Me and the Hassidic Rabbi of Ger

"The human being is called a 'walker,' having to go from one step to another. For habit makes things reflexive and this hides the inner light...Whoever stands still is not renewed..."

                                                                        Hassidic teaching, circa 1902

That's from Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger, a Polish rebbe who died in 1905. And, yep, that's what was in the Hebrew pages I had to decode for my text class the day after I returned home from hiking with E in Israel.

The hike was definitely about renewal. First, in hiking 10 to 12 miles daily over four days, I remembered with every muscle how trekking has fed my soul since I was a youngster in wilderness camp. Don't you think that which we love in childhood is that which our most authentic self loves? For me, its vanilla ice cream, pine forests, dogs, and the sound of my boots crunching on the trail.

So it was the happiest of reunions to find each other again. [Insert commercial for orthopedic surgeon and artificial knee prosthesis here.]

But it was also about the freshest of new experiences. The Greatest Hits.

Traversing cliff ridges gripping wires and descending via six inch metal rungs... walking alone in a banana grove to suck some shade while belting out the Chiquita Banana song at the top of my lungs...munching on fallen grapefruit in a citrus grove...falling asleep to the fireworks and gunfire that are how Arab villagers celebrate weddings, in a hostel made from the ruins of an Ottoman palace...Scanning every rock,bush and tree for that damned orange and white trail marker...touching the stone of the nook that held the Torah in the ruins of a second century synagogue. Fresh pomegrantes. Even fresher pita.

And our fellow hikers...well, those gentle souls from Australia, Denmark, Germany and the southern US will get their own post soon.

Jesus played no part in my choice to hike The Jesus Trail, but its geography will forever alter how I feel about what I read in the bible. Because this is geography you can feel. Even at its end, the Israeli summer is about sun that can eat you alive. When you feel a journey like this:

You truly understand the magic of this.

How a well was what a Food and Gas Ahead sign is on the long stretch of highway after midnight. How shade, just simple shade, could be the cornerstone of hospitality.

Our journey started in the ancient market in Nazareth and ended on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. I wished then--and feel it even more now--that I could have kept on going. To walk from point to point as determined by where there is water, listening to the crunch of my boots on the stones and clay shards of an ancient landscape.

But my life is also about Himself, who blew through 36 barbequed chicken thighs and then defrosted a banana bread instead of a turkey meatloaf for his supper (which apparently didn't cause any real change in his dinner plans, except that he didn't have to search for the ketchup).He only likes to hike if there is no other way to get to an intriguing destination.

So I find myself torn between Himself and the Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger. He wrote the quote at the beginning of this post. And here's how he ended it:

"The angels above can stand. But the person has to keep walking." 

Things could get serious between us.                                             

לְהִתרָאוֹת

It says "l'hitraot." That's Hebrew slang for "see you later."

In a few hours, I'll be on my way with E to Israel. We will visit friends, binge on hummus and pita almost out-of-the-oven fresh, and, oh yeah, take a four-day walk.

Its called "The Jesus Trail," and you can read about it here.We're going on our own, with the added convenience of the trail folks shlepping our stuff from guest house to guest house. (I love hiking, not hauling.)

For many people around the world, this trail offers a chance to experience religious pilgrimage. For me, it is a pilgrimage, but of a different sort. It is a victory lap, a chance to remind myself why I went through the total knee replacement surgery in the first place. A chance to feel the person I love being. And to do it in the company of my BFF, even if she goes at such a fast clip that I'm sure I'll be Wiley E. Coyote in her Road Runner cartoon.

I prepared myself by reading Zealot, which is an incredibly well written look at the historical Jesus and the world he lived in. And by augmenting my pretty decent conversational Hebrew skills with  important phrases like "excuse me, have you seen an orange trail marker anywhere?"


And because Apple makes sure that ipads can't play nicely with Google Blogger, I'll be back in about two weeks.

Thinning Out the Carrots

This summer, for the first time, I actually paid attention to that little note on the carrot seed packet that advises thinning seedlings. I never did that before, it was just too much of that awesome "who shall live and who shall die" responsibility. 

Or else laziness. I can't remember which. 

