Gathering the threads

In praise of cloth, how to stay warm in wind season & traveling via the pages of old notebooks

Hello!

I’ve been encountering one of the same obstacles - if it can be called that - that I encountered last year about this time when I started writing here.

That as I’ve been thinking, dreaming, pondering on tiny idea seeds they suddenly grow in many directions all at once, and even the stories walking around in this very neighborhood want to twine themselves into the weft to be woven in.

And pretty soon, as I’m writing, asking questions, getting organized as to why I am doing this and what I am trying to make space for and give life to by doing it, and engaging in the very process itself, I’m well on my way to writing a book for this next post….

And it turned into multiple posts…

And it all turned into enough fodder to last for at least the rest of the spring…

And I got a bit swept up in the inner (and outer!) winds…

Well, Tis spring, I guess.

Doing my best to put something out, imperfect as it is, reel in the book writing for actual books and leave you with some sort of photo/drawing essay for today.

So, I bring you:

Some color.

How to stay warm in wind season part 1 (and learning how to love the wind again)

And travels via old travel notebooks to touch some of the inspiration threads, right in time for festival of Holi, which makes an appearance, and then off to southern Mexico to remember a small mountain town full of music and beauty.

Color Blooming

Studio. North wall, lime-wash white.

A spontaneous still life & new desk altar that emerged in the flurry of rearrangement. A door to where, now that it’s no longer hung in its portal but is balanced on the back of two horses? ¹ An eye in the storm of a gale or the gale in a Galen? Or an eye (or an I) seeing a seed of calm in the chaos?

BLUE, yo!

Garden. pre-dawn gloaming time ambulation ‘round the house and through the garden sipping on spring air, birdsong and color.

Ceanothus ²; this salvia i don’t remember the name of but have been calling “the sage monster" (it grows big and quick! and so far is putting up with the wind and complying nicely with my medicine hedge ideas. Its pretty funny watching fat bumble bees³ land on these delicate blue flowers that take them for a ride unable to support their weight. The hummingbirds seem to like them too, buzzing round and stopping to sip) ; Borage stars.

And the tree collards all purply green and leaning down to get ready for the wind and grow anew, holding diamond droplets of morning dew, a purply green backdrop curtain to all these spots of blue…

There is still beauty in the world folks, just look at this blooming earth we live upon:

a windy walk, baby blue eyes, a stretch of headlands further north than my home zone

Dreaming. House north wall, bed nook, quilt, as stained glass window, as softness between cold north winds and the current bed corner.

3 avocado pit-dyed lotus blossoms - blooming - as the light seeps into the day.

Soft morning light filtered through make a joyful silence⁴

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How to stay warm in wind season, part 1

Sketches on a sunday morning, of getting creative with a length of cloth and the hot water bottle, and keeping myself amused

Perhaps you live somewhere where it actually starts getting warmer this time of year rather than colder. Perhaps you have a toddler or small child you wrap against your body and have no need for the hot water bottle. But me, well I am here investigating how to go about my days with the feeling of lying on a hot rock as part of my embodied experience, or at least melt the tension patterns that seem to build up this time of year and I don’t even realize I’ve been going around being kinda low grade cold for who knows how long. Perils of living in a damp windy place, I tell ya.

Meanwhile spring gets wild and fierce and tis the season of gale force cold winds charging off the ocean (and also rainbow season, and late spring rains season, and first wild irises starting to bloom season) and the little house i am making home in is right smack dab in the wind tunnel part of town, so its just part of my learnings of how to live here well, and befriend the wind, if i’m gonna keep living here.

As I picked up this shawl for the task of experimenting with baby wrapping a hot water bottle, my mind wandered to memories of times traveling in places where I remember being inspired in many ways, among them: what could be born from simplicity, and how ingenious humans can be with a simple length of cloth.

