windthread

this is it in the dark this morning.   tweeked by the add light feature in Picasa

 

then with the flash

 

THEN….this.   Jude's cloth is back.  back to it's Place, there in the center, under the Treasure Shelf.   and  look how it's very bottom fray touches.  and how the fringe extends into.

There is much more to see here but i need to Work Away.  

 

it began like this.   and right about this time, actually, probably is what brought me to the window, was GOATS making noises.  such an amazing display of vocalizations, i so wish i had a way to record them.  there were the In Heat muffled expressions punctuated by really awful bleats that remind me of the Exorcist.  and then the responses in more normal Goatly voices,  trying to accomodate those in heat.  then the pushing and shoving,  on the porch/off the porch  and it was COLD.  like really really COLD out there.   i had to go to work away today so was doing what i need to do and suddenly turned around and SAW what i'd put on the back of the couch the eve before.

this is Marti's cloth.  you have seen it.  it's been on the Wall for a while…Vertical.  covering, actually, the crack between two drywall panels.   she gave it to me because she was not particularly pleased with how it had come out  and i had loved it because of it's moodiness, it's grays.  it's large.  a little over 4ft long x 9 inches.   Vertically, it was very soothing to me,  i loved it there on the Wall with small things pinned to it.    but, this morning, when i turned,  i saw something else entirely.

 

 

i see 

Winter.  How it is an Altered State, i think, for all of us.  Mostly, for the Beings that remain Out Side.  Wild things and the domesticated Wild.   how they might experience the Phenomenon of Winter.  Those cranes that i talked about know this landscape.  it's their Place for months until they Return.  Every evening and then morning until SunRise,  this is their world.  i love that  it is divided in the center.  Above  …..almost…. mirroring Below but not quite.   it is just so incredibly beautiful to me.  Just as it is.  It talks to me about becoming quiet in the night.  Waiting.  Still.  Waiting for the Sun.  that genetic codeing that says just wait.  be still.  Light will come.  it always has.

so there is the absolute fascination with this change from Vertical to Horizontal.  How Amazing.

but then,  there is a lesson here for me about dyeing cloth.  even before this, i could not have cut that cloth.  it was too strong in its softness, its subtlty to     cut.  it needed to be just as it was.  and now, even more.  and what then does one DO?  when you find yourself given such a gift?

i can see maybe a few, maybe some  single stitched cranes flying left to right.  easy.  but then, this is not my work of art…it's Marti's.   because she didn't see it doesn't change a thing.  it came from her pot.  the Whole of it, even with some birds, would be from her hand.  from her Pot.  her cauldron, as she lovingly calls it.  

so i am going to leave it at that for now.  keep looking.  Waiting.

 

and inbetween taking care of Goat Things and bringing in wood,  i stuck the cloth in the Walnut pot on the Wood Stove, but it was too shallow,  so i dribbled my way outside and plunged it into the big pot out there and went off to feed.  came back and it is just so Cold…so i dribbled it back in to the shallow pot on the wood stove…and fed the dogs and cat.  Darker.  so back out to the cloth line and within maybe 15 minutes…it was frozen stiff.  this pic was hard to take..i have short arms, i guess but it was STIFF.  now is pinned, hanging to dry in the Room.  We'll see.

 

this is Later…7:23 pm….it thawed.  it's almost dry.

 

 

 

 

 

today there was balance.  i went back…to the beginning of Jude's online classes….and just wandered around.  What a Wealth of ALL MANNER OF THINGS.  and so much,  i was not ready for, at that time, but now see so differently and more clearly.  it was Wonder Full.  and so.  That's what i am going to do, during her Sabbatical ….Re~View.   My Selfish Self is content.  

 

Going through my notebook, looking for pass words i came across a printout of this cloth.  had totally forgotten it.  looked and found it.  there's something about it that i like.  so…my first thing will be to take it apart.  do a walnut dip of the Pinkish base cloth.  see what happens and then maybe go from there.  This might be interesting.  at the time, i had NO idea what to do.  but now, since i have LEARNED things, who knows how it might go.  Smile.