In July, I did thin the seedlings, which by that time had yielded those little baby carrots for which you pay a ridiculous premium in the produce section. I had them for salads and left the rest alone. Yesterday, I rooted around a carrot row and was astounded to find these guys:

 

Ok,they weren't in this formation. But they are about eight inches tall, and they harmonize like nobody's business. I almost pulled up three more to see if I could get a menorah's worth of candles out of them. But I'm letting the rest sleep for now: don't you just love the idea that we have food that just quietly and invisibly stores itself in the ground like this until you need it?

Speaking of "who shall live and who shall die," Rosh Hashanah melted into Yom Kippur last weekend, which traditional liturgy presents as the day God closes the book on the Divine Plans for Thinning the Human Garden in the year ahead. That metaphor scared me as a kid but a more adult view is that it is an opportunity to thin away all your bull, confront your pure self in its mortality, and  make changes in the year ahead that bring yourself back into alignment with the Divine.

Every year, I try on one small but concrete change. A change that is kind of like thinning the carrots: moving out some behavior that is crowding out the ability to grow into my best self.  One year, I decided never again to watch TV's "Law and Order"...and that ultimately helped me be more thoughtful of how much violence I expose myself to and then, to being aware of how I spend my time in general.

Last year, the praying yielded a decision to avoid white lies...you know, those "have to wash my hair" untruths that we spout ostensibly to spare feelings of others but really just indulge our own fears or cowardice. I now try "I am sorry, I am really uncomfortable at parties" instead of "oh, I have to take my mother/father/husband/dog to [fill in the blank.] And that has lead to an encouraging uptick in courage in all kinds of choices.

The system is not a perfect one. I am still addicted to BBC mysteries, as if the detective's English accent somehow gives violence a pedigree. And is it helpful to be aware of how I spend my time if I am spending it trying to shoot the moon in a game of Hearts with, of all things, a computer? You'd think the lying thing would be a good one. In fact, it has heightened my ability to gracefully slink out of the room where the conversation--or the Caller ID--suggests that a white lie might be imminent.  Not lying, but not truthing, either.

But even the smallest turning toward the Divine is a turn. So last week, through those Ten Days of Awe between RH and YK, I waited for Word on the shape of this year's change. Boy, it got pretty damn near Last Call before I heard it, making me think I would have to wing it and try the old standby resolutions, ie, listen before speaking, think before chewing, and other impossibilities. Lucky for me it finally came just as sunset ushered in the Yom Kippur prayers.

No more whispering.

No, sillies, I am still allowed to whisper to tell Himself to stop hogging the whole armrest at the movies. Or to ask E what page we're supposed to be on at Friday night services. But I am going to try to avoid whispering about another person. If what I want to say is too catty to use my full voice, no real good can come of saying it.

That's the plan, anyway.

Alacrity

The mosaic table that had been floating around my mind as a summer project for the past 4 summers is finally done...just as the summer calendar zips itself up and disappears.

Grouting turned out to be like making mudpies and hunting for treasure all at once. Imagine smearing grey oatmeal on a favorite picture and then just clearing it away over and over again to reveal the images below!

The story of this table is about sitting atop mounds in the desert, digging with a stick. One eye looking for color, the other eye guarding against snakes. It is also about all the crashes and "oops" in my kitchen. What a way to transform the feeling of loss into a surprise gift of tesserae (look it up).  And while I wanted this to be made entirely of my own finds, I have some full disclosure. I was at work last week, coveting a blue and white plate of Liza's as I bemoaned the fact that I was about 4 inches short of goods in the final cobalt blue ring. Lucky for me, she had another one just like, chipped and exiled to the back of the cupboard!

Like my quilts, I love some of the supporting characters almost as much as the story itself:

So what have I learned?

This was a lesson about alacrity, which the dictionary defines as "cheerful willingness or speed." In other words, the opposite of inertia. I can remember clearly the moment I actually got started on this, the very first snap of the very first shard. For weeks, I kept thinking, "Guess it is going to be another summer without making a table." As if it were a random event. Then, "I probably should start on that table..." to finally making the connection between a wish and my own hands. It took some real cerebral effort to ignite my energy. Not sure why, but at least I understand that every wish has a fuse that needs to be lit with something more flammable than dreams. 

