Raven and Sparrow

Dampened enthusiasm

Although I had big plans for the next phase of my table project, my forward movement has been blocked by the weather. Specifically, a massive rainfall poured down our driveway and flooded my studio. I know it doesn't look like much in the pictures, but what a mess. The drainage situation has been a problem for many years, since we live almost at the bottom of a long, steep hill, but we thought we had addressed it with ditching. In any case, we have never seen so much water come down, or such extensive flooding in the house. It was just too much. 

The effect of just a shallow sheet of water across the studio floor has been profound. The worst loss is the box of my best dyeing books that were waiting to be reshelved after I took them for show and tell at a recent talk I gave for our local weaving guild. There were also containers of dye in the box, most of which were impervious to the water, but a bag of cochineal bugs colored the water pink, so the books wicked up pinky-black water...enough to swell and discolor everything. My box of pictures for design ideas is ruined, as well as another box of less interesting, but valuable papers. The portfolios in which I stored my old drawings and new watercolor paper got all wet too. I should be glad...I am glad...that that was the extent of direct loss, but the studio is in shambles and I can't get back to work until it gets straightened out. The horrible sour washcloth smell is dissipating, but a fine white rime of mold is growing across the floor, especially where the cracks in the concrete are still showing damp. Everything that was on the floor is now on the work surfaces and the books are on the drying rack, trying to get dry enough to see if they can be saved. The amount of effort it will take to move everything, scrub the floor and get things put back has slowed...stopped...my work. I'll get to it soon, I hope, but dang it.

Some muddled thoughts on clarity

The beginning of the year always prompts goal-setting and new resolves through which we evaluate our lives and try to correct our course. I feel like I need to peel away the clutter (both mental and literal) that collects around me as I live, but lately I've wondered if the urge to clarify doesn't have a dark side. I have always been drawn to clarity...even as a child I liked cartoons better than live-action because the edges were so easily discernable. It was comforting to have everything reduced to simple hard shapes that had no ambiguity. Fortunately I moved on from cartoons visually, but I still cherish clear glass, clear thoughts and a clear path forward. We need some of all that just to make the decisions that guide our lives, but I now think that clarity can also be a lure and a trap. I have seen people leap upon ideas with a certain sharp sense of relief that, at last, they have found a solid place to stand in the shifting sands of existence. Those ideas, while true, often only describe part of a larger truth and insisting upon them twists them into something fundamentalist and false. The crystalline edge of clarity rejects the ambiguity that is an equal part of the world and it has taken me a long time to appreciate the twining roots of the unseen and unmeasurable. We long to see the whole picture...we feel safer viewing our territory from the heights...but we never can. We can feel its presence though, and maybe that is as clear as we are going to get.

Going back to Christopher Alexander: he describes a theory that beauty comes into being by a process of unfolding. Each element of a creation proceeds from what has happened before, and the final product cannot be seen at the start. This unfolding is necessary to create a thing that lives. I have certainly found in my own work that what I plan (and I love my plans!) doesn't always come to pass as the project goes forward...that each project develops a trajectory of its own that must be respected if I want anything to come of my efforts. Reading the blogs of Jude and Grace has introduced me to Just Going in both life and work, which is unfolding by another name. It has helped so much to see them (and so many of you, really) apply this to daily problems both visual and intrinsic and intuit how it shapes them as people. Thank you again and again to my dear friends who share their lives with me here. May we all continue to Just Go together, in the dark if necessary.

P.S. My links don't seem to be working again. Sigh. Jude is at www.spiritcloth.typepad.com and Grace is at www.windthread.typepad.com. Good luck.

 

Christopher Alexander holds my hand

We are two weeks into the new year, so any resolutions I might have thought of making have had plenty of time to disappear, but I have been trying to formulate and articulate some goals for myself. At least I am making lists of things to do and things I think are important. The clarity of goal making has always appealed to me, but usually when I try to do it, the words I come up with don't hold the feelings and I slip off the whole enterprise like jelly off a doughnut. Well, hope springs eternal, and sometimes even the inadequate words are helpful, so again I'm making lists. Where am I going with my work? What small steps can be taken daily to get me there? What other things need attention? WHAT DO I WANT?

