A Woven Meditation

This weaving that I made for an art piece that homie John Schmitz is putting together reminded me that I can still weave on the big loom. I hadn't touched this loom in a very long time. I know one might expect me to make some sort of statement to set an expectation to really focus on larger pieces now, but I don't want to do that. I honestly do not give two shits about how big I weave. That's a young man's game. Once I realized that the way that I wanted to weave (frame looms with manually opening shafts//drop spindles//sun dyeing yarn) wouldn't allow for any "margins," I had a hearty chortle and gave up making this practice into anything other than a community-focused practice to show gratitude and care for others. This may be the only time that I can thank Kat-ip-alism for anything. I appreciate your insistence on the dollars and cents knocking some sense into me, because I have been paid back so many more in the relationship with other makers and exploring the mysterious depths of what I can conjuring into being.

I am in this really cool spot where I am just letting the projects come organically. Long gone are the days where I would just be weaving whatever I wanted and dreaming about ways that I could be making things that served other people. Now, I am living in the reality I dreamt of wherein I was a community fiber wizard. Whether I am making protection weavings for people's homes, weaving memorial tapestries to keep the connective thread alive with a departed loved one (typically a sweet pet), or crafting more subtle symbolic weavings that mark important rites of passage (birth, death, rebirth), I get to make utilitarian, enchanted textiles that serve a purpose in people's life. Honestly, that's all I ever wanted out of this practice 10 years ago. I just wanted to make beautiful, meaningful things for people that would help them feel things and move through transitions.

Given that most of my spiritual work over the last 5 to 10 years has been death work with Sacred Death and fatherhood work with the Dagda, it's not surprising that most of my work has been memorial- and protection-related. The universe tends to set tasks in your lap for that which you know intimately and that which you set your course for. I suppose this sounds like a slightly dressed up version of the law of attraction, wherein the I am "manifesting" the opportunities that I want for my practice. I suppose this is slightly true in this case. However, in most of these instances, the projects I am taking on are offers I am making to dear friends or gifts of services that I provide because I want to honor the skills I have been given. Consequently, I do want to be completely honest that it's not like I have manifested myself out of wage labor. No, far from it. I have just taken the need to be paid commensurate with my skill in currency out of the equation. Instead, I just take on projects that are most intimately connected to the work I am already doing in my personal life. This affords me the luxury of controlling the rudder on the ship towards projects that fill me up, given that I sell my labor power doing sociology (my first vocational love) for a living.

One of my biggest growth areas has been in learning what protection means to me as a man and father. I certainly play acted as a protector when I was a young man and was told that I was the man of the house at 16 by my mom (who was a single mom). Honestly, that was all bravado though. Being a protector doesn't mean that you hone your muscles in the gym for the day when you can inflict pain on another for wronging you or your family. Such are the reductionist fantasies of protection from the emaciated form of masculinity that I was handed. No, it wasn't until I had been a husband for some time and had kids of my own that I understood protection to be much more oriented toward being that soft, steady hand that is there to bolster other folks as they come up against the storms that life throws them. Sure, when I think about embodying the Dagda, I think fondly on how he would do anything to protect his kids, up to and including harming others. In my life, the biggest threat to my kids is a distracted father who isn't present with them, who isn't that steadying hand. That was the thing that was most harmful to me. I didn't have a dad who was there to catch me when things went wrong. So, I start there with simple protection.

I do the same in my protection weavings. The magic placed in such weavings is not meant to be this burly, active aggression. I am not calling up demon hoards or angels of retribution enacting the ceremonial magic contained in 15th century Italian grimoires. I am not magic shaming here. If you into that, that's cool, hoss. Go off, Queens/Kings. No, I am too simple a man, the veritable castle groundskeeper, for those sorts of works. I stick with what I know. I work in the magic of the spider, the nettle, and the fence. My protection work is much more centered around obscuring, stinging, and erecting walls. However, that is only one side to protection magic, which has two facades//sides. This work is just as much about its second side, which wraps someone up in a blanket after they have done a hard days work in the cold and says, "don't worry, you're safe." That is the side of protection that I didn't know until I was a father and husband. What is lost in all the bravado of our thin masculinity is how the function of protection is not for retribution. Rather, it's really about giving someone the safe space to be at ease in what are perilous times to be alive. It's less about ensuring that nothing bad will ever happen and more about letting your people know that when something goes wrong you will be there to catch them and nurse them back to health.

You see, the greatest gift I got as a young man was to learn how to be a father from my mother. My mom modeled this extremely expansive form of masculinity that my father never offered me. She showed me how the masculine can be strong while caretaking. This is why I take to the Dagda who wielded a great club of life and death but also kept the cauldron topped off so that those who came for sustenance never left unsatisfied as a guide. He has the more robust form of masculinity that my mom modeled for me. RIP Shelly. Thanks for teaching me how to be a father beyond gender norms.

This is why I try to maintain the feeling of weaving as a home to rest. I often times will pick up my 16in x 12 in. Hokett Loom (RIP Jim - You the goat) in the quiet pockets of time after putting down my two kids. You may know that time if I describe it. It's that time period of charged calm where all the little creatures have been fed, washed, clothed, and tucked in to bed. All the energy has left the room and now the slower parts of our being can come out to help us loosen our shoulders and breathe a bit deeper. We may have a few household tasks to complete but they are quickly dispensed with and completed. It's in that space that I can turn on a record, settle into the couch with my little fur ball Winston, and just be with the yarn or hemp twine. I can just be with my mom who wanted to learn to do this work before she died. I can just be in the simple stillness of purpose aimed toward making something for an old or new friend. I often will pick up that smaller lap loom, because I just want and need to feel like I am at home in this rhythm. I don't need the pomp and circumstance of the large scale loom.

