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!

a note about process

Writing is what happens in between. I live at the edge of something, the causeway connecting many things. A river empties where I stand. And in this land of ebb and flux, I simply arrive to find something waiting. There is writing happening all the time, everywhere I meet inner light manifesting Truth through form. Sometimes it appears on paper, but sometimes I write on the inside of my eyelids, or in the sand, or on the skin of a beloved. I write trails through the air, and send messages on the wind. Most of it is in the language of my living cells, though English occasionally predominates. Even if I decide ahead of time what to write, what appears will be markedly different, and not of my choosing. The only thing I can do is be ready, be skillful, and craft myself into the finest instrument for some larger (and as yet unknown to me) purpose. And then I show up to play. It is wild. It is an untameable ride on the rollercoaster of the cosmos. There are no guard rails. And everything I bring back with me counts as another star, a fresh start, a word added to a bag full of sand. The magician never reveals his tricks, because there are no tricks, just the magic of perception. The five year old, wide-eyed, knows it all. Nothing is written in stone because the word, nothing, is written in stone in the sidewalk. It's a joke. And I have so far to fall.
It's true that I have no expectations, but is the expectation of expectations an expectation? The anxiety is all me, but I empty out through this work. My vital spot is the meeting place, the ecotone, the blending and opposing forces as they join. The front and back covers, yin yang. All I am certain of, all I name myself, is change.

What shall I write next?

is always my question. And the glass of water answers, telling me of cool thirst slaked, and the sparkled beam of sunlight answers me, disappearing in the shadowplay of the willow. And the traffic of the road answers me, sounding like an unfolding ribbon or cascade of pavement, musical more than other times when it rains. And the whisper of the stars answers me, sending me all the information I could dream to write. And the blades of grass answer me, cool and perspiring beneath my feed, green and full of two-sidedness like my pages, becoming the leaves and sheets of parchment that I will write. And the spines of books talk to me, divesting secrets with an intimacy that shocks me at times, pouring forth to the empty air--patient and meticulous verbiage. And the quiet chair answers me, holding me up within a pocket of time. And my pockets answer me, containing as they do my memories and old smiles, worn and soft handkerchiefs, and the chocolate wrapers I opened at the theater. And the windshield wipers answer me, shhing in the gloom, and their story is about seeing new possibility, keeping the doors of perception fresh. And the empty air holds my reverberant breath. And I dowse each movement of my pen, finding water underneath, a flowing torrent the life water that becomes real and flows as ink to the surface.

What I thought about last night and what I am right now, these are things not taken lightly. I dreamed a burning house. I was the house and the dreamer. I burned myself and I was relief in the wake of those ashes. The clarity. And I think that the house was unwanted. And if there was anything that I needed, I didn't need what was in the house, the house was wrong.
There are hours of the day where I have time to myself. I go infinitely in, like the hanged man on the card. If there was something for me to do I would keep it to myself. A true meaning presents itself. And the fortune on the cookie left ripples in the air. If there was a message written on a little slip of paper... A man reads a fortune cookie and has a perfect realization. What happened, what brought him to that dawning? What were the events that made so much sense when he read that slip of paper? If we could be so lucky, our lives would fit like novels into sense and cohesion, ended by two books, one beginning, one closing, and all the threads neatly tied. But the center of self cannot hold in coheshion without sacrificing a swim. The neurotic drowns in water he was meant to swim in. The mystic swims in the sea. I think I'm setting out in a boat. If all the docks are dry where do the ducks go in winter?
I am on a journey. What house will I build to replace the one that burned? I think I will live in the old and worn house of Joseph Campbell. I will walk the tattered floor where I felt vertigo. I will converse with pale clapboards and the slate-grey sky. I will associate with the wind.

now you see me...

I practiced invisibility for many years. When you say that no one should go out expecting to be invisible, know that as I left my child's body I tried to keep whatever quiet and nondescript silvery film covered me. I tried to keep still as a mouse, still as the books I read. I stayed passed over, or imagined myself passed over. I became an eddy in the flow of humanity. The first time I came into an understanding that I was not invisible for all practical purposes, I was twenty and in a foreign country. A country, moreover, where dark-skinned (mostly smiling) faces insisted on meeting my eye. Here I could not escape by being in my own head. I was loudly, publicly white, very much an object of curiosity and conjecture. And there I realized I had never been invisible. I had never come to terms with the striking truth of my own identity. The closest I had ever come to wearing my own skin was when I mingled with performers, bravados, young lions boastfully holding a posture, their swagger all tail and flowing hair. Among people to whom a mask was so essential, people who maintain a separate stage identity beyond all proportion to a normal human ego, and who may not mingle easily with the common fold, among such people I found a strange kind of freedom from my self-imposed exile by invisibility. Their masks oddly freed me from my own. I could slip out of my dull cloak and stand, feeling myself no longer all elbows and knees and knobby shoulders. I felt that what I had become was not so foreign after all in their company, where it could be taken for another mask, and where those with true seeing would not mind. Knowing that my full realized existence would challenge social conventions, I kept my moments of lucid embodiment to the practice of performing, a new skill I exercised as I once had invisibility. The three months I spent under tropical suns were three months of constant performance, constant embodiment of an identity, when I knew that I exist without borders when no one is looking. (I am like the cat, everything, nothing. Examine me Schrodinger, and I am fixed, a contrary to your constant.) The exhaustion of stares, blazing stronger than the sun, weighed on me. That battle constantly waged within my face. Knowing that I will fight to be seen, to express myself, knowing that an aggressive assertion is linked to some presentation of selfhood, I yet linger in the penumbra, whispering what I would shout. Awaiting some cue to step from backstage and to take my place in the spotlight.