Finding Out

 Why do adults like things that taste bad?

Why do we sometimes laugh as we cry?

Is coffee bitter, is bitterness life?

Why in the pharmacy do women buy cakes of makeup to conceal their bruises?

A cynic's wit aims for the knees until everyone tagged is bleeding out.

What is it about things 'bad for you' that are good for you?

Who buys all the sin they can get, and wants more? More punishment?

When blood quickens and parts soften or harden accordingly, 

who says you move towards the good

the yielding, the syrupy thick sticky sweetness of that unknown fruit

with a hard, high walnut of a pit,

shiny with the pain of finding out?

And who says you lock up the sweet,

restrict the calories of the erotic

to fit into an outfit all rolled up in roles?

Who says good is bad?

Can bad be good for you?

When that curtain is pushed aside, would you recognize the country beyond?

In a Thunderstorm

If we made love in a thunderstorm,
Sidled up to each other in the sticky heat of that expectant afternoon,
Our sweaty brows would be thunderheads
Born where two fronts meet
One warm, one cool, to bring forth rain and fire.

If we heeded the call of those rippling winds,
Following a current of longing
As tangible in the hanging air
As the first cool breeze that heralds the storm,
Our hearts would thunder first and loudest.

If we gave in to the looming presence between us
when that desire became too great to contain
And our touches crackled and sparked,
Then it would start to pour.

If we took our cue
From the staccato on the roof,
Water would fall fast and furious as kisses.

If our bare skin purred like the thunder's rumble,
Sending shivers up our spines,
And we gasped in air that was suddenly honey,
Then waves of lightning would finally crash over us in relief.

If we made love in a thunderstorm,
Then after we rolled apart
We'd reach out to brush against each other,
Lightly, just touching,
Gentle as rain.

A constellation of hurt

I'm an astronaut.
I've visited you.
As I look up in the sky I can see your home,
In a constellation of hurts, lost loves, and lonelier plantets.
It is a place of regret for me.
We don't go there anymore.
I'm a star and you're a star. 
When stars collide, the shards of shrapnel
Hang in the void and aggregate around
The biggest lump of heartbreak they can find, that lump
An iron block in the pit of my stomach
That rises to choke off my voice.
I've traveled the stars, I've shone so bright,
Yet all that answers my stuttering fear
Is the darkness.

Dishes pile in the sink when you're with the one you love.

New home

I am moving to
http://bloomlate.wordpress.com

I will still post some poetry and thoughts here, but more chronological and contextual information and pictures of my surroundings and my work, will go on the new blog.
I have also moved to the Grand Canyon.
See you in the world!

A cat--whose only signs of aging are a deep chest cough and balding eyebrows--insists on sitting on top of my arm. Life is quiet, by which I mean I am quiet. The seven of pentacles, three of wands, and the Hermit. I am coming up all waiting cards, dreaming of the return of the perversions of hope.

Diogenes follows me through a prolonged literary ramble, from an anecdote in a self-help book to a slick reference in Neil Gaiman's short stories, and now this. He is carrying the hermit's lantern, always lit in his search for an honest man. This light here has just gone out, a blown fuse I expect, and it's hard to replace.

I made no choice when I wrote down that my purpose is to create masterpieces of time and evolution, and I cannot take credit for this bit of spun silk and dreamstuff, though since the age of twelve, I've been very concerned with the puzzle of my destiny and the scope of a human life. In the Mastery of Love, Don Miguel Ruiz simply states "A dream master creates a masterpiece of life." Making a leap here, the purpose of my life is to live it, and the life of a human is itself a masterpiece of time and evolution. FORTUNE COOKIE: BE THE SYMPHONY. It is hard to loose my grasp on the idea of production, of forcing my life into some vessel of lasting worthiness.

