Our own TINA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Lion King Cherrywood Challenge Traveling Exhibit….300 entries, of them 120 chosen for an exhibit that will travel the country!!!!!!!!!!!
YAY and such great happiness, Tina, and maybe you can put a link here??? to the latest info on the itinerary? I can't imagine how great this must feel………………………
and the shapes now dance…butterflies dancing…..
going through the baskets, looking for sooo small fragments
this suddenly appeared.
it's one of Jude's scraps, Jude Hill. One of her paper piecing 3's…each the size of a postage stamp. I've never seen this before but maybe i saw it from it's "right side" rather from this Other side, what i am thinking as the Private side of things. It has no weight. Really. I pick it up and it has no weight. So fragile and a rip in the right square here, just from the threads separating for their own reasons. I don't like or use the word …precious. But it's the word that came….so, if this word means that your breath is taken away, that you close your eyes and hold it to your heart, then…precious. Tenderly elegant….i can't tell you…..
that book i said i would make, of how it came to be, of how it goes as it goes, for the kids, but also for me.
arrived from Blick Art Supply. 9 x 12 drawing pad. Hard cover. I can write. draw. glue stuff in. I ordered 2, incase i have more than i think, and in case there's more time than there might be.
I like it a lot.
and i ordered drawing pencils, just the Blick brand, some for me, some to send to Julian. I like B's because i can smear the graphite, blurrrrr the lines. I need that. And first thing i noticed is that they are made in Czech Republic….how interesting since i spoke of my maternal immigrant grandmother as being from there……mother country pencils…..made where she was born……
many changes, many more to come. I really want that middle orange there but it's hard. Part of what i had in mind/heart was to use some scraps that i tend to avoid, scraps that are Scraps, not beauty Full fragments from Deb Lacativa, but some of the ton of just used clothing scraps that i brought home over time. I want to use them more. Make do. The orange is from a great india import skirt and i love how it faded and got marked on its own. I want it there but ……..
* forgot to say. it's called The Book of Now
i'd gotten an email from a man that i used to work for several years ago. He would be coming through Socorro on his way from Colorado to Arizona. He and his wife are moving again.
Would i have breakfast?
we have kept in touch over the years, his wife sends a holiday newsletter at Christmas. Now and then i update them about here, how that Toyota Pickup is doing so Great….they're the ones who gave it to me when they moved to Colorado. Somewhere in this last year an email told me that he had been diagnosed with 4th Stage Melanoma. 3 places in the brain, then his tongue. That he would be having laser surgery and then a new chemotherapy. He's 82. Since then i had been included in group updates. In the last month or so he has been told he is cancer Free. There is no sign of it.
I drove into town to the restaurant not knowing what to expect. Haven't seen him in maybe 4 yrs? and now after all this,
And there he was. Him self. The same him as always. Fit, energetic, happy, like always. We took an hour for breakfast, he had a long drive still ahead, and on the way home and since, i thought about how it went. About how the time was Full with conversation, and still, so much left unsaid, unshared. I thought about how each of us had somehow spontaneously told our Story without thinking, it just came forth, sometimes keying off something the other said, sometimes a switch in topic, but somehow our minds kept the story coming, somehow choosing amidst the many possibilities which stories to tell, which things we found important about those stories and somehow without thinking we said them aloud to each other. We didn't talk about the past, except very recent past, we didn't talk about the Future, really, either. We expressed who it is we are in the moment. I talked about the goats and Tay. He is interested. He talked about his dog who was waiting outside and i had the chance to meet and then talked about trying to convince his Episcopal church to "certify" him as somekind of spiritual counselor…a LOT of training….which he did…..to men in prison. Things like that.
and now it's over. and i think about it. What we chose to tell.
Mo gave this link yesterday. as did Terri Windling. An essay in the New Yorker of Keith Ridway in August of 2012.
"….Everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones…they are characters you have created. You have a perception of the way things are and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience….with our senses and our nerves….is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos."
the opposite of Jude, i find Naming something i just don't do. When i put Cloths in the shop, i need to give them some kind of identifier and i work at it.
but here…this is The Garden of the Imagination. it came of it's own accord, this "name" and it is sure and Good. The Garden of the Imagination. It's all tentatively basted in place, waiting for how it will go. I like it very much.
