blue morning

Last spring I prepared some fabric for indigo dye work but other things transpired. I fell into a deep dark hole I hadn’t noticed was there and it took time to figure out how to extricate myself. It was my fault. And it took time. I could not find the time to make a dye vat and do the work of immersing the bundles of knotted or tied or wrapped linen and cotton. But towards the end of summer, the issues were resolved, although of course nothing is ever entirely resolved. Or it is, but you are different. You are more careful. You are quieter.

But what you have, what I have, is time. Yesterday, while swimming, watching the ripples after a silver trout jumped out of the water, I thought, Spend the day remembering everything. Remember the ripples, the jellyfish glowing in the lights of the freighter you spent 5 nights on in April (you peered through your porthole after midnight and saw them), the Brem River estuary. An indigo vat takes time. And I love the process of this work, how it begins as a faith in the unknown, because honestly I never know what to expect. I don’t expect anything. I give myself up to the process, the long afternoon of dipping the bundles in dye, then removing them to oxidize, asking myself, Is this the 5th immersion or the 6th, and adding one last immersion just to be sure. All night bundles waited on the long cedar bench by the garden. The tall one is linen wrapped around a length of pvc drainpipe. The knobbly one is beach stones wrapped with hemp string.

I was awake before 6 but made myself stay in bed because it wasn’t really light enough to go outdoors to begin snipping the string and unwrapping the fabric. But just after 7 I was out in my nightdress with a cup of strong coffee, snipping in excitement, taking each length to the clothesline to hang.

The pieces on the right are actually one long length of beige (maybe simply unbleached) linen from Ikea, 5 meters I think, wrapped and twisted and tied with string. After I wash it later today I’ll have to figure out how to hang it to dry because it’s so long. I love how the areas kept from dye with string and tight wraps turned sort of greenish. The image at the beginning of this post is a linen tablecloth, a bit stained, that a mouse had nibbled the exact centre from — it was folded in a drawer. Yesterday, on a whim, I wrapped it on the diagonal, not sure what the result would be. I love it. The little hole will be mended. You can see the linen on the other side of it, spangled with jellyfish. Because of how I’d folded the fabric before tying in beach stones from Trail Bay in Sechelt, some of the relief areas are mirror-images of themselves. Who could have predicted that? A more detail-oriented person perhaps but I’m not her.

And my favourite, or at least my favourite moment, is this:

Eelgrass, estuary, cracked rock.

So this morning the clothesline holds what I learned during the spring and summer, how deep blue can hold both anguish and hope, it can hold possibilities of light in its shadows, and how everything is in flux, ripples radiating out and out and out, gravitational waves, across space and time, and given a place in coarse linen, a radiance.