and i were sitting somewhere creating a mutual creation.  it had two pieces that would automatically fit together once we had made them and would be come a third thing.  it was something like a pendant.  our pieces were about the size of a quarter, some kind of stiff material, but we were making them with our fingers and they had SCENT.  while we were busily making them, their fragrance floated up…his different than mine….  and as i thought about the dream, i thought, of course.  he's blind!

i never got to the end of that because it somehow changed into my son and i making the fountain outside.  when he was here about 3 years ago, my daughter was teaching herself how to make concrete counter tops.  so, he built a form and made me a large concrete triangle, with holes in it according to some envisioned design he had.  it has pieces of stone in it..kind of mosaic and somehow some rust.  but that's as far as he got before he moved back to Denver;  well, we did bring it out here to my house.  it's been out in the lizards island by the mirror chair all this time. 

so i went out there and looked a long time then dragged it from across out there to here, to the inside house garden area and into the diamond raised bed.  it must weigh over 100lbs.  probably right about how much i weigh.  it took a while.

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this is from the front door.

and then,  considering all that,  out of the blue i tea dyed this little something that looks to me always like a fossil of SomeThing that had been very complex and very important in its life.

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and as Sun drifted to the rim,  i cut some cloth into shapes and just randomly pinned them.  and what a difference just these amorphous rock shapes, just pinned, just a few,    Make.  there is weight now and almost a rocking motion  looking at it.  tomorrow i will cut more and begin sewing them down.

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37 responses to “a shift”

  1. Michelle in NYC Avatar

    I’m coming out of my greyness to look at your place; your hand holding cloth, seeing the scissor (Ha-I just bought one of those today)…and then the yard and the stone, now in it’s new place…..and all the while longing for some green to sprout….and the way the triangulated vine trellis echoes the elongated triangle of stone…..the way it is an alter and the yard becomes the church with it’s blue sky for a steeple, and the newly dug dirt/sand place for a grill waits for fire. Now the cloths and their new pieces, all that blue in the grey…and the pink and orange and golden places….so many stories…..many rooms. it’s kind of overwhelming. I’m retreating back to my grey place to wait for tomorrow….sending you a wish for sweet dreams..

    Like

  2. grace Forrest Maestas Avatar

    good thing then that i didn’t put the pic of the ever so
    barely budding apricot blossoms and the ever so visible
    green of the lilac leaves. and how the swords of the
    iris are piercing upward. good thing.
    and what appeared to you as the newly dug dirt for the
    grill is really the adobe frame around the bedspring
    grill that finally caved in this winter with the snow.
    it had been a little three sided wall kind of. now,
    i will haul that dirt away and replace those 3 sides with
    something. probably old tin that’s lying around.
    it’s a grill for roasting chili, mostly. it’s pretty
    big for one person. hence the hibachi perched on it.
    and yes…i read about your grey. this post is about
    some kind of SHIFT. like maybe, the Shift of Why Not?…
    and goes back to the posts about Meaning and Purpose and
    stirred in with such bleak things of the world, the
    Planet, in these days. i am thinking that until a
    burning bush appears and i am directed to Purpose, i will
    just follow these small urges as they come. won’t
    question them or, like i was advised about dreams, Make
    them Stand to Reason…just say ok.
    i would assume a lot of your grey is to do with your
    weather. i would have molded, rotted into mush by now.
    so, your remaining in place is totally commendable to me.
    love to you, Michelle…….

    Like

  3. grace Forrest Maestas Avatar

    and this is a continuation to Michelle….
    THOSE SCISSORS are ones that Jude suggested way way back in the
    beginning of time. that’s when i got mine…they are
    MAGNIFICANT.
    i used to work for a dermatologist when i finished nursing school
    and he would use curettes…like for moles and skin cancer and
    stuff. they are a wonderful simple surgical tool that just
    scrapes off the bad stuff. somehow KNOWS where the healthy
    tissue begins…really amazing, but anyway, that’s what these
    scissors are like. precision tool. like a surgical tool.
    you will LOVE them. and looking at the pic, i see that mine have
    some sort of splotch on them. will wash them of to their
    original grandure.

    Like

  4. Elizabeth Avatar

    hello grace, your yard feels so quiet. I spent some time gazing at your mountain. No wonder you love your place.
    I was trying to remember a poem about mountains – can’t think of it, but when I remember I’ll share it with you. The rocks look very good in the cloth

    Like

  5. Nancy Avatar

    Came in late tonight…came on over after seeing your earlier response to me…really like the additions (rocks), especially near the clumps (love that word) of grass…it’s like Of Course!!! They just belong. Nice.
    And in the yard, your outside space made me think of how a friend used to say that the outdoors, that nature was her church. Like that.
    Goodnight.

