Spirit Cloth

Open Air

Good Morning!

Always, there are open air ceremonies with cloth.

This one could be finished. But I know it's not. It is already useful as a blanket though.

All day hanging in the crisp September air, hoping no birds would shit on it. They always come sit on the clothes line. But yesterday was windy and hanging big cloth scares them away I think. 

I like how the two sides come face to face here. 

I will let this, HEAL aka Regenerate, rest. Turn my attention to GROW aka Reach. I'll rummage through what's here looking for something like compost.

Connection

The internet came back yesterday.

The whole thing seems very fishy here. This internet service. I don't buy any of their explanations. Maybe they think I'm stupid.  Our guess is that they are over capacity and they are engineering some kind of rolling blackouts. Here in Nowhere'sville, we are not a priority. Whatever.

Two blankets. As one. Connected by no real thread. Just being.

So you spend all this time, making a blanket, arranging things to look just so. But really, this is the way we see it. A changing landscape. A surface.

What I love about quilts, the large cloths that really become blankets, is that they are removed from the Gallery Show and Tell scene and inserted into real life. All else melts away.  Art is cool, but a blanket is warm.  Warm and protective in the way skin is. It wears and tears and lives a life. It holds all the thoughts along the way and makes them useful. There is a bond with a blanket that defies intellectual analysis. That is what brings me back over and over again. The beauty and comfort in that connection. In perspective, the need for such a simple outcome.

link to audio if you see no player

I need this to become that.

Summoning

 

For those of you subscribed by email, there is a video below and if you see no player you can watch it directly in YouTube by clicking this link.

I am a firm believer in Form Follows Function. And to extend that into the spirit of the thing, if you have no use for what you are making/doing, it will not turn out to be anything much at all. Usefulness is a broad concept. Maybe you need to make a living, maybe you need a blanket, maybe you need simply to see what happens. But there has to be something. For it to be something. 

This one is forming. Through intention. Even though I remain on the edge of what it might look like. I want it to be a two sided blanket, I don't want one side to be more than the other. I want it to center me and yet express empathy. To give visual form to that. No matter what it looks like. 

The red. Such an odd addition. But I like that it fits, make the candy colors work more deeply. As I drew and expanded the original red lines, stitched and then thought the split stitch was too blah and would also take too long, I switched to my signature Wrap Stitch, (here, stitched only on the top layer) I drew some dividing lines, for the bars, and suddenly those spikes seemed like backbones.  And courage popped into my head. And then the words...to become whole again, to heal, requires courage. 

I spent a long time stitching, and not one single minute watching either convention. I feel clear headed. And that is what I need this one for. 

Caught by Just going

Here I am. With a little help from a friend.

How about that? (quoting Mom here)

Path. On the wall. On the wall for many days, through this and that. Hasn't grown. Probably I set myself down by the stream of life, to rest.

Like most bigger cloths, smaller cloths find places to stay a while.

Now more than ever, I find myself acknowledging how hard it is to explain how I think, what I think, why thought is so elusive yet vital for understanding. How I've often compromised my true thoughts to accommodate connection. To validate, we seek approval by acknowledging a common path... Still, it is the strangeness of thought that I find most useful. How useful it is to realizing new form, even if no one else ever catches it. So much time passes, I feel someone somewhere must understand, but then after so much time of substituting the love of approval for personal truth, well, form often twists into some more acceptable shape.  Truth may simply not fit to the agenda.

Path has form also. How we go. In itself it is as much "a work" as it is "a way" to the work. It takes time to be able to step back and look at it. 

The other day, when I posted that lovely John Lewis photo over on Instagram, one of my followers commented "I'm confused, what the hell does this have to do with cloth?"  In a very tell tale moment, I deleted the comment and did not take the time to explain.  I think this is a sign of our times. And my age.

I did say to myself, though, the cloth is a metaphor. And I added , in my mind, "asshole". Was that me thinking? Or was it someone else?

Anyway, 3 things pinned there. Not just pinned, but thoughtfully pinned. This caused me to consider 3 aspects of path.  Path as a frame. How path becomes place and might hold and give meaning to what happens. Change it even. Path as pattern, simple as one step in front of another, maybe the result of a simple plan, and then how a shift in pattern, intended or not, might change it's form, how we might even see it as a mistake. And alliance, how something so different might fit by considering which parts lean into one another. Together how path is, again, a puzzle. 

These considerings are useful to me. For story, for form, to connect my life with my making. The question today, for me, is do you understand? Do I need you to understand.  Do you need to understand?  Is it possible to understand? Does it matter?  What's the use? Which will ultimately lead to... do I need to be here? These questions are for me, not you. Here, because Instagram is not the place for them. And I am afforded the luxury (privilege) to consider them.