wonder and amazement

There’s been a lot of wonder and amazement in the more negative, disbelieving sense lately… as in, I wonder how people can be so insensitive to the suffering of others, to the ongoing genocide in Gaza and continued targeting of immigrants and indigenous folks everywhere. And I wonder how anyone can be so selfish and short-sighted as to prioritize tax cuts for the insanely rich, at the expense of social programs that benefit everyone…. But this train of thought could lead to madness, given the amount of fodder being generated every day. Instead, I wanted to share some wonder and amazement of the more wide-eyed, receptive and enthralled variety, in part because I believe it’s what can ground us in the sanity and compassionate care that is needed, always.

These images are from a visit to the Painted Hills of Oregon, where the various mineral deposits and volcanic action of the land have left layers of unusual color, some of which are only exposed through erosion. The lavender in the next photo is true color - purple dirt!

Against the deep cinnamon hills, the delicate greens of sagebrush and juniper gained potency. And the sky seemed to intensify its blue.

Some of the rocks were also blue, or an interesting blue-green that almost matched some of the sage, and was close enough to my sweater color that I had to pick up a sample, just for a photo.

Amidst all this far-out color and trippy landscape, I was also entranced by the basic, gentle blooming of a cherry tree on the land where we stayed.

A large part of my amazement these days is simply that spring happens, that all these plants bubble over with life in the form of buds and leaves and blossoms and so much outreaching growth it’s almost hard to handle. The giddiness of perceiving what all is going on - especially when the birds are calling, chasing around, busily gathering nest materials. It’s so energetic and happening, and yet so peaceful. The waving of bright green fir tips and flitting of warblers carries deep peace because it’s just so right, so much the way things are.

I have very few words these days, to counter the deliberate destruction going on, but to be still and look and listen continues to feel like a crucial practice.

True emptiness is clear and always present

masked by delusions for reasons we don’t know

how could what is real and what is false exist apart

flowers bloom and flowers fall when the spring wind blows

- Mountain Poems of Stonehouse, 92 - Red Pine translation

PS - I do keep adding to my poetry page, this one posted as a typewritten image on instagram last fall. Still working on the weaving blog post, and the weaving as well.

PPS - I wrote some commentary, added to yet another page. My virtual house of words, it is sprawling. Also just read this please - Arwa Mahdawi telling it like it is.

uplifting play

Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, Montana. A photo that looks like a painting, the texture of the water making brushstrokes somehow… not at all intentional on my part. I love the colors of the Rattlesnake’s rocks, and wanted to keep them with me.

Yes, the sky is falling, and also creative work is rising.

Creative, heart-based truth is leading the way I wish to follow. The performance of Les Arrivants in concert with the Glacier Symphony orchestra was a good example, a nourishing blast of brilliance that I’ve been cherishing and revisiting over the last month.

It’s hard to speak about the music, because it’s such a qualitative experience, so emotionally connected. Of course I have a Rilke quote for this. In a letter responding to someone asking about the influence of another poet on himself, Rilke says the influence is “dissolved in memory and experience… interwoven with it,” and that it mainly “consists in developing one’s capacity for wonder and for work and in compelling one back to nature.” That’s how art works: you can’t point at anything specific and say it did this to me, but it does something. It affirms something you already knew…. it motivates your own work.

Birch with pink inner bark and cool fungus, outside Kalispell, Montana

A bird’s nest with blue tarp strands and bits of my husband’s hair, which I cut out in the driveway and always hoped the birds would make use of it. This was in an Ocean Spray bush, found in winter - I don’t know whose nest it was.

Those of us who watch Les Arrivants perform live tend to overuse the word “amazing.” I say it myself, and I hear other audience members as they approach the musicians afterward or try to express their reactions. I think it’s because this group takes us somewhere new and unexpected, outside of any ready vocabulary we might have. Part of the mind is still chewing on the experience long after it’s over, and in the moment of greeting them it’s still just new and delightful and moving, and we haven’t had time to understand how we’ve been touched. It’s a powerful enough experience that it requires a time of processing, metabolizing new input that goes way beyond any form of mere entertainment or pleasure.

The first time I saw them, all this was true, and they were alone as a trio, in a relatively small venue. This time they collaborated with a symphony orchestra, playing five works in a row that were newly orchestrated, three of them world premieres of original compositions by each of the three musicians. It was like dwelling in a series of multidimensional worlds called up by these unique minds, one after another. Unbelievable.

Low tide on the Salish Sea.

Although they’ve coordinated with an entire symphony and have expanded the sound and texture and grandeur of each orchestrated piece, they retain the sense of intimate communication and responsiveness among themselves as a trio. Even with a full orchestra behind them, the three play for each other and include the audience in the warm-hearted way that defines their music. The more you know their music, the more you appreciate their sense of play and conversation, the way they explore and support each other.

The introduction to Bagelissimo, the Mile-End Tango, was a great example of this. Abdul-Wahab Kayyali and Amichai Ben Shalev indulged in a languid, almost teasing exploration, tickling and caressing all sorts of possibilities before giving the orchestra the gratification of the bright tango beat (which the orchestra clearly loved playing.) Ben, having done the orchestral arrangements for the five pieces being premiered, seemed to be on a justified high, judging by the look on his face as he sat surrounded by the sounds he had summoned from the instruments, and in his own solo work & virtuoso treatment of the bandaneon.

Wanting to say something about improvisation and weaving, as I attempt to learn double weave, copying motifs from Shahsevan tribal weavings (nomadic Iran). As with a musician’s skill, a weaver’s increased familiarity with a technique and the design possibilities gives more opportunity to improvise and be inventive within the format. I have my hand in too many different weaving techniques to master any one, probably, but I’m working on gaining some fluency in the design languages and the structural rules that inform them. Watch this space for more on weaving & improvisation.

I can’t remember much about the oud solos, except that I wanted them to go on forever. I’ve already been expressive about how much this musician’s work moves and inspires me, and this performance was further confirmation. The emotional intensity of the concert was front-loaded, since the first piece was played by Les Arrivants without orchestra, and the next piece was Shaymaa’s Dance, Abdul-Wahab Kayyali’s piece composed upon the death of Palestinian poet & academic Refaat Alareer’s eldest daughter, months after his own death. The music envisions the two of them dancing at her wedding.

The composition is an imaginary celebration of the simple continuation of life that will never happen for these two, who along with other members of their family, were killed in separate, targeted Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. The grief and infinite pain of this vision permeate the lilting melody and sweetness of this classic, lyrically moving waltz. (A brief excerpt is in the Glacier Symphony link above.)

This image is from the article linked above, from a protest in Cologne, Germany soon after Alareer’s death.

Unfortunately, the world premiere of this work was accompanied by a compromise of its power. Whoever finalized the program for the Glacier Symphony chose to edit the artist’s statement, without consulting or involving the artist/composer. As a result, the description of Shaymaa’s Dance was scrubbed of any reference to Palestine, Gaza, airstrikes, genocide, or even the violent and targeted death of these two individuals. While Refaat Alareer’s name is mentioned, the situation is glossed as “loss,” and thus impossible to interpret unless you already know who he is. 

The composition and premiere of this piece is what motivated me to instantly seek tickets, bring my family to the concert, and tell others. To have it sanitized in the interest of genocide-denialist sensitivities seems counter to the purpose of playing it, and of inviting Les Arrivants to Kalispell. Fortunately, the music speaks for itself, and I know that Kayyali and Les Arrivants will have more occasions to highlight this work and reach ever wider audiences with their brilliance, now that they have taken this first step into orchestral collaboration.

