Everything but the Kitchen Sync

Some days,
you forget.
You stand in the hall closet,
trying to candle the eggs
in the only dark spot
and they roll and tip
into a cataclysmic fall
landing as eggshells
and yellow-yolk muck
on the small
hardwood square of floor.

Some days, you try to hang
the clean wet lumps of cloth
up to dry in the freshening wind
But a chicken distracts you
and the sound of a distant dog
and at noon half the laundry
waves at you,
bright cheerful flags on the line,
and half of it peers,
sullen, lumpish, wet
from the basket on the rock.

Some days, you stand
in the garden despairing,
wondering how and when
you will find a source
of more bamboo poles
for the pole beans
and then you notice, forty yards off,
a forest of saplings
tall, straight, and true
waiting patiently
to be thinned.

--copyright Mainecelt 6/30/2010

Friday Five: Wind in My Sails

Sally, over at RevGalBlogPals, writes:
"... sailing is a family passion, we love the water and the wind, and take delight in the fresh air and quiet, but also in the competition, striving to do our best!
How about you?

1. Is there a sport/ hobby that is more of a passion than a past-time for you?
I've never been one for sports, although I do like salt-water swimming and Messing About In Boats and I adore a good game of Extreme Croquet.
My hobby/passion is the exploration of folk culture and traditions--especially those of the British Isles. (I come by this anthropological bent honestly-- growing up in a multi-ethnic family with three adopted siblings, intercultural study was simply a part of daily life, and provided a goodly portion of our family fun.) With some like-minded friends, we even started a nonprofit organization to support our folk culture habit, although it's in "sleep mode" while we finish building our house. The Piper and I have justified the purchase of many a CD and weighty ethnographic tome by saying, "It's all for the Ceilidh House library, of course--and we'll use these as reference materials when we teach our bagpipe and Gaelic language students!"

2. Outdoors or indoors?
Outdoors: festival-going, "ethnically-correct" gardening and orchard-tending with heirloom plant varieties, and staying close to the salt water that bouys my spirit and connects me to my ancestors. Indoors: delving into books, gathering with other folklore enthusiasts, swapping stories, and having great music session around the woodstove.

3. Where do you find peace and quiet?
Not sure right now-- it's been a hard year. I seek peace in the slow intake and release of breath, the comfortable closeness of my partner, the gradually-revealed beauty of our almost-finished house and the slowly-emerging health of our land. Quiet is easier to find than peace--I am thankful every morning and every night that I can begin and end my days surrounded, almost entirely, by natural rather than human-made sounds. (I'll relish the quiet more fully when I can find my missing whetstone and "take care" of a couple of extra roosters, if you know what I mean!)

4. A competitive spirit; good or bad, discuss...
A competitive spirit is like fire: a good servant, a terrible master, and dangerous to play with. I appreciate its ability to overcome inertia and get a person moving towards a goal, but I don't like the way others tend to be left in a person's wake. I should come clean and declare, right here, that I am a vicious card player, but fortunately my commpetitive streak is matched by a tendency toward distraction and terrible bad luck in the dealing of hands.

5. Is there a song a picture or a poem that sums up your passion ?
I've posted links to Richard Hugo's poem, Glen Uig, in previous posts. It captures some of the essential pain and joy of reconnection to one's past. Here's another poem from Cathal O Searcaigh, translated from Irish Gaelic by Gabriel Fitzmaurice:

A Portrait Of The Blacksmith As A Young Artist

I'm sick and tired of Dun Laoghaire.
Of my bedsit in Cross's Avenue,
A pokey place that cripples my wordsmith's craft
And leaves me nightly in the dumps
Scrounging kindred among the drunks
Instead of hammering poems for my people
On the anvil of my mind.
Almighty God! It's gone too far,
This damned silence.
If I were back in Caiseal na gCorr
I'd not be awkward, half-alive.

No way! But in the smithy of my tongue
I'd be hale and hearty
Working my craft daily
Inciting the bellows of my mind
Stirring thoughts to flame
Hammering loudly
The mettlesome speech of my people.

--found in Writing the Wind: a Celtic Resurgence: The New Celtic Poetry, ed. Thomas Rain Crowe.