I was particularly remembering a little sketch I made in a travel journal from bumping around in India, 15 (!!) years ago now, as I watched men tie themselves up by the side of the road for a handy seat/backrest while waiting for the bus:

Do you remember crazy creek chairs? I think this must be the ancestor to those camp chairs we know…

And as I wandered into the old India journal, I also found some other ways I was inspired to see people use a piece of cloth simply & elegantly:

for your very shelter! When you need a place to sleep, out in the desert. In this case, Kachchh, the desert lands, home of the Rabari pastoralists, somewhere in the midst of the villages we were “touring” with a taxi driver who was attempting to help us find “the real mud bunga” (they were mostly built with concrete by then when we were there… but I’m getting sidetracked… )

And while I was there, finding tracks and traces left on the pages while bumbling around on a trip that felt significant and life changing enough that when i think back on it i think of it in terms of before i went to India, and after I went to India, or at the very least it was a voyage that started teaching me how to wear a shawl properly (something that i must say is not as easy in this country, I had to learn that in other places…) how to drink chai at all hours, and how to travel properly in the open doors of trains…

…I came across a timely celebration, that- this particular calendar year we are in- just occurred last Friday, the day after the full moon.

Holi, the Hindu celebration of Color, Love, and spring.

And it feels like a good time to remember a celebration exists that is specifically about celebrating these three things.

Fifteen years ago, I happened to be in Gujarat when the festival of Holi was happening. I was wandering around in the ancient port town of Mandvi, where they still make huge wooden ships on the river bank by hand, and people were celebrating in great crowds with their dressed up camels and friends and families by throwing colored powder at each other, riding around all happy and all colorful - as many as 4 or 5 piled on a motor bike - while my dear friend & traveling companion was unfortunately rather ill and staying in the room we’d found, but there I was, finally having figured out how to sort of wear a shawl, in the midst of all the mayhem being shyly approached by Gujaratis who wanted to get some color on me too and include me in the festivities….

So, in case you need a little inspiration for how to dress up and decorate your camel, or remember that it is time to celebrate things like color, love and spring, here you go.

*

Meanwhile, back in Mendocino I’m warming up in the comfy chair by the sunny south window, thinking too many thoughts all at once with my hot water bottle, wrapped up in this shawl that just flew me off to Gujarat, but maybe I aught to take just a moment and remember where these palo de aguila & cochineal dyed woven cotton threads wrapped around me actually came from…

That there was a time, 6 years ago, when love of a piece of fabric took me to a small mountain town, (with the only lady taxi driver I ever saw in Oaxaca city) ⁵

where the music filled the town from dawn til beyond dusk, a lone parrot and a trumpet player filled the empty hotel with song that echoed up the open air cement staircase, and proud and beautiful villagers walked through town wrapped in fabrics embroidered with the plants they tended that grew everywhere around them.

I hesitate to share the name of this place (which is really hard NOT to tell you because it sounds like a spring songbird singing jubilantly in a tree full of flowers when it rolls off your tongue) and think I will not (even though perhaps that sounds silly) in the off chance too many people read this and it sends them off looking.

I guess its my small way of attempting to protect this tiny town full of real life that inspired my own learnings and growing and makings from the tide of hungry ghosts going to gobble up Oaxaca and offer my two cents to say hey, the way you get to places like this, or one true way in my opinion, is by falling in love with something/someone, whatever it might be, and hop on the magic carpet ride that is opened up as a result⁶

I will tell you I found the farmers market, and a young woman selling strawberries with her grandparents, and she led me to the weavers I wanted to meet, who showed me more shawls that I got to swoon over and learn that actually the weaving style they practiced they learned in Chiapas, and the weaving room, and the barrels where the palo de aguila dye was soaking into the cotton threads, and then we continued on and my new friend gave me a tour of town as well, as she wanted to practice her English. So I spent a day with her, going up and down the steep steps everywhere past the corn growing from literally every nook and cranny (cracks in the sidewalk even) and peach trees and brugamansias, and houses made of adobe bricks the color of the shawls I loved, and she practiced her English with me, and I learned a bit of Mixe from her, and then walked her home via the ice cream shop, and met her grandmother, (the other one).

and then I left the next morning after a couple days seeped in the mountain air and the song of this place, crammed cozily into the collectivo for a lift back to Oaxaca city (thanks Judy, but there ARE collectivos available)

There is more I can say, but I am doing my best to keep this not too long, even though I get excited and suddenly there’s a million stories and directions to go from here.

