OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Sixty Seven WEEDS

Weeds have a logic all of their own.  I have until recently despised them, cringed at their encroachment and battled them with real muscle to the point of joint pain and chronic allergic reactions to poison ivy and yellow jacket venom.   I have been vigilant for years against the vines and the grasses which will naturally fill up our acre of hillside on the Hudson River.   Our yard can feel positively Amazonian.

Milkweed, buddleia, sweet pea and mugwort

Yesterday I began weeding again after many months, but with less vigilance and rage.  More respect for the plants I was pulling out and a greater willingness to let them be.   Walking home from my studio today I collected many dried grasses - as much as you can find at this time of year - determined to weave them into a basket I'm working on.   My friend Daphne will me celebrating her middle years with a Wise Woman Ceremony - a croning - and that will be my gift.

Our back slope is a tangle of day lilies, grasses, bindweed, and small asters.   I look out my kitchen and bathroom window at it each day, but it no longer raises my blood pressure and makes me want to give up whole days cleaning it up.  

Day lilies and asters through the kitchen screen 

The garden across the street on the river is the same, but today I began to see them in a very different light.  Certain weeds seem to gravitate toward each other and form communities where the butterflies and birds like to nest.   According to Sue Smith-Heavenrich of Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners, weeds grown together can enhance each other's growth and repel insects.   With certain crops the density of companion weeds correlated to the lessening of damaging pests.

http://www.mofga.org/Publications/MaineOrganicFarmerGardener/Spring2001/WeedsasCompanionPlants/tabid/2239/Default.aspx

In Australia they often weave with invasive coco palm.
http://www.abc.net.au/gardening/stories/s4038835.htm

What if the weeds were planted specifically to be harvested for weaving baskets? Now there's a concept.

Coco Palm 

Phragmites Reeds

Kid's camp project

http://funcraftskids.com/weed-weaving/

OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Sixty Six NEW LAND

So having navigated through my first experience at Haystack School and then continued studies in Somatic Experiencing, it feels like new door are opening onto strange and wonderful new worlds.  
It's as if there is more land mass within me and some of it is as of yet unexplored; a wonderful experience for an almost 60 year old person.   Landscapes shift and we need to go with them.   How timely that the Outerbanks of North Carolina have their own new landscape: Shelly Island  (NPR Wed 6/28).  It's a spit of sand that's risen up several feet about sea level and named for the numerous conch which are found there.  I imagine wandering Shelly Island before it disappears.  Could become connected to the mainland or could disappear in the next hurricane.  Get there before it goes.

OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Sixty Five NEW PERSPECTIVE

As a result of this amazing work with Somatic Experiencing ( as well as my exceptional adventures at Haystack) I feel a new spaciousness within my own body.   I've come home to my house on the Hudson River with renewed eyes.   For several years now I've wanted to let go of this sanctuary for many reasons: the children have grown and moved out; their laughter and childhood still linger filling me with nostalgic longing for past times; the weeds are epic to untangle as is the poison ivy and the nests of wasp which appear in the most unlikely of places each year; its too big and even though I now have someone to help me clean it, I don't have energy for even the most basic maintenance; last but not least our taxes have gone through the roof and beyond so now we must sell.   All of these amount to an inability to "be" in the place where I live - almost akin to not "being" in one's own skin.

Since Monday night when I arrived home I have begun the process of "nesting", rearranging furniture and rugs, pulling out forgotten items, potting new plants and cooking in my kitchen for old friends.   I've begun to set up my dining room, which is hardly used, as a space for weaving and making.   In these middays of summer a light breeze fills to rooms and pathways of energy seem to have emerged. It no longer feels like a space where memory has come to die, but a place where the present and future can occur.   Everything I've touched or placed seems completely balanced and within my control - made sacred.   Joan Borysenko writes of the sacred space as a place where we have relationship to things that we love and where we are in harmony: works of art, small shells and stones, plants.   Nature is such a space where we can feel a greater connection to "Big Mind" and God.

