A Lesson I Learned From My Daughter

I will warn you ahead of time, dear reader. I am bursting at the seems to write to you, so I may jump around more than normal. It may feel a bit like we are teleporting around the cosmos while I catch you up on everything that has transpired since last we talked in “Just Keep Going” on June 30. It does feel like we are in a different world over here, having successfully visited a little mountain town as a little family unit. Yes, dear reader, if you can believe it, my family has only gone on one trip out of our little hermitage in Denver since Juniper (Juju) was born in 2020. We still haven’t flown, but that’s a whole different bag of worms that we won’t get into today (hehe). However, we live right next to a fireworks launching pad, and our sweet little senior boi Winton cannot do the fireworks anymore. So, Lily, in her infinite genius, decided we should bite the bullet and jump town up to the mountains where its cooler and we can relax without the fireworks or any distractions (cough writing cough).

Yes, dear reader, I am sorry I did not make it back in time for our weekly constitutional. Well, I cannot assume that I am aiding your well being with my writing discipline. I sure try to offer real human stories that make folx feel things, but it is one of life’s great mysteries whether that aids anything or anyone. The weekly discipline sure helps me, so this could be a one-sided constitutional. (BUT I I HOPE IT’S NOT! HEHE) Sometimes, living life of the run from patriotic, nationalist buffoonery necessitates that you change the everyday discipline in order to keep your family safe and sound. Look at that sweet face above! Wouldn’t you flee the city to the mountains to keep that sweet boi safe?

With all the family time, I got some wonderful lessons from my daughter in living small and noticing the mundane. Sure, I wax poetic about everyday life all the time in this project. I talk at length about erecting a society that allows us to soak in the small joys of the mundane. However, my toddler is way better at it than I am. I get too caught in the theoretical weeds of talking about the everyday while she is just live in the slipstream of the moment. Juju’s sense of time is immediate. She doesn’t have much use for 5 minutes ago or 5 minutes from now. No where is this more evident than the extremely common refrain of toddlers and younger kids everywhere: “Are we there yet?” Sure, parents will scoff at that question after it is asked 500 times, but beneath it offers a look into a different way to experience life.

This is where my daughter becomes a great teacher. She wants to go on nature walks around our neighborhood after dinner. This is such a special time, because the whole family goes on the walks. I only have one rule for myself on those walks: observe the same little half mile circuit as if I have never seen it before and wonder with awe at the little treasures I find. Of course, I set that rule for myself after Juju found the most wonderful things with her own observing. Last night, I spied with my little eyes mushrooms bursting forth out of the ground. I pointed at them with a startle and said, “LOOK, JUJU, MUSHROOMS!” She looked over and said, “I want to hug them.” UGH, my heart exploded into a million pieces. I let her know that we don’t hug mushrooms so that we can give them their space to grow. She looked at me disappointed but nodded her head.

This whole interaction lasted around five minutes, but it contains a whole universe of meaning. When was the last time you walked around your block with such a steely intention to truly see your world? Prior to our nature walks, I would be all too focused on something else, music, a podcast, or some storyline in my head, and losing this opportunity to really see what my everyday life looks, sounds, feels, and smells like. Honestly, these walks have taught me how much more I enjoy just being another animal on the planet and marveling at all the little joys there are to behold. As Hunter Thompson said, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.” Just drop right out of all the hullaballoo a swirling with all the content there is to upload into the soft tissue of your brain and exist as a mammal on a rock hurtling through space. Well, at least do that for a little while, you still got stuff you gotta tend to like opposing all the evils of the world we live in.

Unsurprisingly, Lily and I were watching Amélie the other night and right smack dab in the first 10 minutes comes the perfect line to sum up this approach to life. Amélie is talking about how she likes to go to the cinema on a friday and she says,” “I like noticing details that no one sees.” YES! GREAT GELATINOUS GLOB YES! That’s what living is all about. Finding joy and satisfaction can come with climbing the great mountains of skill or craft, but it also can come in completely mundane ways that are available to all people. It can come with keeping your eyes open and being able to marvel at the awe-inspiring fact that nothing is ever the same. No, every particle on our planet is ready to be discovered in any moment as something that is startling and new.

