I was sitting at my desk when I saw three pileated woodpeckers fly past my window. They were squawking and I realized I’d been hearing that sound since I woke but it was sort of in the background of other morning noise: the kettle, the news, the cat. So it took a few moments to register. And then I remembered a similar hullabaloo, two years and a week ago, when I was out in the morning, removing the string and banding and clamps from a batch of indigo dye work.
https://theresakishkan.com/2016/06/29/blue-days/
I’m guessing the young have just left the nest and are learning the territory: which trees are best for ants, how to pick huckleberries and saskatoons. How to use their voices for the best effect. As the world turns, as the days repeat themselves, so does the work. I have a basket of fabric prepared for the dye vat and am hoping to get to it soon.
Two years ago I was dyeing fabric and listening to woodpeckers and anticipating the September birth of Henry. This morning I’m thinking of Edmond, a week old today, and how philosophical he looks in this photograph that arrived last night.
In the book I was reading two years ago, Memory on Cloth: Shibori Now, Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada writes that, “The cloth sensitively records both the shape and the pressure; it is the “memory” of the shape that remains imprinted on the cloth.” Maybe we are cloth, we are the very fabric of being, the world recorded on us like blue dye, the sound of woodpeckers echoing in the trees just beyond.
...Theresa Kishkan 