 

 

somewhere in some comment, here or over in Jude Hill's What If Diaries,  i said something about a line in a book that i couldn't remember….only a few words…"lost like the stars are"…..such a small book,  maybe like 4×5 inches or something.  and i have been stuck since saying that, trying to remember but i couldn't.   and Jude is making stars as a goodbye to the World as We Know It in the moment and i don't want to make a star.

 

but, and ok,  here is my star.  it's gauze.  i don't know if it will become "prettier" or not.  maybe not.  but i made one. and ok.  but i was still going crazy for the name of that book, for that memory from back in my other life  when everything just went along without Thought…when Just Going wasn't even something that needed those words, Just Going, it was something that just ….Went.  Without much notice even.   but i am seeing Today that there is that pulsing thread…going Back, Touching Here, Now.  and i called my old bookstore partner Jim and with a pile of unconnected words told him….and he said  Cooper Edens.  and YES.  it's Cooper Edens!!!!!!!!!!  YES!!! OH!

it's Cooper Edens book,  "If You're  Afraid of the Dark, Remember the Night Rainbow" published by the oh so elegant and loving Green Tiger Press.   and in my search,  i find in Wikipedia this quote of Cooper Edens.  "  if you don't like the way the world looks straight ahead, use your peripheral vision." 

it has been quite a day.  WIND has pushed and pulled us.  the Sky was graphite gray and cold.  only two small moments SUN broke through.

 

 

 

 

 

so i made, for the first time in my life,  French Onion Soup.  i had all the correct ingredients, no substitutions.  this is kind of embarassing, but i have never even HAD French Onion Soup before.  i have always Wanted it.  but if i had a choice on a menu,  i always chose something else.  so the morning was involved with carmelizing onions in a perfect way.   

and as i sat down with my bowl with floating broiled good bread with Gruyere Cheese melted on,  and took the first bite…hmmmm.   it was…..ok.   Ok.  but not heavenly, as i had always imagined it would be.   I googled Julia Child's recipe and she used cognac.  maybe that's it?  so…there was a morning…flown away into just OK.   i have a quart and a half left over.  i'll think of something.

then, more to the Point,  i stitched.  many invisible bastes and then began the Kantha that will surround.  this is the first time i have done the Kantha first,  before the rest,  and having to remove scraps to accomodate it.  so i have learned.  a little.  and i split back stitched the first of the rings, having learned again, i'll do the rings with this kind of neutral thread first and then add as i go.  Already i am loving this cloth

 

 

India Flint  who can be found at  …..  not all who wonder are lost. blogspot.com  has posted a Giveaway.  i'm sure that everyone who comes here goes to India's blog,  but she requested we post this on our blogs and other social media.  don't do social media,  and am not very good at bringing things from other places here.  so…this is the second of India's books that i just photographed on that little Dalai Lama table.  

if you leave her a comment, well….just go there and read her words.

again.  Clarissa Pinkola~Estes   Women Who Run With the Wolves

La Mariposa,  Butterfly Woman 

"To tell you about the power of the body in another way, I have to tell you a story, a true, rather long story.

For years, tourists have thundered across the great American desert, hurrying through the "spiritual circuit":  Monument Valley, Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, Kayenta, Keams Canyon, Painted Desert, and Canyon de Chelly.  They peer up the pelvis of the Mother Grand Canyon, shake their heads, shrug their shoulders, and hurry home, only to again come charging across the desert the next summer, looking, looking some more, watching, watching some more.

Underneath it all is the same hunger for numinous experience that humans have had since the beginning of time.  But sometimes this hunger is exacerbated, for many people have lost their ancestors.  They often do not know the names of those beyond their grandparents.  They have lost, in particular, family stories.  Spiritually, this situation causes sorrow….and hunger.  So many are trying to recreate something important for soul sake.

For years tourists have come also to Puye, a big dusty mesa in the middle of "nowhere", New Mexico.  Here the Anasazi, the ancient ones, once called to each other across the mesas.  A prehistoric sea, it is said, carved the thousands of grinning, leering, and moaning mouths and eyes into the rock walls there.