I'm grateful for this new perspective which makes me feel more alive and purposeful by the day.

OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Sixty Four INTEGRATION

So I left the training in Connecticut still aware of shaking on my left side and hoped that it would stop.  At home after the two hour drive west on the interstate I had no more clarity on the subject, except for a profound sense of wellness/completeness.

I reached home in time to pat the dog and then headed over to the reiki circle in Ardsley.  On the table I was worked on by the hands of a wise elder woman who held my left foot and toe for a long few minutes.    The reiki energy almost made it hurt because it was so intense, but with that sensation came the memory of injurying that toe at age 10.  Sewing for my younger sister on the family room rug, I stepped on the needle and the tip broke off in the joint of my big toe.   I had to be hospitalized and put under general anesthesia for it to come out.  What remained was thick scar around my left big toe, which has always felt stiff and sensitive.   What was less apparent were the emotions: fear, worry, abandonment.  I was left alone in the hospital over night and was no doubt frightened.   There were lots of presents from my grandmother to play with in my recovery bed like flowering papers and metal ring puzzles, but the memory of the terror lay buried until that integration during the reiki circle some 50 odd years later.   Quite powerful.

        

OGT Daily Day One Hundred and Sixty Three BOUNDARIES

Everyone has them, but how aware of them are we?  For some boundaries and keeping them are a given for maintaining personal space and a sense of bodily integrity.   I thought I was one of those people.  I grew up in a family with nine siblings where it wasn't unusual to be forgotten at dinner and not have plate of food passed to you.   It was necessary to stake out your own personal territory.  I remember drawing a chalk line across the floor the bedroom I shared with my younger sister and saying,  "This is my side.  That is yours."   We jealously guarded our possessions and were somewhat wary of the distance between each other except when we were playing and metaphor for boundaries and aggression were absorbed into the story.


What if you had the chance to rewrite that story?   That is essentially what happened for me this weekend in Somatic Experiencing training.    I spent a session focused on the left and right hand of my body.   While I am quite aware of the imbalances in my body, I was unaware that focussed attention could cause those entrenched patterns to dissipate.   I learned first where the boundaries actually lay in my physical being and the extent to which they represent old emotional of physical injury.  Right dominant in handedness, I was unaware how bullied my left side felt in comparison.   A physical shaking of the left became apparent for which I could not account, but there it was.

OGT Daily Day One Hundred and Sixty Two BOURBON

So three days of intensive emotional therapy training is enough to drive anyone to drink and that's exactly what I did this evening.   I am not a drinker but Bulleit Bourbon on the rocks took the edge off of what had been a ringer of a therapy training session in the afternoon.   We explored what it meant to have boundaries around ourselves.  Literally 360 degrees around ourselves.   Going into this I thought, "How difficult can this be?"   Then I sat down in the client seat and was asked to imagine the comfort (or discomfort) zone around my body.   When I turned to the left where I felt stiffness, I found myself staring at and empty wall and burst into tears.   Who knew that feelings of abandonment and loneliness could arise so quickly?

It is wonderful the realize the wisdom that the body contains which has little to do with thought processes.   Wonderful to realize that a little drink can soften that edge.

OGT Daily Day One Hundred and Fifty Six thru Sixty One SLEEP DEPRIVATION

Okay so its been 5 days!   I know, I know I made a commitment, sleep deprivation is a pretty good excuse for not writing.  It's what I have been warned about art residencies.   You stay up late just to work in the studio and there is no one telling you what to do or when to go to bed.   This all started when my roommate demanded that I be in by eleven PM and I rebelled by staying our till 2:00 just to avoid her.   I also spent time in the library each night writing this blog, but I always got up early before 8 so I could walk by the water and in the woods.  What a distinct pleasure bringing me back to the most pleasurable moments of my childhood; the granite rocks, the mussel shells, the pulsing tide with the landscape of islands at the back.  

