A Weekend of Wonder: Part 2

Even as I mercilessly edited the Collection, it became apparent that not everything would fit into the box. Not even everything from this trip, let alone from the 20 or so years since we first began the Project.  I put some of the Collection on loan throughout the house:

I washed and labelled all the bits and pieces of fabric scraps that I've found out west and on my hikes everywhere else...

...and decided they will go in a handmade book. I sought the wise counsel of bookmaker extraordinaire Mo Crow and she's just waiting in the wings (hee hee) as I get this project I mean Project underway.

But the big news is what I found in the corner of my studio. Its kind of hard to miss, and it had been there for years, getting full of stuff.

But this time I saw it for what it really is: a real, live Cabinet of Wonder. Hot Damn! I moved my much beloved Indigo Girl Cloth from Grace to its rightful place next to Saskia's Little Bird...

And I set to work. My successes with the box freed me somehow and I hit another book, this time about my absolute favorite artist:

I love assemblage and have felt the urge to do it bubbling away for years. Why else would I pick up used bingo numbers at the flea market? But, once again, Assemblage intimidated me. (You getting the theme here?) But Cabinet of Wonders? Hah! I am Mighty Curator of my Collection. And so here it goes:

These guys from Deadhorse Bay really want to play, as soon as they are dry.

This weekend, I learned the etymology of two words:

• Museum: a place of study and sanctuary for the Muses
• Amateur: one who loves

 I really learned them.

A Weekend of Wonder: Part 1

Cabinets of wonder, that is.

It started with this act of wonder that Himself made for me on our return from Idaho this summer.

The man is a wizard with a woodburner. I would have set it on fire,which is why I am not allowed to play with his toys.

He based it on a chest we saw in a small rural museum in Idaho, one that I thought would be perfect to store the artifacts that seem to follow us home on our Vandalization of the American West Project. (Its a Project. That means its not petty larceny.)

I figured filling the box would be a good Snow Day project and so I just left it alone. But, in truth, it intimidated me. That's because I wanted it to be more than just a shoebox where memories are stored...or a scrapbook where they are arranged creatively.  I wanted the experience of opening this box to transmit the spirit of adventure, the urge to discover, that pushes the two of us to see and touch What Was.

I had no idea of how to do that. I had no idea of how to even think about how to do that. My usual approach to creating pretty much mirrors Clutch's approach to eating food morsels on the floor:  go to it with gusto and decide afterwards whether it was the right strategy. But the difference between the dog and me is that when it doesn't work, he just throws up. Me? I suffer knots of frustration in my gut and usually just abandon ship in defeat. And THEN I throw up.

This time, Himself stepped in and suggested I prepare...prepare myself. He pointed me to a book:

Its an incredibly photographed look at curio collecting from all possible facets. It even had photographs of a thespian ancestor of Saskia's Old Bird King, dressed for his role as Tinkerbell in a Viking production of Peter Pan:

Somewhere in the paragraphs of fancy art theory I picked up exactly what I needed: the act of experiencing means more than just seeing or touching. First, I needed to call it a collection, I mean Collection. That means I became the curator...and my museum of adventure would be a Cabinet of Wonder.

Second, I needed to imbue the Collection itself with a sense of discovery in how you get to see or touch it.  I still wasn't sure how this would happen but somehow, I just believed that it would. From Saturday afternoon through Saturday evening, I sorted every object...touching, grouping, getting to know.

And then I reached for all the old boxes,the cloth scraps, the handmade paper, the strings--everything I could get my hands on that I had collected for years and years without ever knowing why.

You never know when you'll need a troll doll, apparently.

 Sunday began in the early morning and ended when the Hungry Woodburner showed up for dinner. I don't have words to explain what happened but I hope the pictures of my work in its  very early stages do it for me.

First, you open the lid and slide the tray...

And here's what you will find.

Each bears a decorated label, archiving its former home. And,for the most part, you need to do something to access what lies within.

This holds bits of hardware and glass in bag made from one of the first cloths I made for What If Diaries

Holds bits of rocks taken from bottom of hot springs, with rolled up map of how to get there.

Cloth from site sewed into a wrapping...