I’ve been working with Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus lately, and the phrase that keeps cycling through my mind with regard to this music is from the final sonnet of Part 1, which talks about Orpheus’s dismemberment at the hands of the raging Maenads. The German is “aus den Zerstörenden stieg dein erbauendes Spiel”: From among those who would destroy you, your uplifting (edifying) play arose. The word Spiel, or play, is the playing of the instrument, and you could say ‘tune’ or ‘song’, but ‘play’ evokes the improvisation that is so integral to the work of these musicians. Each of them is raising something new and edifying each time they play. The premiered compositions of this concert were ‘erbauendes Spiel’ on a grand scale, but every performance involves this uplifting play, and among the forces of destruction that currently surround us, lifting up an edifying song feels like a sacred calling.

The tatreez-supporting jacket also had its debut at this performance. No photos allowed in the theater, but here’s Abdul-Wahab Kayyali wearing it, speaking with admirers from the audience after the show with Amichai Ben Shalev.

On the topic of censoring Palestinian voices, the response of universities is getting me down… (eta: understatement, and Rebecca Solnit says it way better than I can here. Read, follow, act on her encouragement.)

Despite their evident financial emphasis and power games, all of which was more than obvious to me as an Ivy League undergraduate thirty years ago, part of me still wants the university to be a bastion of clear thinking, a safe place for dangerous intellectual experiments and risky conversations. It must be the part of me that never gave up the dream that being a serious student and an intelligent person was the way to move forward, to achieve lofty aspirations and enhance the world.

I was raised with this implicit ideal: the university was the place to go to exchange thought, to further ideas and creative growth. There was no doubt in my mind about this. And of course, this led to repeated disappointment. I perceived things clearly enough to dissuade me from pursuing academia as a professional. And yet, I see now in my current bafflement, there was lingering faith somewhere in my mind, that universities were the stage where things could happen that would expand and change our society.

And I don’t know why I feel closer to universities, or expect more of them, except that academia is where you’d typically belong if your primary activities are writing, thinking, and comparative study. Doing these things has made me feel close to academia and pay attention to how it works, even though it’s never been my job. My independent study of poetry and textile research also keeps me in the scholarly milieu, so it just feels like the portion of society where I should be most at home, although I haven’t associated with a US university in decades, really.

To see the universities motivating against their own students and faculty, in the service of ideologues, deflates the residual hope. It’s not all universities, of course, but I’m not going to dig through the newsfeeds pulling out names of who is punishing, expelling, and allowing doxxing of pro-Palestinian activists and who is being more supportive of freedom of thought and expression. At the moment Columbia is in the spotlight for the former, and what matters is the general trend.

Here’s a thoughtful conversation about it, at least. And here is a written statement from Mahmoud Khalil, from his unlawful detention, including the sentence, “I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear.”

Clouds, from where I live, telling me about ‘erbauendes Spiel.’

May we keep expanding our minds and hearts, and keep developing the skill and fluency to allow our improvisations to rise up and edify one another.

a tatreez story

There are a lot of parts to this story: the textile, how I found it, what it’s own (partially known) story is, what I decided to do with it, and the work and result of that. This may be a long post, but I think that’s better than dividing it up into episodes. I also hope the story continues, and will happily add updates when there’s more.

Tatreez piece, rolled up and prominent in my studio. For more information on tatreez: Tatreez and Tea, Tatreez Traditions, Tiraz Home for Arab Dress are all excellent resources.

Having found this piece in January, 2023, I will have lived with it for almost exactly one year. The uniqueness of a handmade piece makes it like a person’s face, something you learn to recognize beyond doubt. So the presence of it becomes familiar. I kept this piece visible in my studio for many months before I knew what I would do with it, and its face is precious to me. Even now, I sit and stare at the photos, enthralled, and have to urge myself to work with words… in some ways, the textile says everything on its own.

At the time of finding it, the attack on Gaza had been under way for (only) 3 months, and the sight of Palestinian embroidery pierced my heart. Somehow I felt that it was older, made as part of an original garment, but I didn’t really know anything for sure except “Palestinian cross stitch.” It was in a consignment shop in Port Townsend, Washington, where many of us buy and sell each other’s goods. It had been sewn by machine into a sturdy linen border & backing, which I left on while I contemplated what to do with this piece, apart from posting photos online over and over again.

When I finally removed the border linen and held the tatreez piece by itself for the first time, the voice of it came to life. Handling an old textile, there is a liveliness, a warmth to it, like holding someone’s hand. Being able to touch both sides and to see the back was like a direct communication with the maker, the woman who held it before - a more intimate listening to the language she wrote with her stitched marks.

Then I learned more about this piece. I noted that the three uniform-sized panels are not the style of design used for a Palestinian dress. Reading further into Shelagh Weir’s Palestinian Costume book, I saw that the Hebron area head shawls, or ghudfeh, have three panels, and bands of embroidery along one end. Using ghudfeh as a search term, I found other examples, also identified as Hebron works. Clicking through links, I suddenly found myself looking at exactly the same embroidery patterns, in a portion of a shawl in the collection of the Textile Research Centre of Leiden, Netherlands.

Doing a watercolor painting of a textile is a great way to study the designs, complexity, scale, and color choices, to learn more about the language.

The same! I knew the designs well, having looked closely enough to try to paint them. I still don’t know what this similarity means, exactly - what is the microcosm of shared embroidery vocabulary that would result in such an identical design… same family, or village, or time frame within an area? I haven’t successfully communicated with any textile scholars about this yet, but it’s certainly striking - I’ve looked at a lot of tatreez, and this is the only time I’m aware of seeing identical patterning. The benefit is that I can more confidently place the segment I have in time and place. And the conclusion of the TRC folks, in consultation with Wafa Gnaim, is that their piece is c.1900.

When we talk about old textiles, I know there’s a tendency to glorify age for its own sake - older pieces are more valuable, considered more authentic. Sometimes this is unfair to anyone still making textiles now, and in terms of the marketplace, I believe in supporting active craftspeople and not inflating value based on scarcity or exclusivity of access. (I’m also opposed to the way the textile collecting world mirrors the rest of the fine art luxury market in this way, with artificial fashion trends and status competition affecting the way things are valued. The inherent value of textiles and why they matter has nothing to do with all of that.) When I revere something older, it’s because of the life that is in it, the context that was woven or stitched into the piece itself, through materials and technique and the lived experience of the maker.

In this case, finding out how old this piece is likely to be was emotionally moving, because it places the original maker before so much of the suffering and disruption that her people are experiencing now. These stitches were made before Israel was established as a country, before anyone in this woman’s home environment was being forced to fight for their ability to live there, or flee. Her voice is grounded in place, and the language of her composition flows like confident music. Knowing that this piece was made in the pride and faith of belonging, of fully living her culture, makes it a powerful message from an ancestor, something to pass on strength and integrity of being.

Magnified view of the cross stitch embroidery - the white lines on the side are millimeters.

Which leads me to the obvious need to put it into Palestinian hands. I’d been contemplating this, how to give this on to someone for whom it would have personal, identifying meaning. And after meeting and beginning a correspondence with the musician Abdul-Wahab Kayyali, (whom I have mentioned before) the thought occurred to me: could it be made into a gift for either display in the home, or to wear? I had not yet come up with anything when he happened to mention in an email that he was interested in wearing tatreez while performing. This gave me a concrete goal, and I started thinking about a wearable base that could serve as support for this textile.

Abdul-Wahab Kayyali plays with guitarist Tariq Harb as the duo 17 Strings.

I envisioned a boxy jacket that could go over a dress shirt, with the tatreez wrapping around the jacket body, above the hem. I think I was influenced by Southeast Asian tribal clothing shapes in going for a black, square jacket - but I also found these Turkish fellows looking very sharp, which I was sure the recipient would appreciate, given his musical and personal Turkish connections. The Turkish image gave me the idea to use piping along the neck and front opening. I got some black linen twill from my local fabric shop, and found a suitable silk for piping in my stash of fabrics I’ve dyed in the past. After a few practice runs with making and sewing piping, I took the plunge and cut the linen, creating a piped edge along the round neck and center front, between two layers of linen.

