1. In the small hours, awake, the room suddenly illuminated with lightning. The white curtains, briefly gold.
2. Chickadees arrive in a cloud for breakfast. Two Steller’s jays, a towhee. I keep putting my bowl down, finding more seed. I have greeted the jays for more than 40 years and each morning I’m dazzled by their colour.
3. Cloudy yesterday. I was dyeing with marigold, trying to make sunlight.
4. At the lake this morning, the young man in black, making espresso on a little stove, offered me a cup. Not just now, I told him. I want to swim while there’s no one else. When I pushed out into deep water, a Steller’s jay called from the big cedar. Green lake, a tiny white feather on the surface where I made my first stroke.
5. I will mix the indigo starter in a big jar and when it’s ready, I’ll prepare a vat. I have lengths of cotton and linen. I have a stained tablecloth. And the white curtains? Maybe those too.
6. John is splitting wood for the winter’s fires. How soon September has arrived and how soon the cold will come. The woodstove is ready. There will be the long dark days, the snap of cedar as the kindling catches. I will swim as long as I can.
Again as an illustration of the colour of the atmosphere I will mention the smoke of old and dry wood, which, as it comes out of a chimney, appears to turn very blue, when seen between the eye and the dark distance. But as it rises, and comes between the eye and the bright atmosphere, it at once shows of an ashy grey colour; and this happens because it no longer has darkness beyond it, but this bright and luminous space. If the smoke is from young, green wood, it will not appear blue. (Leonardo da Vinci, from “Theory of Colours”, trans. Jean-Paul Richter)
...Theresa Kishkan 
You have so captured the season. Happy September to you, Theresa. (also, I love this line: “I have greeted the jays for more than 40 years and each morning I’m dazzled by their colour.”)
Carin, over the past two days I’ve dyed 4 large lengths of cotton and two of them set as the colour of Steller’s jays. Don’t know or why these two did and the other two (though really beautiful, deeper and more marbled) didn’t. But I’m grateful…
On the drive home from Yorkton yesterday, where we’d gone to visit Farmbeau’s mom in the hospital, the land was blanketed by smoke and I said out loud, as much as I hated to admit it, “Our planet is burning.” It’s so depressing. There’s part of me that’s glad neither of my two adult sons will have children, and that maybe my sons will be dead and gone before things get really bad. For everyone else who will have to live through shit that I don’t even want to imagine, I am so sorry. I try to stay positive and believe we’ll pull out of this mess we’ve made, but as I look at the world around me and see the greed and disrespect with which the planet is treated by those who think their money will protect them, I’m disheartened.
Meanwhile, among the good things that we still have, are your beautiful dyed fabrics.
Oh I hear you, re: planet. I tell John that I’m glad we won’t live forever, though I wish we’d done better for our grandchildren. It’s easy to be disheartened. But I just sewed some of the lovely indigo cloth into a gift for someone I love and picked the day’s tomatoes, beautiful greens for a salad, and will hold those pleasures close. For now.