a few (blue) lines towards the end of the year

This is not the jay feeding outside this morning. Or maybe it is, but there’s a skiff of snow and today’s jay is a little skittish; I couldn’t get a clear shot. But the jays have been coming most mornings during the fall and winter for more than 40 years. If this jay, photographed last year, isn’t the one this morning, it’s probably a relative. Some days there are as many as 6. I love it in early fall when the ones born in spring are learning how to feed on the posts. (I have a hanging feeder in winter but I can’t use it until the bears den late in November because otherwise they drag the feeder down and bust it to get at the seeds.) Their crests are untidy, the young, and they are nervous. They’re kind of wildly acrobatic. And honestly, is there a better blue in nature’s paintbox? This is the colour I dream of, try to find in my vats of indigo and woad, dipping linen and cotton, 6 times, 7, and letting it rest overnight, untying and unclamping the next morning to see how close I am to the dreamed colour. I think the best morning was this past September when I was patient enough to spend most of the day dipping and removing for the solution to oxidize, dipping and removing, and then again. The indigo process is counter-intuitive: it’s not the length of time you let the fabric soak but the balance of immersion and oxidization.

I’m thinking about words to guide me through the next year. Patience is a good one. I’d like to be more patient. Do you remember Adrienne Rich’s poem “Integrity”? The one beginning with that astonishing line: “A wild patience has taken me this far…”? Maybe that’s the quality of patience I am looking for. Wild, problematic, untidy. The past two years have been hard in many ways. I felt I was shaken off my familiar foundation and I have been trying to learn how to made amends for my failings, to try to find a different way to look at the past and whatever future I have left. I have been trying to find a way to forgive myself. There’s been sadness in this work, and also anger. Also regret. It’s complicated. But patience would certainly be a better resource, particularly a wild patience.

Anger and tenderness: my selves.
And now I can believe they breathe in me
as angels, not polarities.
Anger and tenderness: the spider’s genius
to spin and weave in the same action
from her own body, anywhere —
even from a broken web.

Do you see the spider webs in the fabric on the right? I didn’t know those beautiful arcs of white would be the result of the tying I did to the white cotton I began with. I wrapped with hemp string, tying it tightly in several places. I had faith, I think, that whatever the result would be, it would be beautiful. And on this cold late December morning, I will be patient until the days are warm enough to make a dye vat, to take my lengths of cotton and linen and even the raw silk I have saved patiently for the right time to give it a new life. Maybe this is true for me too. I don’t want a new life but I want to let the anger and tenderness breathe in me as angels now, not the difficult weight they have been for the past 2 years.

A wild patience. Can I choose two words for the new year? Can you? In the meantime, I wish everyone who finds me here a very good year. There is a little band of pinky-gold light on the western horizon, beyond the lake, beyond the trees. The chickadees are fluttering by the door and the jay is waiting in the big fir for more seeds. The morning has a kind of clarity, green, snowy white, the blue feathers of the jay. I wish everyone, even myself. In a little while, I’ll bring in the basket of blue fabric to sew by the fire. Nothing needs doing as much as that.

I have nothing but myself
to go by; nothing
stands in the realm of pure necessity
except what my hands can hold.

Note: the lines are from Adrienne Rich’s “Integrity”,