Post It Notes from Heaven

There were no bits and pieces of flags in my yard this weekend...apparently my Angel got her hands on a raspberry gel pen and a yellow post-it note.  Because in the park this weekend, dogs and I turned the corner, stopping at a large grey boulder that Billy and Clutch say is the park's canine sign-in sheet. And there it was, just sitting there.

 

This seems like a timely thought as Elul winds down and the hard stuff, the opening of the soul, is right around the corner. This particular thought doesn't seem like much of a challenge anymore, I'm happy to forgive myself for just about anything these days. So I need to go back to the park and see what else she's got.

OK, Am I on Candid Camera?

In my very last post, I put up a picture of the scrap that I found at the sycamore tree while mowing the lawn on Sunday.To refresh your collective memories, it looks like this:

Today, at the base of the maple tree that sits 100 feet away from the sycamore, I found this:

Its not from the same flag as Scrap #1, since the strips are much narrower.

WTF??!???

 

Odds and Ends

Look at these cuties!

They're the new patches on my old shirts, masking (L) a stain and (R) a jagged tear from a vicious door knob.

These shirts were laying in my sewing basket for months...along with one red linen dress with a historical artifact (my drippy appetizer at a Mexican restaurant at the beginning of the summer). I was really pleased how the shirt mending came out but couldn't seem to create the right patch for the dress.

The next day (I am not making this up), I was mowing the lawnweeds and looked down to see this cradled in the errant roots of the sycamore tree.

Understand that we live no where near a parade ground. Or a flag store. Understand that in 17 years, I have never found a scrap of any fabric of any type on our property. I appreciate a sign when I see one, even if it is not really the right shade of salsa.

And in other news, the mosaic table is coming along nicely.

I have closed the nipper joint (not the blade, what do you think I am, stupid?) on the thumb of one hand and the palm of the other. I have stepped on the tiny shards that are colonizing into their own table beneath my work surface. And today, I stabbed myself with the microforceps I am using to pull up the dried tile adhesive. As I was placing each piece of the mosaic, I thought perhaps in ancient times, I would have been a tile artist. But I probably would have been dead of sepsis after the first atrium floor.

Moving My Shards into Elul

And so the wheels of introspection move forward.

On a walk along the towpath with the dogs this morning, I spotted a great blue heron on the path ahead of us, just perched on the ground by the side of the canal. Billy finally noticed and charged ahead.The bird let him get about three feet away and then hopped in one single laugh of air to a log in the middle of the water. Three feet away. As if she knew that Billy only steps into water to lie down for a combination drink and mud bath.

And around the bend, another heron sitting on a rock in the middle of the pond. And yellow coneflowers. A network of groundhog (or anaconda) tunnels. Giant sycamores wound in some kind of ivy, with their bark shards ringing the ground. And drops of rain just here and there. I noticed everything around me and I got the message: I am part of it all. Connected. And perhaps that means I don't have to fight with life so much, just fold in. Just go, as Jude says.

I came home to start a project that has been on my list for approximately four summers. It starts with this:

These boxes contain broken bottles and shards of china that I have dug out of trash heaps in ghost towns throughout the West, from the surf at Deadhorse Bay, and from a really good midden that we found just across the river when I was trying to coax Himself to take up walking. Leave it to him to look down and find an ivory cuphandle sticking up under his boot, which meant we had no choice but to run home for our trowels and gloves. Which meant he never did have to go for the walk and, now that I think of it, he probably planted all that stuff there the day before.


Where was I?

Oh yeah, sorting shards by color so that I can enter them into The Permanent Record by making a mosaic on an old cafe table. I felt for the memory in each piece. And I felt the women who had tossed them into the trash. The one who put her mother's cobalt blue platter back in her china cabinet after Thanksgiving, the one who dusted ivory porcelain cups on a piece of lace on the shelf over the piano, the one who always hated the ochre vase her mother-in-law gave her and was SO happy when the cat knocked it over.

The woman who perhaps loved this:

Then there was my own collection of shards-to-be.