Bonus for posting a video/ link.
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Wise Tiny Creatures and The Sort-of Hat

Alright, so this may not be Hogwarts, but we do have hogs...

We haven't made it to the latest Harry Potter movie. In fact, the penultimate and ultimate books in the series are still buried, unread, somewhere in our old-house-turned-storage-shack, waiting for that novel invention, "free time." Maybe THIS winter, I'll read them!

For now, the season demands the busy-ness of my hands. For those rare occasions when I'm actually forced, by circumstance, to remain seated, I've been toting along my craft basket and making dolls to sell at the farmers' market. I call these my "Wise Tiny Creatures," an affectionate nod to the poem, "Glen Uig," from Richard Hugo's Hebridean poetry cycle, "The Right Madness on Skye." The dolls range in size from two to six inches, about right for use in dollhouses and easy storage in backpacks, Christmas stockings, and coat pockets--a few of the places one might want or need them.

The dolls started with a kit my sister sent for my birthday a few years back. While I was delighted by the ingenuity and ease of the dolls' construction, I found myself itching to push the limits of design and decoration, to come up with something that matched the dancing creaturely images in my head. I wanted dolls with realistic bodies, padded and rounded and pleasant to cradle in one's hand, to tuck in one's pocket, to play with and pose and hold. I wanted engaging little faces, some wise and old, some fresh and young, some pensive, some mirthful, in a wide range of skin tones. I wanted them to be made, as much as possible, from natural, rather than acrylic, fibers and materials. I wanted dolls that would stand up to a fair amount of play, equal to the imaginations of those that might acquire them.

Each doll begins with two pipe cleaners or chenille stems, bent into an armature and wrapped with cotton embroidery floss. The heads are simply wooden beads from a craft store, but I hand-paint the faces--even though I question my sanity and rue the cost of the tiny, quickly-bent brushes each time I do so. I cover the acrylic paint with a few layers of non-toxic gesso and use a non-toxic craft glue to attach hair and beards made from wool that has been washed/carded but not spun.

I found a source for plant-dyed 100% wool felt from which to sew clothes. This is the hardest of my materials to find-- none of our local craft shops carry real wool felt, and I use such small quantities that it hardly justifies the cost of shipping from most internet vendors. (Also, I sew too slowly to use up my own inventory with any speed, but I do wish I had a few more colours!) Lately, my original source seems to have slowed production and cut down their range of offerings. Any suggestions besides dying the wool myself?

Salley Mavor's excellent book, Felt Wee Folk, includes patterns for fairies, pirates, mermaids, and members of a royal court. I've played with a few additional ideas: wizards, saints and a poseable nativity set, among others. A favourite commission: the request to make a doll that looked "Like St. Patrick, but for a guy who's really into Zen Buddhism." (I embroidered yin-yang symbols on the wee saint's stole and tiny gold snakes on the bishop's mitre and robe.) Lately I've taken to making shoes for most of the dolls, which is ridiculously time-consuming but ensures that they can stand on their own--an important feature for both display and active play.

I'll never be able to charge what these dolls are worth in terms of time and care and creative energy--they sell for twenty to forty-five dollars--but I justify them by reminding myself that much of the work is "multitasked" in the service of keeping my hands busy during meetings and such. (I learned years ago that handwork helps me focus and attend much more effectively. In grad school, I kept my hands busy by colour-coding my class lecture notes with a set of a dozen fine-point gel pens. People were always asking to borrow my notes when it was time to study for exams!)

Back to Harry Potter for a bit: devout readers and movie-goers will be familiar with the character/device known as the "Sorting Hat." During the School for Wild Girls, KyedPiper gifted me with a set of circular needles and two balls of lovely colour-flecked chocolate-brown wool-blend yarn. (I should note that my previous knitting experience is limited to two scarves and the back of a vest--one of many over-zealous unpatterned experiments I took on, then muddled and hid in the bottom of a trunk.) She talked about hats she had made and suggested that I try making one for myself.