I have reached the point in the Two Towers where I no longer want to rush ahead. This is where Tolkein splits the action into two books, the first accounting for the adventures of Merry and Pippin, Legolas, Aragorn and Gimli, and their dealings with the Ents and the Riders of Rohan and with the affairs of wizards. My favorite of all the books, I think because my motto is "Follow the wizard". And the second half, my least favorite, in which Sam and Frodo take a cold hard slog over marshes and dusty lands into Mordor, with the treacherous Gollum in tow. No magic or gallantry there. The transition from companionship, cheer and daring deeds, to a present and growing horror leaves me shocked every time.

Creature of memory, she- never, unless Einstein- Aliens have landed-lived, loved

The enormity of small events colliding:
the feeling built slowly
all day
pearls sliding one by one onto a string
sending tremors back and forward
along the whole strand.
Every moment felt as if it had already been lived
already carefully examined and savored.
It felt too familiar,
like snapshots of life pinned
where the wandering eye would memorize every detail,
a school or an office, memories pinned above a desk,
the everyday bustle meaningless, and only those
celluloid squares framing life, the real story
the one happening just now, filling every corner
with the sensation of seen-this-before.
Not only, lived-this-before.
Stepping from one image to the next, walking through walls
like the paper filling of a plot, one sheet at a time,
flipping, flipping
and no one, (or is there?) to tell the heroine,
turn the page, he's right behind you,
open that letter from your uncle,
grab an umbrella.
Creature of memory, she
had always been. But this day
made an ocean of her sunny fishbowl.
Now in the depths of it, in the reaches,
she remembered things she had not yet dreamed.
Two women with the eyes of fishes, eyes of the dead
one looking forward, the other looking behind,
sisters never seeing the eyes of each other.
Speaking truths that pass like ships
One knowing what was, one knowing what will be
one who is, coming for counsel.
A merchant or a thief (it's one and the same)
holding a green glass bauble before a boy.
He is slippery, untrustworthy, but he means no harm.
That image, there, the dish on the stove
this girlish sashay through the kitchen,
breathtaking sprinkle of stars in the heavens,
A small step for man,
the steps of a careful dance around piles
and boxes in a crowded flat.
She has lived it all, so attentively, before.
This time she is careless, bored,
overwhelmed, and paranoid by turns.
No one writes you back, she observes.
You can never write anyone back. You don't know
what it meant to such an author at the time, or what it still means
no experience is truly shared
if our lives are moving targets.
You can only write forwards, write for the moving targets of the future
those who can never, unless Einstein,
unless traveling against that flow,
those who can never write back,
only forwards for them too, trapped in the flow,
no reciprocation, equal and counterpart, action-reaction.
Yes, your cipher worked.
Well done. I am here. Aliens have landed.
it will not say, the message you can never get.
I have heard you. I am here too.
because they have shared what you
once were, a sloughed skin
your futures will be their pasts,
or is it their futures your pasts,
and you will look past each other
at the screens of each other's experience
encrypted
and they will always long for who you were
when you, in past, in passing, left tracks.
Beads, pearls, colliding on a string
separately resonant, but when you
string the last bead and fasten the clasp,
will it slip gently around your neck?
Are those pearls cool on your skin,
or warm, holding a trace of body heat?
Were they a gift to your past or future self?
Two-way mirrors set at right angles.
If the affair is remembered before it can be lived, loved,
she is always haunted by the shadows of what comes next.

All of my letters are unfinished
So when they say the writing's on the wall
No secret of mine can be read
My hopes mostly left un-wished
In this ragtag collection I scrawl
on the inside of seashells I thread
into strings of un-pearls,
these dreams float
not on currents but inside my head.

