More on the Circle

Growing up in rural Alaska, church was one of the few regular, all ages, social events on the calendar. My parents bundled us up and traipsed us through the snow to Nome Methodist most sundays. I liked the singing, the donuts afterwards, the big satin stitched banners that hung above the alter and I loved when all the congregation moved out to the edges of the sanctuary and held hands in a giant human circle. I was always in between my parents, so holding some strange adult’s clammy hand was not a concern. I could suddenly see faces instead of backsides, witness the fish mouth looks of people singing, and I felt the electricity of all those connected beings. 

I am not religious now. I did not feel particularly religious then, but I felt the power of the human circle and the collective human voice. It affected me and still feels potent now. The circle contains magic. 

Centering

Naming my work is often a multi-draft, meander-think process that plays out along side the actual manifestation of the piece. I love the naming effort! I love words, how precise or vague they can be. I spent this tuesday in the studio focusing my efforts on the center of this circular piece. It got me chewing on the word CENTER. The word is a changeling. Its single meaning shifts subtly depending on the center of what. The pit lies at the center of a peach. We refer to our heart center, centering oneself, the center of a conflict, being the center of attention, even the center for disease control. The center points us at a place, a location but the location is infinitely variable, taking on the qualities and conditions of the body that surrounds it. While sewing little golden nodules onto the center of this piece I was listening to a story about a drug rehab facility that was scamming clients and insurance companies. It was refered to as ‘rotten at its center’. 

Tuesdays!

I just “retired” from my part time teaching work. I will miss playing music with young people. I will miss the beautiful chaos of the high school environmment. I will miss daily contact with my teacher colleagues. I will miss the homemade lunches. There are many things I will miss but I will no longer have to juggle two work lives with their seperate complexities AND, most excitingly, I will spend my Tuesdays in the studio. This week was my first tuesday, stitching, cutting fabric, choosing losing myself in color, listening to a 3 part series on the House of Gucci. The Tuesdays in my future feel like shiny precious beads strung on a woven cord.

pencil, paint and pen

Studio time, no fear, intention, focus, play and music. Can you find these words inside the image?

Being in Touch

I made a collection of small leather bound journals for our recent Art Chics sale. The simple efforts of folding and tearing paper, cutting and stitching leather, tracing line, and threading needle; were each a healing action, a sacrament to the holiness of hands. I feel awe and gratitude for the many delicate and intricate things hands can do. Their complex motion (each finger moving and tensing seperately) and their finely calibrated sensitivity (from lightly brushing a moth wing to grasping and bending a metal rod) astound me. How lucky are we to have two of them!? Two mighty and responsive hands!

Handmade Journals

Why we cry

I am wrung out and tender this morning, as yesterday I had several epic cries. Not the pretty tears that one might disappear with a sleeve or the side of a hand, but great sobbing snotty affairs that left my face swollen and my sinuses raw. When I cry like this, which thankfully isn’t often, I am struck by how beyond my control, how involuntary it is. The veil that obscures my inner emotional world is dissolved by floods of salt water that pour from unmapped reservoirs. I am made see-through. Why and what for?
We seem to be the only species that cries tears in our hightened emotional states. There is surprisingly little scientific certainty around why we cry. A European theory from the 1600’s asserted that heightened emotions heated the heart which then produced water vapor to cool itself. The vapor rose into the head where it condensed and was released as tears. This theory fits nicely with the cartoon trope of the angry character with steam jutting from his ears. I suppose thats what happens if you lack tear ducts.
Further scientific inquiry has debunked this body-as-boiler theory but no absolute clarity as to why we cry has emerged. I like that mystery. It lends itself to the sensations that follow a good hard cry. I am emptied and wind blown, tired eyed and ragged like I’ve gone on and returned from some arduous, harrowing journey but I am uncertain just exactly where I went.

the curiosity muscle

I’ve been thinking a lot about curiosity lately. This special state of alert, ponderousness requires that all basic needs are being met, that one is essentially safe. It implies an amount of space; time for inquiries that meander, back track, or even peter off. Curiosity is comfortable, even intimate, with mistake making. Aside from the cat, curiosity conjures a contradictory collection of ideas. Imagine the pink cheeked attentive child investigating the anatomy of a daisy. The nosy, condemning, busy body of a neighbor peering and spittling behind a pair of binoculars. Revel at the stunningly productive curiosity of scientists like Einstein, but recall the role of curiosity in rationalizing inhumane and racist, scientific agendas across our human story (the heinous example of eugenics for one).
Curiosity is a privilege and a weapon. It is a high octane fuel that drives human ‘progress’ and innovation. It is neither benign nor evil, more like a slippery shimmering liquid mercury. Please handle your own tendency toward curiosity with the reverence, attention and care it deserves.