18 - Starting with Space
May 12th 2012
The day I named this cloth.
I sewed four pieces of sky/ shibori together , quickly, this morning as the sun came up. I used a sewing machine for the long straight seams. Sometimes I do that as a starting point. A point of reference. The context of the time we live in. It felt as if I needed to start. Make this space. Now. The resulting cloth measures a little over six feet square. A good basic size I think. Maybe it will get a little bigger. Maybe a bit smaller. Certainly big enough to sit on or hide under.
I took no care in making a perfect meeting point. There was no need. The cloth touches and holds together just fine. It is a nice open space. And as I turned the cloth over to press the seams I stopped to notice the honesty of that place. So fragile with such thin cloth. I realized that this cloth is being started at a time when I have been quite focused on the way things might move through us. How that might have a lot to do with understanding. And so, with that thought caught again, I decided to make the other side, the one we hide most often, that side of the base will be the face. I will start with sympathy for what is on the inside. This is good.
The cloth needs a name. Naming is often a sympathetic evolution for me as I work. Mostly I am thinking about kindness. And how we change as something is allowed to move through us. This exchange. The resulting transformation. What we might become. And with all these thoughts, for some reason, I think of home. Maybe it is just the comfort in that. So for now I will call this one Home. A safe place to start. Maybe even a good place to end up.
A place where fragile is beautiful and ok for as long as it takes.
And I have started a real journal. Something not digital.