Make it New: Mending at Rock & Sling

Happy Not-Quite-So-New-Year, friends! So 2019 was quite a year, and I have spent very little time with this blog. I have instead been up to my neck with various and assorted Things, some fabulous, some not-so. One of the best things is that last fall I went back to school for a master's degree in English. Do I dare say I've resolved to post more here in 2020? For today, here is a link to my new post over at Rock & Sling: Make it New: Mending.




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New(ish)

Slowly, slowly, I am adding things to Bark Bread Designs. And learning things, and reading things, and trying to catch some of the ideas that flicker in my head. If I can get them onto paper they stay longer, grow brighter. Some make it into the world, which I am glad for--the whole birthing process, and holding what I've made (poem, paper thing, mended thing) and sending it forth into the unknown--I love all of it. Other ideas--I have to remind myself to enjoy all those sparks flying around inside. All that light and warmth.

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We Can Work With This, Too

Maybe you don't know what you will come up with. Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the color is the thing, and the playing with it--layering and adding, covering and taking away. After a while the paper takes on its own life, and while you did not find the thing you were trying to create, you found something else and it was beautiful. Think of it as a collaboration between you and Chance. I  am open, you tell God, you tell the universe, you tell the people you love. We can work with this, too, without losing ourselves, without forgetting our dreams. It's just that the canvas is so much bigger than we had anticipated.

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Coptic Stitch Journals

These days I have to think in terms of projects. While I work on one the others wait, patiently or otherwise. I finish things, but usually not within the time frame I had imagined. Some days this is frustrating, but other days I can totally bask in the warmth of knowing that I do finish things, contrary to how I saw myself when I was much younger, and not only that but I like the things I eventually put out into the world. Most days that is really a whole lot of warmth, and it is helping me to get more comfortable with the backlog of Things Waiting.

One recent project is this group of hand bound journals/sketchbooks/blank books. Pink is not a color I turn to very often, but back in February I was recovering from influenza and bronchitis, thinking about how nice spring would feel, and probably feeling the influence of Valentine's Day everywhere I turned. I wanted pink--glowing, tender, robust, healthy, promising pink in deep-breathing, loving shades. I also wanted to play with watercolors and so, slowly, these journals were born.

Somewhere towards the end of finishing one of these journals, I had the impression that I was creating a small world. And hopefully someone else will take this simple small world into their hands and feel the call to create their own world or worlds within it. That is my hope for these little blank books. I think our souls ache to create and birth and converse as much now as ever in our history.

This, too, is an encouragement when I start to get overwhelmed by all the Things Waiting. They will be finished because they are needed.

These three are available in my Etsy shop, Bark Bread Designs:

These two are available locally at an antique store, along with some other items I have made. (If you are interested in these, please message me.)

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Now in my Etsy Shop!

"Maybe I can let the pile of laundry be what it is and see it transformed at the same time."

My book, Shift: a visual poem, is now available in my Etsy shop. Equal parts prose poem and photographic series, this slim hybrid challenges the reader through vivid pictures and spare text to see the world around us both "as it is" and as something more--magical, transformed, full of possibility. You can find it here.

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Pasta with Squid Ink Sauce

Hours after moving our son into his dorm room at an arts boarding school a year and half ago, my husband and I sat down to one of the most delicious and memorable meals of my life. I was heartbroken and terrified--our boy was young and it felt way too early to have him away, despite the fact that he had initiated it and that after much soul-searching we were all convinced it was the right move for him. The dinner fixed nothing, but the sheer warm magnificence of it was something of a balm, the way light glitters off broken glass and reminds you that despite the shattering there is still beauty to witness. We ate wonderful things, including a pasta in squid ink sauce, which, despite a warning from our waitress, I ate without tucking a napkin into my shirt. I admit it, I fully believed I had learned to eat without dribbling. And I not only dribbled, I dropped a big piece of pasta right down the front of my shirt, and the black stain is never going to go away. I could not throw the shirt away, and I could not look at it for a long time, either, so I tucked it deep in my closet with all the other things I do not know how to deal with. Something in me remembers at times like this that I am a slow-simmerer. Finally the thought struck me that I could cover the stain even though I could not remove it, and I found tucked nearby one of the lovely vintage handkerchiefs I brought home from my grandmother's house after she died. And I sewed the two heartbreaks together, and it took a very long time, longer than I thought it should have, but look I have made a new beautiful thing and someday I will wear the people I love who I can no longer have close by. 

