Slow Down

This week’s essay is free for the community. The essay should be pay-walled, but what I have to say is too important to me to not offer it for free. So soak in me offering humble truths about why I crashed, how weaving will help heal me, and how I aim to walk myself home after my crash. Regardless, I would love for you to become a free or paid subscriber. All free and paid subscribers are what make this whole project spin round. Paid subscriptions go to paying for web hosting, silly stickers, and materials for my weaving. Both Free and Paid subscribers are literally a jolt in the arm that makes me believe that my writing matters. Every other week, a free essay is available. If you want to read all my essays, a paid subscription gets you access to all the essays published as part of this projects. Thanks for caring enough to read and support. Your attention means the world to me.

In my monthly personalized reading with Hannah Haddadi of Mourning Light Divination this week, this message was clear. “Slow down,” Hannah told me. “Make room for the death you are going through and be sure to keep your protection up.” Upon reflecting, I can see how my busy-ness contributed to my great fall — what I am calling my crash a few weeks ago on my bike. I was trying so hard to fit in with people who ride their bikes long and hard that I was sacrificing a lot of me time. Yeah, most of my me time over the last few months had been spent on a bike. I truly do need to slow down.

Busying myself with body movement is a throw back to the old days for me. I used to spend a majority of my time playing tennis. There was at least 15 years when I used to play tennis 5 to 6 hours a day while training for tournaments or college tennis. However, with me letting go of tennis after a rash of injuries a few years ago, I am surprised I found myself back in that rhythm. I thought those days were long gone, replaced by writing, reflecting, exploring, and weaving.

I should know better than to ever underestimate our human yearning to belong, however. Social media is a great place for talking about a myriad of random niche topics with other weirdos like myself. I have made great friends there. However, its also a gigantic comparison machine. I have to be honest that I saw people riding their bikes long and hard in exciting places, and I was like: “I want to be like those people.” What those folks were doing was randonneuring, long unsupported bike rides. In my attempt to be like those folks, I also rode long and hard, giving up huge chucks of my free time to try and fit into their ultra-endurance bike club on the internet. However, I had no understanding of how to ride long distances safely, other than my experience being an athlete in other sports. Consequently, my body gave out on me on a ride that would have been my longest ride ever: 85 miles. I fainted and crashed trying to belong. I could get down about falling prey to this age-old human problem, but I am one of ja-gillions who have found some harm while trying to belong with others. I will cut my losses and go back to riding with folx who want me around, not riding to try to get people to like me.

In my most recent doctor’s appointment, my doctor told me that I could ride a bike gently and slowly in a place where people could see me. At first, I thought she meant going to a gym to ride a bike. I told her, “I do no have a gym membership. Can I go to the park?” She replied, “Yes, I just don’t want you riding on some trail all by yourself.” I felt like a toddler in the best way in that I needed my community to keep eyes on me while riding. However, in true gentle fashion, I haven’t even gotten on my Clem-L—my last bike standing after all the crashes lmao—yet. Instead, I have just run a few errands and ridden to appointments on the family cargo bike. I still don’t feel 100% up to ride a bunch even gently.

Instead, I have just been lazin’ around the house and weaving. There have been two projects that I have been working on. First, I finished up the back stitching and buying the dowel rod for Luigi’s memorial cloth. Juniper tried to hi-jack the whole dowel rod for her self at the hardware store. There was a negotiation and Juniper let me use a part of the dowel rod for Luigi’s cloth as long as I gave her the 70% of the remaining dowel rod that would be left over. Now, I have Luigi’s piece all finished and I just have to do the final death work blessing on the piece. In true gentle/slow fashion, I did not want to force the blessing if I was in a tough physical, emotional, and mental place with my accident. So, we will see when I feel up to that.

