I LOVE HOW I FELT

This photo is the view from my kitchen window in January. I never cease to be amazed at the beauty before me and I count my blessings...in fact it seems like an absolute miracle that I should wake up every day and be able to say wow...this is my home. It's a soft fuzzy feeling. As a lifelong keeper of journals, I have noticed that my journaling habit really jelled when I started using writing to understand the complexity of my feelings. Nothing is ever cut and dried for me. There is always feeling and reaction to feeling...superficial feeling and deeper, truer feeling. There's what I tell myself to keep on keeping on when the juice is gone and then there is the underneath yearning for to find the juice itself. Writing is my friend that way. It helps me to feel my way along...to move through the dark and to do so in a way that is honest for me. I've made all kinds of discoveries about myself through writing and I am grateful...yet writing only goes so far. Words take you places and words can be put together to form endless images to surprise and delight. The words themselves have color and feeling and the language has a rhythm and a music. But there are places where words are ineffective. In fact, they can actually cause more misunderstanding than they solve...especially between folks who have a very long history together...like family or a long term spouse. There comes those places in life when the words touch off a sarcastic "blah blah blah" going off in my brain. And focusing on the words that someone says only drives me farther away from the essence of their intent. Communication is a downright miracle but I want to get to the bottom of it all. So writing starts to seem like my old favorite jeans when life wants me to try out something new. I have drawn this view from the window...and painted it in acrylics and watercolors...made pictures with crayons and craypas. Once I even tried to render it in stained glass but that was a bit of a disaster... creating many slivers of broken glass and a feeling of embarrassment because I had tried to do something so complex with a medium that I had no experience with. And so I wrote out how I felt. And I laughed it all off. I am pretty funny.

I was given a gift this Christmas. My good friend April gave me a felting kit. Ever hear of it? I hadn't...though I had seen lots of wonderful creations at the Fryeburg Fair made from fibers, I was not informed about felting. My grandmother made lace. She tatted. And she made our clothes...navy coats with anchor buttons, Peter pan collared dresses that we wore with black Mary Janes...and my grandmother was Love embodied. I tried sewing and gave up because my sister was so much better at it. I tried knitting and after what seems 100 years, I've finally mastered the knit stitch but never learned to pearl. I keep trying because there is some need inside me to express myself in fabric. I want to be moved in the very fabric of my being. I want to live the warp and the weft because I feel the duality of things even in the essential oneness of their manifestation. I feel it when I go to Salem now to care for my Mom. I come back like a shuttle thru a loom and then I'm home again just a little changed but still the same...and then I take myself from home and under I go again, shuttling back and forth adding rows and creating the fabric of my life as I enter the threshold of the Elders. So I got this kit. Felting is applying colored fibers with a special needle to a background of felt or distressed wool. The nature of the wool fiber makes it possible to make one out of many. You can apply small amounts of a color and work it into the fabric to create pictures, birds, landscapes or even small sculptures. I worked on the Chickadee square that April gave me. Oh...it's so satisfying. It's a wordless process...banging, needling, poking, prodding and you can do it by the fire...and while your talking as long as you are careful not to stab yourself. I enjoyed the process so much that a trip to Wrinkle In Thyme Farm became essential. We went up to Sumner on Sunday and suddenly a whole world of potential opened up.

I saw felted squares and flowers and wall hangings and even landscapes. There was a whole pallette of colors to choose and a real felting needle that is definitely the right tool for the job. I thought about my writing. All my soft feeling written on the pages and hidden away. I thought of Sadie and how she turns an open stomach to us when she surrenders to love, making all her tender places open and vulnerable. I tend to cover mine up and pretend bravado so as not to seem overly sensitive or soft. I learned to do that to protect myself in my family of 5 girls. Exposing my softness...the hardest thing about marriage is to become truly vulnerable and open and yet it is that which is most satisfying because that softness, that tenderness...those places that hurt and that dance quietly in the trees where no one can see...those are the places that need to define a relationship if it is to have the strength to survive the aging process. So now I can bang and needle and poke and prod the fibers of the sheep we had the honor of eating thanks to our friends who raised her...and I can mix colors and define spaces and essentially draw my landscape in wool...a warm, soft, project that slowly becomes a fabric that captures the beauty of the vision beyond my window. I'm excited. Suddenly my day begins with more energy. I feel like a teenager in love...right down to the fabric of my being. And the days below zero pass happily while I imagine the potential ways to create in this medium. Thanks April...you have brought so much warmth to my January.