I used to have my little girls throw our broken ceramics into the field over the fence, planting shards for the archaelogists of the future. Just like all the other women?  Now, I save them for this project and today, I took a hammer to them...and folded them into the boxes with their ancestors.

 All one. All connected.

A Month of Introspection and Itching

That's what began this week in the Jewish calendar.

The month of Elul is the last month of the year. It slides right into the Jewish New Year and the entire holiday package known as the High Holy Days or the Days of Awe. Like the secular new year, Rosh Hashanah ("Head of the Year") involves both celebration and transformation.

Unlike the secular new year, Judaism gives you about 30 days to warm up. You get the entire month of Elul to look inward, to see who you have become and how far off your path you have wandered. Many rituals facilitate this introspective assessment. They increase in intensity as the holidays draw closer, spiraling you near and nearer to your Truths.

On Rosh Hashanah, you invite those truths, good and bad, to creep into your awareness. For 10 days, you look hard at them. Then, on Yom Kippur, you flood yourself with Your Self. You acknowledge it all, move nakedly to ask others to forgive you, move compassionately to forgive (especially yourself). And then, as the sun sets, you feel cleansed, renewed...and ready to start yet another year of marching off track. 

This year, Opening Day of the spiritual pre-season that is Elul coincided with the one-year anniversary of my total knee replacement. I have been wildly grateful for my return to long walks with the dogs, for the hiking adventures now on my calendar, and especially for the glorious absence of searing pain in my joints. This anniversary renewed my sense of physical power, which I then aimed at the weeds covering our front porch. For nearly three hours, I yanked and pulled till I turned into a sweaty mess. Hah, I sneer at sweat!  With the back of my hand, I just wiped it clean off my arms, off my brow, off the back of my neck. My new knee makes me Mighty. Invincible...

...but apparently not immune to poison ivy.

Its not like I didn't know it was there at the start. Himself saw it and refused to go out there unless I got him a biohazard suit from the Centers for Disease Control. Me?  I was just so enamored of my strength that I consciously decided not to change clothes. Even if the clothes were shorts, a tank top and...oy, I can hardly bear to type it...flip flops.

Yes, I sneer at toxic plant life!  And I continued to sneer for the next two days. Which is exactly how long it takes for those first bumps to appear. They quickly turn into vicious lesions that pop up on wrists then toes, on fingers then neck, like some dermatologic whac-a-mole. One week later and I am still on fire. I am even scratching my skin in my sleep.

You're probably wondering what all this has to do with Elul. Let's just say that a person who wears flip-flops into a poison ivy patch probably should start the process of transformation by reviewing the chapter on humility.

Something Significant

I had a transforming creative experience last night.

My intention had been to take this cloth:

...and turn it into a story of The Power of Spirit. Riveting. Dramatic. Intensely Personal.

A whole lot of stuff to put on the end of the needle, don't you think?  Not surprisingly, the process got pretty heavy too.

First, I stitched radiating circles on the nine patch but then there was no more empty space and I had to move into the dreaded What Comes Next?  I paralyze myself exactly at this step because, let's face it, each creative turn is only one of a million options.  Every time I start to commit to one (and by that I mean putting a pin into fabric) the voice Julia Cameron calls "The Internal Critic" starts screaming. "NOT THAT! SOMETHING BETTER!"and I drop the pin. The noise hurts my head, not to mention my soul.  It ultimately causes me to turn out the light and head for the freezer in the off chance there's a stray piece of Halloween candy in there somewhere.

This time, as I pinned and unpinned around Horse, the voice started up again. And this time I made a deliberate decision not to listen. For two reasons. First, the last trick or treaters were through here in the mid 1990s. Second, just that day, Jude had said something in a What If Diaries audio clip about stitching samplers that I immediately transcribed. "I like to think of the sampler as a small library of possibilities and a place for practice. That frees you from too much expectation that the piece has to become Something Significant." The caps are mine, but if you create, I'm sure you recognize the concept.

That was in my mind as Horse and I went back to the studio. It must have lodged itself somewhere deep because of what happened next. I had been positioning Horse on a background cloth that I had woven, one I was saving for...well, for Something Significant. But this horse really didn't care how Significant she would be.  She only wanted this cloth. And to make it worse, she didn't want the whole cloth, she wanted only half. So, I picked up the scissors and cut out the piece she needed! (If you need some history on my clinical aversion to Scissors, please see this.)