    Like

  6. Robyn Ayaz Avatar
    Robyn Ayaz

    And it looks good there with the Buddha(?) and the frame against the fence and I thought of you dragging that across the yard! Believe it or not I envy you being able to drag 100lb pieces of concrete – sometimes I can pick up a sheet of paper the wrong way and I can’t move for a week. You must be very strong, I know you are very strong and the stones on your cloth say, yes.

    Like

  7. Eva Ucgatwork Avatar

    Hello Grace,
    I love the detail of your magic cloth. The colours are beautiful together.
    A few days ago I dreamt a whole story too. Isn’t that funny – dreaming your own personal movie . I was a bit angry when I woke up:
    I would have loved to dream the whole “movie”.
    I don’t think one can dream a sequel…
    enjoy the weekend,
    eva

    Like

  8. saskia Avatar

    hey Grace, colourwise your garden is the opposite of ours……ours is green and muddy with lots of moss and hundreds of snowdrops, we live in bogland, where we have to control water’s flow with dikes and and ditches and canals, however the (dare I say it) untidy feel is exactly same!
    Great to get a glipmse of your garden over here…just this morning I was moaning to my husband, don’t you think we should get our garden act together? he replied: the first thing I see are the budding crocuses and snowdrops, I like our garden just as it is!
    About the rocks appearing: how funny I thought, yesterday birds in the AIR and today rocks from EARTH, always a need to remain grounded I guess, as always looking on in admiration!
    p.s. what wonderful dreams you have…

    Like

  9. Deb G Avatar

    I love the flow of your words and pictures in this post. I’m hoping to spend most of today in the garden today. There should finally be some sun…

    Like

  10. Doris Avatar
    Doris

    your picture of the garden and the mountains remembers me at a trip to the US years ago we traversed New Mexico by train and car and I liked it a lot. I would like to sit there and smell and hear what it feels like.
    Today I´m full of words about your cloth but I cannot express them in english, all I start to say seemes so flat and dull to that what I mean to say. So I had to stop writing.

    Like

  11. Michelle in NYC Avatar

    It is another gray day but I have shifted and can feel it. Just wrote a post about a beam of “What if” light piercing the greyness (maybe for Monday music though I’d originally had something else in mind). Yesterday and Friday I did museums (The Rubin with it’s Buddhas and Demons, and the Quilt museum with giant flowers machine stitched over with thread patterns…took some photos and am constructing a post to present them in). And, I did see a bit of green way at the back near the fence, but want more (greedy for green is like starved for stars). if I could, I would bring truckloads of topsoil, with four strong helpers to build you a frame with a greenhouse room for growing vegetables in year round.
    I too dream, sometimes quite viscerally, full of sensation. I have love affairs there with landscapes, animals, people, and loathe to wake. But I can return to a dream if I don’t move–will to reenter it. It’s a technique I learned as a child by chance in order to deal with nightmares then, one I remembered as an adult, and learned to use again for different reason.
    This afternoon I’ll go to a poetry gathering to listen to metric verse (Jude’s brother will be there too, and read one of his astounding pieces I love to hear), then to a painter friend’s (a rather famous one actually, more on that in some other post sometime) for a small supper. Of course, on return home again, I’ll turn the computer on and check my favorite blogs…..then dreams dear friend…..dreams again.

    Like

  12. Michelle in NYC Avatar

    really looking forward to using them…got a few threads too….some colors I love…and there’s a stretched piece of shiny green fabric on the loop waiting for me.

    Like

  13. jude Avatar

    your cloth is so much a place, the place with the things and the space around and between things that forms a ring around you.

    Like

  14. Valerianna Avatar

    I’m continually struck with the contrast of the place you live – dry and brown – with the place I live – wet and green. I know yours shifts, but underneath, they both remain their essence…. I love all the triangles in that shot – concrete, trellis, garden bed – all creating different planes and levels. As I look at the cloth, it seems the same kind of thing. The shapes are flat, but are different planes all the same.

    Like

  15. Nancy Avatar

    I am so excited to hear (read) someone else say they want to “feel” what a space smells & hears like. This is always what I want to do, get inside a place and truly ‘feel’ it, live it. No one I know, has ever expressed that! 🙂

    Like

  16. nemo-ignorat Avatar

    i am speechless
    serene
    what beauty
    in the words
    and pictures

    Like

  17. Doris Avatar
    Doris

    Nancy, sometimes it happens that I´m in a place with such an intensity that it seems to be inside me – but that doesn´t happen very often. And once in a blue moon it happens that I´m thrown back in such a place and remember the smell so intense as if I´m there – even if I am in another place and I don´t know why it happens. Strange. When I saw Grace photo I remembered the air in NM and my feelings back then. It was in 96. Part of my brain must be an elefant brain – the rest is a colander.