The Navajo, Jicarilla Apache,  southern Ute, Hopi, Zuni, Santa Clara, Santa Domingo, Laguna, Picuris, Tesuque, all these desert tribes come together here.  It is here that they dance themselves back into lodgepole pine trees, back into deer,  back into eagles and Katsinas, powerful spirits.

And here too, come visitors, some of whom are very starved of their geno-myths, detached from the spiritual placenta.  They have forgotten their ancient Gods as well.  They come to watch the ones who have  NOT forgotten.

The road up to Puye was built for horse hooves and moccasins, but over time automobiles became more powerful and now locals and visitors come in all manner of cars, trucks, convertibles, and vans.  The vehicles all whine and smoke up the road in a slow,  dusty parade.

Everyone parks trochimochi,  willy nilly, on the lumpy hillocks.  By noon, the edge of the mesa looks like a thousand car pile up.  Some people park next to six foot tall hollyhocks thinking they will just knock over the plants to get out of their cars.  But the hundred year old hollyhocks are like old iron women.  Those who park next to them are trapped in their cars.

The sun turns to a fiery furnace by midday.  Everyone trudges in hot shoes, burdened with an umbrella in case it rains (it will),  an aluminum folding chair in case they tire (they will), and if they are visitors, perhaps a camera (if they're allowed), and pods of film cans hanging around their necks like garlic wreaths.

Visitors come with all manner of expectations, from the sacred, to the profane.  They come to see something that not everyone will be able to see, one of the wildest of the wild, a living  numen,  La Mariposa,  the Butterfly Woman.

The last event is the Butterfly Dance.  Everyone anticipates with great delight this one person dance.  It is danced by a woman, and oh what a woman.  As the sun begins to set, here comes an old man resplendent in forty pounds  of formal dress turquoise.  With the loud speakers, squawking like a chicken espying a hawk, he whispers into the 1930's chrome microphone,  "An our nex dance is gonna be th Butterfly Dance."  He limps away on the cuffs of his jeans.

Unlike a ballet recital, where the act is announced, the curtains part, and the dancers wobble out, here at Puye, as at other tribal dances, the announcement of the dance may precede the dancer's appearance by anywhere from twenty minutes to forever.  Where is the dancer?  Tidying up the camper, perhaps.  Air temperatures over 100 degrees are common, so last minute repairs to sweat streaked body paint are needed.  If a dance belt, which belonged to the dancer's grandfather, breaks on the way to the arena, the dancer would not appear at all, for the spirit of the belt would need to rest.  Dancers delay because a good song is playing on "Tony Lujan's Indian Hour" on radio Taos, KKIT (after Kit Carson).

Sometimes a dancer does not hear the loudspeaker and must be summoned by footrunner.  And then, always, of course, the dancer must speak to all relatives on the way to the arena, and most certainly stop to allow the little nephews and nieces a look.  How awed the little children are to see a towering Katsina sprit who looks suspiciously, a little at least, like Uncle Tomas or a corn dancer who seems to strongly resemble Aunt Yazie.  Lastly, there is the ubiquitous possibility that the dancer is still out on the Tesuque highway, legs dangling out of the maw of a pickup truck while the muffler smudges the air for a mile down wind.

While awaiting the Butterfly Dance in giddy anticipation, everyone chatters about butterfly maidens and the beauty of the Zuni girls who danced in ancient red and black garb with one shoulder barred, bright pink circles painted on their cheeks.  They laud the young male deer dancers who danced with pine boughs bound to their arms and legs.

Time passes                                                                                                                                                                                     and passes                                                                                                                                                                                     and passes.                                                                                                                                                                                    People jingle coins in their pockets.  They suck their teeth.  The visitors are impatient to see this marvelous butterfly dancer.

Unexpectedly then, for everyone is bored to scowls, the drummer's arms begin drumming the sacred butterfly rhythm, and the chanters begin to cry to the Gods for all they are worth.

To the visitors, a butterfly is a delicate thing.  "O fragile beauty," they dream.  So they are necessarily shaken when out hops Maria Lujan.  And she is big, really BIG, like the Venus of Willendorf, like the Mother of Days, like Diego Rivera's heroic size woman who built Mexico City with a single curl of her wrist.

