The latest issue of the Nation arrives this morning. Vandal in Chief is the article's title…Adam Haslett and i begin to read. and come to:
"….knowing in my gut that all I or any of us were doing was losing whatever frayed threads of decency still held American political life together. Through the conventions, the summer meltdowns, and now the fall debates, my mind has been captive to each flicker in the polls.
And I am hardly alone. Our presidential contests have become such prolonged episodes of mass distraction and political anxiety it's hard to even keep track of what we are experiencing. Still, we have to try. And that begins by understanding that one of the reasons they have become such totalizing events is that presidential elections are one of the only chances we have left to fulfill the basic human need to experience collective emotion. In an era of social atomization and online living, when we have so few points of civic attachment in the vast middle ground between domestic life and the imperial presidency, the candidates….as the phenomenon of Barack Obama made abundantly clear…..have become repositories for feelings that have nowhere else to go. What have been, for most of our history, political contests over leadership of the executive branch have transmogrified in recent decades into something we experience less as debates of the direction of the nation than as zero~sum battles over who will be allowed the pleasure and relief of feeling they are not alone in their own country. Beneath the smog of vitriol and disgust that has characterized this election, then, lies a great sorrow; that there is so little fellow feeling left among us these days that we are compelled to seek it in our national leader. Historically, this has never been a good sign."
if i were capable, i would have written these exact words. WHAT RELIEF to read what i feel and know!!!! To have all of what these days are put into words in black and white print in a publication that arrives in my mailbox. RELIEF.
OK.
THIS is why i have been seeking solace in the small cloths of walnut dye….Paticca Samuppada….seeking out small soft brown places to put myself here among all who come here and will see me in this soft brown and it will be just OK. Ok then. and yes, this new larger walnut dye, the View of Moon, yes again. To be and be accepted.
AND
all along and through all this, i have kept thinking, going back to
this Cloth…
Today i looked in Picasa to see when it was i was making it…it felt like a thousand years ago and i saw that it was
AUGUST.
so i went to the drawer where Cloths live and brought it out, layed it on the most recent Walnut cloth. Looking all day.
Responding to a message from Wendy Golden Levitt where she said "with the lightest love", i wrote words about how it was all ok, my present sense of Grief…for Snowbunny, for the Planet and words and thoughts and then saw that i had written…..
"light love feels tender and as a promise that Light Love can exist and thrive and multiply across the land like butterflies" and as soon as those were typed, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i understood!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOW IT IS. HOW IT IS TRUE…the dependent arising, the Paticca Samuppada….how we ARE ONE, always…..
how her birthday is Monday and how year after year i had thought to send HER a cloth…not the children, but Her…. and i never knew what i could send, and in this moment, in my grief and in her response to my grief with the lightest love
….like butterflies
How this GIVES a concrete example of it all….how this gives reason to Go. To go Lightly, no matter.
and mid morning, this…
How Crows move now, this time of the year….overhead, they are back and forth, calling down and i go out and call UP to them….
i want to make this Cloth