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Introducing Bark Bread Designs

So I spent much of 2017 making things. Writing and submitting, still, but also making the most lovely little tangibles I could manage. My visual poem Shift was the first project, but I have also been working on a number of paper creations: earrings, blank books, a few necklaces. And I finally have an Etsy shop, Bark Bread Designs, open so I can share them with the world. Please visit! I have more to list, more to learn, and a bunch of new ideas to try, so stay tuned. I'll keep you posted.

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I made a book. You can buy it if you like.

It's been pretty quiet here on the blog. Partly because life has been crazy and busy and full, and partly because I have been working on several longer-term projects. I put the first one out into the world today. Shift is an extension of the teleidoscope series I did during the Advent season last year. The project was powerful for me, and I wanted to make it into something a person could hold in their hands, or place in someone else's hands, if they felt so inclined. And so, this. I liked the idea of print-on-demand for this particular project, because only as many of these as are wanted will go out into the world, and I do not have to get anyone else's permission to send them out. I would love it if you wanted to buy one.

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What I Did This Summer

So I've been playing with paper for a long time. And long ago when I went off to college I thought I would have time to study both art and music seriously. When it became clear that I had to focus on one or the other, I told myself I would take art classes again someday, maybe after I got my big orchestra job. And life went differently than that. That's okay, though, because hovering on the side of my writing all this time has been this desire to extend words and thought more and more into a physical realm. This summer I took several classes at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and my head and heart are bursting. (It's a magical place, and I can't wait to go back again.) The pictures above are things I made in class--now I'm trying to find time for skill-building, and practice, and ways to bring some of the ideas in my head to life. I have so much to learn, and I'm so excited.

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Origami

When the news gets to be too much, send paper stars out into the world.

Not that you won’t get back to the news, the opinion columns, the how-to-survive-what’s-next articles. Not that you haven’t been talking about it, educating and comforting your children, ranting to those closest to you. You have vowed not to turn away, to do everything you can to support the people and programs and systems that are at risk.

But you know you have to find a way to live beyond the fear and sadness. The horror at each day’s developments. What do you do with it all? You told your kids the day after the election that you would keep living the way you knew you should live, and fight harder than ever for what you believe is right. But what do you do with this Waiting now, for the days to reveal just how many people have been betrayed, and how much damage will be done?

Start folding stars, for one thing.

At first they were Christmas ornaments for your family. For your children to take with them into adulthood: tokens of your love, a bridge from old home and old life to new. For the one close to you who left all extras behind as she fled a life of abuse in order to build something new and better.

It did not take long for this project to turn into something else, though.

It’s not just the working of your hands, or the bright squares of paper, or the repetitiveness of the task. It is the power to put good out into the world that compels you. To make something beautiful in the face of ugliness, and out of humble things, and with your own hands.

These are your greatest acts of defiance: beauty, kindness, love. They are not the only things, but they are the beginning, and quite likely the end. A promise to yourself and the people around you that you will not stop doing what you know is right.

And you keep folding. Take note, as you memorize the folds. So many fussy little preparatory creases: seven, followed by a cut and an unfolding, and you are holding a pentagon in your hand. Fifteen more folds and un-folds, a little pinching and arranging, and suddenly the paper pinwheels into shape. Five more creases, a tuck—and there. You are holding a star. And that moment where everything shifts into place becomes something you want to repeat, over and over.

There are no shortcuts. You forget once, and do all the preparatory folds with the pattern face side up. You try to force the pinwheel into shape anyway, thinking that maybe the backwards folds weakened the paper enough to make it do what you wished. But no. You have to go back and fold everything the right way. The paper had been weakened, yes, but in preparation for something else.

And this is what sinks deep into every cell of your body: how the folds weaken the paper, how the sheet softens in your hands. How without this weakness there would be no getting to the new shape.

Note how the new thing—this bright and delicate star—is stronger than the original.

Repeat, again and again, folding yourself into the process. Bend yourself over and over, in preparation for what is next. Hone your skills for beauty. Flood the world with stars. 

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"Bowlful of Light" at How to Pack for Church Camp

Summer camp is kind of a magical thing. When I think of how much learning, growing, playing, crying, and stretching I and the people I love have done at various camps through the years it is overwhelming. So I loved finding the online anthology "How to Pack for Church Camp" recently, and I am honored that they have now included my piece, "Bowlful of Light," on their website. There is such a wonderful collection of stories here, touching on what must be millions of raw/odd/beautiful/funny/deep/painful/holy stories that play out at camps every summer. Hope it stirs up something inside of you, too.