Cue Hallelujah Chorus, like all you stitchers promised me, the cutting set me free.

The same Diaries post also touched on integrated applique. This stitching technique blends one piece of fabric into another, creating the perception of a whole in place of edges and seams. As I put scraps on and off, I focused on integrated applique. Could I integrate this bit of blue? Or this one? A title even flowed from fingertips: Integrated Horse. On and off, on and off, the challenge felt playful. So much so that I upped the bar: no second guessing, just figure out where it goes now and then you will somehow use stitch to integrate it all together. Ok, there was a bit of second guessing, but no fourths, fifths, or sixthes.  And whatever I pinned had to stay. And whatever stayed would get basted down that night, before I could come to my senses.

And whatever I basted will now get stitched.  And what else could I call her now besides this: Horseplay.

Sometimes I feel like Patty Duke being Helen Keller with her fingers in the gushing water at that well...finally oh so finally comprehending a truth. 

A Bowl of Memories

When we moved into this house 18 years ago, my mom bought a scraggly little raspberry stick for my youngest daughter. She wore overalls and white Carter's underwear with pink flowers (daughter, not Mom) and we planted it back near the new post-and-rail fence.

The bush has spread throughout the yard and into the field next door. The fence is now an ivy-covered wall.  Mom is 82 and doesn't remember bringing her the bush. The little girl in the overalls is gone, replaced by a 23-year-old woman whose underwear has a whole lot to do with tiny pieces of black lace.  

Me?  I get these. And everything that went into them.

The Furthest Thing from Triangles

With the last scraps of Haze Kilim triangle detritus picked off the carpet and the dogs, I am flying back with outstretched arms to Cloth Without Rules.

I find myself returning again and again to Saskia's story cloths that also tell stories in words. Especially after I saw Patricia undergo the same experience: creating a story cloth that also spun words.  Probably because they are the furthest thing from sewing triangles together, those two projects floated around me in my first free day in the studio. I started to imagine MY cloth that could write...and what it would say. I put on the soundtrack to Dances With Wolves (music that was written for me, not Kevin Costner in a loincloth). I hit the "Buffalo Hunt" track, turned the volume to its maximum and then my hands reached for the old indigo Shot Cotton that fell into my life when I cleaned Liza's drawers. I hit replay again...and again...

...and here's what came out.

There's a girl in grey and red  and a mane/tail made from Glennis's Shibori Ribbons lying in wait.

The Quilt That Taught Me a Truth

It started months ago with two questions. First, could I remake Kaffe and Liza's Haze Kilim quilt with the new handwoven stripes that landed in the shop? Second, could I do it with a heretofore unexamined attention to detail and precision? 

First, a review. It started with half yards of stripes of all shapes and sizes...

...cut into strips by color family...

...then sewn together to form new fabric.

The trick here is to keep the lines...well, in line.  Because they are loosely handwoven, they want to undulate when disturbed. And because my 1/4 inch seams are often a "more or less" operation, those undulations can quickly deteriorate into waveforms. When you keep pulling at the waveforms to straighten them out, you end up with spikes normally associated with ECGs.

This part went more or less okay because I threw all my attention into the accuracy of the 1/4 inch seam. (It helped that I took every stitch in the grip of an audiobook set in Bombay, read by an actor whose voice breathed life into Australian, Indian, Afghan, American, Italian and Palestinean characters. Shantaram is an epic novel based on the author's escape from an Australian prison and his years on the lam in Bombay; the book is over 900 pages and the audiobook is about 40 hours...enough to become a good friend.  Enough to envelope you in delicious loss and disorientation when it ends.)

But back to the quilt.  The new fabric then gets cut into bizillions of triangles. With accurate measurements and straight stripes.

I was still trying to be precise but by this point, it didn't come very naturally. Still, every time I saw some wonkiness, every time I sensed that I was fudging on the cutting, I redid my work. Then, it came time to sew Light to Dark, creating squares from the triangles and then sewing the squares together into a family.

