Forget knowing. Not knowing is not ignorance.
Emotional truth, subjective truth, folk craft, these are all not knowing. Go back to the primitive; be like a child.
Have a different reality; question your experience of the ordinary.
De-skill.
Unconscious memories and dreams are unlocked by the sense of touch.
Pay attention to the physical qualities of the materials.
Its’ not about minimalism, it’s about being present in this moment.
Maybe it’s minimalism with a dash of mortality
Or tranquility tinged with anxiety, something felt, not seen; something spiritual.
Give up your will and trust beyond measure.
Not knowing.
Don’t say too much.
What is not there conveys what cannot be put into words.
10 comments:
You and fresh air are one and the same.....The world, says the great poet Wislawa Szymborska, is "inhuman." It doesn't work on hope, or beauty or dreams. It just...is.
View with a Grain of Sand
We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect or apt.
Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.
and that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.
The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world,
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.
The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
And its shore exists shorelssly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.
And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows
A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they're three seconds only for us.
Time has passed like a courier with urgent news
but that's just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe
his news inhuman.
ah but the perception of hope and beauty and dreams is what makes being here for this brief span worthwhile and it's what we each do with those perceptions that makes us more humane in all the best senses of the word.
love the earth colours .... LOVE your wise words ;-)
Beautiful. Not knowing is good. xo
Beautiful. I agree.
A note about the fabrics.
Over the weekend, I decided to see if the natural dyes I cooked up last fall and left on the deck all winter were still OK. They looked OK, although two had evaporated completely.
I still had walnut, hawthorne, blackberry and a little golden rod.
The silk and wool fabrics on the line steeped with no heat in the pails - on the deck - for 48+ hours.
Natural dyes are amazing in that they keep giving and giving.
The poem about not knowing - I wrote in the middle of the night. I'm not sure if it matches the dye images - but both the text and the dyeing are honest records of how and what I'm doing at this moment.
Michelle - that poem is wonderful.
The years of experience, the deep thoughts and feelings that go into your work... the tremendous skill involved & the knowing of your materials as well as your own skin deeply and profoundly and then how you relate this depth of experience up from your heart & out through your hands into your needle and pen & out into the light of this digital screen seen on the other side of the planet... thank you for your insights and sense of beauty and wonder... I have thought all day about this post, the photos & your poem... "you make good art" to quote Neil Gaiman recently in his address to the Universtity of the Arts Class of 2012
http://prophet-of-bloom.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/roses-roses-all-way.html
"tranquility tinged with anxiety, something felt, not seen; something spiritual. Give up your will and trust beyond measure."
yes; the "tinged" word perfect among the pails of essentials.
.
You bring me through wholeness, taking the forest (the without) within (time's essences waiting on the porch, in the pails (a within, a womb;
your essences (intelligence in all its ways) (the forest itself) infusing within the sheep wool, tinging time into the silk worm's weaving; the cloth itself hung like infused breathing new skin back in the forest of beginnings
to be taken into,
hand, heart, mind,
held skin to skin.
you seem to breath on the edge where the poet and mystic meet; build fires; give as an alchemist mother birth to the unseen. Your honoring makes me stronger.
.
my word v below is Satisfaction. that in itself is enough to say here. :) thank you.
Those middle-of-the-nght poems are the best. The absolute best. And the not knowing, well, that's everything to creativity, to learning, to aging.
i think your daily doing and your nightly words are beautifully interwoven. this is a story quite moving. i like, by the way, de-skill when thinking about skill for the sake of skill, not for the knowing it opens.
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