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Found, 3/1/16

Spending the season of Lent looking for signs of the Divine in the world around me.

Something new, made from things found and discarded. A small act of redemption. Very small. And yet I feel compelled to repeat small acts like this over and over, fueled by equal parts rage and hope. To cluster them in bouquets and leave them wherever I can.

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Light, 12/20/15:

Today's light: sparks, flashes, warmth. 

Got lost in music, in making things, in the people around me. 

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Light, 12/18/15:

Today's light: handmade. Which is really more like a tapping-in, but it still counts.

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Thankful, 11/7/15:

For the play between made and found, old and new, chance and plan. For how things bound to this earth—the things I can touch—release the things bound inside my head and heart. For what can be done (say, with the newsprint ads that show up, unbidden, at my front door every week.)

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On My Mind

I have been thinking about the power of transforming something, and the power of re-telling a story.

I have been thinking about this, and making more flowers.

I have been thinking about the heart—the meaning—of a poem, hidden in a cluster of words at the heart of the larger poem. (Poet Helen Frost was one of six authors and illustrators Middle and I got to hear speak at the Children’s Literature Festival at Truman State University Friday. I am still floating a little bit.)

I have been thinking about how mixed in with the rain that fell outside the dining room window yesterday were tiny white petals from our flowering pear tree. And mixed in with the raindrops clinging to branches out the back kitchen window were tiny green leaf buds.

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Holy Monday

You don’t always, but on this particular day off you wake up without the alarm (it was turned off, to allow for the richness of sleeping in) at almost exactly the time it would have gone off on a regular school day. The light is lavender, the air saturated with spring. Since you are awake, you sneak downstairs, fill the bread machine with butter, egg, milk, sugar, flour, yeast. You will make Resurrection Rolls a day late. This is becoming a tradition, almost, not managing to get them made in time for Easter. Last year you bought a roll of refrigerated dough, in desperation and even though you hated the compromise, but in the end it did not help. The tube sat in the refrigerator door until two days ago. You are determined to keep your promise this year.

Later Youngest will help wrap dough around marshmallows, and then you will dip each dough ball into melted butter and then roll it in sugar. The sugar and butter will cling to your fingers, salty and sweet. You will lick them once all the rolls are dipped and rolled, no one watching, as if you were still five years old.

Yesterday was good, and you celebrated. But it did not go the way Easter was supposed to go, exactly. In the middle of everything necessary for the day for your family—in the middle of the best clothes, sunrise service, breakfast at church, easter egg hunt, baskets of candy, dinner with family day—there was Youngest’s fall, and a horrid gash in her knee that looked unrepairable, and the E.R., and stitches because it was repairable, after all.

There was a time you were proud of your strength around blood, and your calm in the face of an injury. That, though, was before you had children. Your children’s injuries shake you to the core. It is not so much the blood itself as it is the fact of injury, the fact that you could not stop it, the fact that you could not convince your child after she laid eyes on it that she was not dying. It is not so much the stitches themselves as it is holding—laying on top of—your child while she gets stitches, and, more than that even, the way you absorb the fear and hurt into every cell of your body and try to hold it there, away from your child, even though you know that’s impossible.

Later in the day on this quiet Monday, when she is feeling her woundedness especially deeply, you will show Youngest pictures of Japanese pottery, cracks and breaks filled with gold, stronger and more beautiful for having been broken. Kintsukuroi. Isn’t it beautiful? She cries at the thought, but she also points out her favorite piece. It is exquisite.

Later still in the day you will hide yourself someplace quiet to make paper roses from old scrap paper. It is right to make something beautiful from what is cast-off and unwanted. It makes you dream of making other things. After so many days of looking and seeing and taking in, in the middle of exhaustion and anxiety over things both small and big, making something seems like the proper response. So much inhaling—now is time for the exhale. Without the release you are not actually breathing.

Yesterday was meant to be holy, and it was, in the way that Easter Sunday always is. It was also holy in the way that something broke through all your plans and expectations and made you see it all in a different light. But today too is holy, and maybe even a high holy day—set apart to exhale, set apart to ponder these things while making sweet rolls, while everyone else is asleep.