And then, sewing five families together to create a row, a neighborhood...and eight neighborhood rows together to create a city. Make four borders out of leftover triangles and at last, it is born. A finished quilt.

So it started months ago with two questions. First, could I make a new Haze Kilim?  The answer is Yes. I love all the jewel tones bouncing off each other and the handwoven feel that I cannot capture in my photos is intoxicating. Second, could I muster accuracy and precision?  The answer is...um, for a while. In the company of a good book. And really, only because I could channel the Emergency Broadcast System and alert myself that "This is a test. This is only a test."

But.even then, my attention to detail lagged.  At some point, the need for precision and the ensuing frustration when I couldn't deliver same just got on my nerves. I ripped out really obvious lapses but by the time I sewed the borders on, I had really lowered the bar on the definition of "obvious." And I even changed my perception of those moveable lines, daring any quiltmaker to intentionally duplicate the wave that I had created!!

Don't gasp at my conclusions while looking at these photos. They are not close ups.  Just trust me, there are little mismatches everywhere.  On one hand, we say, "yes, that is the nature of the handmade." But I work with women who can do this perfectly and with Grace. The truth is that I cannot. I simply do not have the technical skills and Grace leaves the building every time I do something that requires a ruler. I used to think that if my life depended on being technically proficient, I could do it. With this quilt, I now know differently.

And here's the bigger, more important truth: I am just fine with that.

Its just one more shortcoming. No matter how many leggy pony-tailed friends tried to show me, I could never do a cartwheel and I was reasonably athletic in my leggy and pony-tailed days.  No matter who explains it to me using words with only one syllable, I cannot understand quantum or any other kind of physics and I am very smart. I make lousy pie crusts, get paint everywhere if I don't tape off the woodwork (and I even do a pissy job of that), and am invariably brought to my knees at work when I have to  calculate the cost of an 1/8 yard of fabric that costs 10.50 per yard.

These shortcomings, they are my friends. They are me. (Don't get me wrong, I am still fragile enough to have shortcomings that can close my throat, but damn if it will be about a 1/4 inch seam!)  I am glad that this quilt taught me all this.

Coming Attractions

Taking photographs here in Spain is a challenge. The "calendar ready"  images cover every corner: white washed walls dotted with terra cotta pots of red geraniums, curving cobalt blue Gaudi tiles in the afternoon sun...the town that painted itself Smurf Blue to host Sony's world premiere of a Smurf movie in 2011 (ok, that one is not a cliche but it is real and I wanted to make sure I was holding your attention.)

What is a girl to do?  How about a focus, like Jude gives to her work? Wings, white, windows, and even things that do not start with a W.

So please return to this space sometime next week to see...ta-da...The Nine Patches of Spain.

PS To paraphrase the Wizard, pay no attention to the little box below if there is one on your screen. It is my ipad trying to wrest control of my blog from me.

Potato Famine in Bucks County

Well, not in all of Bucks County. Just this .97 of an acre.

I love planting potatoes. What I really love is harvesting them, snaking my fingers through the soil till I get all the spuds from the bed. Another one! And another!  Its like those sand table treasure hunts we used to have at the kids' preschool Purim carnivals. If you have never been to these exercises in pediatric chaos, count yourself among the lucky.  They are the only thing in my life that has made me contemplate another religion besides Judaism. 

But I digress.

For the past several weeks, I have been coaxing my seed potatoes into sprouting some growth and by Monday, they were ready to go into the ground.  I cut them into pieces and laid them out on a cookie sheet so they could get a protective skin around them before I planted them Tuesday evening.  I put the cookie sheet in the center of the kitchen table.

Which is exactly where I found it when I came home from work on Tuesday.   Only it looked like this.

I was dumbfounded (don't you love that word??) Do we have mice and if so, do they have biceps the size of those little cartoon mice you see carrying away hunks of swiss cheese?  Do we have ground hogs that go grocery shopping in our kitchen? Oh wait.  We have this.

In Clutch's defense, there was no barfed-up potato skin anywhere.  There was no spud smell on his dog breath (visualize me figuring this out), and most important, look at his teeth. Those little nubs peeking through his smile are all he has, courtesy of some pre-rescue jackass who filed them down.

