Relic #6: Where My Dreams Go, 1957

“The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.”   ~Haruki Murakami~

We went here, not knowing.  Here, the bitter wine. The dreams. Trailing bare feet through the mica-flecked water, sky reflecting brown. Cicadas humming hungry harmony. Lust in the green leaves. You turned to me and said we couldn't have any more than this. So, I took a long pull from the bottle and swallowed the words I wanted to give you.  Passed you the bottle instead. Watched the fine ligaments of your throat drink it all in. Imagined tributaries and hollow veins channeling downstream beneath your skin.

There, the flutter of your pulse in your neck. There, where my dreams go. Some summer afternoons, I can still almost kiss you. Can almost taste it. The wine that turned. Heart that turned. Face that turned away from mine. The answer is in dreams. The answer is always yes.    

Remnant #7: Stitchcraft-Witchcraft

"What do you like to do?”
She scuffed a toe amongst the rushes. “Needlework.”
“Very restful, isn’t it?”
“Well,” she said, “not the way I do it.”

~George R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones~ 

Today, I am a guide over at the Inner Alchemy Circle: Air Coven HERE, offering my writing and a card I created for the archetype of the Witch.  The card was from one of my embroidery art pieces I have been making out of old porn magazines from the 1970s.  I've created both witches and saints for this project and it has fed my creativity in ways I never anticipated.  The embroidery I used for the witch card is part of a larger piece, called "The Water Witch," and she has a saint counterpart, which sold at a local arts show. 

The show is over and, now, the witch has been shared for the group and the saint has gone to her new home--but, I haven't stopped making them.  I never expected any of these pieces to sell or to have them shared in any public way.  I'm thankful to one key person (you know who you are) for encouraging me to move my private practice into a public forum.  It meant the world to me that one did sell--and to a woman who is creative and talented and kindhearted.  And that the other has been seen by local artists and creative women via the online course, all around the world?  It blows my mind, in all honesty.  I am a writer, not an artist.  But, the line blurs and I find myself tangled up in a visual narrative I have no plans to stop working on. 

I have since made progress on more of these women.  The interesting part for me is that writing led me to needlecraft in the first place--and now, I am coming full-circle.  Eight years ago, I asked my mother to teach me to knit because a character in a story I was writing was a textile artist and I wanted to get the sensation of working with yarn exactly so in my words.  Then, it turned out that knitting became an outlet for me.  I still knit--most recently a tarot bag for a new deck of mine.  A few years after knitting, embroidery showed up.  I have been intrigued ever since.  Recently, my writing process has been difficult.  But, with the magic of this stitchcraft, I have found a way to remain connected to the thread of story running through my life.  Instead of words on a page, I've been creating the narratives of these women with thousands of stitches.   They are as real to me as any of my written characters.  I will welcome the story, however it comes to me...every pass of the needle, a new form of conjuring...every lustrous strand, another creative incantation.       
 

Remnant #6: My Wild Year in Books

"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road.  They are the destination, and the journey.  They are home."

~Anna Quindlen~ 

In the last six years, I have lived in six different places.  My family home, my brother's home, a dear friend's basement bedroom suite, a sundrenched apartment in a subdivided house that was once a clockmaker's shop, a little white cottage on a lot of green land, and my current home--a funky cape cod full of candles, curious-collections, and books.  Ohhhhh, so many books.

As I planned for my last move in May, my brother's only request was, "Can you maybe have some of the books moved beforehand?  Please?"  I laughed, but I knew what he meant.  As it turned out, I got the keys a month before move-day and the very first thing I did (after smudging the whole house and working a few other small rituals) was to move my books in.  With the April light pouring in the windows and the smell of palo santo heavy in the air, I sat in the middle of the dining room floor, surrounded by my first stacks of books.   

The battered blue Yale Shakespeare set caught my eye and I pulled As You Like It from the stack.  "And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it."  And a wild yes in me.  Every book that was hauled into the house over the next few weeks brought me one step closer to home.  I think this is the gift of books for me--they make me feel HOME, no matter where I am.  Books hold memories...possibilities...magic.  They have always been my safe haven.