And Maria Lujan, oh, she is old, very very old, like a woman come back from dust, old like old river, old like old pines at timberline.  One of her shoulders is bare.  Her red and black manta, blanket dress, hops up and down with her inside it.  Her heavy body and her very skinny legs made her look like a hopping spider wrapped in a tamale.

She hops on one foot and then the other.   She waves her feather fan to and fro.  She is the Butterfly arrived to strengthen the weak.  She is that which most think of as not strong:  age, the butterfly, the feminine.

Butterfly Maiden's hair reaches to the ground.  It is thick as ten maize sheaves and it is stone gray.  And she wears butterfly wings, the kind you see on little children who are being angels in school plays.  Her hips are like two bouncing bushel baskets and the fleshy shelf  at the top of her buttocks is wide enough to ride two children.

She hops, hops, hops, not like a rabbit, but in footsteps that leave echoes.

"I am here, here, here…                                                                                                                                                            "I am here, here, here…                                                                                                                                                          "Awaken you, you, you!"

She sways her feather fan up and down,  spreading the earth and the people of the earth with the pollenating spirit of the butterfly.  Her shell bracelets rattle like snake, her bell garters tinkle like rain.  Her shadow with its big belly and little legs dances from one side of the dance circle to the other.  Her feet leave little puffs of dust behind.

The Tribes are reverent, involved.  But some visitors look at each other and murmur  "This is it?  THIS is the Butterfly Maiden?"  They are puzzled, some even disillusioned.  They no longer seem to remember that the spirit world is a place where wolves are women, bears are husbands and old women of lavish dimensions are butterflies.

Yes, it is fitting that Wild Woman/Butterfly Woman is old and substantial, for she carries the thunderworld in one breast, the underworld in the other.  Her back is the curve of the planet Earth with all its crops and foods and animals.  The back of her neck carries the sunrise and the sunset.  Her left thigh holds all the lodgepoles, her right thigh all the she-wolves of the world.  Her belly holds all the babies that will ever be born.

Butterfly Maiden is the female fertilizing force.  Carrying the pollen from one place to another, she cross-fertilizes, just as the soul fertilizes mind with nightdreams, just as archetypes fertilize the mundane world.  She is center.  She brings the opposites together by taking a little from here and putting it there.  Transformation is no more complicated than that.  This is what she teaches.  This is how the butterfly does it.  This is how the soul does it. "

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

this most recent need to look for the godthing took me back to the Magic Diaries Cloth,  to hang it again so i could ReSee some things.  in doing that,  cloth that had been pinned in that space got moved around the house.  cloths that i'd become so accustomed to seeing there,  i no longer Saw.

 

this morning,  i DID See.   The dark is a piece from Jude some time ago.  it is porous and strong weave.  it has been so beautiful to me that i could never imagine adding anything to it.  it simply is what it is,  there on a tea dyed piece of again, silk noile.  

i can leave all the Questions for now.  Let this be the godthing.  As Is.  this is good.

 

and let this be Spirit.  Which is really, all i can ever know.

                                                               ………….LATER…………

more snow.  

time to give up the wool socks and Crocs.  Boots.  which need cleaning up, some oil, and….What did i use the laces for??, so, laces too.  ok.

 

 

 

thinking how we look for answers about very Unknowable things….and really, believing that  any and all the Belief Systems, Religions, etc  are equal as a way

and this morning remembering something from Women Who Run With The Wolves   Clarissa Pinkola~Estes….in speaking of Wild Woman                                                                                                                              "She is the mind which thinks us, we are the thoughts that she thinks."

here is the whole passage:

"She is the Life/Death/Life force, she is the incubator.  She is intuition, she is far~seer, she is deep listener, she is loyal heart.  She encourages humans to remain multilingual;  fluent in the languages of dreams, passion, and poetry.  She whispers from night dreams, she leaves behind on the terrain of a woman's soul a coarse hair and muddy footprints.  These fill women with longing to find her, free her, and love her.