Piping is basted onto one side in the first step

Linen is shifty stuff, so there was much basting. The two layers of the jacket body were basted before cutting the neck, and here I’m basting them again after sewing the piping in the neck edge, before adding sleeves.

I decided on a T pattern with square gussets for the sleeves.

(I’m narrating it slightly out of order. I was already well into the project when I found out the age of the piece. This caused me to [hyperventilate and buzz around going omg and then] be more thorough in my documentation of the textile, especially the back which would no longer be accessible once it was mounted on the jacket. I will make the images and information available to others who work with preserving Palestinian textiles, if they are interested.)

Magnified view of stitches including joining stitch. Millimeters marked at the side.

The back side of the embroidery

Given that the sleeves would be visible, I wanted to add something decorative on the cuffs. In dresses from the 1930’s or earlier, Palestinian women used imported silk taffeta to appliqué onto the skirt panels. A typical design is a rectangular strip with diagonal lines made by reverse appliqué. A slit is cut into the silk, and the edges are turned under and stitched. I knew this technique from other textile cultures, and had done it myself in the past. I auditioned a few different silks and practiced the reverse appliqué several times over, before working it onto the jacket sleeves. The cuffs have a small vent, and are hemmed with lines of running stitch in handspun yak/silk yarn. Running stitch is another embellishment that is seen in Palestinian garments and cloth. 

Some of my reverse appliqué samples, with the preferred choice in the foreground.

Image from Shelagh Weir’s Palestinian Costume book showing a dress with taffeta appliqué in the center front of the skirt.

Spindle-spun yak/silk singles, sewn in rows of running stitch along the cuff hem.

The idea was to provide a supportive, wearable base for the tatreez, consistent with some aspects of Palestinian textile culture, while not drawing attention away from the embroidery. It is different enough from any traditional garment that, I hope, it takes the tatreez sufficiently out of context to be essentially honored as an element of traditional culture, and not co-opted in a way that conflicts with its original use. 

Primarily, it is a way to connect the voice and art of an ancestor with the living continuation of her culture, to make it possible for others to continue listening to and learning from the beauty and message and strength of this textile.  I hope that it will provide deep-rooted support for this musician as he expands his creative and expressive potential through composition and performance. Like the tatreez piece, his music is powerful, compelling, and tapped into strong cultural roots. 

Abdul-Wahab Kayyali during a performance of Mafaza, in a screenshot from the Instagram of Majd Sukar, co-composer of the Henna Platform production. Photo by Joshua Best.

The image above was concurrent with my beginning work on this jacket, and I hope I can convey how much it broke my heart. Mafaza is a powerful stage production, involving two Syrian poets, Waeel Saad al-Din and Mosab Alnomire, and two musicians, Abdul-Wahab Kayyali and Syrian clarinet player Majd Sukar. The debut performances were in early November, 2024 in Toronto. I was compelled by the trailers and interviews that Henna Platform was sharing as the performance date approached, and I knew from Abdul-Wahab that creating this work was a strong experience for all of them. What I didn’t know until I saw this image was that the musicians, who were on stage the whole time along with the poets, were dressed and made up as survivors of an explosion, with torn and dirty jackets and dirt-smeared faces. The fact that they performed the whole time in the garb of the bombed, embodying the dehumanizing, targeted status that many would give them, was almost too much to fathom. And the contrast between this and the type of jacket I’m trying to make, the message I’m conveying with it, that this musician is esteemed and worthy of the best, most meticulous efforts - it still squeezes my heart when I think about it.

When I describe the details of the textile and the garment making, I’m trying to be thorough with the information, so I get into report-writing mode. But the feelings are there in the work and care, and the truth is I often had difficulty working on this project and not crying. It feels like the most important thing I’ve done in recent months, and one of the most significant textile projects I’ve ever had the honor to work on.

Beginning to stitch the sleeve detail, while listening to Les Arrivants.

Sewing the hem on Dec 7, 2024, the night that Syria was being liberated.

After the sleeves, and after sewing the hem, the only thing that remained was to attach the textile. I had one of those sudden bright ideas that come while lying in bed, regarding the stitching for securing the textile. Given that the jacket has two layers, if I quilted them together with colorful sashiko-type stitching, I could conceivably stitch the tatreez onto the top layer only, and then the stitches wouldn’t show on the inside of the garment. I basted guidelines for the top and bottom edge of the tatreez placement, and did some decorative stitching in between with (cotton) embroidery floss. (see finished photos)

The tatreez textile is tacked to the jacket body, which is wrapped around a large pillow.

Securing the textile along the top. The tricky part was sewing through the top layer only. The curved needles helped.

For mounting the textile, I needed a support that would hold the body of the jacket in a rounded way. I used a large throw pillow, covered with cotton cloth, and laid the jacket onto the textile, then wrapped it around to the front. After securing in several places with stitching rather than pins, I began to sew along the top edge, with white linen that was darkened with natural dye to match the old linen cloth. This was a chance to bring out the textile conservation needles - tiny little curved needles that are nearly impossible to thread and hold, but that make minimal holes in the textile. After a few minutes, I got back into the habit of holding the wee needle, and this part of the work was calm, reverent, and rewarding. Every moment of looking closely at this piece has been a gift.

Finishing the stitching on winter solstice, with the setting sun lighting up the tatreez textures.

Detail of finished jacket: bound side seam in foreground, interior decorative quilting stitches, and the outside of the jacket in the background, showing piping and textile.

When I finally hung and stepped back from the finished jacket, I was overwhelmed by a mix of emotions and anticipation, barely able to wait for my visit to Montreal and the giving of it.

As it happened, I was visiting Abdul-Wahab Kayyali on the 19th of January, 2025 - the day the ceasefire went into effect in Gaza, so the wild mix of emotions continued, and how could it not? The heaviness of all the surrounding story, of historical and present-day suffering, are bound up in this textile, this garment, and the friendship that has caused me to make it. Even where there is joy, and beauty, and love, deep pain is an inherent texture of it all. It brings Rilke’s phrase from a letter to mind: “Wie sollen wir es nicht schwer haben?” How can it not be heavy for us?

Nevertheless, it makes me very happy to report that the fit is just right, it works well with playing the oud, and when he first put it on he said, “Perfect.”

I’m quite sure there will be more photos of this project, here and there, and I look forward to sharing its public debut when Abdul-Wahab Kayyali chooses to wear it for a performance with Les Arrivants.

what I'm doing now

November, 2024:
Of course I think about leaving the country - I spent nearly 20 years living outside the US prior to 2015, so the possibility of doing so again is never far from my mind. I think about Jordan, which I wrote about after a very short visit, where there could be excellent cultural and relief/volunteer opportunities, as well as a chance to immerse in Arabic and really learn. I’ve been plugging away at Duolingo and some old Teach Yourself recordings, in an effort to improve and also just to hear and affirm this language with a depth and intricate wisdom that has so many iterations across the globe, and which has been relegated in the US mindset to negative associations. I won’t write the negative, misleading words, because repetition gives them weight. Instead, I listen to music and poetry from the Levant, and explore the small ways I can discover what Arabic has to teach me now, with my limited capacity.

Sunrise at Salt Creek Campground - S’Klallam and Chimacum and Coast Salish ancestral lands.

And elsewhere there are several weavers I would love to sit near and learn from for weeks or months, in Laos, in Mexico, in Japan… 

Japanese maple in my friend and neighbor’s garden.

And I understand the outrageous privilege and freedom of movement these possibilities attest to, which is another aspect of my reluctance to just go somewhere else. I found a piece I wrote in 2020 about travel, and have added it here because the reflections are still true.