At any rate one thing lead to another and I was soon getting to bed by 3:30 and waking up at 7:30.   4 hours seemed to be enough for me and I did not feel sleepy.  But the net result was driving home down the coast feeling narcoleptic and then arriving at my Somatic Experiencing training  in a semi-psychotic state.   My body was so depleted that I almost tipped over twice during the morning lecture.  Later during the practice I feel asleep on a coach     Today I was refreshed and ready to absorb new material, but because of my dissociated state, I did not care whether I learned the new terminology and techniques.   I had only to slow it right down and follow my gut.   Oh and then there's the masseuse and the salt water pool.   But the shooting from the gut and winging it on instincts  is exactly the way to go with this technique which cannot be learned in books.

                                                                                                                                                                                         

OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Fifty Five FLYING

Tomorrow I'm going to construct a kite.    I've been reading about Japanese kite making.   The first stories of kites come from 500 BC in the time of Confucius.   The first was thought to be in the form of a wooden dove which may have been made by Lu Pan, also known as Lord Rohan.   He was said to be a magical carpenter who came from a purple cloud to complete the Moon Palace.   He fashioned creatures and birds out of the very sky, sea and land.  He could conjure a bird from the end of a stick.


Mystery surrounds this first kite whether it was a kite or a bird or Lord Rohan himself.   The first recorded invention of the kite was by an advisor the first emperor of the Han dynasty who used the kite to measure the length of a tunnel for broaching the walls of an enemies palace.
(The Art of the Japanese Kite - Tal Streeter)

Mine will be made of ripstop nylon.   A modern wooden dove.

OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Fifty Four SINGING

Two days late!  I haven't had tome to write or even sleep.   Art camp is all about staying up late and working in the studio and sitting by the fire and singing while some one plays guitar or Can-jo - a banjo made form a can.  Very odd hanging out with the twenty something crowd at night.  The time warp continues as I feel like I'm in college again.  Lots of work to do and creative energy I don't want to sleep.   Learned how to splice rope today!

OGT DAILY Day 0ne Hundred and Fifty Three PLAYING

A hard week of learning and working - cramming all sorts of new concepts and techniques into my brain and fingers.    But I could not be happier.   But what a relief to sit on the rocks in the fog of Penobscot Bay eating lobsters with the foam spraying in the surf.   That was dinner.  The we have a dance party.  Today was all about sleeping in after a Friday night drinking, listening to the rain and a leisurely day in the studio.    People spent time casually visiting the other classes to see what's up.

In the metal welding class they all came back from visiting an old tool shop and are creating a baroque salvages of bits of tarnished history.  Bugs and shells and vintage buttons encased in bits of copper and silver; a fantasy of mechanics and embellishment.

In the design class they are essentially engaging in art therapy and delving deep into the psycho dramatics of their own creative lives - that's all.   No big deal.   One person is exploring the metaphor of the granny square and its embodiment in human pathos.  Another is taking human hair from various residents to weave into s tory of identity.  Another is creating a miniature theater from folded paper recreating Joseph Cornell's studio.   In the wood shop they are taking apart a piano to make new instruments.   The clay class is deep in the molding and casting process - with some taking a break just to throw pots on the wheel.  It's an intense and lively group.

I was so proud to have finished threading my first loom today - seems somewhat of a weaver's right of passage - only to be told I still needed to thread the pedals.  No problem - that seemed easy.  Wrong! After two days of squinting into the thread holes of each heddle and nearly going blind, I find myself lying on the floor shoving hooks up into the sheds - another hour or so.  By the time I was done I was exhausted and the prospect of weaving almost seemed anti-climatic.   But my woven plastic does look good.

I was invited by an artist in the metal works shop to collaborate on a maritime themed co-creation this week.  Going to be fun, but tonight we dance.

OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Fifty Two REFLECTION and BLOOMSDAY

Well I missed it by 13 minutes, but I did want to acknowledge Bloomsday (June 16) in honor of James Joyce's beloved character Leopold Bloom.   I'm sure pints were consumed and passages were read all over Dublin and lots of other places in the world today.