...that houses a jar found at Deadhorse Bay, which houses glass shards from Idaho. Screw still moves up and down!

I am master of the hot glue gun but Himself still won't let me use the woodburner.

But wait! There's more!

Speaking of Old Stuff

My ex-husband used to say that my idea of a large crowd and his idea of a small intimate gathering involved exactly the same number of people. I've been that way about parties from the start.

That's two year old me. In red, naturally.

This weekend, the Divine Ms S hosted a birthday party in honor of my 60th birthday (which is actually this Wednesday, but Himself only socializes on Saturdays between 6:15 and 9:30 pm.) I made the guest list and went crazy:

Six other people!!! My parents, Himself, Mr and Mrs E, and the Divine Ms S. Unfortunately, Dr J (the gynecologist, not the basketball player) couldn't make it.  If I add in Other Julie in Jerusalem, the list of my friends is complete. Actually, if I subtract my mom and dad (I was raised on two refrains, one of which was "we are NOT your friends, we are your parents...")...

...then I have five friends.

Actually, four girlfriends and one husband.

Parts of me really envy people who have housefuls of friends. However, when I actually tiptoe into socializing with that much intensity, my head spins, my throat closes and I feel yanked off my center.  I do know that my friendships are incredibly intimate and since it takes time...real time...to feed and water these intimacies, I think this might be it for my Lifetime Guest List.

The intimacy gives birth to wonders. After a sweet toast, my father stood (that alone borders on wonderous, since he is pretty clumsy to begin with and 87 years haven't helped any) and told us all about the day I was born.  Who gets to be 60 and hears her father talk about the evening Mom's water broke? And even at this age, I felt warmed by my daddy's love for me when he recalled seeing me for the first time and "all I could see was two giant blue eyes."

The Divine Ms S outdid herself on creating  her signature warmth and beauty with color...

Say hello to E's Cheese Cutter Guy on left

 ...and the sweetest of little touches just for me.

The flames are different colors!

I take no issue with turning 60, these days number among the best in my life. But I am overwhelmed by disbelief. Didn't I just have on a little red outfit with a party hat and a chocolate cake with marshmellow bunnies? Didn't I?

Old Stuff...

I've noticed a common theme for how I am spending my time these days: old stuff.

 

Old Stuff #1

When I am in my forced march through Octagon Hell (ok, I've learned the hard way that 200+ of anything except Peanut M & Ms is just way too many), I listen to free podcasts. This month's favorite is a joint project from the BBC and the British Museum:

You can find out more about it and even listen to episodes here.  The "rules" of the program were that museum and BBC muckamucks would choose 100--and only 100--objects from the gazillions that are in the museum collection. (To get some idea of how hard that would be, know that it took us three days just to see what was on display there. Himself is still trying to figure out a way to get locked in overnight so he can see what is stashed in the basement crypts.)

The objects had to start from the beginnings of human history (two million years ago) and come up to the present day. And they had to come from everywhere in the world, with the goal of "trying to address the many aspects of human experience...to tell us about whole societies, not just the rich and powerful within them. ...the humble things of everyday life as well as great works of art."

Each episode is just a few minutes long and features a complete audio documentary--experts musing, ambient sounds, the whole works. The object itself becomes a tool to explore intriguing concepts that I haven't really ever thought about before but in many ways form the vertebrae of our existence. Like this one.

Yeah, another clay pot. This one from Japan, about 5000 BC. But the program asks you to really, really think about what happened when, 10,000 years before that, some lump of clay wound up in the campfire in a shape that could hold stuff. And what happened? Oh, just the ability to store food that baskets could not protect from insects or mice...the ability to eat stuff that had been inedible or toxic raw...the ability to serve up soup or stew. Or ice cream. A complete overhaul in diet, that's what.

The Pot changed everything and it is the damn Wheel that gets all the applause.

Here's another favorite: The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus.

I love it for its title, inked in red on the front page: "The Correct Method of Reckoning, for Grasping the Meaning of Things, and Knowing Everything--Obscurities and All Secrets." It taught Egyptian civil servants from about 1550 BC how to solve 84 practical problems that still trip up us lowly homeowners today. Here's a good one for you who are tired of throwing out yet another chewed- through cereal box:

"In seven houses there are seven cats. Each cat catches seven mice. If each mouse were to eat seven ears of corn and each of corn, if sown, were to produce seven gallons of grain, how many things are mentioned in total?"