But there is that smile...smug and self-satisfied, I say. And there is history of prior offense.  There was the dozen bagels that turned into an empty bag with a few poppy seeds on the living room rug. The entire soup-pot of veggie chili left on the back of the stove that evaporated into a licked-clean pot, left upright on the kitchen floor.  And of course, the legendary tray of baclava that Allyson left us as a gift, which turned into exactly that: a tray.

I think, Grace, that losing raw potatoes to a toothless dog who knows how to cover his tracks is the singular definition of The Unforseen!

The Discipline of Discipline

Because we are leaving at the end of this week for an adventure in Spain, I wanted to get the Haze Kilim triangles cut. (Isn't that what every traveler has on her to-do list?) 

I spent this cool and windy weekend cutting triangles while listening to the first 10,000 hours of an audiobook novel called Shantaram.  It was a great combination--my imagination carried off with the main character into the vividness of Bombay, all the while creating little color stories of my own.

And before I knew it, there they were, all 570 triangles, plus a few spares. I had intended to just stack them in piles for my return, but they had me at hello, those little patches of jewel tones.  I started arranging them on the wall,  just a few,  just to see...

...and I looked up two hours later.  

 I still have to lay out the bottom row, which puts my eyes just inches above the floor molding and requires contortions reminiscent of the last moments of a limbo contest. But it will be worth it.  To me, this quilt is turning into a novel made up of lots of wildly compelling major characters and some really neat minor characters, too.

Thanks, Jude, I took the time to learn Picasa "collage."

The real trick awaits: precision sewing of these triangles. I look forward to this about as much as I do stepping on the scale at Weight Watchers after Halloween. But I am intrigued not only by the idea of having this morph into its next phase (the color stories will shapeshift yet again as I stitch 1/4" seams all around).  I am also intrigued by the challenge of discipline...can I sew slowly and carefully? Can I fix mistakes when they happen so that a short seam on a triangle doesn't catapult an entire row off its rocker? There's no crime when that happens and I am most attracted to the imperfection of folk art. But what if...what if I approach this task differently than I have other projects?

What if I impose the discipline of discipline on myself for the duration of this quilt? That's something I've always envied in others...not so much for their perfect seams, but for sustained healthy living, sustained use of mind, heart, and soul. Sustained farming of time.  You know what I mean.  

What would it feel like to intentionally impose discipline on my self in a defined (and thankfully limited) way? Can I do it? What will it teach me about the way I live? 

I'm going to take two weeks under the Andalusian sky and inside bottles of Cava to mull it over.

A Whisper Through the Dark Haze

I finished cutting all (270) light triangles for the Haze Kilim quilt this past week. My goal for the weekend was to create the four dark fabrics just in case someone breaking into the house during the night wants to cut them into 270 triangles.

Thanks to a rainy Sunday and some really terrific Radio Lab and TED Radio programs, I assembled all four and finished sewing three of them. I think you could make popsicles from them.

 In the spirit of "And," I also took out my Michigan cloth.

I added some red and some stitching bits but I've largely been stuck on the next steps here. When my writing freezes, its inevitably because I don't know what I am trying to communicate and I just make pretty sentences with no punch. When that happens, I screech to a halt and complete this sentence with the simplest nouns and verbs I can find:  What I am trying to say is this:_________.

And I think that's what has been happening here. I'm not an extraordinary stitcher like so many of the What Iffer's. So my cloths will not speak through artistry or fine craft. That's ok with me, I am happy being remembered as the curly-haired girl with the lettuce leaf stuck in her teeth. But the cloths could be more expressive, telling something about me, if I shut up long enough to listen to what they are trying to whisper. I've been practicing that Intention with this cloth, coincident with an overall new year's intention to try listening before speaking or even instead of speaking.

But the damn cloth has kept its mouth clamped tight these past few months. Until just moments ago, when I read that Jude's next focus over at "What If Diaries," (which, by the way, she has reopened for enrollment so run don't walk to here) will be "windows." And in the very act of uploading the photo here, I heard the cloth whisper, "windows."  It wants to be viewed through a window, echoing the way I watched the state fly away through the airplane window on my last visit.

I have no idea what that will mean and that really excites me.