She is ideas, feelings, urges and memory.  She has been lost and half forgotten for a long, long time.  She is the source, the light, the night, the dark, and daybreak.  She is the smell of good mud and the back leg of the fox.  The birds which tell us secrets belong to her.  She is the voice that says, "This way, this way."

She is the one who thunders after injustice.  She is the one who turns like a great wheel.  She is the maker of cycles.  She is the one we leave home to look for.  She is the one we come home to.  She is the mucky root of all women.  She is the things that keep us going when we think we're done for.  She is the incubator of raw little ideas and deals.  She is the mind which thinks us, we are the thoughts that she thinks."

so..i begin the day which is sixteen more days till Solstice.

                                                           …………..Later in the day……………

when i had the flu i drank tea instead of coffee.  and since then, the urge for coffee is just vanished.  so i have tried different teas.  this is my favorite morning tea…Taylors of Harrogate  Scottish  Breakfast Tea.  today i put all those bags in with some of the silk noile and ahhhh, o look at that color.

 

i pinned the Magic Diaries Cloth back up and there was 

shock

that entire central background was a grey  l a v e n d a r  color….!!!  During the Monsoon it was on the back of the chair and got wet from a leak in the ceiling.  I'd hung it out to dry on the clothesline and forgot it for a few days….remembered and just brought it in late in a day and folded it back over the chair,  i guess without Attention.  and here it is.  not the color it was.

 

this is a pic from when i was making it,  in June of 2012.  it was a kind of slate bluegrey.  and here's the point…i don't really remember how i got that color.  i'm thinking it was a piece of cloth that i was trying to get BLACK with the Color Hue Dyes?????  i think so, but am not at all sure.  

and now i know.  A lot of times it doesn't matter to me if something is color fast.  but here is an example where it matters a LOT.    i NEVER would have chosen to use a cloth of a greyish lavendar for this.  Never.  but now i have it.  and now i know.  because i have always assumed that if something loses it's original color, it would just become a more faded shade of that color. 

SURPRISE!

 

 

  

 

whatever else goes on with this Cloth,  this will remain.   that accidental but Perfect representation of Butterflies.   

                                                                     ………..~……….                                                                                                        

Went to work where i borrowed this cookbook.  i think i am going to eat nothing but Soup for a while.

 

in the small time left of the day after necessities,  i ripped and placed the harem cloth and then a cloth for the Other side where all the stitches always Show.  am thinking this Other side might be very interesting.  i like very much again the wrinkled harem cloth at the top this time and then the irregular Otherside cloth.   the scene is set.   and then i remembered an Eye as being on the Cloth i made in Magic Diaries and took it from where it's been draped on the back of the rocking chair for many months, really, almost a year.  i'd forgotten it's FEEL.  it's SUBSTANCE.  Like an old Lover, i held it, remembering.  it was never finished.  i'll work on it again now.  but i looked.

 

 

 

 

 

that tiny tassle made me crazy with love

 

 

all these images.  these are Spirit.   and i am wondering.  what do i think the difference is, between Spirit and the GodThing?   how do they differ in my sense of things?   Spirit is Everywhere, all the time,  waiting to be noticed.   but the godthing?,   i always have identified it as a Vast and Formless Intelligence that is forever Unknowable but shows itself on this plane with….Spirit.  and also more undeniably with butterflies.  Even as a child when i wondered these same things,  i ended up with the same ….facts…..as i have today.   if there were no godthing,  if things just Occured,  then how can we explain Butterflies?  Butterflies pollenate.  Butterflies provide food for other entities.  ok.  so they could be all yellow.  or brown.  or orange and perform these necessary functions for the well being of the whole.  or they could even be a modest combination of color and design.

But they are not.  They are such an incredibly magnificant Array of design and color beyond imagination.  Think of it.  Can you even attempt to speak of the incredible variety occuring on this Planet?  No.  

So…the question has always been for me…Why?    all i can think of is that maybe Some Thing, like a god thing,  loves, LOVES Beauty in mindboggling proportion and takes delight in that.  ??????