Heart of the Hills Campground, Olympic National Park

Heart of the Hills Campground, Olympic National Park

The main thing is though - all the images here are things I’ve seen during the second week of November, when I took off camping alone - here with my own senses, not far from where I’m actually permitted to live, to own a house that is not currently being bombed or flooded or set aflame…. I have the grace of this natural world around me, willing at every moment to interact and teach, and so I only need to remember to listen and be available to it, and since this is my greatest benefit in life right now, it feels like a responsibility, one that I take seriously and with joy and gratitude.

(you can stop reading here if you’d like to end on that note)

Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park

Now: All of that was written in November, soon after the photos were taken, and it has taken me a while to catch up. In the meantime, I self-published a book of poems whose title conveys the topic: Breathing Rubble Dust. Some of these poems have been published on this blog or the poetry page already, all of them written between October 2023 and February 2024, which is already so long ago.

Book cover: Breathing Rubble Dust, Tracy Hudson

Back cover: Poems for and from occupied lands

I know the poems are heavy and hard to read. They are for me, too. Because they reflect my waking awareness that a rogue nation is slaughtering innocents on a daily basis with the full support of my own country and an utter lack of impunity, despite worldwide efforts at condemnation.

How can this not be heavy? Given that my experience as mere helpless observer pales in comparison with anyone who lives there or has family being relentlessly and unpredictably targeted and bombed, their lives set aflame….. this reality is my breath, blood and bones, it’s part of my own body and yours as well, whether you realize it or not. This human collective, this earth’s skin in which we live together - each drop of poison affects the whole.

The gap between my posts is me trying to summon the sense that it is worth it, that I have anything to say that can matter. At the same time, the message and purpose of printing these poems is that our individual and collective creative voices matter, that we mustn’t stop speaking about how we are all affected by the reverberations of what happens in the world.

At the moment, I’m distributing these chapbooks personally. Contact me or comment if you’d like to know more, acquire a copy, or help spread them around. 

Update: the books are also available through this site, as a fundraiser, and through Camas Books & Infoshop.

stitching together

Sewing a seam to join handspun, backstrap-woven wool striped fabrics.

As soon as I began to stitch a figure-8 seam with alternating colors, these bits of weaving seemed to become a legit textile. This decorative joining stitch made my weaving look a bit like the handwoven textiles I brought home from Damascus and Doha.

Joining stitch detail of a handwoven, handspun camel hair rug made in Raqqa, Syria, and purchased in Damascus in 2011.

Damascus in February, 2011, just because

Bedouin and other nomadic weavers using ground looms tend to weave narrow cloth in long strips that are cut to the right length and sewn together. I’ve always admired the alternating colors on the joining stitches, and knew it required extensive care and time to make these figure 8 stitches so close together. It wasn’t until I started sewing that I understood that alternating colors has a structural function. If you alternate colors, you’re adding strength and protection, because if yarn breaks in one place, it’s surrounded by the opposite color yarn and won’t simply unravel. Traditional methods almost always have a practical, structural reason behind them, in addition to beauty.

Joining stitch detail of an Iraqu Bedouin weaving, purchased in Doha in 2013

Bedouin weaver Noura Hamed Salem Shehayeb working on a small frame loom in Doha, Qatar, 2011. This weaver is interviewed in a film from Qatar Museums: https://qm.org.qa/en/stories/all-stories/women-of-the-desert-video/

Souq Waqif in Doha, Qatar, where I bought the Iraqi weaving and saw many others from Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and the Gulf, 2011

Even this tatreez on linen, a Palestinian fragment that a friend identified as possibly from Bethlehem, shows the dense alternating joining stitches. Makes me wonder if this is a case of a popular technique being used in excess of its structural need. I’m sure this join is stronger than strictly necessary, but it’s definitely beautiful. The artist experimented with another type of joining stitch in the area on the left.

Palestininan cross stitch panels with intricate joining stitches

Now I'm noticing joining stitches everywhere. This is a nice join on an embroidered bag from Gujarat, which I've been using to hold a writing project. It's more of a double blanket stitch, maybe similar to Van Dyke stitch…. I don't know how it's done.

Meanwhile, I carry on stitching my panels together. Looking at the joins on these various traditional pieces, maybe you can see why my own weaving feels more like the real thing when it’s sewn together with decorative joining stitches. And it feels good to make narrow strips into a wider cloth (although I still can’t say what it “is”, besides handwoven wool cloth.) There are times when ‘putting in stitches,’ as my quilting mentor Mrs Graham used to say, feels like the only way to hold it together. I mean that in the widest, most global sense.

How it looked when I first began. The two sewing yarns are both in action, and the yarn is threaded behind to begin the next section of stitching.

I could say deep things about ‘joining together’, but I think the metaphor is already obvious. I continue to not be able to get enough of Abdul-Wahab Kayyali’s oud playing, which moved me to poetry when I heard him live with Les Arrivants last month. Just learned about this powerful project combining music and poetry around themes of survival and devastation (Mafaza project, through Henna Platform). Wishing for more beauty, less bombing.

Another detail of this wonderful Palestinian embroidery, known as tatreez. Check out this website for more: https://www.tatreezandtea.com/

Nostalgic Doha photo of someone fishing, 2008

le guin onion skin all of a piece

A rainbow halo around the sun, over the Pacific Ocean at Kalaloch. Here, because somehow I need to share it, and the focus of my wonder keeps shifting like this, from the vast and epic to the miniature and daily - expanding and shrinking, but continuously stimulating wonder and amazement. (And I saw another one again today while composing this post, a rainbow halo around the sun, following a rain storm on an otherwise warm and sunny day.)

Gathering promise from Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned and Lola Olufemi’s Experiments in Imagining Otherwise

A glimpse of the table. (Handspun continuous cord from cat’s cradle textiles, a bit of fiber magic)

Daily practice of writing, reading, painting, sitting and watching carries on. Interactions of poetry, paper, paint, birdsong, water, weather, war, wisdom and the lack of it, wrangled through arrangements of objects, words, and thoughts.

I’m reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s Always Coming Home, a rich, indulgent tome of her brilliance and insight. So much resonance with the backwards-headed people, for those who know this work! I don’t have the capacity to get into it, really - the post title was a working title, but I like it so much I’m just going to leave it at that, with hopes of revisiting the LeGuin when I can be coherent. Let your own mind make the necessary connections in the meantime…

Having cooked two more stitched salvage sketchbooks with onion skins, I once again took an indulgent number of photos while opening them up. The unrolling is the most exciting part, because the colors are most saturated when wet. Each segment has its own serendipitous story to tell, and the unexpectedness of it makes each book a thrill (as I’ve mentioned before). Above and below are all unrolling images from the same two stitched books, as I gloried in the effects, both bright and subtle.

Spiraled to dry in my studio, they look like like a huge rose, and I hate to even move or fold them….

The books, these stitched rolls of paper that are colored and folded and written and painted, keep shifting and growing, in the manner of lichens: multi-textured, slow, subject to weather, force, accident…. One thing I love is the way paper changes when it gets wet, and the way these books can accept water, unlike most books. The texture will change, and things may get very blurry or mushy or require reinforcement, but that’s part of the never-ending assembly project that they are.

The focus on slow growth in silence and solitude is my way of being with the world right now. With offerings of awareness and acknowledgement to Arab women and everything being asked of them. It’s a couple of years old, but I’ve just seen a video highlighting Bedouin women, which features an interview with my weaving mentor from Doha. I knew her as Umm Hamad, but she introduces herself as Noura Hamed Salem Shehayeb in this film. It’s wonderful to hear her stories - we did not have enough language in common for me to hear them when I was there.