Making my way through a book of poetry and a bowl of palatable oatmeal, and it keeps occurring to me, one flash of insight hard on the heels of the previous one, that I am quick to read the book of someone else's existence. Quick to witness someone else's dash into the unknown with a torch. I courageously brave only the night, my reading lamp my only torch, illuminating no other path but the one laid out for a strong female lead.
I remember a man, once an uncle, who built his career on making structures outlive their inhabitants, preserved past the content of living memory. So keen in detecting structural flaws, he left his own house til too late, the moldings crumbling til my aunt brought the roof down around his ears. He made life safe for ages of long-dead residents, and she outgrew his living for someone else.
Fortune cookie says: Stay, and be unremarkable, leave and break hearts.

the Meaning of FLOW

Forgive my soapbox speech, my pulpit pounding. I've a lot to say.
Flowtoys hosted a recent video challenge to members of the spinning arts community to describe the meaning of 'flow.' Flow describes a state when the basic skills of a craft have been mastered and can be applied with some fluency to express the artist's whim. After a run, spinners might say "Nice flow" and mean nothing more than the smooth linkage of basic concepts to form words, sentences, paragraphs in a language that laps the air with tongues of flame. A superficial connection, but a necessary precursor to the real deal. For fire spinners and performers, the term flow can also be used to reference a state of synchronistic performance, when rote drills and muscle memory meet inspiration. In the state where the well-honed artist wields himself as the tool, the lag time between thought and deed disappears, and the resulting cosmic dance within a human vessel leaves sizzling trails burned into the back wall of the audiences' skulls. This may happen never, once in a lifetime, or, for some people, every other week; but if you ask even years later they will recall the sensation of everything clicking into place and streaming through them as if from somewhere else, from divine inspiration, one could argue. Elizabeth Gilbert describes the relationship of the psychologically healthy artist with a creative muse in similar terms in her TED talk. And in general, artists have taken this experience of creative flow and run with it, pushing all the limits of human expression past known horizons.

I privately approach fire twirling not so differently from the religious ceremonies of Sufi mysticism, especially those of the people colloquially referred to as the whirling dervishes. The Sufi mystic poet Rumi began the practice of turning in circles to attempt to reach a state of divine ecstasy. To be more precise, Rumi turned in circles to attempt to return to a state of divine ecstasy, to echo his previous, direct experience of a very intense, transpersonal and ecstatic nature that occurred in the presence of Shams of Tabriz, whom he referred to as Friend in many of his poems. Sometimes you can believe that the Friend is God, and sometimes the Friend seems to be Rumi himself, perfectly mirrored in the eyes of another, but the underlying friendship, loyalty, and love within the poetry are almost tangible. For Rumi, being with that man, talking with him, was like looking into the heart of a fire. Really magnetic, and with no chance to turn away. This experience was so important that Rumi ceased teaching his followers, and only conversed with Shams. His students, angered and jealous, had Shams murdered. And in Rumi's ensuing grief, he began to walk in circles around the pole in his garden, speaking free form poetry for dictation. He began turning and turning and turning to try to recapture the original state of that experience, and he left blazing poetry to trail behind him, about love and infinity and experiencing windows into the divine. Not so different from the aim of the fire spinner: turning on an axis can become a prayer. In motion, there is stillness, a stilling of the will, and in that silent space there is room for conversation with something greater. And that conversation might be about the human condition, what it's like to be a human, to rise to meet challenges, to feel, to suffer, to be inspired, to triumph.

Poi spinning (to me) describes the same experience, it's an inward journey of reflection when you work things out and put ideas into practice, but the art is also about how you bring your revelations to the world, and how you express the fruits of your inner journey. It's one thing to experience the meaning of life, it's another to convey that experience to another so that it lives inside them too, making them want to leap to join the dance.

"Those cursed/blessed with a Psychedelic view of the world have some condition or have some extraordinary experience in their history that changed their basic perceptions of the world. Which is why a lot of them gravitate towards the arts, it's the only way they can express the ineffable," said Christopher Knowles, posting on The Secret Sun blogspot early this month. To paraphrase, experiences may be classified as psychedelic, as opposed to rational or scientific, moments when the mind acknowledges the incomplete and faulty nature of the sensory input upon which 'reality' is based.

