Guess Who is Coming to Town?

Gillams hosted its second annual Santa parade yesterday. I was told it was a good turn out in both floats and spectators - in Gillams terms that meant five floats and some miscellaneous Shriners buzzing around in their little vehicles wearing fezes.


No worries about separation of church and state here. This is one of Lucy's great friends as the Virgin Mary in the Gillams Recreation Committee float depicting a creche scene.


The requisite mummers. No decent Santa parade in Newfoundland would be held without them.


And the man himself! Finn and Lucy will be taking a hike with him tomorrow - he's a versatile guy, that Santa.

Seasonal

Although the forecast is for more unseasonably warm weather this week, we have had a bit of snow. It reminds me why I fell in love with this place











It was with some regret that I cut down a tree up behind our house, but Finn and Lucy were delighted. It took quite some time to find just the right one, but I think we found a good one. I guess it is some consolation that it was growing close to a skidoo trail and, sooner or later, someone would have decided it was growing into the trail and cut it down.



At least now it is giving joy and being well-tended.

Someone Call Mad Men

This is our local lumber yard and hardware store. It is locally owned, staffed by very knowledgeable people most of whom do not treat women like idiots (I said most, not all!), and they deliver. I love Stan Dawe.


But who are their marketing people? "A cut about the rest"? I don't think so. Wouldn't it be much better if it said:

"I Stand in Awe of Stan Dawe"

There also is a real estate agent in Corner Brook named Linda Freake but does she use the slogan, "Get Your Freake On"? No, she does not.

Sigh. So much work to do.

But look! Snow!




It is a balm for the wounds left by missed opportunity.

Top 5

Yesterday I was very surprised and happy to learn that The House Museum was listed as one of the top five cultural destinations in Newfoundland and Labrador by Angela Antle, host of the CBC Weekend Arts Magazine program, in the Newfoundland and Labrador Book of Everything.

Have to say that I have noticed a shift in the general reception for the project around town as well. From not tossing out the sign I had attached to our road sign when the town replaced it this summer (they very kindly and carefully reattached it to the new sign) to the Town Manager asking me, with a note of anticipation in her voice, "You didn't open the museum last summer...but you will this year, right?", well, it all gets me thinking.

Like Newfoundland itself, The House Museum project is ever-changing. The questions that want asking are different now than they were even five years ago. The project needs a new direction and I am trying to keep my eyes wide open so I can find it.

What are the other Top 5 destinations? Check them out!

King's Point Pottery and Craft Shop (Linda Yates and David Hayashida)
Norton's Cove (Janet Davis)
Paterson Woodworking (Mike Paterson)
Luben Boykov's foundry (sorry, couldn't find a link!)

Yes B'y, That's Some Good Prajna

Finn and Lucy are spending the day with a neighbor who is an amateur naturalist. He agreed to a regular gig of taking them on hikes and teaching them about local flora and fauna, of which he is an expert. They were not so happy to have their slacker, wander-out-of-bed-at-noon schedule interrupted but they managed to get out the door, bribed with pancakes and coffee. I am excited about it not just because now I have several hours of blissful silence (I smell drywall plastering in my future) but because their guide knows all the best trails and berry picking spots in the general area. I told them to ask a lot of questions and remember everything!

In the quietude, I have been reflecting on some of the goals I had when I began The House Museum project and we purchased this house back in 2002. In particular, I had this idea that I wanted to gain access to the local community - earn their trust and learn about their lives from a more intimate perspective than could be learned from a typical visit made by a tourist or "summer resident". From past projects, I knew this kind of relationship had to be earned and could not be taken for granted. And it was especially tenuous given the fact that I was inserting myself into this community uninvited - it wasn't as if the Gillams Town Council met and decided that what would best improve their town would be if an American artist came and set up a nosy parker museum exploring tourism and culture. Indeed, there have been moments when I have suspected the Council may have been meeting to figure out a way to get rid of me!

Yet I have hung on, sometimes achieving those moments of intimacy and insight and sometimes stumbling and putting my foot in it. Drawing people in and pissing people off. Naturally I prefer the former but the latter has to be part of it too.