I was up at 5:00 and down to the little sand pocket beach on Penobscot Bay by 6:30.  There I made a mandala spiral on the sand and collected bitty colorful snail shells in colors of saffron, amber and charcoal. These are the same shells I collected as a ten year girl scampering over granite rocks on foggy Maine mornings among the seaweed in Casco Bay.    Like the expansion of time in Joyce's story of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, time seemed to move backward for me today as every sense - touch, smell, sight - was filled with the embodiment of what it was to be that child again.  This week has been such a gift. Warping the loom has created a time warp.  I feel myself moving both forward into new relationships among like minded people and much desired skills - and yet backwards to state of innocence and newness.  It felt good to reflect on the week and spend some time alone.  It brought me back to a feeling of balance.

Today I spent two hours in the Fabrication Lab making circular cut canvases to paint on, which had me completely excited to be in the studio again.   Then the entire class drove out to Stonington to the Marlinspike Chandlery to watch Tim Whitten twine rope and show off his fancy rope braiding and knotting.   I bought a beautiful old spool of cotton twill and a knotted bag which everyone is using as a model for their netting skills.

Marlinespike bell pull

Tomorrow is Saturday and I can start weaving - Yeah!   I played dominoes tonight and won the whole shebang.   Who knew?  Probably just beginners luck.

OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Fifty One LEARNING A LANGUAGE

Already there is more to say than I can possibly write before I pass out from fatigue.
This is art camp for adults and we are all at capacity full speed on the creativity intensity and out put front.   Not to mention just meeting new people and remembering names, but learning new concepts from crocheting, making nets, and warping a loom to knowing the difference between raster and vector files for the fabrication lab.

Today I watched myself learning a new language like a toddler learning to speak, or a child learning to read.   The concept of a warped loom was only hieroglyphics to me earlier in the week and between yesterday when I prepared my warp by laying it out on a large warp board, and today when I actually set the warp on the loom (with the help of the amazing TA Liz in our class) - it began to reveal itself as a visual language, a verbal language, a numerical language and most importantly a physical language.   Threading the warp of a loom allows you to touch every thread on your loom and to truly claim the story that loom will write.   It also demands a level of mental and physical focus that is almost super human.   Yet with the support of the TA and teacher with various comments about tricks to set mistakes aright, I set out on the journey of counting that is the math of physical warp heddle threading.   First you must count forward 1-8 with every thread alternating between over and under.    Then you count backwards from 8-1 with every thread alternating between under and over.   So the count flips as does what you must see visually and do physically with the hand.   It is mind bending and reminds me of Neil DeGrasse Tyson speaking about the directional spirals of protein molecules which make up all human life.   The all turn to the left and those that are manipulated to turn right become toxic.   The reason this comes to mind is a Radio Lab segment about Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and Alice pondering to her cat if there was such a thing as "mirror milk."   Would it be the same as regular milk or reversed some how?   On the molecular level it could be toxic!   Warping the loom made me think of the possibility of mirrored images in the loom both left to right and top to bottom, as well as under and over.   A duality experience in so many aspects of life, yet integrated into the whole cloth of the loom.

OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Fifty FELTING and OLD STUFF

Man do you ever need arms muscles to make felt.   That's what today was all about.   We stood out in the bright Maine morning sun with piles of raw wool in all sorts of colors soaked with soap and hot water and rolled away until my arms were all bruised.  You have to roll the felt around a PVC pipe and then inside a bamboo mat just like a giant sushi roll until the water seeps out and the fibers of the wool stick together forming a solid mass.  The Mongolians used to, and may still, drag such a roll around the steppes behind a horse to make the felt for their yurt houses.  The combination of heat, moisture and agitation cause the scaly wool fibers to grab on and felt.  Unlike other fibers wool is a protein with particularly sticky qualities.   People who used to do this for a living; felting hats and other garments or saddle pads for instance were called fullers - as you are fulling out a pre-knit object.   Hence the surname Fuller which some people now go by.