While watching episodes of "Xena, Warrior Princess" on DVD, Kyedpiper helped me cast on and get set up to knit on circular needles, something I'd never tried. I worked without a pattern and, a couple weeks after she left, reached the stage where I knew I needed to decrease stitches further than the up-til-now-easily-used circular needles would allow. Another friend let me borrow some double-ended needles and taught me how to work with them, and a couple days later the hat was finished. With a vague nod in the Sorting Hat's direction, I have christened this project my "Sort-Of Hat:" I sort-of knew what I was doing and it turned out sort-of how I hoped it would! (I am still debating whether to adorn the tip with a pom-pom or a small bell, or just snip the extra yarn and leave it as-is. I'm leaning toward the bell.)

Into the Gap...

The Bluebirds of Gappiness showed up again on Saturday. This time, it was a mated pair, flitting between milkweed stalks and fenceposts by sudden, urgent turns. I wonder how much longer these messengers will remain before they start their annual migration, leaving Wise Old Raven behind as official mystic courier of the Frozen North. Perhaps they'll make the switch at Samhainn, (pronounced "sow-when"), which literally means, "Summer's end."

It's almost time... which, as a person with so-called A.D.D., is a state of being with which I'm most familiar. (I prefer to think of myself as "multifocal," since it's not a lack of attention, but non-singular attention, that best describes my style of engagement.) One book about A.D.D. describes the afflicted as "hunters in a farmer's world." While it's true that hunters spend a lot of time scanning their horizons, I don't buy this idea either. I've never met a farmer who DIDN'T have to keep their minds on a hundred things at once.

The more I study my Celtic roots, the less my so-called disability distresses me. Celts, it seems, have always understood the complex and flexible nature of time. Celtic philosophers and theologians have long recognized time as an embroidered tapestry, a mesh of the interwoven, the knotted, and the wrapped. An old Gaelic hymn to the Christ Child includes the declaration that, "although You are not yet born, people are praising the great things you've already done." The Divine Child is both "already" and "not yet." This speaks deeply to me. It describes my state of being, much of the time. It also reminds me that, as a Chronos-bound creature, I have my work cut out for me. I know, full well, that I can't afford to stop TRYING to do things "on time." I will never stop struggling to do business promptly and show up prior to the official start-time of shifts, classes, and meetings. This may never be an arena of particular personal grace.

Yet Grace does come--and it comes, most often, when it's "About Time." It is when I am most awkward, most unsure, and most open that the Holy Spirit shimmers and flutters and blazes into view. Poet Ted Loder calls this, "teetering on the edge of a maybe." I perch on the edge of self-doubt, which strangely doubles as the edge of cosmic acceptance. Grace unfolds in those awkward spaces between naughts and oughts. I am challenged, continually, to live more fully and step more willingly into the gaps.

And now it is Almost Time for one of my favorite Gaps of all: Samhainn, the Celtic New Year. Like Christmas and Fat Tuesday, this has long been celebrated as a "time beyond time" when the shackles of society are shaken off in favor of wildness. Yes, there's a sinister side--tricks can be cruel and damage may be done--but the essence of this time is a holy one. Where and when else, in our fast-paced, artificially brightened lives, are we given permission to see and acknowledge the dark?

Like the Jewish people and many other ancient agricultural societies, the Celts recognized darkness as the necessary time/place for all beginnings. Each new day begins at sundown. The year starts when the cold creeps in, the light wanes and the hard labours of harvest come to an end. It's a welcome respite, a seasonal sabbath. Seeds rest in the soil, new life sleeps in the dark womb, and all wise people take time to laugh and rest, doing the crucial work of re-creation, singing and sharing tales among deep shadows and flickering light.

Among the shadows: not an easy place to be. Yet our shadows demand attention, as our brightness continually invents them. Samhainn may wear the disguise of No-Man's Land, but what it really offers is Common Ground, a place for honest hopes and unreasonable fears to meet. Here is one meeting I will not miss. Here is one lesson for which I dare not show up late. (Hurry! Finish the wiring in our new house, so we can turn off all the lights!) Now is the time to step into the darkness, dance and wrestle with the darkness, shake the grief loose from my bones, mourn for all things returned to earth, and dream of new life that shall spring.

Happy New Year! May this "Almost Time" become a celebration. May we dance and weep around the bonfires of loss, feast on the richness of our memories, and--in dreams--step into the future's blessed embrace.