My attempt, which I’m not sure I succeeded at, was to start to make a small nod to some of the places, people, and lineages that have fed me along the way to learning the tangible practice of making cloth (among many other things), or at least have a little heart swelling, soul filling adventure to bring a bit of brightness and remember some ways of living real and beautiful lives doing worthwhile human things in these times that are a bit chaotic and soul killing.

*

Closing with a little spice

(the drawing from back in the India journal)

Don’t you sometimes wish there were collective agreed upon times deeply woven into the fabric of the culture we live in to remember to do things like clean out your spices and herbs? I guess we have to make up our own traditions and see what gets remembered in the process…

Was deep in cleaning out spices and herbs a month ago. Cleaning the stickiness from dirty hands moving too quickly while cooking off the glass spice jars, pulling the medicine herbs from their creaky drawer to strew the jars all over the counter and take stock of what medicines are here, mix tea blends, dream. you know what they say, if you are feeling blocked start cleaning out your spice shelves? have you heard that? yes? no? ‘tis spring sorting and cleaning-out season anyhow…

and a holy COW:

THANK YOU for reading this edition of Color Song Threads! I hope you enjoyed this post and it wasn’t too overly long or windy or all over the place in a way that only really makes any sense to me… I dearly wanted to go deeper with many things touched upon in here, and maybe didn’t even get to all the places I was intending to go, but am experimenting with how to use this medium and am just going to get on with it in the name of getting on with it.

Also, If you enjoyed it please feel free to touch the heart, leave a comment below (I love to hear from you) or to share it with a friend. And please feel free to unsubscribe at any time if you did not, or you no longer would like to receive missives from me in your inbox that are the gathering threads of a mysterious weaving of text & textile, lines & lineages, colors and song, and learning how to be truly at home as a human in the most sane and beautiful of ways….

1. horses of birch… sawhorses that is, (from Ikea). I got one years ago thinking there were two in the box (nope) and when you live in little towns far away from big box stores (which you don’t shop in anyhow) sometimes buying things gets slowed way down. (which is very cool) and well, finally have the second though in the meantime i almost just started making my own… maybe later. anyhow, now, i have a desk! another one! and it is glorious.

2. the glorious California lilac…. once i sat in a room of a 100 people learning to make musical instruments which taught me a little bit about the music this particular spring blooming bee feeder can help to make, but that’s another tale….

3. did you know bumblebees used to be called dumbledores? and yes that is where JK Rowling got the name from. A new neighbor walking by the blooming lavender in my garden last year called them bumblejacks... i like that name for them too…

4. A quilt gift in 2018, from mama B, the mama of a dear friend I’ve known since nearly the beginning of my California days and a huge fiber inspiration & cool person herself. She makes amazing bags too, as does my own mummy, among other things. ( “grandmummy bags, mummy bags & mama bags” might have to get their own post later on…,)

5. Her name was Judy, and she told me there were not any collectivos that went where I wanted to go so she’d have to take me herself (and charge me quite a bit more). I remember feeling a bit like Thelma and Louise part way through the drive (I’m not sure why) sometime after we swapped cars with her husband and before the hot chocolate/coffee break.

6. And really, its not like it hasn’t been “discovered,” even though I didn’t see a single other tourist the couple days I was there. I did hear stories about a French designer who had showed up there, appropriated the village’s designs and gotten in some trouble over it, and turned into a story repeated by locals who told the story & laughed with a shrug… well what can you do.