Raven and Sparrow

Light returning

 

The day after I read a post on Heather's blog (www.truestitches.blogspot.com) about the lengthening days and the return of the sun, I was stunned to see illumination in a corner that is always dark. The angle of the sun was just right to slip in under the roof overhang and hit the glass-fronted cabinet in the kitchen, which bounced it into a place the sun never shines...the top of the china cabinet at the end of the long hall. The horse statue someone gave me in high school is parked there, along with some bronzy glittery fronds that I put up at Christmas and haven't changed out yet. The effect was like a sudden blaze....spontaneous combustion. It was so temporary I didn't dig out the tripod, just grabbed the camera and shakily shot. I like the wobbly picture, but I especially like the way that light can sneak even into the most protected places and create a festival. 

More family, more fun

This has been a busy week with lots of company. Mike and I have birthdays on consecutive days which often results in a heightened social schedule. My parents came and took us out to dinner, our oldest son Brendan and his girlfriend Michele accompanied us to the beach and the arrival of two of my brothers and my nephew prompted a walk in the woods. It has been so nice to see everyone here and be drug willingly out of our usual patterns. I provided several meals in this time, but in keeping with the "its my birthday and I shouldn't have to work" spirit, made no big dinners and set no special tables. (I did make a birthday cake for Mike and felt it was only right to help him with it, since it was my birthday too.) In between visits I have been dye testing some wool and silk for a natural dye class I will be teaching in June and doing some volunteer graphic design work for Mike's local Kiwanis chapter. I feel pretty good about what I have accomplished, but now I need to return to my own projects...cleaning up and Becky's table. Okay.

An unplanned outing

During their visit this weekend, my son Joel and his girlfriend Becca beguiled Mike and me into taking an impromtu morning ferry ride into the San Juan Islands. We walked on without our car and sailed happily for about an hour through fabulous scenery until we got to the tiny town of Friday Harbor. By our combined efforts we made serious inroads on one of the ferry jigsaw puzzles and the weather was mild enough to allow some outdoor photography. The sun shone beautifully, but the scrim of high clouds gave a brassy, wintery quality to the light and the water was dark and cold. 

Once we arrived in Friday Harbor we had a deliciously non-ordinary breakfast of eggs benedict and wandered aimlessly about the town poking into stores and galleries until the Anacortes ferry pulled up to the dock about two hours later. 

On our return voyage we were lucky enough to sight a small pod of orca at very close range, although my pictures don't do justice to their beauty. All orca have fairly impressive dorsal fins, but there was one in this group that was quite large. It was a delight to see them and to spend a morning amongst the wonders of our home. It is easy to become blind to what is always before you, but somehow a ferry ride brings my gratitude and appreciation for this place sharply into focus. It was also charming to spend time with my family unencumbered by agenda or expectations. A good day.

Losing and gaining

Some purges are undertaken voluntarily, some are forced upon you. When I was moving furniture around to wash the recently flooded studio floor I found my old portfolio of design work. I hadn't remembered that it was there. It had been sitting wet for over a month, next to the box of printed examples from which I had made it in the first place. Every single thing in box and folder was damaged at least, most were ruined.... All the evidence of my career in graphic design was glommed together in a pulpy mass, or delaminating from the boards it was mounted on, discolored and moldy. I have to admit, I just fell apart when I saw it. It was as if all those years and all that work had come to nothing, that everything had been lost.

After the storm was over, I realized that nothing I really needed was gone at all. Although I worked as a graphic designer as recently as two years ago, this is not really what I am interested in anymore. I have received the education I was meant to glean from designing printed stuff for other people and now I am trying to apply it in a different direction, for myself. The portfolio is really just a memento of a time now passed...it wasn't even useful when I looked for work. (Portfolios are in electronic form now and to even show one like this is to brand yourself a design dinosaur.) There was more than one embarrassing project that I was glad to get rid of...it was garbage when I made it, but I always felt I should hang on to it to remind myself of past errors and point the way to future improvement...a sort of penance for bad design. It is great to release myself from that obligation and chuck that crap, as I should have done years ago.

To step back even further, none of this was going to last anyway. Printed materials like posters and newsletters are ephemera, meant for the moment. (That is one of the reasons I switched to textiles...they have longer lives and deeper engagement in their construction and use.) I myself am not going to last and no one but me cares about this pile of paper. 

The final service my ruined portfolio performs is to remind me to make, and live right now. We activate and energize our world moment by moment, stitch by stitch, kiss by kiss. Hanging on just holds us back.