Thinking about how we repeat things ….to ourselves…inside our heads…. Things we have come to believe as fact, about ourselves or the world, then
Repeating these things, almost casually, in our heads, until they are just a "given" of sorts and eventually we don't question them. until for whatever reason out of the Blue, we wonder.
These. Three of them. Jude's Winter Bitch. The Moth that came. The best cloth i have ever made. These three. All i need. They will carry me.
there could be more stitching….as in following the shadow lines, but all i added were the marks, those so like Thread Beads (Jude Hill) at the hem of the Moth's wings. I drew her antennae with pencil…graphite, for those who love words…i debated stitching them but that would have changed everything and i didn't want to. So. Enough for now, maybe for ever. But for now there's these three and they will take me into the Next.
THE bread and butter pickles.
it stormed all day. it's cool. Pickles. perfect timing.
recipe of my mother, my aunt Francis, from their mother, Katrin Marie Ludvinka of Moravia or Czechoslovakia or Czech Republic now. and for the first time…how interesting…it occurred to me that there was a woman before Katrin. And probably a woman before her. I'd never thought of that.
I remember. Standing on a chair at my aunt's stove at her summer home in northern Michigan. She and my mother talking. I remember going to the place where the people grew the cucumbers and them sorting through them, taking only the smallest.
they are sliced no more than the width of a dime…the cucumbers and onions.
the jars are not, NOT…. processed. This is the secret. The liquid is brought to a boil and the cucumbers and onions added. Slowly heated until
there are tiny bubbles rising to the surface. NO MORE. Do NOT boil. Do NOT even simmer. Only and just to the point of the tiny bubbles. That was my job. To stand on the chair at the stove and stare into the pot, watching for those bubbles and Calling Out. it was a huge responsibility.
so you fill the hot sterile jars. no processing. no one has died from them over my lifetime and they are the most crisp and excellent bread and butter pickles on this planet. You cannot open a jar until Thanksgiving. That's the Law. My mother used to monitor the consumption. Just so much. They were like gold, like jewels. Like…well…treasure. I can eat a whole pint in a couple days. and I can, now, because i am the boss of me.
to get to where i got to in the last post, i realized today, what i was doing, without realizing it, was that technique of Eugene T. Gendlin's….Focusing. A book by the same name, from 1978. Asking, being with what comes until the Felt Sense.
There is a peacefulness now, and also some kind of heightened sensitivity to Everything. I am still spending a lot of time just being OutSide, like it was when they were here. Sometimes sitting but more often squatting, gazing. and to admit, sometimes Willing that snake to return. I want the snake to return.
OutSide, at night, long.
the cucumbers are finally coming in. I am so grateful.
We made things with Sculpey when they were here. I made Snowbunny. I think she might have cancer. I'll send this to Julian on his birthday in October. I make the marks, a little at a time, going out to look at her….say, right cheek….and coming in to make the marks. or her ears
and today, finally, Back to Cloth. How this feels. Back to Cloth. yes.
so the month of July has passed. July…Monsoon they are synonymous in N Mex. This year, not. There was ONE rain….the 4th of July.
Every day almost there is commotion over there at the Rim, late afternoon usually, all manner of dark clouds with brilliant white outlines, Thunder, lightning, Wind picking up pushing and pulling trees, bushes and plants, hard. Throwing sand, knocking things over. There's not so much electrical storms in California, so at first the kids were afraid. I was outside doing something, came in to find them huddled in the bathroom because they'd been told that it was the safest place. I told them it really didn't matter, in this tin house, that there really wasn't any safe place not even outside. But that we don't have tornadoes here or earthquakes, normally, so we could just watch the Storm and wonder at it. I told them about the mammary clouds, how they portend the worst, and after a couple days, we'd go outside to look for them. We watched the Goats, how they simply continued doing whatever it was they wanted to be doing and we sat with them. Let them teach us.
