So A Rabbi, A Buddhist Priest, and an Episcopal Priest Walk into a Bar...

Actually, they walked into a tiny, one-room stone Episcopal church in our Delaware River community. And they sheparded this community..well, let me back up a bit.

Yesterday, I took to my bed. Australian red licorice for breakfast. Soft caramels for lunch. You get the picture.  And I was ruminating about whether to make a run for potato chips for dinner but the idea of getting dressed was more than I could handle.  And then I received an email from my beloved Rabbi Diana:

"We wake up this morning to the aftermath of an incredibly polarizing and difficult campaign season. What we see is a country divided. Half of voters are celebrating a surprising victory for their candidate. Half of voters are mourning a shocking loss for theirs. While there is optimism and joy in some quarters, in others there is real pain, despair, fear, and foreboding about what the outcome of this election means for the country we share.”

No matter who we voted for, we all know that we and our country are in dire need of healing. To begin that process, there will be a post-election Community Conversation at St. Phillips Church at 7:00 p.m. We will listen to each other and care for each other.

Tears flowed and even though I am the opposite of a "community type," I got dressed and quasifunctional. At the church, we heard teachings from three faiths.

Many folks stood up in a room full of strangers and shared feelings of being Other...or of demonizing Others.

Community supervisors and volunteers from many social action groups spoke about where to volunteer locally, because service connects us...

And is a start to healing division.

It doesn't change anything Out There. But it changed everything in me.

And I didn't stop for potato chips on my way home.

Announcing Dead Horse Bay Arts Company

I've carried on about Dead Horse Bay in this blog for years now. And now, we are actually doing something about it.

 

We just unveiled our new crafts venture moments ago as a healthy alternative to election coverage. I started to wax poetic about it here and realized that the words I was typing felt strangely familiar. Oh. I have already said exactly what I want to say over at our website (which took me an entire summer to create and made my vocabulary swell with strange acronyms like "HTML" and "SEO").

So take a peek here to learn more about who, what...and why. 

And please don't worry about buying anything. I just want to share. If you are the social media sort and want to share the link, we'd be much obliged.

Spudnik

Yesterday, I went hunting for dinner in my favorite venue.

I wait all year to find 'em.

Growing spuds is not like growing tomatoes or beans. You just never know what's going on under there. But this year, health and happiness prevails beneath the straw, because it is the third time in two weeks that I've pulled in a harvest like this.

And turned it into this..

Yesterday, I mashed 'em up skins on, added butter, chives, and yogurt and gave them to Himself so he could have all 730,000 calories of his annual caloric intake in one convenient meal.

That was fine with him.

But others just stared at their kibble in disbelief.

Back to Basics

All summer, I felt torn between coming here to write Big Thoughts about life vs staying outside and living it. As if there were nothing in the middle. Anyone who has spent more than 20 minutes with me knows that balance has never been my strong point. Now, however, it is becoming a medical necessity.

Because for first time in my 61 3/4 years, the insanity out there is actually worse than than the routine craziness in my mind. It has shaken my balance and I am in desperate need of a safe haven.

When I think of safe havens, I thought of my connection to all of you. Yet my lack of posts in the previous months and months shows me that writing Big Thoughts is obviously more than I can handle, at least until November 10th. And so, for the moment anyway, I'm just going to go back to basics: writing about the stuff I am making. And maybe we can pick up where I left you off?

I created this over a very snowy winter a few years ago.

The rule for this quilt was simple: only fabric already in my shelves, and even then, only my favorite ones.It holds the story cloths that really reflect my My Story:

It has bits and pieces from flea markets...

And from the pile of jeans that Himself has been stockpiling for future black market operations:

I basted the quilt top to some kantha cloth and began some handstitching here and there. But no clear direction emerged. I threw it on the bed for inspiration...

But nothing happened, so so I just rolled it up and stashed it away.

Meanwhile, over the past three years, I have also been handstitching the world's longest connection of blue and white squares, with no intention other than an idle fantasy about the Guinness Book of Records.

Several weeks ago, these two worlds collided. Probably moved by a search for a piece of myself to cling to, I put the quilt top back on the wall and the blue and white squares jumped on. That lead to these four borders:

I have been focusing all my stitching on them, embellishing them with other scraps that I have created for no apparent reason...just moving the needle through them in complete contentment.