I was absent on the day they taught that at my junior high, but don't worry. The papyrus shows the answer in red, along with all work.

Spending my days with these objects triggered a thought: what are the 100 objects that tell MY history? I started a list and jot them down as they appear in my brain...my Shirley Temple doll with the hair that I straightened, my rock that looks like an Oreo that I picked up in my summers at camp in Northern Michigan, my mother's Gold Metal Flour sifter, the copy of The Prophet that my famously untouchy/unfeely mom gave me in 9th grade. My Earth Shoes and guitar, my briefcase and Filofax...my saddle and bridle. Try it for yourself. 

 

Old Stuff #2

This semester, I am auditing a course at the local rabbinical college called "Biblical Core." The professor is a whizbang biblical scholar who knows all things ancient Near East. (She read us a poem in the original Akkadian the other day and everyone oo'ed and ahhed until I pointed out that no one in the room would know if she made a mistake.You can say stuff like that when you are auditing.)

The course is increasing our proficiency in biblical Hebrew, which bears roughly the same relationship to Modern Hebrew as Canterbury Tales does to modern English literature. That's why every Saturday, my kitchen table looks like this:

 We translate roughly 20 lines at home and then explore them in class, where we learn historical context for the text. What was happening in that particular society to make someone write that section? What pre-judaic myths lie beneath the stories? And, most intriguing, where are the misinterpretations? Here's a good one:

This is a verse from Leviticus that you may have run into: You shall love your neighbor like yourself. Or that's what we've all been taught that it says, anyway.  That translation makes sense, both grammatically and because it sure seems like a good idea, no? It also concludes a long list of other very nice moral marching orders, like not insulting the deaf or tripping up the blind.

BUT hold on. It is equally plausible grammatically that it says something completely different, something way further down on the niceness scale. It could actually translate as "you shall love your neighbor who is like yourself." Not nice at all, but invaluable if you are trying to preserve your new little band of monotheists against the guys with all the gods one hill over.

I love being up to my elbows in words written nearly 3,000 years ago. I have often wrestled with the fact that the spiritual text of my people was in truth cobbled together over years and years and is full of mispellings and editorial failings rather than mysteries meant for us to unfold. But the ability to read the original helps me love the human inaccuracies for themselves...they are the footprints of the real live people who molded generations of stories and archetypes, who wrestled with the shortcomings and the beauty of human nature, who put it all together in a way that has managed to survive when I live in a world where a book goes in and out of print within two years.

I love old stuff.

Walking the Disclosure Tightrope

I started this blog almost two years (and 89 posts) ago.

Back then, I intended it as a way to document--and to share--the work I was creating in all of Jude Hill's classes.  It started as a crafts bulletin board of sorts, but one that had extra space for my thoughts, doubts, or pride in a particular piece. And, to my amazement, the bulletin board immediately talked back, in the form of unusually perceptive, often sidesplitting, and always supportive comments from creators around the world.

The back and forth created a link...a net between us...an inter-net.

Women I may never meet feel to me like an intimate community and they...you... have become my daily bread. (And listen up, those of you who muse on the mysteries of this internet relationship thing.  I carried on a wild online romance with a guy I never met and eventually wound up married to him, so I fully trust the reality of these feelings.) This trust led me to start tacking up more personal things on the bulletin board. My dogs, my home, my trips...and then, my moods, my anxieties....my sorrows.


Which, in case you were wondering what the hell I am trying to say, brings me to what I am trying to say.

It is this: I often feel like I am walking a disclosure tightrope. I feel on solid ground when it comes to protecting others in my world from my little camera and my big mouth. But where exactly is the balance when it comes to me? Where is the line between way too much personal information and Truth that could create more intimacy? Grace wrote this last night, at the very time this question was circling around my brain:

 "...if you would ever want to know someone's Story,  if you would ever ASK them about it,  you should need to be prepared to listen for days and months and maybe even years. You should be prepared to LISTEN to ALL of IT,  all the seemingly fragmented threads and keep listening,  keep paying such close attention that you become familiar with the fragmented threads and begin to see how they tangle to become the whole,  to become the Experience of the Story."