The largest challenge of going slow and gentle is the obvious difficulty of having to sit with the dramatic uncertainty of my health right now. I wish I could just write up the typical glorification of the slow and gentle that is common for folx of our community. However, when I am getting MRIs, ultrasounds, heart stress tests to rule out serious issues that could have caused me to faint and crash, slow and gentle is its own form of torture. My therapist reminded me to sit with, label, and identify the fear I feel with all the uncertainty in regards to my health right now. That is its own form of torture as I am very afraid that there will be something very significant that they will find that will threaten my health. I have no evidence to suggest that is the case yet, but I will not be able to close that door completely until all my tests are done. So, I am back to weaving with death, pain, and fear.

I started a new weaving project to work through some of that pain and fear. I am not going straight on by depicting my fear in this weaving. I don’t need that sort of obvious, head-on approach, because I will already be doing sexercises that invite me into that space of feeling with my fear of the uncertainty. I just want to carve out the space for myself to be working on and with those feelings in the background while I am doing a handcraft. This was my tried and true way of weaving my way through the grief tied to my mom’s death. I learned through the process of weaving through the period of my mom’s illness and death that every weaving is about life, death, and everything in between, even if the subject matter isn’t explicitly touching on those issues. If you let it, the weaving can put you back together after some of the worst tragedies. I just want to carve out the space for the weaving to do it’s work.

In my new piece I started, I will be weaving up some painted over graffiti from an underpass near my house. I have grown extremely fond of these painted over beige-on-beige segments of my lifescape due to the work of my buddy Cliff, who is an artist, designer, dj, and local art teacher that also maintains the beige-on-beige instagram account that chronicles these “post graffiti movement” moments of happenstance and beauty that emerge when graffiti is painted over. Cliff is one of my internet buddies that has opened up entire new worlds of vision to me through his work and life practice. I doubt I would be as obsessed as I am with tracking down these everyday vistas of decay, censorship, and minimalism that surround us in the urban US if it wasn’t for Cliff. I know I wouldn’t have been so encouraged to looking for everyday vistas if it wasn’t for his emphasis on documenting those moments. So let’s gas up Cliff for his amazing art and practice. Thank you for being you, buddy,

I told you I was serious the other day about gassing up my friends. It’s literally my favorite thing to do. Go do it. It will literally make your day to gas up your buddy and tell them how much their art means to you. Normalize making your friends art your greatest inspiration. That’s way better than being inspired by famous people, like Johnny greenwood of Radiohead, who recently performed in Israel and tried to explain away how problematic that performance was during the genocide in Palestine. Your friends will always be better muses than “famous people,” because the processes whereby people gain notoriety in capitalism will always make their work somewhat questionable. OK RANT OVER!

I will be using my beloved Shetland yarn for the weaving, but not my own handspun and hand-dyed yarn. Yes, in the true spirit of going easy, I will be using Jamieson & Smith Shetland, direct from the Shetland Islands. I am doing this because I want to be able to capture the grey, blue, and terracotta of the paint used to cover up the graffiti without having to teach myself how to acid dye first or try to learn how to concoct those colors with my own natural dye stuffs that I have available. Maybe if I wasn’t having to face down the fear of my own mortality as a typical early afternoon mental health exercise everyday lately I would feel more spritely and up to that challenge. But, I do not have that luxury, so I am glad to support a Shetland Islands busy that buys a significant majority of the Shetland yarn clip every year on the Islands. When I am weaving up their 2 ply jumper weight yarn, it feels just as ancestral and magical to me as a person of Scottish descent as when I am handspinning my own Shetland yarn from fiber derived from flocks near me.