And THEN, all the stars aligned. Specifically, the stars over at Spirit Cloth, where Jude has retooled her Sun, Stars, and Moon teachings. She periodically fills her shop with clusters of overdyed indigo stars and moons and lo and behold, I was actually able to score a few sets. Within 24 hours of landing here, these little beauties found their way into the border:

 

Sooner or later, it will be time to marry the borders to the quilt but right now, we're just enjoying our very fine romance.

Thanks for looking. I feel better already.

The Months of Kindred Spirits: Part One

I loved this phrase the moment I first heard it from little Anne Shirley (of Green Gables fame). Kindred Spirits.  Those souls whose core contains a piece of our own...who trigger the feeling of deep connection in even the most simple of encounters.

May and June brought me two precious encounters with Kindred Spirits.  (July brought a war between my camera and my computer, with a momentary truce attained just today.)  

In May, I returned again to the Crow Timber Barn for another week with fiber artist Dorothy Caldwell.

Remember how much I loved her first class, Human Marks? This workshop is called In Place. It consists of various exercises that capture Dorothy's passion for experiencing place, recording information about it, and translating all this onto paper and cloth. Specifically, two small handmade books.

So there we were, 19 women. Some in pairs of friends or sisters, many on their own. We started with a simple map and three pins each. One by one, we pinned 1) where we were born; 2) where we live now...

...and 3) a place that is important to us. In the stories we told explaining this last pin, we begin to perceive Place as much more than landscape. "I left Cuba when I was just a little girl." "This is where my daughter was born." "I saw the Aurora Borealis here." 

"Look how much we impose on the land," Dorothy points out. "It is the library. It holds heritage, experiences, and people.  It holds everything."

For Dorothy, everyplace is Place. Look how she records airplane landings from every trip.

She makes rubbings from soil or plant matter everywhere she goes (or ink wash, when the mood strikes). I noticed she uses a singular expression about her fieldwork and it fits: When I am working, when I am In the Land...

 
We start by comparing dirt she had asked us to bring from home...

 ...and rubbing it into fancy Japanese paper.

There were many other exercises. We made cord and colored it by rubbing it in local flora...

I couldn't get enough of this one.

We wandered with pen on paper and then stitched those lines.

We each selected a Place on the farm (roped off with our cord) and recorded with simple lines the sounds, the sensation of the air there. And then stitched THOSE lines. We examined maps and how they reflect our beliefs. Read through this one if you can:

We dyed with rust and plant, we marched blindfolded around a pond. We talked about curating collections, comparing the 100 objects she asked each of us to bring from home.

As if you couldn't guess which one was mine.

Are you wondering where the Kindred Spirits come in yet? From their introductions and samples of work, it was clear that many women in the group were dazzling professional artists. From the remarkable use of paint, of color, of line, it became equally clear that the quiet ones too were extraordinarily accomplished Makers.

Yeah.

Yikes.

It didn't take long for me to feel underwhelmed by my own work. Seduced by the colorful pages emerging around me, I too took watercolor brush to paper. At which point I felt even worse. I had a sleepless night and then called Himself in tears. I don't know how paint works, I sobbed. He suggested that a one-week workshop might not be the place to master a new medium. And anyway, wasn't I there to learn and absorb the approach Dorothy takes to Place?  

And feel grateful that you are in the midst of such talent, he added. Would you rather you were spending a week with people who didn't know how to do anything?


Sometimes, he is the most Kindred Spirit of all, that one.

I took his advice and surrendered into the warmth and comraderie in the studio.

After all, when in the history of time have 19 girls ever gotten along all day, every day? Seriously, this place was far from the high school lunchroom as possible. I felt the strand that ran through us all, the urge to create, and just hung on to that.

 Creativity is probably the most elemental part of my spirit and it became magical to be among others made the same way.

 By Day 4, I recognized that while I don't understand paint, I do know more than a little about how fabric works. Hey, now I get it. I am not a painter. I AM a quilter.  So I asked each person for a two-inch square of fabric, whatever she could spare. (One woman--a gifted professional painter, naturally--shrewdly bartered her Japanese shibori scrap for a piece from my 100 finds from Dead Horse Bay.) 

 I sat with the squares and within a few hours, had the last page of my book all sewn together.