Yes, I know I risk being cliche saying that what is typically denigrated as a domestic craft is indeed a domestic craft. It is for me though. I am not trying to be a fine artist. I.do.not.care. I am not trying to write tomes that will be bought in lifestyle stores in the next century. If the "art world" went away tomorrow, it wouldn't impact me in the slightest. I would still tuck myself into my couch after putting my kids to bed and work on a textile that my friend wanted or I offered to make for someone. I don't yearn to be shown in galleries. No, I yearn for having an enchanted tactile purpose to drive my explorations of fiber and magic forward. I yearn for a place to come back to each night where: my attention is not being manipulated by algoriddims, I don't have to think about who I could be (skinnier, faster, smarter, more worthy, etc.), and I am not focused on analyzing anything. Instead, I am weaving little webs with the hope of being more embedded in the community around me.

Community: that's the secret to what fills me up. Again, I am wrapping this text in tremendous layers of cliche, but it doesn't make it any less true. Being able to be in community with other makers by being a maker myself, fills me up more than any form of passive consumption that I have ever done. Learning about books, records, techniques, art, or ideas from other folk deep in the trenches of making things and sharing a form of kinship that we are in this together is what makes this life so so sweet. Aside from being a husband and father, being an artist is what lights me up. It will never get old conjuring up something from deep inside myself and bringing it forth for someone else to see, touch, or smell.

That's why I was so school when John asked me to make a miniature version of this weaving above that now is hanging in my baby/toddler son's room. You mean I get to make something for a buddy and he thinks of my work highly enough to put it into an art piece he is making? Sign me up! It was like John was inviting me to cosplay as an artist who does traditional art things with big looms. He requested a 10in x 6in version of this weaving. In order to weave up 10 inches without a bunch of finishing headaches, I would have to use my larger 2 ft x 2 ft loom. Regardless of how much I identify with my smaller looms, I did enjoy getting the larger loom out. It felt like a throw back to my time before kids when I was routinely working on larger pieces.

My favorite little elaboration of technique I worked on in this piece was how I added in the flourishes of color into the two hemp waves. In the last few pieces I have discussed in these newsletters, I talked about embroidering color flourishes into the textiles. I changed it up with this weaving and skipped the embroidery. Instead, I sumac stitched the embroidery thread into the weft right between rows of hemp. The only sort of manipulation I had to do with this technique was use multiple strands of embroidery floss to mirror the thickness of the 6-ply hemp twine. Without tripling up on the embroidery floss, the thicker hemp twine would have drowned out the hemp and rendered the pops of color indecipherable. The downside to this approach is that it meant that building up each of these hemp waves was rather decision and time intensive with changing between colors and materials constantly. As I am want to do, this resulted in some feelings of overwhelm before each of the sessions where I was working on the tidal waves. This approach did pay dividends in the end though. Once the work was done on each wave, I did not need to thread embroidery floss threw a small needle eyelet, add quilter's knots, and stitch my design.

One of my favorite additions to the piece was the ombre-dyed embroidery floss that I found at the antique mall by my house. Finding the floss before dinner with my family one Saturday had me giggling, because I had gotten back from a bike quest to get a couple new colors embroidery floss from my local yarn store. Here I was in my favorite booth in this antique mall, and she had 5 or 6 packs of embroidery floss grab bags. In my defense, none of the bags had the exact colors I had purchased on the quest, so all was not lost. The bag I did purchased had this sand, white, and rusts brown ombre dyed floss that I knew would be perfect for John's work which focuses on interventions in tidal environments. FLOCK, John's work is sick. I need you to go check it out ok? (John's website) I felt like it was a wonderful serendipitous moment that any fiber wizard would be a fool to ignore, so I purchased it. You can see that found floss (when did you ever thing you would see that phrase uttered?) adding a flourish of movement and detail to the top of the bottom, thicker part of the wave.

As per usual, the yarn is all my own handspun shetland from fiber secured from the Dyers Wool shetland flock down in the four corners region. I cannot wait to see what John does with it.

As per usual, I ran out of time to write about the second weaving that I finished recently, so we will have to discuss it next week. What's new right? hehe. I mean, it is good to just bite off little chunks to chew when you are chipping away at bigger projects whose contours will only be revealed over the accumulation of months and years and not in any one essay. That's my hope anyways. I launched these weekly essays as a way to see if I had a books worth of things to say. I think I have shown myself that I do. However, when I went to go write that book in the last few months, I became overwhelmed by how many threads I had unearthed in these essays. I am a very chatty dude I guess with a lot of interests.

The biggest priority outside of keeping you all updated on the goings on of the community fiber wizard is to finally make a zine. I have a lot of photos and a great head start in the essays I have published in the last 3 months for what I can write top for that zine to accompany my photos. I have talked with some local buds that will help me. We will not be diverted from the model already laid out here. I will just make them to be able to hand out while on quest and to trade with other zinesters. As always, I make art to be more embedded in communities I want to be a part of and to learn about who I am as a human by making things.

I hope you all are well in your neck of the woods!

Best,

James