On a roll

Before

After

Continuing with my cleaning rampage, I have now tackled my book collection. Although it doesn't really look like it I got rid of almost a hundred books. I've always been an avid reader and an accumulator of books. I feel safer and more at home with books around. I like the way they look. I need to have them at hand. That said, I've also come to the conclusion that I am using them as a shield and an ego prop, so that makes some of them joyless.

I remember from my youngest days hating to be ignorant. Somehow, I figured out early on that knowledge was power, the only kind of power that was in my reach. Ever since then I have gathered up information, with books being the outward sign of what I hoped was in my head. Of course, there is never enough time or brain for everything, and it turned out that my true interests were creative more than intellectual. Creativity has to be practiced, not read about (although I tried that too). Many of my books are a false front, meant to be seen in my bookcase, but not read more than once. Those are the ones that need to be released and I think I have. I took every one out of the case, roughly sorted them by subject, and then put back the ones I love. The Lord of the Rings, the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen leaped back without hesitation. Only about a third of my garden books returned and about half of my books about home and space. Lots of self-help books hit the road, leaving Joseph Campbell and Christoper Alexander with more room to breathe. I had six (six?!!) books by Ken Wilbur, who always made feel like I wasn't quite up to his level of enlightenment. They are gone. The category that I'm surprised I kept is the literature books from my early years in college. I thought they would be show off items, but when I took them in my hand I remembered so clearly the excitement I felt at being able to delve into them and discuss them with others...it was great, so I still have Shakespeare, Dante, Blake, Marlowe, Homer, Petronius, etc. living here at home with me, although all old philosophy and history books hit the bricks. I found Middlemarch, which I thought I would have to re-buy. I love Willa Cather, but I dumped her novel My Mortal Enemy, which was unpleasant, and her collected letters, which was more a marketing ploy of the publishers than an insight into her writing. I could go on and on.

The cleaning of my closet brought out all kinds issues I have struggled with about body image, appearance and femininity. Cleaning my bookcase has exposed my intellectual conceits. I wonder what pocket of inner demons my kitchen utensils will release.

Pattern recognition

I used to buy books on organization and clutter control in the hopes that one of them would help me keep my world in order, but I finally gave up when none of them ever did... ...until this one, maybe: the life-changing magic of tidying up by Marie Kondo. Its a funny little book...the writing shows its Japanese origins...but it has an animistic attitude that I've never encountered in other how-to-clean-up advice. It is the first to use feelings as a basis for choosing what to keep and what to throw, and to describe the energy that belongings can hold. Most treatises on organization evoke the burdensome weight of too much stuff and try to deal with it logically, which leaves me floundering with ever more finely drawn distinctions between this thing and that until decision making becomes the biggest burden of all. Marie is the most ruthless culler of any of them, but her only criteria for keeping or throwing is whether an object, when touched, gives you a feeling of joy. That is, its the thing itself, not the idea of it, that should transmit its necessity in your life. She also advocates gratitude to objects, including the ones that do not transmit joy. Discarded things have played their part in showing you what you don't like or no longer want, or just by being chosen or given have satisfied someone's emotional need. They should be honored for that, without necessarily needing to be kept because of it. Every single thing you do keep, according to Marie, should be something that gives you joy, and therefore you will live surrounded by things you love and care for, whatever they may be. This, finally, makes sense to me. Christopher Alexander says that the luminous ground of being permeates everything, but not everything equally. Why should we not be able to perceive the presence of living energy in our lives and discern which things hold it most powerfully for us? Who else could make those decisions?

With some trepidation I have tried to put Marie's theory into practice. By her advice, I started with my clothes. I felt very reluctant to begin, oppressed with the fear that nothing I own would actually feel good. I remembered all the years of trying to hide behind shapeless, ugly clothes; feeling fat, inelegant, ashamed, afraid of standing out, afraid of looking cheap. Long ago I decided there wasn't much satisfaction in what I wore because I felt those things no matter what I put on, so I put my energy elsewhere and my clothes show it. If I waited for something to give me joy I might have to go naked.

So...was joy present in my closet?  I didn't feel it literally when I touched each thing, but asking the question for every garment made the choices clear. There aren't too many items left (this picture doesn't include my jeans, t-shirts, socks and underwear...they are in a drawer), and some of the ones I kept don't fit me right now, but they are, or were the ones I love. 

The color palette is instructive...I knew I liked blue and gray...here is proof. The styles are equally similar...all supremely simple and undecorated, hardly even patterned, with nothing stretchy or clingy in sight. High quality construction and natural fiber fabric mean a lot to me, touching did transmit those qualities immediately. This row of clothes is a self portrait, a view within and a guide for the future. The feelings that were elicited by the process needed some air and I am holding and considering what they told me. My closet is clean, I no longer have an ironing basket, I feel I might like to go shopping. Okay.