Working on a handwoven camel halter in Souq Waqif, Doha, Qatar, 2011

I believe the film accompanied an exhibit at the Qatar National Museum:

Qatar Museums film Woman on the Move

Spinning sheep’s wool in Doha, 2011

And another beautiful Arab woman whose work I know and admire was interviewed here (Instagram link - the Lebanese film maker’s profile on Vimeo is here). Widad Kuwar’s Tiraz home for Arab dress has been much on my mind, given the continuing destruction of Palestine. Memories of visiting Jordan and seeing the bounty of textiles ten years ago…. there was definitely a sense of needing to preserve and hold the knowledge, history, and beauty of these things, but it did not feel as desperate as now. Nothing from a few years ago feels as desperate as now - is that the right word? It’s a feeling of having the wind knocked out of me, a kind of continuous shock, where it’s impossible to accommodate the understanding of what is actually happening.

But, given that I have the unutterable privilege of peace, home, food, love, and solitude, I make use of it to grow on behalf of all of us, and as I wrote at the beginning of some time alone in February, “The details of things gather around me like patient friends, offering supportive gestures in their mute beauty.”

moss energy

What I love about the picture above is that I really can’t tell you what is going on there. I still don’t know yet. But the alchemical invitation of combined elements feels activated, there is potential for an emergence of some kind, however small and searching. That’s the nature of my studio space these days. It holds and pools and mixes together images, textures, acts of mark making and folding and tying - possibly generating amulets, or maybe the assemblage itself is the amulet, a protected and protective space to hold thoughts that wish to heal and halt destruction.

This rock also felt strongly of healing and wholeness. Such a wise and soothing design, so smooth and comfortable in the hand. I carried it along the beach, my first time back since an incident of local violence, and I left it there to mark the site with its calm assurance, another hope for healing and reparation.

I only feel capable of temporary offerings these days, momentary indications of care and tentative hope. I gain reassurance from these ancient forms that don’t need us humans, really.

A cedar showing me the beauty of a difficult life.

In preparation for a moss walk with the land trust study group, I was thinking about two aspects of mosses’ being. First, their extreme delicacy and sensitivity: with leaves only one cell thick, mosses have no protective layer filtering the outside world. The environment permeates their cells, making them highly susceptible to toxicity and air pollution. At the same time, many mosses are drought tolerant, can essentially go dormant until conditions are suitable to flourish, and when land has been depleted through mining or deforestation, they are often the first to come in and begin to find ways to grow. As some of the oldest plants on the planet, mosses have an ability to make soil habitable for other organisms. So they are simultaneously more sensitive, and more likely to create the conditions for communal thriving. These sound like the kind of characteristics the world needs, and it’s encouraging for those of us who have the experience of being too sensitive, feeling too much and too easily, to recognize that we also may have the capacity for encouraging better conditions for everyone, for starting over with small-scale care and attentiveness.

I roll it around in my mind as I visit the mosses and watch the birds and handle fiber: slow, gentle delicacy as teaching and strength.

Cotton from Traditions in Cloth, leather-whorl spindle by Allen Berry

Recycled paper stitched together and dyed with onion skins.

Maybe that’s where hope resides - with those of us who are unable to tolerate bombing of children, hospitals, libraries. Maybe our very intolerance, our inability to harden against this unacceptable reality, is what will create conditions where more of us can grow together.

A Bigleaf Maple offering shelter & embrace.

Small, persistent offerings feel small, but also crucial, as so much is being wantonly destroyed. Like the stitches in this Palestinian embroidery, creating meaning and preserving an attentiveness to life, to identity and place.

Palestinian cross stitch, found by chance in a local consignment shop. Someone tells me it has West Bank motifs from the Bethlehem area (thank you, Dot Ranch!) Along the right side are cedar/cypress trees of life.

more listening

I find myself again listening to the beach, and as with the previous time, I feel like letting the place speak for itself. Only now more so.

Words seem frail, as do individual humans.

Often, my photos follow a stem thought, a particular noticing that compounds on itself, in the form of a series. The thought on Rialto Beach, which is an astounding place to beach-listen, came after attempts to transcribe the waves….

shoo-aaah …. hmmmm-wah …..

ooooorr - rehhh …. brrrr-oh…wa …

prrrr-woh ….. sheeeeeeeeee ….

kraaaah …. kssshhh …. kraaaaaw

And the thought was, that all my countless written syllables, in all my notebooks, in English, German, French, or attempted bird-tree-sea-wind-wave languages, are nothing to the simplicity of stones in sand, the sea’s soft drag ever again recurring, whose writing was expressed all over this wide morning beach with an aching delicacy of line.

My wish is only to make/craft a response that says I am listening. This may be the whole point of all my writing and making: to say I’m listening, to immerse in the learning that is available to me, surrounding me in nature and textiles and all these living beings.

And P.S. - the sinuous lines of trees, also taking my breath and words away…

what I can do is try to write

Power hungry men

make rules

      make decisions

                 make war

from within their hunger

       not from deprivation,

        but from excess

More is never enough,

hungry since their power

           is not valid

          comes not from them

but is grabbed and claimed

           and vapid and fragile

Real lives in the balance

people hungry just for food

             and water

earth, fire, air -

            enough to live,

to call into relationship 

            with praise

People only want to live

in places without fear

but power hungry men

           like hungry ghosts

cannot be satisfied

           by just enough

enough to sing and sit

        and watch the clouds

        and hear the birds

        and touch the soil

these simple, sacred dreams

              are only fodder

         for the scavenging

         ideologies that serve

to drive the threshing machines

   that flatten all resistance 

          into stubble

broken stalks of

         things that might have grown

if power meant

         the way we know ourselves

         the way we show respect

         the way we humbly learn

         and carry teaching

© Tracy Hudson 2023

you see, I want a lot

That is really one of the best opening lines of a poem, isn’t it? Du siehst, ich will viel. (whole poem and my translation below)

The next line is Vielleicht will ich Alles: Maybe I want everything.

This is the selfishness of the seeker, compelled and uncompromising in the use of attention and time. I’m feeling a similar impatience, wanting it all, wanting everyone to Get It, uninterested in doing things that do not feed into this river of learning and listening, wishing to be more and more with whoever can share it. I feel it, in the demands I put on people (in my mind, at least), to bring their fullest selves into whatever we are doing. I know it’s irrational and unfair, but it’s me trying to will expansiveness into being, to support the opening we all need.

That last sentence shows the paradox of our situation - how and why can it be unfair to expect people to bring all of themselves to an interaction?   hmm….pause….

Because it is assumed (since it’s usually true) that we are all spread too thin, that portions of our attention are being rationed out among various, compartmentalized (if we’re good at this) areas of our lives, since we can’t possibly have room in our schedules or minds to devote to Just This One Thing Here Now, unless maybe we are getting paid to do that one thing, in which case we try to focus but only because someone is buying our time…?

What would it be like if ‘showing up’ were the norm, if each person were resourced sufficiently to bring themselves fully into the spaces they inhabit for work or play or daily necessity, if they could bring their emotions, their children, their pains, their broken hearts, their wild dreaming, so that the explorations we engage in together could be part of life and not a separately cloistered thing?   …end interlude….

I mean, this ROCK! I left it there, but kept thinking about it later. Love you, rock.

I’m working my way through Rilke’s early collection Das Stundenbuch, the Book of Hours, all written when he was less than 30 years old (!!). The title refers to medieval Christian prayer books, and the first section containing this poem is called The Book of Monastic Life. So “God” is there, but not always in a strictly Christian sense, and my favorite poems are when the idea of the divine is luminous and unbounded, seeping wide and woven into all life, and also an intimate listener, the you in “You see, I want a lot.” (In another poem he says “My God is dark and like a web / of hundreds of roots silently drinking.” Oh yes.)

And I’m actually undecided whether the ‘you’ in this poem (the 14th in the first section) is God - an easy assumption since much of the Stundenbuch is, as Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows call their translation, ‘love poems to God.’ With this one, though, he could be addressing himself, or the reader. The final stanza especially seems to be speaking to himself or fellow humans, although it could still be addressing the divine - possibly the object of his address shifts, but I’m happy to leave it amorphous.

Beach curve, showing how the tide sculpts around this point.