It is my privately held theory that object manipulators (like artists and magicians of every stripe (and I do love stripes)) are prone to 'extraordinary experiences' of what the human body and mind are capable of . Those who strive to reach beyond the everyday become artists to express the unquantifiable living wonder they find there, and like Prometheus, they emerge from the mountain of the gods bearing fire to spread among humankind. The success of this quest depends on the ability to enter into mystery, to swim in waters where others might drown, and equally important, to return intact and to form a bridge between the transcendent and the ordinary, to chart those waters for a daring few, further explorers. It may be an act of grief at separation, a longing to return to transcendent bliss, as in the case of Rumi, but it is vitally important for the world, for the advancement of human potential, that these highly gifted beings return to a reality that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, and bring back a little of that warmth and illumination with them. They make the world habitable for everyone who seeks out the extraordinary.

frozen tracks

Write what you know, people say, as if they know what they mean. I'm waiting, nothing under my bathrobe, I'm waiting to write, barefoot in the chill of a winter morning, until I know something worth writing. I clip my toenails as I wait, in the pale diffuse light reflected in snow from an overcast sky, blankets of white covering the world. Instead of trudging the well-tracked margins, I'm waiting for some urgent mission to send me plowing my own track across the pages, ledger lines drawn out for me like corn-stubble marching through a snowy field. I'm waiting to be hit with sudden inspiration, before I take my morning shower. Waiting for the call of life to grip me as a hand grips a pen, waiting for life to make me its instrument. Indifference or merely indecision will dissipate, going the way of the cloud cover as a beam of sun, a clarion call, comes to galvanize me into aciton. I'll sit, then, alert, bare feet barely feeling the chill, and I'll swim through the meltwater from the thaw that was my fear bound in blocks of ice, shocked by the cold and by the pouring torrent of life rushing all at once to fill and flood the unused corners that lately were settling fields for my imagination. I'm waiting to write until I am struck forcefully on the temples by something worth writing. With all the expectancy and hush of winter, I am waiting to live until I find a reason worth stepping oug my front door, so I can knowingly take that risk and go about the dangerous business of living with the eagerness of a beloved. I'm waiting, sweating under my bathrobe, with ice cold, purpling feet and stubbly unshaven legs, my blood racing with sweet expectation that can only be the ice block's lusty dream of running fast across a plain, in love with the flowering of spring.

It's been becoming more and more obvious to me that writing, and especially writing science fiction and fantasy, is the best way to open young minds to new ideas, the meaning of life, and to convey the importance of protecting the planet we live on and creating a livable future for all. Speculative fiction, as it's called in the 'biz, gives all people but especially young people, a chance to imagine 'what if' and to explore beyond the boundaries of the known. It is through such exploration that we dream and invent and make something more inspiring of ourselves, and escape beyond the confines of current expression and conventions to realize our own potential. I was thinking about this when I found the following letter, drafted circa 2006. A bit childish, simple, but my sentiments have not changed and neither has the overwhelming message that fiction is what feeds my passion. I have a habit of writing to authors as I finish a book, my mind afire. Maybe only the last sentence is worthwhile, but for context, here is the letter I wrote:

To: Diana Wynne Jones, on the subject of The Merlin Conspiracy, a thoroughly excellent book.
This was fabulous. I must say the cover art had me quite skeptical at first. But I opened the book and immediately was plunged into an intricately, vividly entertaining story, that was both amusing and profound. With each page, a new layer was added, the whole piece weaving itself together into a delicate, delicious and exotic tapestry, like the people in the canyon world.
I enjoyed most of all Nick, Romanov, and Maxwell Hyde, the latter two for having real power and enticing complexity, and the former for not having either quality. Nick seemed so genuinely a teenage kid, with absolutely no clue what was going on, but who wanted to do something important. To have a grand adventure sprung upon such a character rings true for me. I feel sometimes that school, homework and worrying about college and test scores are just fillers, things to take up time until one day I'll just take a step sideways and find myself plunging into my real life, which will of course be full of adventure and excitement. There's got to be more to life than existing and consuming, even soaking in knowledge has begun to seem pointless and anticlimactic.
I enjoyed the very British flavor of your story. British lore can't help but have something of chivalry and King Arthur, of Stonehenge. There is a connectedness with the land, history, something archaic, something greater, that you just don't get in America. Your whole country is steeped in history and myth and magic; everyone just breathes it in I think, and the resulting works are refreshing to those surrounded by raw commercialism daily.
Thank you. I'm sure you get fanmail, but I wonder how much genuine appreciation and admiration actually gets through to fantastic authors. Definitely not enough. Thank you for a moment, a point in time, one page, when the world was still, and time held its breath, and the universe fit inside a book, and a book was a wealth of universes.

From the Farthest Shore

Ursula K. LeGuin's third novel in the classic Earthsea trilogy holds these pearls, which I gather to me now.
"It is time to be done with power. To drop the old toys and go on. It is time that I went home. I crave to walk on the mountain, the mountains of Gont, in the forests, in the autumn when the leaves are bright. There is no kingdom like the forests. It is time I went there, went in silence, went alone. And maybe there I would learn at last what no act or art or power can teach me, what I have never learned."

"A kind of weariness of dread, of waiting for the worst, grew in Arren all day long. Impatience and a dull anger rose in him. He said, after hours of silence, "This land is as dead as the land of death itself!"
"Do not say that," the mage said sharply. He strode on a while and then went on, in a changed voice, "Look at this land; look about you. This is your kingdom, the kingdom of life. This is your immortality. Look at the hills, the mortal hills. They do not endure forever. The hills with the living grass on them, and the streams of water running... In all the world, in all the worlds, in all the immensity of time, there is no other like each of those streams, rising cold out of the earth where no eye sees it, running through the sunlight and the darkness to the sea. Deep are the springs of being, deeper than life, than death..."
He stopped, but in his eyes as he looked at Arren and at the sunlit hills there was a great, wordless, grieving love. And Arren saw that, and seeing it saw him, saw him for the first time whole, as he was.
"I cannot say what I mean," Ged said unhappily.
But Arren thought of that first hour in the Fountain Court, of the man who had knelt by the running water of the fountain; and joy, as clear as that remembered water, welled up in him. He looked at his companion and said, "I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?"
"Aye, lad," said Ged, gently and with pain.
They went on together in silence. But Arren saw the world now with his companion's eyes and saw the living splendor that was revealed about them in the silent, desolate land, as if by a power of enchantment surpassing any other, in every blade of the wind-bowed grass, every shadow, every stone. So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again."

November's gift

The earth in late November is transmuted, or simply muted, by the cold--no longer snapping sharply with the sudden shock of early autumn, but penetrating deep into the bones of the ground and settling there in a long persistent throbbing.
Grass bleaches, showing the raw earthen colors beneath, ochre, gray, and brown beds laid bare on the hillside, and trees assume their purple silhouettes, skeletal finery slender and tall against the mountains' shadow.
November is life turning over in bed and dreaming of the bones of the earth.
Not black-and-white, not technicolor, this dream is filled with sepia tones, faded textures, and nostalgia for the liveliness of summer. Clay and slate predominate in a once-vibrant landscape, violet and charcoal populate shadows that pooled in summer with deepest green.
"Purple mountains majesty and amber waves of grain" were not the mountains and fields of late November. These mountains are far from cartoon, the purple a silent and waiting color, the wisdom of the bare trees written on the hills, grief at the season's end tempered with the maturity of a landscape that endures the test of winter, scrupulously saving to emerge again in spring. The stubble and straw remaining reveals the plow's furrowed tracks, script of a different story, what people have made of the land, their conversation with or their conversion of the earth, schooling it to articulate careful rows of corn, silky tops waving, or whispering seas of alfalfa mingled with the hushing of grasses. November winds have no reeds of grass to caress. Nobember winds go hungry and gnaw bitterly at the land. November's grace is tarnished silver, precious metal weathered by the ravages of time. This time of change and lengthening shadows does not yield up its secrets easily, and all yield to the relentless turning of the wheel.