I have been reflecting on all of this because, on Sunday, I was working with the community, not through art but through yoga - I am teaching a beginner class at the Summerside Community Hall on Sunday evenings. Nearly 30 showed up for the first class! Based on that success, there is a possibility of teaching two or possibly three more times/week in other towns. Suddenly, I am meeting all these people who felt so distant before, particularly women. Perhaps it is a kind of shyness that has kept many women from participating in THM projects, but I so often felt like there was an impenatrable barrier between me and them. Or perhaps it was because I had set up something that felt so foreign and intimidating that they were put off. Lord knows, I didn't make it any easier if they did come - more than once I heard people ask "where's the art?" when they came in the house. My response of "it's everywhere" never quite convinced anyone.**

"You see, it is conceptual, exploring the nature of the museum experience and the gift economy versus the commodification of...whoa, where'd they go??"

But yoga is a little more real - your breath, your body, this mat, this life.

It is very gratifying to be able to offer something that is being accepted and, in exchange, get to know people who otherwise felt beyond my reach. And who knows, maybe the two offerings - yoga and THM - will someday find a way to play off each other.

Namaste, m'dear.


**Just want to make clear that I do not believe that people here are somehow unable to get what I was up to with THM - plenty of people did get it and much of the confusion people felt originated with me. That said, for a lot of people for whom art isn't a regular topic of conversation, the project was like some kind of secret language that they didn't know. Nine times out of ten, if they were open to talking about it, they left feeling like they "got it" but that was a big leap and not everyone wanted to take it.

Blow, Wind, Blow

The wind is blowing a gale today. The house gets a pounding as the wind comes over the mountains, across the bay, up the hill and hits our little abode. No mercy from the wind.

While I listen to the roar, I have some pictures to share.


Look! Local wool! Yes, the rarest of beasts found at the Templeton Academy craft fair. The craft fair revealed a certain truth that, if everyone has access to only a limited supply of materials, it is hard to distinguish the final results. Table after table of nearly identical quilts, aprons, and table runners. Lovely and well-made, but clearly everyone shops at the same place for fabric. For me, one table beamed out of the fog of Christmas patterns and squashberry jam - skeins of wool stacked in a small pile along side socks and mitts made from said wool. Although the woman behind the table and I seemed to speaking different languages, I did get that it came from her own sheep. She was selling it at a painfully low price (as was everything - it drives me crazy! I saw a XL woman's Aran sweater with amazingly complex cable work on sale for $45! I wanted to shout at the woman who made it - You are bringing everyone down when you price like that. Have some respect for your own incredible talents. It is a message that is heard very reluctantly here.) Anyway, I bought up some yarn and felt happy to have made a connection to local wool. Long may it continue.



Look! Lucy is knitting socks! She turned the heel like a seasoned expert. She also is working on a cowl with cables that is just lovely (all are destined to be presents). Sniff, sniff, I am so proud of her...my little baby is kick-ass knitter.

And then we went into the woods and burned things.


We went over to our dearest of dear friends, Olive's house. They had a lot of brush left from gathering wood for the winter, so we made a bonfire.

Awesome!








Then we went back to her house for a little snack (a visit with Olive always, always, always includes food). Here is a photograph of her cat, L'il Puss. L'il Puss clearly enjoys her l'il snacks, so much so that we have taken to calling her Mega Puss. The picture does not even accurately depict L'il Puss's girth.

Before we could take on a phsyique similar to L'il Puss, we fled into the night, smokey but very happy.

Links I Like

Yesterday, Dan called me and asked, "Are you alright?" with a worried tone in his voice. He was a little concerned I might have fallen off the deep end after that last post.

Whaa? Can't a girl have a cussin' and fightin' kind of morning once in a while?

Anyway, to move on to more positive things...I have spotted some fantastic things around the interwebs; things that don't rely on fancy photographic tricks to make them beautiful either (god, will she ever give up??), and I thought I would share them.

First, two lovely treasuries on etsy, featuring, among other things, my recently spun skeins of yarn. Find them here and here. Click and enjoy.

Then, I discovered that a Finnish natural dyer that I admire greatly, Riihivilla, now sells kits of naturally dyed yarn and original patterns for mitts. Oh, how to choose just one? For what it is, I thought she priced them fairly reasonably, although I didn't look at shipping costs.

Oh yes, and click here for a glimpse into current Newfoundland politics. I knew Danny Wiliams had amazing hair, but I didn't know he was so short.

And possibly the funniest thing I have come across in a long, long while: Werner Herzog reading Madeline. Did you like that? Then go hear him read Mike Mulligan and His Stream Shovel. "Living in the dark with nothing but his guilt and Marianne's twisted and deformed remains..." How can you not love this?

On a more serious note, and perhaps most importantly of all, I am happy to share the new website for Dzong Mar Mountain Hermitage. It is being developed by an American-born Tibetan nun in New Mexico. She is still raising money for this project through donations and through sales of her beautiful yarn and hand-painted fleece on etsy. You can read a bit about the history of the project and the plans for its future there.