Amélie’s approach just hits me different than most other philosophies, because of its accessibility. You don’t have to ascend some great pyramid of skill and knowledge. You don’t have to buy anything. You don’t have to accept any gods or saviors. Nope, you can just be a somewhat furry animal that looks around and finds joy in what they see. That’s what my daughter intuitively understands on our nature walks, and I am so glad she reminded me of that. Somewhere along the way of growing up, I thought I had to earn that joy. Nope, you can just have joy from noticing and riding the current.

Sun Ra was so good at pointing this out. Sure, he was focused firmly on outer space, but I cannot help but read a subtle undercurrent in his songs. Take “Outer Space Incorporated” for instance. The refrain is calling us to abandon our boredom for different horizons:

“If you find earth boring

just the same old, same thing

come on sign up with Outer Spaceways incorporated.”

For Sun Ra, that horizon was space. For me, I want to sign up for finding my neighborhood and lands around me as infinitely interesting as people find space. However, given I am a druid who is rather immersed in practices a seasonal wheel of the year, this makes sense. We all set our sights on some horizon where we will find deliverance from the society that surrounds us and tries to force us into certain ways of being.

The other fun thing is just trying to bring joy into other people’s lives by making tiny little things and sharing them with others. In typical fashion, I have been keeping my grubby little paws busy in my shetland fiber and wool. I am participating, very loosely, in the Tour De Fleece, which is an online spin-a-long where people dedicate themselves to spinning everyday of the Tour de France Bike ride Around France. I have been practicing most days, working on a custom blended heathered grey yarn that I will use for a large griefscape related tapestry that I want to complete. I want to handspin all the yarn, so it will take the small work of many days to complete all the yarn. Since I am not too precise with my weaving, I will likely end up spinning way too much yarn and then will have a ton of extra. I could be more precise, but I am a bit too tired to care about such matters. I would rather just enjoy my little pile of heathered yarn just grow and grow until I feel it is time to start the tapestry.

I just love the idea of small, everyday work making bigger effects over time. The romanticism of that idea will never leave me. I will always just feel that notions pull since this whole project from its origins was always me just fiber arting and writing in my spare time away from my jobs. I have no formal training. It’s just me, my hands, and my mind trying to make sense of the reality that we are all trying to collective make and inhabit. I know I can count on the fact that if I am so lucky to be granted the time to complete that work and those other tapestries I am working on that I will get to leave a mark on the world in whatever small one my words and tapestries do. Well, that seems a good enough thing to have faith in during this time of collapsed dogmas.

This focus on the intimate details of life has extended into a new focus for my weavings. I am still weaving fiber spells imbued with all the power of my own spells and the power of plant kin I hold dear, but another foci has come to the fore as well. I have recently been trying to adopt an approach where I don’t just weave everyday, I weave the everyday. The first weaving in this series was me weaving the painted-over graffiti under a bridge that I saw on many bike rides. I have talked about it a lot here in these weekly essays, so I won’t belabor the explanation of the piece. I finished that weaving in the last two weeks and got to see the power of weaving the mundane and watching the reality it used to inhabit crumble away. Yes, I know that’s dramatic, but it’s true. I rode down to underpass a few days ago on a bike ride and saw that the graffiti artists had taken it back from the silly HOA-related censorship of beige paint. HUZZAH, Change is the only Rule! Viva the taggers who take the world as their canvas!

The next weaving will be of a portal to a secret garden in my neighborhood (See watercolor below for general design). I have finished the warping, commenced weaving, and started weaving some spirals into the work. I have avoided weaving many spirals in my work thus far, but that needs to change. Yes, they are complicated, but I found with this piece that I love weaving them even with the difficulty. There is something so satisfying about having a symbol which was in nearly all my moms crochet work in my work as well. But then again, when is my weaving ever not just an explicit interdimensional collaboration with my mom.

