" Is it possible to grow a worthy cosmology by attending closely to our encounters with other creatures, and with the elemental textures and contours of our locale?   We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things…of insects and wooden floors, of broken down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents rising from the soil…seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what's worth knowing.  According to assumptions long held by the civilization in which I've been raised, the deepest truth of things is concealed behind the appearances , in dimensions inaccessible to our senses.  A thousand years ago these dimensions were viewed in spiritual terms: the sensuous world was a fallen, derivative reality that could be understood only by reference to heavenly realms hidden beyond the stars.  Since the powers residing in such realms were concealed from common perception, they had to be mediated for the general populace by priests, who might intercede with those celestial agencies on our behalf.

In recent centuries an abundance of discoveries and remarkable inventions have transformed this culture's general conception of things…and yet the basic disparagement of sensuous reality remains.  Like an old, collective habit very difficult to kick, the directly sensed world is still explained by reference to realms hidden beyond our immediate experience.  Such a realm, for example, is the microscopic domain of axons and dendrites, and neurotransmitters washing across neuronal synapses…a dimension entirely concealed from direct apprehension, yet which presumably precipitates, or gives rise to every aspect of our experience.  Another such dimension is the redondite realm hidden within the nuclei of our cells, wherein reside the intricately folding strands of DNA and RNA the ostensible  code and perhaps even "cause" the behavior of living things.  Alternatively, the deepest source and truth of the apparent world is sometimes held to exist in the subatomic realm of quarks, mesons, and gluons (or the still more theoretical world of vibrating ten-dimensional strings);  or perhaps in the initial breaking of symmetries in the cosmological "big bang" an event almost inconceivably  distant in time and space.  

Every one of these arcane dimensions radically transcends the reach of our unaided senses.  Since we have no ordinary experience of these realms, the essential truths to be found there must be mediated for us by experts, by those who have access to the highpowered instruments and the inordinately expensive technologies (the electron micropscopes, functional MRI scanners, radio telescopes, and supercolliders) that might offer a momentary glimpse into these dimensions.  Here, as before, the sensuous world….the creaturely world directly encountered by our animal senses …is commonly assumed to be a secondary, derivative reality understood only by reference to more primary domains that exist elsewhere, behind the scenes."

David Abram in   Becoming Animal      An Earthly Cosmology

Beginning this book again.  Watching over and over the BBC and Nat Geo documentaries of the Wild Dogs of Africa on U Tube.  Watching these Wild ones.  Now, looking at Dogs and Goats.  

IMG_9813f

and this morning,  beginning to ready the cloth to ship out,  i am caught by this "solar flair, flare" and see how it is WEAVE.   Considering Jude Hill's Considering Weave,  i look and am taken by it.  I did not weave anything,  but this small fragment of a piece of Deb Lacativa's dyed recycled damask is really,  maybe the central point of this Cloth?  it and the small black and white wisp that to me is Animal.  All Animal,  including me.  Animal,  looking UP… Continuing…in it's own small but singular way….
So…a Delay in the sending.  I need to look for a while more.  Need to understand the place this small weave has in this Big Picture.  Need to really take that in and understand what i can of the beingness of cloth,  how it is woven into what we just take for granted as cloth,  but is really,

Weave.   

 

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25 responses to “language…speaking…hearing…understanding…maybe not with words”

  1. Nanette Avatar

    the little wisp has markings like Tay. I saw a baby once, born in the hospital I worked in, but from a remote Aboriginal community, who was born with markings like Tay’s, we worried that the mother was abandoning her, because she wouldn’t stay at the hospital to care for the little girl. But no, they were all very proud of this baby with Dog Dreaming markings, their own clan dreaming ( Dreaming is like a totem)…..there was a medical explanation I forget, because it’s not as interesting as a babe born with it’s clan’s marks on it’s skin. Sorry, not much to do with your cloth but I know you like to ponder interesting things, and every time I see Tay I think of that tiny girl. She would be a teenager now, I wonder what became of her.

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  2. grace Avatar

    yes, i do. like Pondering. Pondering takes me where i
    need to go….and that girl, a teenager now…i Ponder
    her.
    i need to read this more times to know what to ask you

    Like

  3. Michelle in NYC Avatar

    It’s hard to let go of meaningful work? That’s only right. Contemplation is the finishing stitch. We are the ‘mediating experts’ into the depths of our own creations after all.