My wrist is still hurting!   But I made beautiful piece with piece of curly lamb hair stick in it.
Here are some beautiful examples of work:  

Dagmar Binder

Felt rocks

This evening an artist named Zeke Leonard played the old blues tune "You Got to Move," on a one stringed instrument he calls a "canjo" which he made from a large can, several screws, an amplifier pick-up and a broom handle.   His manifesto is "Make stuff out of things, not things out of stuff," as a critical assignment for us all in our communities to think about the loss of "making" to default consumerism.   An inspiring guy.

Check it out:  http://zekeleonard.com/home.html

OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Forty Nine NEW TECHNOLOGY

Today I learned how to weave a basket.   Yesterday I learned how to make a rope.  All you need to make a basket is rope or structure you can coil and something to weave into it.   Basic, basic techniques which then can be translated in so many dimensions - really large,  unusual materials, tiny and delicate.  You can make nests and vessels and houses and urns.   Containers.  I am overjoyed.

Nested in Laurel by Matt Tomme

Pauite water basket from 1900 Southwest desert 

Japanese Ikebana bamboo sculpture

But I also went to the Fabrication Lab to talk to the technician about recreating things made in the weaving studio.   So exciting to learn that you can scan an object and print it out exactly in a polymer plastic.   

Exciting things to come.

OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Forty Eight LEARNING and LOVING

There's nothing like learning a new skill to make life exciting again.   I'm here at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle in Maine, studying fiber craft and weaving Marianne Fairbanks an artist from the University of Wisconsin.

Today we learned how to spin wool and cotton on a spindle, make rope! and set the warp on a floor loom.   Then we were all told to create a loom out of materials we found around the school in the woods etc...   But we also learned about the dyes and fabrics used to spin solar collecting materials.

It was a lot in one day.   My head is crammed full and I still need to go and make some drawings.

It is also Loving Day in honor of Mildred and Richard Loving, a black woman and white man in Virginia who married and challenged the anti-miscegenation laws.  It went all the way to the Supreme Court and on June 12, 1967 these racist laws based on a theory that intermarriage would affect racial purity.

OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Forty Seven DRIVING NORTH

On the road by 9 am - heading north on 95.   I drove through the Big Dig Tunnel in Boston and reached Kittery, ME by 12:30.   Driving over the Piscataqua Bridge btween NH and ME evokes so many memories for me.

As a child with a big family my main experiences of summer were massive camping trips.  We all piled into the VW camper and headed for the coast of Maine or the White Mountains in NH.   I always seemed to end up in the way back squished between the sleeping bags and the coolers. Someone might pass me a MAD magazine if I was lucky, but I loved the drive and watching the long stretch of Maine highway and the blue, bleu sky and the tall pines emerging out as we made progress past Portland.   Even tho the highway sign warns of moose we never saw one.   Usually we went to Casco Bay and stayed on Hermit Island in a campsite by the beach and stony coves.

Later as a teenager we went to a friend's family compound on a lake near Sebago.   Running through the woods from house to house and swimming naked with the loons in the pond.

Today I drove east on Rt 3 into the craggy peninsula's and islands of Penobscot Bay and nearly cried driving through Bucksport because the harbor and islands reminded me of Sal in One Morning in Maine.   

I have arrived in a place of pure pleasure:  Haystack Mountain School of Craft on Deer Isle with a crowd of other craft artists.  We are all here to learn and explore.   Nothing could be better.

OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Forty Six SISTERS

Today was all about traveling and reunion with my sister.  Forever grateful for a place to lay my head on my journey up north.  We are a year and a half apart so even though we don't see each other that much there is always so much to say.  We speak a kind of short hand based fifty years of shared memories.   I would not be who I am without my sister and she would not be without me.

Dinner by the water in Wickford, RI and a stroll about the harbor.  Thank you Annie!

OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Forty Five ANNIVERSARY

A fine June evening on the Hudson River:

Dean's fresh caught striped bass for dinner on the porch at sunset:

Two days early - but a celebration of 29 years of married life together from a similar beautiful June
day in 1988  - June 11, 1988.  

We haven't changed a bit - ha ha.   Well maybe a little, but it takes a thick skin, patience and commitment to put up with each others foibles for that long.   So here's to us.

My anniversary present to Dean in honor of thick skin and commitment - a rhino made by my friend, artist Louise Cadoux.    Reminds me of the Albrecht Durer etching.

Off to Maine tomorrow!

OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Forty Four APOGEE

This is the night of the strawberry moon, so called by the Algonquin tribes because it is the best time to pick strawberries - not because of its color.  The full moon of June is also know as the mini moon because the moon is at its highest height from earth during the year - its apogee.   This is in contrast to the great super moons of last fall when the moon was at its perigee or closest to earth.

Another apogee occurred today in Washington during the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings.
The height of frenzy and excitement about former director of the FBI James Comey's testimony.   There could not have been more media hype and anticipation.   What I saw was the apogee of integrity.   No matter what James Comey has done in past months regarding other issues, it was a balm to American society to see a man speak rationally, truthfully and with heart about the insidious corruption and lies which he faced in working for the current administration.   He took great risk to his own reputation to speak truth to power and he's a hero for it.

OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Forty Three NEIGHBORHOOD

Today my walk took me on another route through town.   I walked the mile and a half and back to my supervisor's house and then back.   It's a street I traverse often, but always by car.  Walking gave me an opportunity to look at the neighborhoods and houses of our small town of Hastings-on-Hudson.  
2 1/2 miles square and no more than 9,000 in population, it's really a village.  While there are extremely expensive homes and wealthy residents within its borders this small village is for the most part a humble and interesting mix of professionals, real working people, artists, teachers, seniors and lots of children.   Our houses are a varied crazy quilt of styles - Sears houses, tudors, Capes, colonials - and our yards are small, stony and covered with vines.   Located on the edge of the Hudson River streets rise upward from the river to hills above the town center.   Many of the yards are made up of these steep slopes and require winding stone steps to access.   This is not a town of manicured lawns and fences.  It is one of unruly hedges knit with weed maple saplings and poison ivy.  

There were an abundance of roses blooming in these front yards I passed.  It is a banner years for roses it seems, standing tall in the sun as the peonies have dropped their heads and shed their petals on the lawn.  Making my way home via the Old Croton Aqueduct I spied three large chickens meandering in the wood behind an apartment building on the trail.   One was speckled black and white, the other two red.  All three very plump.   I wondered where they might have escaped from.   This is unusual for Hastings a commuter town just north of NYC not a farming town, but not really.

Hastings is funny like that - some people do keep chickens in their yards.  Further down the trail was a child's action figure propped up on a post holding two lost keys and then the home made dog poop bag dispenser installed by a local architect.   It's a place of cordial cooperation and creativity where people do look our for each other.

As the world of politics continues to be increasingly surreal and the Byzantine twists and turns of this Russian investigation rollout ever so painfully, I am ever so grateful for my very real and unpretentious little village.  

OGT DAILY Day One Hundred and Forty Two NESTS

Today something very simple.  My head hurts from being too ponderous.

The other morning I discovered this lovely little beauty on my walk:

There are birds all around our yard and neighborhood.  Our constant companions.
I've been collecting their fallen nests for years much to my husband's chagrin.

Two years ago I discovered an active nest in the honeysuckle on our front porch.   It was high enough that the cats could not get it, but low enough that I could just peek in.  This is what I found:

Later when I went to look, the mother robin had returned and wouldn't let me near without making a squack.

Over the weeks they hatched:

And grew:

And one day they were gone.

I've tried to make nests:

But its impossible to replicate the intricate structure of woven grass and twigs made by the birds.