But it never rained. That once on the fourth, we were in town, in Socorro at the celebration there and there was no rain there, only on the way home did we see the arroyos running across the roads, how the road here was a river running. But it was over by then. No rain on our skin.
Somewhere along the line i asked them if they had an understanding of the words Climate Change. Destiny responded emphatically that they "save the hard stuff for third grade". Neither of them are there yet and i let that be a sign, to leave it alone. In three weeks there's not enough time for "the hard stuff". But as time passed, i told them things about how things ordinarily are here in the 20 some years i've lived here, how it was in the beginning when i came. Showed them pictures. Told them about Monsoon and why it matters. Driving around we looked at the desert landscape and talked about how everything we saw was dependent on Monsoon rain. We looked at how they stand, waiting, conserving, all the bushes, Grasses, scrub trees, waiting for water from the sky.
I told them how this Place is really, artificial. We looked at the picture again of how it was in the beginning, and that it was only because i planted things and give water that things came to want to Gather here. To thrive. Next to the Goats, they loved the toads, at first wanting to uhhh, interact with them and i was clear that they were not to. That they could squat as close as they could get, that if one seemed ok about it, they could touch it lightly with one fingertip but no more. That everything here is No More and No Less than one another. Toads, ants, bees, beetles, spiders even the centipedes that would show up sometimes in the places they played. No Kill. No Disturb, even. Stand back and see how they run to safety.
On the night when we were all sitting outside in the dark, when Alyssia had come with Jeff and Fate
and the other adult who is too complicated to explain her connection, sitting under the old apricot tree, Destiny called out that she'd found the first toad of the evening and Lisa, the other adult said
"Grab it! Bring it here so i can see it!"
Julian's voice came from the dark…..quietly Sure: "We don't do that here".
So, we did some fun stuff, but not a lot. Mostly we just were here, like everything else. The fact that every day the temperature hovered around 100 degrees was limiting. The fact of Destiny's ADHD was limiting in that things i'd though we would do didn't happen. No sitting drawing and making books. No sewing more than a stitch or two. No sitting working on reading, looking at the National Geographics for making collage. But they DID spend hours "making worlds". There are so many holes and tunnels and piles of dirt and sticks out there, and Tay helped.
and they're gone now. just a little over a week and i have had so many feelings. Truth is, if i didn't have children i would be happy as a clam to live out my time here, to continue with all i started on and on for the rest of my time. But i do have children. And there's a lot they don't know. Will never know maybe, about how life can be lived. You have to have patience for that and i think be Old or they can't hear you. You have to tell them by telling stories. Your own stories about when you were their age. You have to let them see you stand up to and disagree with other adults.
if things go how it seems they will go, soon enough, my daughter Jenny will come for her Goats. She will have found land there. It will be enough land so that if it goes that way, Alyssia and her kids can live a couple acres over. and somewhere in the acres over, the old nana can live and be of use. I have wandered around since they are gone, wandered in my quiet, wandered in my solitude, and asked that old question that has always been with me since a child….about Purpose and Use. It seems to be answering its self. And not being much for Pretending, i won't. I wish they all would come in this direction. Then i could have both worlds. But they won't and and over time, when it's time, i will defer. This isn't a Happiness in the moment. and i have been kind of stuck in the whatever it is that isn't Happiness for this last week, but looking this morning at Jude's post, the combination of forms and colors in the last pic there, i commented that it somehow acted as a Reset button for me and i felt things shift. I went Out Side and sat looking while the hose dripped in to the Three Leaf Sumac and thought how during The Time Now, i will make things as self reliant as i can. Will work to make swales and places where no matter what comes, things can find shelter as best they can. And i will draw pictures and write and make a book of this place to take with me, so when i tell them stuff, i can show them its pages. pages that will have dates on them, dates of real days. That followed when they were here.
still, the Moth. Working now to let the sky somehow represent the Heat…how it wasn't the usual beloved Sun, but a time of Heat
on the way home from town yesterday, i checked and there are MANY. Like unbelievably MANY.
i'll get one more batch.