I guess the answer lies in how much of my story I want known. But that is a different issue from how much story I want to tell. Because the truth is that writing here feels exhilarating. I had stopped writing when I left my career and getting back to it felt like finding a missing limb. When I write, I feel stretched and limbered and deeply sated, the way my muscles feel after exercise. When I don't write, my soul feels fat.

And like most exercise, the deeper I go, the better I feel. But...well, you get it, right?

Hence my question. To myself, to you who blog. Do you run into this question? How do you answer it for yourselves?

 

Saying Goodbye

The grapes have checked out.

The zinnias are on their last lap.

The beans don't have a clue about what's coming...

But I do. And even though the light splashes over the leaves around me like they were lit from within, even though the reds and golds and tawny browns paper my world...I can't help feeling the loss of the "stay outside" season with somewhat of a dry, closed throat.

And I am not alone. This morning, the sign was crying.

Back to the Birds

Oddly enough, while my soul was going through the spiritual laundromat, my hands have been busy with the simplest of stitches.

Or maybe it is not so odd.

I made this little window hanging to help remind a dear one of her intention, which is to be more like the sun in the lives of those around her.

 And of course I am still having a love affair with my birds, who now are six.

I took the time to learn how to do the fancy-shmancy embroidery stitches Sue Spargo recommends in the pattern. I am shocked, shocked I say, by how much I love doing all this intricate stuff since I tend to think of myself as the proverbial bull in the needlecraft shop.   But look how much personality they give to my flock:

Drizzle stitch make hair!

Pistil stitch makes a garden

Woven picot stitch makes beaks

Bullion knots make...well, whatever this is.

And just in case you're keeping track, I have 208 of the 276 octagons I need for the wedding one-block wonder completed. I am counting on winter camp for the rest. Ok, gotta go, off to the dentist to replace a cap that just can't handle the amount of Atomic Fireballs I eat.

Still Waters

My travels the past two months rolled right over the Jewish Days of Awe--those 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that asks us to look hard at our soul and make some adjustments for the year ahead. The nearest equivalent in the secular world is making New Year's resolutions. The difference to me is that in the Days of Awe, you first make a heart-breaking spiritual descent into yourself, from your fatty lumps of excess to your sharp razors of how you treat others...to your deepest crevices of, well, whatever they are for you.

The descent takes place over 10 days. On the last day, Yom Kippur, you remain there while fasting, standing shoulder to shoulder with your brothers and sisters in the congregation. And you gradually become empty, until the final long shofar (ram's horn) blast at sundown blows your bones apart and signals the end of Yom Kippur. At which point, your soul trickles back, and you return to the world renewed and with some intentions for the year ahead.


Because I am simple-minded, I settle on one intention for the year ahead and I usually receive direction by just staying open during these 10 days. This year, I got it on the first day, in a poem by May Sarton that our wonderful Rabbi Diana put before us. Here it is:

New Year Resolve

May Sarton

The time has come 

To stop allowing the clutter

To clutter my mind

Like dirty snow.

Shove it off and find

Clear time, clear water.

Time for a change.

Let silence in like a cat

Who has sat at my door

Neither wild nor strange

Hoping for food from my store

And shivering on the mat.

Let silence in.

She will rarely mew,

She will sleep on my bed

And all I have ever been

Either false or true

Will live again in my head.

For it is now or not

As old age silts the stream,

To shove away the clutter,

To untie every knot,

to take the time to dream,

To come back to still water.

There's so much there, but the words "still water" leapt off the page into the void at the front of my forehead. This year, I want to do the work necessary to be still water...not to make waves in the ponds of others and not to get ruffled when the wind blows through mine.

Look What I Made!

Last winter, I went to a local workshop on how to grow shitake mushrooms. (Here's my utterly gripping report, with pictures.)