In spite of the countless pages I've read, though, I've never kept any sort of record of any of it, except for when I was in school.  But, if there is any resolution for me in 2015 it is to keep track of the books I have read--offering a brief note or two if it makes sense to, just keeping the title if not.  And, I plan to do a lot of that recording here.  This isn't becoming a "book blog," I have too many other competing fascinations to stick to one...but, there will be sometimes-snippets of My Wild Year in Books here.  Beginning right now:

• Book 1/2015: a reread of The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston.  This is a book I originally read for a Women's Studies class many years ago and have reread several times.  It speaks to me...it matters...Moon Orchid, No Name Woman, language, loss, survival.  "I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. Petals are bone marrow; pearls come from oysters. The dragon lives in the sky, ocean, marshes, and mountains; and the mountains are also its cranium. Its voice thunders and jingles like copper pans. It breathes fire and water; and sometimes the dragon is one, sometimes many."
• Book 2/2015: I wanted a lighter read for my second book, after sinking into Kingston.  The Magician's Lie by Greer Macallister was just right for this.  I liked it for the feminist-slant to the world of magicians and illusionists and the fact that it was the story of an entire life told in one dark, uncertain night.  I read it over a cold winter weekend with lots of tea. "Tonight, I will do the impossible.  The impossible is nothing new to me.  As I do every night, I will make people believe things that aren't true.  I will show them worlds that never existed, events that never happened.  I will weave a web of beautiful illusion to snare them, a glittering trap that drags them willingly with me into the magical, false, spellbinding world."           

Relic/Remnant #5: My Father, August 1962

A deep, wild current runs between father & daughter.  Through her, he sees the evolution of a woman--the dazzling progression from infancy to willowy childhood to adolescence.  It can change a man, witnessing this transformation.  Through her father, a daughter learns how to love or how to lose.

In this photo, he is in the Navy--still unmarried, still childless, still trying to find his way out into the world.  He is already in love with my mother.  Their passionate correspondence burns across page after page of their letters.  His hasn't been an easy childhood, & in my mother, he sees home for the first time.  He sees the first thing worth waiting for, worth becoming a better man for.  This is what he tells her.  He begs her to wait for him.  He spins elaborate stories of what their life together will be like.  He mentions the children he sees in their future.  Two, a boy and a girl.  Theirs.  Perfect.

I am something my father never saw coming.  The fifth born, but only the third to be born alive.  My father got his perfect two babies and then two stillborn sons.  Loss can also change a man.  By the time I was born, I was already a reminder of all that wasn't.  No fault of my own, but I was the baby born carrying the weight of the bones of the dead who came before me. 

This quiet heartbreak of my father's may have been what started us down the path to all that came after.  When I look at this photo of him: August, 1962, I feel a confused wash of maternal love.  He is so young here.  So many trials & sufferings still coming.  I want to reach out & stop him for what he will do.

The story is ours...is mine...is still being written.  It is dark & sad & full of thickets, bramble-wild.  I have "Mom" tattooed over my heart--but, "Dad" may be the deepest scar I carry on it.  A week & a half ago he was in the ICU, my beautiful, adrift, complicated Irish father.  He has come through another trial & it has stirred up in me old vestiges of our fractured past.  What I know:

mending...

fragility...

hope...

possibility...

that I may yet get to learn forgiveness.       

Curiosity #7: Ghada Amer

"The history of art was written by men, in practice and in theory. Painting has a symbolic and dominant place inside this history, and in the twentieth century it became the major expression of masculinity, especially through abstraction. For me, the choice to be mainly a painter and to use the codes of abstract painting, as they have been defined historically, is not only an artistic challenge: its main meaning is occupying a territory that has been denied to women historically. I occupy this territory aesthetically and politically because I create materially abstract paintings, but I integrate in this male field a feminine universe: that of sewing and embroidery."

Ghada Amer, 2006