    Like

  18. grace Forrest Maestas Avatar

    Dear Greedy for Green,
    you know, it’s funny, but i don’t really have a sense
    of Jude’s brother being a
    person
    but rather, a Voice from Elsewhere, that magical place
    with images from afar….
    how interesting, my reaction to reading that you were
    going some where where he would be?
    and growing all winter, no. been through that Urge.
    i learned how to build a Hoop House green house and actually still have a lot of the material for it in the
    Albatros. but the reality of WIND here filtered through the desire. and also, then, the realization of the
    importance to me of the turning of seasons. i need
    the season of brown nothing.

    Like

  19. grace Forrest Maestas Avatar

    Elizabeth…yes. it is so quiet. i spent time out
    there today, looking at all the rocks. stones.
    feeling them.

    Like

  20. grace Forrest Maestas Avatar

    yes. it is my church, too.
    Clump grass is a real term. all these grasses here and
    many of them in the SouthWest are classified as Clump grass. they just grow in rings around the original. in
    clumps.

    Like

  21. grace Forrest Maestas Avatar

    yes…it’s a small bronze Child Buddha. belonged to a
    woman i cleaned for and was given to me when she died.
    i have a long and close friend who also sometimes
    labors under the weight of a sheet of paper. i can’t
    imagine how that would change my life. , like my
    interior sense of things. i am used to Pushing it. just
    doing whatever. in the last year or so i am trying to
    change that some. like…dragging it. in the past i
    would have tried to pick it up.

    Like

  22. grace Forrest Maestas Avatar

    maybe you can…dream a sequel…..
    yes. it IS like a movie. i really would so love to
    just go to sleep
    and just sleep.
    my dreams are far busier than my waking life.

    Like

  23. grace Forrest Maestas Avatar

    yes…Dare! untidy. untidy means to me that it is
    living it’s own life out there. sometimes i get an
    urge to tidy up and do, but then soon, Wind returns it
    to it’s comfort. We will share more glimpses of our
    gardens over the spring, yes?
    and my dreams are exhausting.

    Like

  24. grace Forrest Maestas Avatar

    coming over right after this to see if you did……..

    Like

  25. grace Forrest Maestas Avatar

    well, you need to do what you need to do, but i like
    VERY MUCH what you say and if the english has a “spin”
    then, to me, all the better. once again, i am SO full
    of admiration for anyone having a second language. i feel
    like such a dud that i don’t….just understand Spanish.
    going to say something about Smell and Hear next….

    Like

  26. grace Forrest Maestas Avatar

    i am becoming clearer and clearer about a sense of it all.
    the Cloth is showing me

    Like

  27. grace Forrest Maestas Avatar

    you seeing different planes…THIS IS IMPORTANT!!!!!
    and yes. the essence. and the Truth that if i were not
    participating in this eco system, brown and dry would be
    It.

    Like

  28. grace Forrest Maestas Avatar

    there is Great Great beauty in this oh so plain Place.
    i am seeing it anew.

    Like

  29. grace Forrest Maestas Avatar

    Doris…it IS inside us. and it’s a form of cellular
    memory i think. it’s a wonder full phenomenon that is
    oh so available to us but we were not raised to
    acknowledge it. its all babies have. before we take
    it from them.
    and, i love your humor…elefant/colander…yes.
    me too…………

    Like

  30. Robyn Ayaz Avatar
    Robyn Ayaz

    Oh Doris, me too! I know just what you mean,

    Like

  31. Valerianna Avatar

    A magical, disappearing comment… gist of it was, I like all the triangles – planting bed, trellis, concrete – and how they all define planes, and that the cloth has flatter planes described by layers. Like a topographic map, but at times an aerial shot and times landscape.

    Like

  32. Nancy Avatar

    Through that beautiful floral slide show over at Michelle’s…I traveled to this and thought of you!
    http://www.kristinjakob.com/

    Like

  33. saskia Avatar

    glimpses of the garden the house, the studio….for sure we’ll share more

    Like

  34. saskia Avatar

    yes the cloth is guiding you

    Like

  35. deb taylor Avatar

    the ripple effect continues.
    I adore your altar…somewhat ceremonial.
    Nice view too!

    Like

  36. grace Forrest Maestas Avatar

    it’s going to be a little pond, with fountain kind of
    copper tubing that will dribble water…recycle it…
    and the toads and lizards will be amazed.

    Like

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