I still remember distinctly the simple joy of the day that I bought all the yarns at Fancy Tiger Co-Op. That day, I rode my bike over to Fancy Tiger’s old Broadway location and perused all the colors that they had available in the 2 ply jumper weight. As a weaver in an ocean of knitters, I have learned to be able to enjoy all the acid-dyed color variety that is made available to me because of all the beautiful knitting patterns that exist in the world. This day was no different. I was able to look at my photo of the graffiti cover up and color match almost exactly the various colors in my picture to the yarn on the shelves. That feeling of going into a yarn store and having your little craft dreams waiting for you on the shelves is unparalleled. The only feeling that is similar is randomly finding one of your desert island records (a record you would take with you to a desert island) in a physical format, like vinyl, that you did not have. Ughm glob bless all the record, book, and craft stores that make cities feel inhabited and full. You all are the real saints among reems of sinners trying to extract things from folx in metropoles.

I am working on the lower border of the piece thus far. Because I am using the jumper weight 2-ply that is typically used for knitting, I am weaving up this bottom white boundary by double weaving two strands of the Shetland yarn at a time. This allows me to cheat a bit and build up the solid white boundary a little quicker than if I was just weaving one strand of 2ply Shetland at a time. Given my slow and gentle approach, I decided it was ok to take the shortcut, because I already am slow enough while handweaving on a frame loom. I open each shed manually using a shed stick that was made by hand by Jim Hockett in Northern New Mexico, who ran Hokket Would Work before he passed away last year. As you can already tell, I run romantic and nostalgic, so I am a very slow handcrafter already. I indulged myself here with this decision and allowed myself the little luxury of double weaving due to my proclivity of getting lost in the details of the weave and the people who have touched my work with the tools or art they have made.

It won’t be long before I am painting with the shetland dyed yarn. I have about a half inch left of the border to complete and then I will be laying in all the grey, taupe, blue, and terracotta to recreate the post graffiti moment that I captured via photo above. Ironically, these moments I capture in a photo sometimes don’t last long as someone tags over the attempt to paint over the original tag. Consequently, I feel like an archivist for a rather pedestrian moment that no one noticed and was quickly usurped. There is something rather wonderful in that approach though. It feels like I am making art that is intricately bound up with the processes that make up the everyday. I can think of no more important a thing to be bound up with than getting lost in the world that makes up your everyday life.

This essay was written listening to this excellent Steve Roach Record above “Reflections in Repose.” I bought tickets to see Steve Roach perform at a local church in Denver in October to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Structures From Silence. The last I saw him perform live was in September 2019 before the world turned upside down and changed forever. It feels surreal to even remember that trip that I saw Steve perform on, which changed me forever. I wrote a whole article about how I am still walking Barefoot out of a New Mexico Canyon from that trip because so many things crystallized there. I am sure many of you who have been around me long enough know how important Steve’s work is to my path. He was an artist that my mom and I shared deeply. Echoing the sentiment of (I think) Oneothix Point Never, I have Structures From Silence encoding in my DNA now. It’s almost comical to me to even try to express his meaning to my work in this essay, because his music is where I first was able to be aware of slowness and silence.

I suppose we all come full circle don’t we. It certainly feels like this whole essay was an exercise of walking myself home back to myself on a random, average Saturday afternoon. Yes, I will just listen to Steve Roach, reflect on how my body shut down from trying to prove myself with a super human feat of cycling, and resolve to just love myself a little bit more. It turns out that we sometimes can play out old dramas that we have lived through if we aren’t careful. My crash was precipitated by part of me still being that lonely kid that as a pre-teen tried to prove to my dad that I was worth his attention by exceling at tennis. Aren’t we all just comprised of all those deep embedded experiences that we have lived through? With wisdom comes the ability to put an end to those dramas and leave them in the past. With my most recent trip through that drama of seeking acceptance through athletic achievement and finding physical harm by crashing, I hope to leave that drama in the past forever. May I ride my bike in a way that nourishes my curiosity and connection to others. May I let go of moving my body in excessively rigorous ways that are dangerous to myself and only seek surface connection others. I wish this all for myself with harm to no other.

Thanks for being here and reading this far friend. Wow, what a journey we are all on here. I hope you and your kin are safe and nourished. I hope you can find a moment for slowness today.

Until Next week,

James