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  4. beth Avatar

    Thank you for that excerpt. It is a lot to digest in one reading this late at night, but I will read it again tomorrow. Something here is reminding me of a book I read a few years ago by Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. Narby talks about the Shamans in the Amazon gaining knowledge directly from plants on a molecular level. And cloth as weave. yes. Smiling.

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  5. elizabeth denny Avatar

    Hi grace I’m having yet another try at mastering comments on this Typepad site!
    Love your observations on how you are all settling into a new configuration now that Tay has arrived. What beautiful colouring she has. Hope it continues well for you all.

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  6. yvette Avatar

    have to read a couple of times to understand but i think if i see cloth from a distance you made a world so full of dimensions, connecting things with chains of dna and clusters close and far…..
    love the comment from Michelle
    doeidoei

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  7. Nanette Avatar

    ponder away 🙂

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  8. jude Avatar

    nice michelle…..

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  9. kathyd Avatar

    i love the woven burst of yellow and tay running so fast in a field .
    that is what i see …

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  10. Mo Crow Avatar

    Be Here Now…
    to quote Ram Dass from all those years ago
    simple but really it’s all there is ahe?

    Like

  11. Patricia Avatar

    if i’m getting this right, it’s sure a sad commentary…

    Like

  12. grace Avatar

    i guess for as much as there are Australian women in my world now, i don’t much have a sense of how the Aboriginal people are, ARE, in Australia. Are they like our first peoples here? kind of revered in a way, but really…marginal?
    I LOVe this image of a girl child being born with the marks of her clan on her skin. I want to know everything you
    can say about this. Fact and also your imagination. This is an important Story for me.

    Like

  13. grace Avatar

    There was that moment but i woke today to feeling like
    letting it fly. Keeping. there is that moment of keeping
    but then for me, to let it go, let it Go. Another THING will come, will appear. or not. Whatever is supposed to be.

    Like

  14. grace Avatar

    yes. all of this. Smiling back.

    Like

  15. grace Avatar

    O! dear YOU!…well it worked this time!!!!!
    she is “at work”., this young dog. She is working to affect us, to mold us, to make us into something she Wants and Needs.
    I am SO GLAD that you are here…

    Like

  16. grace Avatar

    am going to go back and follow this thread…
    I love you, yvette

    Like

  17. grace Avatar

    i want to see her Running Fast in a Field, OR along
    the bosque on the bank of the Rio Grande. Watching her
    RUN is exhilarating…she is Stunning

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  18. grace Avatar

    well…it Could be…sad…but i didn’t see it that way. I saw it
    as information to help me Understand the world that has presented
    itself to me since i was born. and i saw it as a….well, opening,
    to see it all differently, to see it as i may, from Here, my Place.
    and i know that you are doings this………….

    Like

  19. Nanette Avatar

    yes, yes definitely to your first question.
    have to think, ponder the 2nd…….I can email you?

    Like

  20. Michele BadAye Avatar

    Have to get this book.
    And all your posts on Tay and Chinche and the goats and the cat are teaching me and verifying childhood suspicions on animal nature. ‘Suspicions’ because could only observe on account of severe allergies. But I had fear because I ‘knew’ animals could think and were complex… and that they were all plotting to attack me! hahahahahhaha

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  21. grace Avatar

    this is staying in my mind/heart, this marked girl
    child…
    her meaning
    and i think again how the Navajo say her when a baby is
    born….not TO the parents, but FOR the clan
    yes, Email, of course. Whenever you have time
    or inclination
    xoxoxo

    Like

  22. grace Avatar

    it only took one extra day

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  23. grace Avatar

    This book…well, it is a really excellent presentation
    of his thinking, but reading along i remembered why i
    gave it up the first time….
    He LOVES language and he loves the need to use the most
    perfect words to describe a natural occurance, image…
    but he uses so Many perfect words it wears me out….
    i realize i need to read it just a little at a time

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  24. Michele BadAye Avatar

    You know, I looked up him up on YouTube and I became confused with what he was trying to convey. Too MANY words for what could be said in just a couple. I didn’t know if it was just me and that I was getting old and losing my patience for the :flowery:.

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