weather report

The rain that pattered through this November day was the kind of rain I always write about, the rain I add to a scene if it needs the grace and inward turning of reflection, that extra whooshing of a passing vehicle or the eloquence of dripping clothing as it dries, slung over a chairback. Spattering my windowpane, beating a gentle tattoo on the roof above my low ceiling, whispering to me as I lie in bed, this rain makes a space in my life around the sheltering roof. In rain the aromas of the earth come rising up to blend in endless conversation around each inhaled breath, and I stand sniffing like a dog, tracking down the experience of the weather. Expressive, gentle, everywhere at once, this rain is a miracle filling five-gallon plastic buckets left in the driveway.

As if I had lost

Tonight the words are addressed to my sadness, coming from everywhere and enveloping me fully in my memories. In autumn, I remember other autumns, other years past, as if they were coils of wire touching each other at the rim, separated by whole years but located in the same space, other wraps of the scarf around my neck. (I wear layered garments of memory, each one brightly insulative against the tugging, scattering winds.) So I've found that in sadness, I remember past sadnesses standing out sharp and clear, tingling along the length of my arm like bangles sliding neatly together. Or it may be that my memories of grief stand out strong as the most vibrant experiences of my life, when a hurricane rocked through my body, more strongly still when I felt the tidal pull of strange waves. I know that I love doing this, that it keeps me alive, and that without this rocking motion another feeling I love would end, which is why I am sitting with tears streaming down my face, as if I had lost a child. Not merely finished a book, where I was witness to another's grief, and the laying down of burdens, fictional and twenty years in the past. Not merely held someone else's child in my arms, astonishment melting me under the light of the infant's gaze. I had not just heard it as a story, seen it in the face of a friend, listened while the parentheses closed. Are these the echoes of some future grief ricocheting off a rupture in the fabric of my life? I honor this feeling and any who can call it forth with as much grace and tenderness as Barbara Kingsolver in her book Animal Dreams.

So Winter Begins

This is a time for remembering, as the first snow falls to the ground, as the winter wraps me in close in deep folds of cloth. A time for turning inward into the heart, beyond the rattle of beech leaves still clinging palely gold, rasping on their branches, the last sensory organs of a dried up season, the last glory and color of a changing perspective. A time for the stores of memory to unwind, a time to examine each garment for holes that would let in the cold, a time to shore up the foundations and the structures that support each of our beings through the long night. This is a time to sit by the fire and tell the story so that we remember who we are, and where we are going. In the dark one's identity is in question, in ways it would never be under the plain illumination, the clear brightness of day. A time of endurance and strength has come, a time of waiting while plans we have dreamed lie asleep still, waiting for us to wake up into them as to a new spring. A time that tests our preparation and our dedication, that seeks out the weak places in us and cracks us open in all our flaws, right there on the icy hillside. In this time, all our acorns must be in, and the long long arms we stretch beyond our valleys to distant lands be pulled back. We are small in winter, small and close, and we keep the heat in but the cold outside of us, and we know when to keep moving, and sometimes we stay still. And in the space where there are no cricket voices, that breath space of cold, ice cavity of a silence instead of a chest, where billowing steam on the breeze replaces the effervescence of a butterfly's lazy trace, there we hear our blood pound through hot vessels, there we hear the clear ringing of the mountain voices, a raven's startle.
I sit and I remember. I remember how the mountains never felt lonely, on those gray blank days when they were wrapped in snowy blankets. Quiet but purposeful, the mountains bowed to receive their caps. It was beauty on a scale only my heart could conceive of, large in the child's chest that housed it. I would tromp along willingly in the wake of its tug, my boots flopping in time with my flouncing scarf and windmilling arms, mittens securely attached. I didn't know why the resonant chords of the mountains, the fact of their presence, laid bare against the snow, should leave such a welling sadness within me, so solemn for an eight-year-old experiencing the weight of the world. The enormity of the love I felt consumed me without outlet, I could not relate it on a human level, nor understand it. I was simply covered, like an avalanche. I found myself running, running, struggling through snowdrifts, wading when it became deeper and entered my boots, urgently heading somewhere, collapsing in the blank hysteria of an empty field, white as a page, my footsteps laid out behind me. Those footsteps proved the pinnacle of my grief, that I would move a tiny mouse pinned to the land, so removed from the rolling vastness of the mountains I longed for, encompassed but never encompassing. I sought the memory I now hold, memory of flight. Memory of my true sight of the world, my falcon's eyes, with which I envisioned all laid out before me, beat wings with which I gave thanks for all laid out beneath me. A hopeless, sweet child I struggled in utter confusion, barraged by the senses I once knew how to make sense of, fledgling in freefall, not yet knowing to spread my wings. The mountains received my keening and echoed back my cries to the crisp, falling snow.