Later in this poem he says,

Du freust dich Aller, die dich gebrauchen /wie ein Gerät.

You love all who need you like a tool. This is beautiful to me, if you get past the negative sense of 'using someone like a tool,' in our extractive and exploitive discourse, and see a tool as essential.

One of my favorite tools, a low whorl spindle from Peru. Spinning Manx Longtan wool

People who have a real, felt need for this, as for a tool; that is, the thing needed to open something or create something. A tool is what gives us access, beyond what we can do on our own. It's also an extension of our bodies, an extension of our will, something we learn to work in conjunction with to do or make a thing, to make possible our own expression and learning.

Needing someone, divine or human, like a tool is intimate, and tender, and sweet, and vulnerable, and fundamental - dear Rilke! So right and true - and also how I want us to need one another, with that real recognition of here is what I want and need, and you are the unique being to help me with that, and I commit to learning how to properly work with you, so that we can do this thing together.

Honoring others as tools, which brings the tool back to its rightful place of trusted, essential collaborator, not just an inanimate object.

Was I saying something about the heiroglyphs on the beach? These worm tracks on driftwood look like script.

I was talking about this with my Rilke study partner (yes!! beyond thrilled to have one, especially a native German speaker, especially someone who Gets It,) and we both wish for this approach when we are teaching: to have people know that they need what we have to offer, and be committed to engaging themselves in the work of learning, so that teacher and student are in it together, sharing an experience that enhances the abilities of both. Students who need the teacher like a tool are exciting students, not passive recipients, but moving toward something with intention, and gathering what they need with active curiosity.

Still weaving black wool… nearing the end of the warp.

The desire motivating this poem, the thirst and serving (jedes Gesichts,/ das dient und dürstet) show Rilke’s mystic affinity. He is fundamentally a spiritual, mystic poet, his writing a form of seeking, and I find his words in conversation with those of Rumi and other mystics. In Coleman Barks’ translation, Rumi says “There are guides who can show you the way. Use them. But they will not satisfy your longing. Keep wanting that connection with all your pulsing energy.” With the simple, straightforward opening of this poem, Rilke claims that longing, and offers it with such intimacy that I can hear the word ‘beloved’ in the margins.

Du siehst, ich will viel. You see, I want a lot.

Vielleicht will ich Alles Maybe I want everything:

das Dunkel jedes unendlichen Falles the darkness of each endless descent

und jedes Steigens lichtzitterndes Spiel. and sparkling play of light of each climb.

Es leben so viel und wollen nichts, So many live and want nothing,

und sind durch ihres leichten Gerichts encountering only smooth

glatte Gefühle gefürstet. and superficial ease.

Aber du freust dich jedes Gesichts, But you are happy with those

das dient und dürstet. who thirst and serve.

Du freust dich Aller, die dich gebrauchen You delight in all who need you

wie ein Gerät. like a tool.

Noch bist du nicht kalt, und es ist nicht zu spät, You are not yet cold, and it is not too late

in deine werdenden Tiefen zu tauchen, to plunge into your becoming depths

wo sich das Leben ruhig verrät. where life quietly reveals itself.

• R. M. Rilke, Das Stundenbuch, I 22

winter plans

I’ve got big plans for the next couple of months. They do not involve any travel, but possibly lots of walking. They are not about getting out, but going in. Digging around in my house and studio and digging on what I find there. Given that I’ll have a decent amount of time at home (if all goes as planned,) I hope to share some of what I do and find. Like this little piece, for example, about which more detail in the Akha page (under the textiles tab - I know, lots of pages, that’s how it is around here. Kind of like my studio space.)

Akha pouch with seed beads and metal discs, mounted on stretched linen, hanging in my studio. Purchased in Chiang Mai, Thialiand, 1998

I’m in my burrow and growing my peace and skills, with the help of fiber and textiles and the many people around the world who have given of their skills, over time, to enrich us all.

Action in the studio ranges from the always-in-progress weaving, to hand stitching, to machine piecing a quilt, to reading and writing and collage and sometimes all of them together. I’ve been modifying an 1895 tome on women’s health as a form of ….. resistance, or therapy, or radical optimism? Somehow it feels right to mark out all but the most positive, affirming words in this book of pompous misogyny masquerading as scientific knowledge. And often, the happy words are very few.

Book page, collaged and marked, with the words “support future friends now” remaining visible.

Book page, collaged and marked, with “CHILD - life - life” remaining.

But that’s an occasional exercise - as with many situations, I find it more fulfilling to engage and uplift the things that move me rather than to try to block out all the enervating, maddeningly entrenched negativity and ignorance. So many excellent people are moving along with their important, responsible, loving and living work. Voices I value right now are Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Tricia Hersey, and Reverend angel Kyodo williams, as well as my forever homey R.M. Rilke, whose Book of Hours I’m moving through very slowly in German, dictionary in my lap and helpful translations nearby.

simmering

And is this quiet life a way of hiding?

I tell myself that this is service, too –

to learn, to see, to read and hear and know

to bring to light my own awareness

and dwell within that knowing,

simmer as others have simmered,

become tender –

this shared tenderness, having

weathered the impact of truth.

This is what joins us, as undercurrent

- it does not flow with words, so

much as tacit understanding, that we

cannot afford to ignore what has

been done and how that formed what

still is done and shapes us now.

imagination

Wanting to write about Kevin Quashie, his book recommended by Leesa Renee often: The Sovereignty of Quiet, which sounded so compelling, and I knew it had to do with Black activism in some sense. But when I got it through interlibrary loan, come to find out it’s a literary studies book - Quashie is a professor of African American literature, and the musings and studies within this book are grounded in poetry, fiction, photography and film. Which fascinated me, as a student of literature and poetry (and, now that I think about it, what caused me to consider art and literature as separate from activism in the first place? That hegemonic education is showing its face again…)

At any rate, the quiet that Quashie is highlighting is a fruitful interiority, every expression of which got me excitedly writing notes. He defines it this way: Quiet is “a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life… the interior – dynamic and ravishing – is a stay against the dominance of the social world; it has its own sovereignty. It is hard to see, even harder to describe, but no less potent in its ineffability.” 

Greeting a huge elder fir near the Elwha River

He later explains that “the quiet subject is a subject… whose consciousness is not only shaped by struggle, but also by revelry, possibility, the wildness of the inner life.” This quiet is not a dampening, not at all the same as silencing, but an inner expansion of potential, an opening within that is not necessarily perceptible from the outside. Quashie calls the interior “expansive, voluptuous, creative, impulsive and dangerous…. not subject to one’s control, but instead has to be taken on its own terms.”

Collage ‘stepping stone’, part of an ongoing series

The examples illuminate how writers dwell in this quiet, voluptuous interior, and how it releases them from performance of expected roles and sentiments. Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, from 1953, gives us a richness of consciousness that exemplifies self-contained power, in the simple truths of her daily experiences, which refuse to rely on a sense of plot, narrative trajectory, or the grand scheme of things. The woman, alive, alert, and perceiving things in her own way, is a lesson in the complexity of human life - something often denied to those being tokenized or asked to represent their community in lieu of themselves. Quashie explains, “The capacity to be animated by feeling is Maud Martha’s agency. It is not so much that she is naive to… social peril…; it is more that the beauty of the feeling, the tender and thrill of the moment, is more meaningful to her humanity.”

Handwoven cloth, being sewn into a Lichen Duster jacket, back of neck seam

The book builds on many other examples, including James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde, with whom I’m immersed at the moment, enhancing the themes of attention, curiosity, self-regard, community, and love, all of which gain flavor and influence in quiet. And then we are able to see how this gives strength for the inevitable struggle, having cultivated interior richness.

“To ask about the freedom within is to reimagine the collective such that the inclination to stand up for yourself is no longer limited to responding to the actions of others; instead, standing up for yourself means understanding your heart, your ambition, your vulnerabilities - it means engaging and living by these. Standing up for yourself is not oppositional, but abundant.”