I parked the incubating logs in the shade beneath the cedar that grows so close to the kitchen window that next year I will be able to store coffee mugs on it. I watered them a bit and then promptly forgot about them.  This weekend, when I was putting my garden and yard to bed for winter camp, I checked on them. One was upright but no closer to bearing mushrooms than I am.  The second one was lying on its side in the dirt, which is exactly what it is not supposed to do.  I yanked it up and holey moley, look what I found:

Its about the size of two open fists. And now its in the kitchen, where I am trying to decide whether to cook it or worship it.

Getting Distilled in Scotland

Ok, I am back from mowing the weeds.

No, I didn't do it blade by blade with a rusty nail clippers. While you weren't looking, I slipped in a quick visit to Thing One in Chicago. But I now expect to keep my feet planted in my own backyard and just soak in everything I have learned from my wonderful travels in 2014.

So what did I learn in Scotland?

I planned this expedition because I yearned to know what it feels like to distill each day into its most simple of activities: putting one foot in front of the other. The first thing that happens is that decisions become very simple--and exquisitely meaningful.  

For example, since everything I put in my pack for the day was going to literally rest on my shoulders for at least 7 hours, I had to really weigh its ultimate value.If it wouldn't keep me dry in the rain, warm in the wind, full in the belly, or safe in an emergency, it got voted off the backpack.

Or put into Mr. E's.

Even the decision to take extra steps becomes consequential in a way that walking dogs through the playground across the street does not. I waged a constant internal battle when we needed to choose whether to go out of our way to see a site. On one hand, I would never be this close to blah blah blah again. On the other, my two feet were now my most important resource and I needed to conserve their well-being in the face of the 35,000 steps they had to tackle each day.  Looking back, this seems lame (hah) but at the time, it felt very, very serious. And so uncomplicated.  

Second, problems also become very simple--and solutions exquisitely meaningful. An overly tight left shoulder strap on my pack consumed my attention one entire afternoon.  And finally remembering to let that strap out and take up its counterpart on my hip was a Blessed Event.

Twelve miles with the tiniest of irritations in the tiniest of toes gives new meaning to one-pointedness meditation.

I worried all night about being able to continue hiking. But it happened that our home that night was in the only town on our route with a hiking gear store. And that the store would be open early Sunday morning when we wanted to get back on the trail. And that they stocked Compeed gel bandages...and that my traveling companion was a doctor who knows her way around meticulous bandaging!  Every morning after that, I made sure each toe had the protection it deserved...and every night, I inspected and treated any little malingerers.

And in a weird way, I loved that these 10 little guys were the focus of all my love and attention.

Speaking of attention, or lack of it,  let's talk about The Burn. You would think that Americans who read "after one mile, cross the Achmore Burn and turn right" would take the time to find out what the hell a burn is. Because if they don't, they will continue an extra mile only to find out from a nice Scottish lady on a bicycle that the Hiking Gods sent down to peddle past us that a "burn" is a creek. Then, they will have to go back the additional mile to get back on the trail. (See notes about step conservation, above.) That was really our only misstep over 7 days, which I'd like to think is a tribute to our our map-reading skills. But is probably because the Scottish hiking authorities had our backs.

  Finally, and as you might expect, our pleasures were simple--and exquisitely meaningful.

 

 

I'm feeling unable to distill this learning into the right words. In the end, it wasn't so much about simplicity but that the stuff that mattered REALLY mattered. If you didn't chart the nuances of the trail map (this is the bridge we just went over, it looks like we need to cross another creek and then there's an intersection), if you didn't make sure your toes and shoulders were happy (I need to get some more Compeed before the stores close), if you carelessly let the piece of paper with the name of the night's hotel disappear out of your pocket not once but twice  (oh wait, I did), well, you'd be lost,in acute pain, or pretty damn anxious about where you were going to sleep just as it started raining.

And I loved that. I guess it makes sense that in Scotland, I discovered the power of a distilled life.
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PS and on a different note.  I promised you Cullen Skink. The servers all pronounced it "Cullen Skank." So when you mix that with a few rounds of single malt, you get into an uproar about all the sailors who knew her. (Go grab some scotch, it will get funny, I promise.) Those who are not drinking, however, recognize Cullen Skink like this:
Speciality of the northeast Scottish coast, it is delicious soup made with cream (of course), smoked haddock, and potatoes.