knit one

I have been working on this piece of knitting for quite a while. It will be a spiral pattern shawl, and it is a gift. I love how the spirals fit together so nicely, and I end up thinking about honeycomb and the center of daisies and soap bubbles and everything that has either the spiral pattern or hexagonally-packed radially symmetrical designs. The practice of knitting says a lot about who I am, and what I do. I get very quiet and still, I work with a focused intent, and I keep a pattern in my mind that represents the whole I am creating. In this state, I will happily untangle snarled yarn, all the time thinking about the mittens I'm going to make. I usually hum wordless tunes, or talk to the person I'm knitting for, or think something nice about them. I watch each stitch carefully as I make it, even if I'm sitting in front of a TV, or in a seminar (I made several seminar scarves. I swear it kept me awake and listening all through senior year). I explore the idea that all the stitches are interconnected, and that a piece of string can become anything with the right guidance, and that patience and craftiness are warmly rewarding. And, slipping into metaphor, if each stitch were a species in an ecosystem, then a slipped stitch, a species going extinct, would create a widening hole in what is meant to be a whole garment, as the species most closely relying on that link in the foodweb are effected and the links begin to crumble. I examine the pattern laid in front of me, counting carefully, and if I see a slipped stitch, my breathing stops for an instant, as I stay perfectly still to keep the run from getting any bigger. I pick up the stitch and work it into the pattern, if there is enough room, and only then do I breathe easy again. Sometimes I undo entire rows, unraveling the mistake and returning to an unbroken pattern. This is what ecological restorationists do for a living, isn't it? Unravel anthropogenic "mistakes" and return to an unbroken pattern, except that there is no knitter, the stitches (species) weave themselves. Which reminds me of a Chinese medicinal text called The Web That Has No Weaver.
At any rate, the study of patterns is necessity to me. If I weren't memorizing carpet squares, I wouldn't have been able to sit through middle school, which moved at a snail's pace, nor even sit in my own room talking on the phone. Out in nature the patterns are so obvious, they have names, aspen, maple, birch, basswood, and I know them the way I recognize voices or handshakes. If you ask me how I know, I will need to think a minute to put it into words, because the patterns do not have words. They have entire stories. But indoors, I compulsively study fabric motifs, wall hangings, and paintings, looking for the same regularity of character or design, looking for something predictable, something that grows and becomes and creates more of itself, as patterns can, and as life can. And so I knit, taking on projects of increasing complexity and scale. Each one I try is a little bit harder than the last, so I keep pushing the envelope. I hang onto the predictability of a pattern in the face of uncertainty. Stories hold patterns that I search for, and they provide an experience of a pattern unfolding and reaching completion. Stories model life. I follow the thread along someone else's pattern, and feel safe and assured, and more confident about my own leavings and tracings, my scribbles, the bits of knotted string that are preparing me for the patchworking of my own life.
This is how knitting is important.