My emphasis. That last line could be repeated again and again. It’s essentially the main theme coming out of this work, as I see it: the more people realize themselves, truly give voice and faith to who they can be apart from, and in spite of, the conditioned expectations, constraints, and delusions we all face, the richer we can all become, together.

Lichen Duster in progress, using handwoven fabric, resist-dyed raw silk, and Khadi silk. Giving the seams Hong Kong finish. Collage stepping stones on the wall behind.

Done but for side seams and hem

Thus it felt like something coming full circle when I opened Kevin Young’s edited anthology, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, and the first poem by the earliest published Black poet in America, Phyllis Wheatley, is On Imagination.

There are many facts of Phyllis Wheatley’s life (c. 1753-1784) that spark outrage and anger, from the sale of her person at auction before the age of 10, to the disbelief in her ability to write the poems she brought for publication, and later dismissive comments about the poems themselves by the likes of Thomas Jefferson. But apart from, and in spite of all that, she claimed for herself this interior landscape of promise and freedom, and her ode to Imagination is a song to this very possibility, a lyric confirmation of all that Kevin Quashie has been saying.

Imagination! who can sing thy force?

…

We on thy pinions can surpass the wind, 

And leave the rolling universe behind:

From star to star the mental optics rove,

Measure the skies, and range the realms above.

There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,

Or with new world amaze th’ unbounded soul.
…

At thy command joy rushes on the heart, 

And through the glowing veins the spirits dart.

(excerpted from On Imagination)

Waters of the Elwha river: cool, soothing, and free

It felt like some kind of lesson, to have the potency of interiority emphasized, over a span of centuries, from an enslaved woman, nearly denied the truth of her literacy, to a contemporary poet laureate. Urged by Quashie’s study, I’m paying attention and taking this emphasis to heart.

Rita Dove, from Thomas and Beulah:

Daystar

…

And just what was mother doing

out back with the field mice? Why,

building a palace. Later

that night when Thomas rolled over and

lurched into her, she would open her eyes 

and think of the place that was hers

for an hour – where

she was nothing,

pure nothing, in the middle of the day.

Elwha River, near Port Angeles, WA

And yes, I made a jacket using my own handwoven fabric. And that feels good. But I’ve been more compelled to share the poetry and surrounding thoughts. The Lichen Duster and a visit ot the Elwha River provide most of the visuals today, although they are only loosely related to the text.

This was the warp for the fabric for the jacket - it was on the loom for quite a while. I wove about 6.5 yards of 14” wide fabric. The duster pattern is good for backstrap woven cloth, because the pattern pieces are narrow.

about that string

A word about the string. Eine Saite, a string, is the title of this gathering place of  thoughts and images. It comes from a poem by Rilke, Am Rande der Nacht (On the Border of Night), which sets up the speaker, the person experiencing, as a string: 

Ich bin eine Saite,

über rauschende breite

Resonanzen gespannt.

 (I am a string, stretched over rumbling, broad resonances.)

The full poem and translation are posted in the about page. I recommend reading the German aloud, if you can come close to pronouncing it. The rhythms are wonderful.

RIlke loves a wide open space - field of Queen Anne’s Lace and big firs during the heavy snowstorm days.

It has appealed to me to have “A String” be the title of a website that is mostly about spinning, weaving, sewing, textiles. However, I’m feeling the need to admit what German speakers must already know - although have been too polite to bring up: the string in Rilke’s poem is a musical instrument string. The word in German would be different if he were talking about yarn, thread, spun fiber. Strings for instruments are usually made from sinew or metal - a different material entirely. So there you have it, I admit to knowing that the stretched string in the poem is not the same kind of string I have stretched across my studio for weaving.

Beginning of a walknut-dyed weaving. 10/2 cotton warp and weft, mill spun.

And yet. We are in the world of poetry, where meaning is specific and also deep, layered. Any string of any material can be stretched across rumbling, broad resonances. The strings of my warp contribute to the vibrations within a vast space (more so, if I’m weaving outside.)

Weaving linen outdoors last summer.

The poem culminates in the realization: 

Ich soll zilbern erzittern - I must silverly shiver! 

(My translation, my exclamation point) The person who is a string suddenly knows how to participate, how to create something that will cause “everything” to “live under me” - or as I interpret, to enliven in that space over which I am stretched. And this is another parallel - when my yarn is spun, and stretched, and woven, I silverly shiver. I choose my participation, that will resonate around me, through all the enlivened things. 

Handspun cotton catching the sunlight

This is elusive, but it has been deeply known to me since I first read the poem: that there is a way to be in the world, activating your own sound, evoking harmony, resonance, dance, light.

My writing slows as it becomes harder to make the words say what I understand from Rilke - but it’s there in the poem.

In Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows’ translation, they say:

A silver thread,

I reverberate:

then all that’s underneath me

comes to life.

My neighbor finds resonance in shaping found wood sculptures and suspending them.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a long time, and about other things Rilke… so many unwritten Rilke thoughts! But especially lately, I’ve thought about poetry and translation and what words mean, because it’s important for subversion, for questioning what we’ve always been taught.

I learned about and ordered this book, an interpretation of the Therigatha, delving only slightly into the stir that it caused around the question of whether it could be called a ‘translation.’ (The current subtitle, “original poems inspired by…” is modified, post-stir.) Without going into my own reading of the original Pali text and various officially sanctioned translations, I will just say I’m more interested in finding out what a poem can do for you, how it cam make you feel and possibly change. (And this version of the poetry of enlightened women does more for me upon first reading than years of referring to the literal translations.)

And I also tend to think that anyone reading poetry, even in a native language, is engaged in translation to some extent, because we each bring our own history of understanding to all words, and we cannot say or know what a poet “means” with a certain word, apart from how it affects us. (Ooh, intent and impact… there’s another thick topic.)

I truly hope to bring more poetry here, alongside the weaving, since they are intertwined in my body and mind. This pulling of myself in the two directions, from words and intellect to hands and technique, makes me feel that they are two ends of the same string, and that all these meanings are present and vital, if not for Rilke then for me, through the intersection of his words and my life.

trees

All I have today is a poem, because finding words is hard.

My hope is for transformation… for new and DIFFERENT ways of being American.

Not just because of a change in administration, but because we see the truth and act to do things differently.

The Trees Around Me

Calling this family

because

every day you see them

in different light

and the small ways in which they change

and the big ways in which they don’t change

and you slowly, imperceptibly

come to know

that they are supporting your life.

T. Hudson, 2021

poetry: la fileuse

Yes, there is an interloper who has hijacked the leadership of this country, the USA. Hijacked also the values, the motivations, the very structure of the government that many of us cherish as a democracy. Not that things weren’t rotting in many assorted crevices before, but the flagrant, unabashed corruption and disintegration of what makes a democracy is alarming.

I have been waiting, for these several years, for people to stop turning up the volume. To mute, to mark as “ignore” - not the concrete damage being done, but the endless harmful and ignorant rhetorical spew. I agree heartily with Ursula LeGuin, who wrote in her blog in 2017 of the golem, a creature created from mud and enlivened by language. The whole post (the whole blog archive!) is well worth reading, but here’s the key thing she said:

I honestly believe the best thing to do is turn whatever it is OFF whenever he’s on it, in any way.

He is entirely a creature of the media. He is a media golem. If you take the camera and mike off him, if you take your attention off him, nothing is left — mud.

There are things to do, such as phone banking to empower voters. Here are a couple of options: Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and Unite Here’s Take Back 2020 campaign, calling on behalf of the hospitality workers’ unions. I’m sure you can find more, and by all means take to the streets when necessary. But I refuse to listen to, or repeat, anything uttered by this person, and fervently hope that the flood of voters, activists, and new candidates for office will reduce it to mud.