For now, it is still early and you are alone in the kitchen. In the oven the marshmallows begin to melt, making toffee at the bottom of the pan, leaving the inside of the rolls hollow, empty. You could give a lecture while the kids eat, but that kind of thing doesn’t usually have the effect you’re looking for. You will probably have to rely on faith that the way these things all work together will work itself slowly into their hearts—that this sweetness, and the story of the empty tomb and how light cracked apart solid darkness, and how the intertwining of failings and promises and scars and love leave us marked and beautiful—these are all wrapped into the day after Easter because they are all woven into our Everyday, worn on our hearts and bodies, hanging in the lavender light of another new morning.

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What You End Up With

I have next to no expertise with a camera. I am in awe of what people who have skill can do with their cameras, and I’m frequently frustrated by what I can’t do. But I’m also fascinated by what I can capture, even in my ignorance and lack of skill. In the car with Husband a few nights ago, appreciating again the colors of winter in my adopted state, and setting sun, and gentle rolls of fields, I took as many pictures as I could. I liked so much of what I ended up with, even while I didn’t capture exactly what I saw out the passenger seat window. Expectations aside, I ended up with something beautiful. I was still participating in some form of seeing.

That play of expectations and my response and what I end up with in the end—it can make me crazy, but it also makes life something of a holy kaleidoscope. And I like that. A lot.

It struck me a few months ago, while walking an unruly bunch of young violinists back from the bathroom and wondering at the crazy swinging we do every day between off-the-wall-tired and brilliant-short jags of learning: what if one of our primary responsibilities while we wade through this life—this chaos—is to dip our hands into it as it flows past and make something of it? Sometimes it requires great skill to form something (smooth, perfect, compact maybe, or maybe towering and grand.) Sometimes all that is needed is to reach into the torrent and hold up, shining and raw, what I get hold of. Either way I am on a treasure hunt. Either way the best thing next to the find is showing it to you.

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New Year's Day, 2015

I started this scarf almost a year ago, and worked on it through most of 2014. On and off, although looking back it's clear I spent more time not knitting than knitting. Such slow work, even after your fingers know the pattern. That's okay, because the process is the thing, at least as much as the finished piece. And besides, there it is, more finished than not. 

Consider this my version of the New Year's looking forward/looking back post:

What if everything that came to you

was in fact some sort of gift?

Everything—

     yes, even that.

The fact that you do not know how

to hold such a gift easily in your hands

does not make it something else—

     inappropriate, say,

     or dangerous,

     or tragic.

Maybe it can be all those things

and gift, too.

The barrenness outside your window—

     bare branches,

     cold earth,

     long strands of sunless days—

those are Someone’s art,

their gift to the world

just like this mist-colored yarn

     in your hands.

The feel of it between your fingers,

the wrap and lift,

joining together and separating,

even the rhythm and click,

lift and pull

of the needles—

all are part of the art of it.

After a while you stop wondering

when it will be done.

You can love

the feel of the thing

growing beneath your fingers,

you can love touching your work

and seeing that it is good.

You can learn to thread yourself

     into the length of it,

you can learn to tear out the mistakes

     and re-work what went wrong,

you can learn to work backwards

     as well as forwards.

You can absorb these things

right through your skin

until you breathe pattern and softness

and the sheen of fog-colored yarn

which you are slowly knitting

into clarity.

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Thankful, 2014: This Kind of Sweet

Early Thanksgiving morning, baking a pie. Pouring molasses, a whole cupful.

As the bottle empties and the pouring slows, time suspends. There is no visible movement, only connection, from bottle to bowl and back again.

In that moment of stillness the thought rises up that maybe molasses is the perfect kind of sweet. Hearty, unrefined, deep. You—who as a child loved to suck on sugar cubes, who as an adult has not managed to grow out of loving any sort of sweetness, whatsoever—suddenly you know that this is the kind of sweet to covet most. White sugar is vapid, has no depth. Brown sugar (as much as you liked to sneak hard little clumps of it when Mom was baking) is something of an imposter. Honey—yes, it is richer, deeper, but it seems to lack strength. The fake sugars—they are all cheats. But molasses—that is the kind of sweet you can desire all your life. The kind that is complex, and strong. It has a history to it, but unlike that unsatisfactory word bittersweet (upset you all your life, that idea of mixing bitter and sweet) it seems to consist of the sweetness left over after the bitter, or maybe the sweetness that rose up from it. A sweetness that triumphs, that gleams, that suspends time as it pours out—even if there is never a hint of glitter.

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