At this point I always think of the architect Christopher Alexander, who says that the only way to be whole and create a wholesome world is to truly please yourself. In his four volume work The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe he says that there is an underlying luminous ground to the universe from which everything arises including ourselves. By making things that make us happy we access this life force, this I-stuff within and make it visible in the world, where it works to heal both us and our environment and society. 

    "It is amazing to fully grasp the impact of making something beautiful. Have you experienced the fact that when you make a beautiful thing, you feel happy for days?...And the reverse is true, also. When you make something ugly, you may be depressed for days....I believe what happens is something like this. When you make a beautiful thing, the depth of the person within becomes more vivid, lives more intensely for a moment...The connection between the life of a made thing and the healing effect it has on the maker is, I believe, very succinctly put just as simply as this: People are deeply nourished by the process of creating wholeness...There is a direct connection between the living structure of the world and the achieved person-ness we experience in ourselves... Somehow, a person's own self is mobilized, liberated, made more strong by that person's success in making life in the world."_¹

    "It is not so easy to please yourself. Why? Because pleasing yourself is not just having fun or following your whim. Truly pleasing yourself means, in the deepest sense, giving pleasure to yourself, making yourself truly pleased. This is only another way of reaching the I, substantially reaching the eternal self, reaching what Zen calls No Mind, reaching what the sufis call drunk in God...To have a hope of reaching the I, you must make each thing, shape each thing so that you really like it, so that it pleases you."_²

I have been reading and re-reading these books since 2004, trying to follow and integrate what he says...leaving them for months and years and then coming back. I keep coming back because of the feeling they always give me that the veil between me and what matters is thinning. I think their genesis in architecture and design helps. I love his assertion that beauty is essential, and a literal presence in our world, not just a subjective fancy that must fall before every other consideration of cost or convenience. Everyone draws from and participates in the luminous ground of being and making things beautiful helps that ground shine out and heal us all. 

I could go on and on about this, but as I attempt to deepen my work and my life I find re-reading Christopher Alexander inspires me to articulate my goals more completely, and so they are more likely to be at least partially accomplished.

¹ Alexander, Christopher. The Nature of Order, Book Four, The Luminous Ground. Center for     Environmental Structure. Berkeley. 2004. Pages 262-264

² Ibid. Page 275.

Mandarins

This was such a strange Christmas season, as illness dissolved one celebratory plan after another. The last event on the schedule, a dinner here with our cherished friends from our old neighborhood, was the only one that actually took place. We knew ahead of time that we wouldn't be able to meet before Christmas, so we made this January date in early December. By the time it arrived I was ready for a party.

Even though it felt like I had lots of time to prepare, I still got caught a little flat-footed, having let everything slide. The Christmas decorations I had managed before the flu struck me down were now dusty and tired, and I never got around to any table setting at all. For this table I decided Christmas had had its day and set out to find some simple flowers that still suggested winter and festivity. Nothing caught my fancy until I saw the bags of little mandarin oranges in the produce department at the store. I love the ones that still have the leaves on and even though these didn't, I figured I could fake it with salal leaves from the woods.

The runner is yet another wool scarf from Asian Eye, our local importer. (They have two wonderful clearance events each year, which I never miss. They provide such a resource for beautiful, yet cheap, table linens.) I thought the white pattern on the blue and purple background of this scarf looked snowy, thus winter perfect. Citrus always offers us Northerners a bit of exotic cheer here in our gray doldrums and I tried to evoke that contrast by using gray dishes and etched glassware to match the weather outside.

The activity of the pattern on the runner and the brightness of the fruit seemed like enough incident for this table, but in the pictures it doesn't seem like enough. This is one of my challenges as I go forward...how to get the proportions of things right.