I had this to say about that connection of my craft with my mom on my instagram earlier this week:

“I feel like my mom woulda loved this weaving that documents an everyday moment: the painted over graffiti that I saw under a bridge on my bike rides. Before she passed away, her art was so embroiled in the everyday. She would crochet blankets to keep people warm. She would illustrate little children’s books for holidays and print them up to distribute to our classmates when my sister and I were kids. These moments when our art intersects are always special, because I started this weaving journey nearly 8 years ago to honor her unfinished work of wanting to learn to weave but didn’t get to because she passed away from colon cancer. She feels alive in these moments.”

Consequently, is it surprising to me that this next weaving in this series so explicitly tips a cap to her work? No, but that is the nature of death work. We are all just trying to keep our people alive in our own work, life, and being. Having lost my mom over a decade ago, I do not think there is a day that goes by in my life that is not a direct response to what she taught me. That is the power of parenting. That’s why I try to show up to it as fully as I possible can with Juju. I just hope I can live up to the excellent example she set as a parent.

Thank you for being here. I so appreciate you. Can I show you some cool things now?Ok, first, I love the internet for all the buddies I have made who make cool things. Tom, an illustrator and dyer who lives in Seattle, is one of those buddies. He runs Werewolf Raspberry, which is one of my favorite t-shirt and sticker projects running. It’s prolly WR and my buddy Glenn’s Be Your Own Drum Circle project that are my go-to’s, besides band shirts, for what I wear everyday. Aside from Tom’s illustrations, I love his dyeing. I think he makes some of the most intricate and subtle tie-dyes out there, so I sent him my new Dude Inn, a Japan-based Deadhead hub, long sleeve shirt to dye. I got the shirt back yesterday and it’s jaw-droppingly beautiful.

I think Tom hit it out of the park with matching the colors of the main design of the shirt to his dye palette. I already know I will be wearing this shirt to my next red rocks jam (drug) band show.

Secondly, I also got my Rivendell Bleriot built up by Treehouse Cyclery in town. This was my first craiglist/internet bike purchase, and it was a special one. With my Rivendell Atlantis have two broken chainstays and my crust lightning bolt fork being complete totaled in my bike crash, I was left with one bike: my Clem Smith Jr L—a step through mixte. I love my Clem-L but I needed one other bike that was lighter that I could ride on little spirited rides around my neighborhood. Enter the Rivendell Bleriot, 20 year old Rivendell model that they no longer make, which has 650B wheel size and a road-adjacent geometry. I worked with Jeremy, this bike’s sole owner, to purchase the bike and make it an almost exact carbon copy of Outer Shell Owner Kyle Xin Jim’s Bleriot, which was featured on the Radavist a while back. I am still working on making Jeremy my good bud. With any luck, I will have another buddy to talk to.

Riding this bike home Wednesday was a big deal for me. First, it was the first time I had worn my leather cycling shoes since I crashed on my lightning bolt. Unsurprisingly, putting on and tying those shoes was hard, because it immediately reminded me of being in the hospital and in a loop of an endless series of tests. It felt good to pedal past those memories and make new ones on my Bleriot. Second, I don’t think I have ever had that immediate of a sensation of perfect fit on a new-to-me bike. I did not have to adjust anything. I will chock most of that up to Kolby at Treehouse Cyclery who remembered my saddle height and where I like my handle bars oriented, even though he is SLAMMIN’ SAMMY SOSA’d with bike related repairs right meow. Finally, I am still sort of aesthetically blown away by this bike. Lugged steel and various silver and black Shimano components never go out of style. To set it over the top, Kolby shellac’d my Newbauws cotton bar tape into that dreamy maritime, mermaid blue/green that perfectly matches the blue of my frame. That ride home was a nice way to try and turn the page (Yes, that was a Bob Seger reference") on all the bad bike luck of the last 3 months toward a new chapter.

Finally, I got an essay published in San Francisco-based bike magazine, Calling in Sick. Go pick up a copy if you want to read one of my favorite bike magazines. I am so happy that I get to appear alongside all these folks that I respect and like so much.

Ok, that’s all for today, dear reader. Have a great day! Thank you for caring.

Best,

James