Hello folks. I'm on the open road, discovering a sense of possibility and questing for a personal direction or a sense of purpose beyond the general save-the-world thing. Really I believe this means I'm looking for a place to belong to, a grounded central space to put down roots, to move and have my being. It's fitting that the tarot card I'm working on at the moment (as part of a new and exciting art project!) is the Ace of Pentacles, which embodies exactly such potential, the energy of the seed and keeping things safely in hand for another season of growth. For now each day is full and the uncertainty is a welcome expectation of change. I thank several artists for my new outlook: Ben Karis-Nix for his excellent album We Are Giants Now, a beautiful artistic rendering of the state of flow that I've been trying to cultivate. I play it when spinning poi and lately while driving. And Big Sam's Funky Nation, the New Orleans funk band that I heard live. Big Sam plays the trombone, wears sunglasses in a dimly lit bar, and dances fit to beat all in his very shiny shoes. He even smiled at me. I doubt I will ever buy a funk album because I don't see how it could duplicate the extraordinary experience that occurred in that bar. The guitar twanged away, the brass reverberated and suddenly the whole audience was swimming, as if in a fishbowl, moving through water, not air, and Big Sam performed spectacularly. He told everybody to shake it, pointing with his trombone, and they did. I swam through the best hour of my life completely sober yet in a deep experiential state of wonder, and I drove home with complete confidence, yet the familiar storefronts I passed looked new to me, like I was driving through someone else's hometown. This has stuck with me in my travels, but it began in the place that for so long I called home. Not the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive, someone told me, that's what you are searching for, what we are all searching for. An interesting idea, like a trail of incense smoke dissipating over a crowded street. Nostrils flared, I'm ready to follow it to its source.

Three

I'd like to talk about a symbol that's become important to me for a number of reasons. This is a triquetra withing an interlaced triangle and circle. A friend and I came up with a proposal recently for a circus training and alternative health facility that would utilize warehouse space in Brooklyn. It would also boast a rooftop garden and a juice/snack bar. We dreamed big, and no surprise that this plan will not be carried out. But the exercise was far from wasted, and we worked out some very important components while envisioning our future lives (in a warehouse). One of the things we thought was most important was a really cool name, Trifecta, which led to a whole discussion of what the three subcategories should be, body, mind, world, like the different spheres of influence we want to be moving in? or heart, soul, spirit, like the different layers of energetic imprints that surround our body? What I like the best is the illustration above, Body, Mind, Soul. It focuses my attention on maintaining a balance between those concepts as a stable equilateral triangle.

The name of our hypothetical, moonbrainchild circus? The Threefold Circus. Again, the fun would be in telling everyone who asks three completely new things that the name stands for.

I've also been toying with the idea of my own stage name, especially after meeting such cool folks at Wildfire. A name sets you apart and gives you a clear identity, a clear presence, so I have been thinking hard about what it could be. I came up with Delta, which is the greek letter d, represented by a triangle. In scientific notation it denotes change, as in temperature, slope, moisture content, etc., but basically a reaction or a transformation, it's the shifting variable. And I'm also enjoying the association with a river delta, the land mass at the outflow of a river where it joins the ocean. I like the changing and mixing aspects of that environment, and it's a fertile ground for the proliferation of the ideas I sow. I think I would be an edge species, so an estuary is a great place for me, dynamic.

I'm enamored with the three-petaled antispin flowers that poispinners call 'triquetra', which really do look exactly like the above.

And I've been looking for a symbol to put on a business card. And in my journeying work with sage, I joined with two other aspects of the plant spirit or myself to form a symbol, we held hands like we were in freefall and wove this design around us. Welcome welcome!