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I have to believe it benefits us to look away, to cultivate our own sanity, to keep building up the notions, ideals, and convictions that are being threatened.

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Looking UP - hello, trees.

What I do intend to listen to, read, and write about is poetry. My friendship with poetry goes back a long way, to earnest high school sonnet writing attempts - I’m sure they were awful, and none saved, but I was learning about structure and how a strictness of form can open up pathways of expression. I’ve constantly collected poems, written and tucked into notebooks here and there, most of them not my own, but once in a while I write them too.

There have been a few that I internalized early, and that keep me company in a consistent, affirming way. Portions of Adrienne Rich’s Transcendental Etude, a glorious long poem, do this - my favorite bit is conveniently cited here, only she cuts off the end of it. The stanza ends “only care for the many-lived, unending forms in which she finds herself.” My emphasis. I could not emphasize that part enough, at the time I started reading it. And still it rolls on, reminding me.

Another example is the Rilke poem from which this website derives its name. Have a look at the ‘about’ tab, and scroll down for the full poem in German with my English translation. I’ve had that one memorized, the German version, for almost 30 years. I remember reading, in Jung Chang’s Wild Swans book, about the imprisoned woman reciting memorized poetry to herself, and made a mental note to add some more to my own internal library. In a culture of readily accessible writing and reading, it’s easy to skip over memorization, the oral power of language. Another reason that poetry is grounding, engaging all the elements of sound, texture, and shape.

As an undergraduate, I wrote my Comparative Literature thesis on the work of Paul Valéry and Rainer Maria Rilke. I was studying their writings on visual art, but also seeing how their aesthetic manifested in their own poetry, that deep interlacement among the artist’s moral imperative, the tools and techniques, and the finished works. Oh, I can wander around in that stuff all day! And these two are rich, in that respect. So once in a while I still just hang out doing this:

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Recently I’ve been rummaging in Rilke, aided by the Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows compilation A Year with Rilke. I have most of the poetry in German, and in other translations, so I read the translation in Barrows and Macy, refer to the German, and compare with Stephen Mitchell or one of the stuffy previous translators, to see how the meanings well and spread, or pool into an unutterable depth. Rilke is an acknowledged spiritual heavyweight, often quoted and well-loved, so it’s not hard to find wellsprings of inspiration there (although whoa it’s deeper than you think.)

But Valéry is a bit more… removed, austere…? Not a name you hear bantered around much, anyway. (They actually met, Rilke and Valéry. I’m reading Rilke’s letters, and haven’t gotten to that part yet ((yes, I make myself read in order, as if it were a fictional story)) - anyway, looking forward to seeing what Rilke has to say about the old guy.)

So for some reason I pulled out my fat, La Pleiade edition of Valéry’s work (shown above - the pages are fine, like that of a Bible) and imagine my surprise when, starting from the very beginning, the first poem in that whole book is called La Fileuse. The spinner. One of the earliest poems he ever wrote, and it’s about a woman spinning wool with a wheel! Somehow I made it this far, having studied this poet extensively, and having studied handspinning for the last 15 years, without knowing that there was an overlap. I had to give that page a doubletake. Then I had to sit down and read the whole thing, dictionaries at hand.

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La fileuse, c’est moi!

Do you mind if I just talk about this poem for a while? I’m not interested in explication, or analysis - just a personal response, a musing. What else is poetry for, after all? I like the way Karl Ove Knausgaard talks about poetry, saying that when you start to read a poem, it either opens itself up to you and lets you in, or it doesn’t. There are plenty of times I feel unwelcomed by poetry, and I leave and don’t come back to that work. But often enough, especially with poets I know, I enter as if to a familiar place, even if I have to look up half the words. Somehow the surroundings are drawing me in, telling me things, and I try to hear and translate what they’re saying - even if it’s purely internal, or more of a visual image.

This poem is like that, highly visual for me. I can grasp it better as a complete, interactive picture than as a word-by-word translation. The poem is written out in French, and with an English translation here (scroll to the bottom), but I’m going to write a prose description, a narration of it. Let me say, right off the bat, that I don’t know what this poem means. Really, I don’t. It forms part of the Album de Vers Ancien, which includes poems about Helen and the birth of Venus, so perhaps this spinner is one of the Fates, but there is nothing that indicates her actual role in the world…. which makes it an interesting evocation. We know a woman is spinning, but there is no why.

Ok here’s the scene: the garden, a melodious garden, is rocking, swaying, balanced on the crossing of two paths. The woman who spins sits there, in the blue, intoxicated, exhilarated, transported by the sound of the wheel, a snoring. She sits in the blue of the crossing, au bleu de la croisée. This is repeated at the end, it’s an important space, this blue. I think of it as a place where the sky opens up, because as the paths cross the trees and tall bushes recede from one’s field of vision. I also can’t help thinking of it as a crossbar whorl on a spindle, with that point where the yarn is fixed and rotating coming out from the center. And indeed, the garden se dodeline at this point, which means to balance or lightly rock one’s head (or an infant.)

She is tired, having “drunk the azure” - I think of when you’ve been basking outdoors all day and you get lulled by so much sky - and she starts to dream and doze, even while spinning la câline chevelure. Now the definition of câline in my Petit Larousse is amazing - it says this means one who enjoys caresses, who expresses sweet tenderness. Kid you not, that’s a real definition in the French dictionary. And chevelure is human hair, not usually a word used for animal fibers. So the fiber likes to be stroked, like a child or a cat, and the lullaby implications of dodeline are reinforced - this spinning is a rocking, a soothing, a caressing into being of a dream state.

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This fiber liked to be stroked. Spindles made by Janet Scanlon (not available, they were unique gifts from a unique and gifted woman.)

There is a shrub that sprinkles small flowers all around, like a water hose. There is a tree branch that bows graciously and pays respect to the spinning wheel, offering a rose.
The sleeping woman continues spinning une laine isolée - it could be the single wool thread that is alone, it could be the spinner who is isolated in herself. Meanwhile, the shadows begin to braid themselves into the the thread she has spun.

The dream winds off the spindle (now see, we can’t help but wonder, we fiber folks, if this is just an artist playing loose with terminology… the wheel would have a bobbin, unless it’s a driven spindle, and the yarn would wind on, not off - but the words used imply winding off, and fuseau is spindle, so I get stuck in technicalities.) But she’s also still caressing the chevelure, so we are still in the realm of multiple, shifting meanings, as in a dream. The azure blue starts fading, the woman is enveloped in light and foliage, the last tree lights up as if burning.

Then suddenly, the spinner is “you” - and your sister, the huge rose where a saint smiles, scents your brow with the luff of her blameless breath, and you feel the burning - you are extinguished.

In the blue of the crossing where you spun wool.

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Valéry said that he wrote this while sleeping. And the whole thing is about creating while sleeping, and all the elements are intermingled in the slippery logic of dreams: the flowers sprinkle like water, the fiber is a living being enjoying the caress, the sun radiates as a rose, all is overbright with color and light, especially blue.

I see la fileuse as sitting au bleu de la croisée, like a jewel set in the point of a cross, that point a fulcrum on which all is balanced. And as I mentioned, it’s also the point at which the spinning happens, where the yarn is formed - in other words, it is the point of twist, with the whole “garden”, that is to say creation, the world, rotating around it. And she becomes as if inebriated, but could this be the spiritual intoxication of a Sufi saint spinning, entering into a dream state that is not oblivion but a continuation of creative action? She is extinguished there, but “extinguish” is a synonym for release, or liberation… possibly a mystic merging with the wind and the light and the blue, as one more invisible element of life force.

As I said, I don’t know what this poem means - I’m just giving my own take on the vision it gives me. Spinners and weavers will understand the appeal of my interpretation, the magic of becoming the point of twist, dissolving into the act of creation - and I’m impressed that Valéry somehow knew that it’s really all about caressing the fiber.

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