Finally, here is a link to Lucy's shop on cafepress.com - SodiaPopShop. She doesn't blog often, but she does have t-shirts!

This F*cking Moment

Several of the blogs I like to read now include a weekly feature called "This Moment", inspired by a weekly feature of the same name created by Amanda Soule, whose well-known blog, Soulemama, is a source of inspiration to many. "This Moment" is posted on Friday and it consists of one photograph that is chosen because it depicts and conveys an appreciation for what is happening right now - this moment. If you look at her blog, she definitely has a keen eye for visual composition and colour not to mention is a genius in her use of large aperture/short depth of field. Why is that so damn appealing? Jared Flood, over at Brooklyn Tweed, is a master of it too. I don't know why, but I eat it up like candy.



Even as I am totally seduced by Ms. Soulemama and her short depth of field photographs, there is something that makes me want to smash through her perfect, tireless life of crafting, child rearing, vintage fabrics, organic gardening and homemade jelly. She never, ever lets on that anyone ever screams bad names at each other in her household. No one ever makes an unpicturesque mess or makes a meal of potato chips and then feels sick. No one ever farts or walks around with something green between their teeth all day. It's like her shit don't stink, as someone I used to know liked to say.



I sometimes get a similar feeling when I spend too much time involved with Waldorf-based programs. We once took a handwork class at a very hoity-toity Waldorf shop on the Upper East Side that inevitably made me want to arrive carrying some stinky McDonald's Happy Meal, scratch myself in inappropriate places and talk about my deep love of refined sugar, plastic and video games. The fact that I would rather starve than eat a Happy Meal, I hate plastic and would never play a video game if you paid me only made it worse.



Because my shit do stink. Even as I also love crafting and child rearing, jelly making and organic gardening, we shout at each other and make ugly messes and occasionally eat crappy food and generally live lives that are beautiful and hideous, at the same time. This moment? This moment might break your heart for its poignant profundity, or it might make you curl your lip in disgust.

As I took these photographs yesterday, I thought about how I could make a perfect Soulemama blog post. Then I thought, bullshit!

So, I present to you my "This F*cking Moment" photograph, the first and last in a series. And just to be a total bee-atch about it (and give myself one more opportunity to include a curse word in this post), I am doing it on a Thursday.

So there!



But, you know, I do really love that photograph....

Living the Laundered Life

This what winter looks like for us. Laundry is a full body, full household event. Because of a dicey septic system that we are babying along for as long as possible, having an electric washing machine that drains into it isn't possible. Yet our clothes insist upon getting dirty time and time again. What to do?

My answer has been to purchase a Mennonite-made hand cranking washer, called the James Washer. If you click the link, you see it costs nearly as much as an electric washing machine, so it isn't a bargain. On the other hand, the thing is genius. Using very little water and detergent, it gets clothes cleaner than an electric washing machine and I get an upper body workout at the same time - 100 agitations/load. Or is it 200? Or do you count one full back and forth? Or is it one forward and two back? I can never remember, so I just agitate until it seems like it has been enough. Highly unscientific but since people are not swerving away from us in the grocery store, I assume we appear and smell clean enough.

In the summer months, the washer sits on our bridge (or front porch) and I agitate and look off to the bay and the mountains, enjoying the gentle breezes and sunlight. When laundry is done, I hang it on the clothes line to dry and soak up the delicious fragrance of the Bay of Islands while I drain the water directly to the ground below. (I use only bio-friendly laundry products). The grey water makes my garden grow.

But what of winter? Last time we spent winter here, I did laundry in the living room and drained the machine out a hose on the front yard. Needless to say, laundry day involved much wearing of ski pants and shaking out frozen hoses. I was not anxious to repeat that experience. The must be a better way I told myself. Then I told Dan.

Dan is clever like that and, lo, he came through with a rather brilliant idea. The washer now stands in our dining room/project room/yoga room/zendo/wool storage facility where a hole has been drilled in the floor to accommodate a hose. When I do laundry I pull the machine away from the wall, agitate however many times/load, then run down to the basement, throw the hose out the basement window, run back upstairs and let'er go. No ski pants, no frozen hoses. Just sweet, sweet gravity doing her thing.

Then slowly, ever so slowly, the clothes dry near the woodstove. Now, if Dan could come up with a clever solution for making the clothes dry just a little faster...

Darkness Visible

In the weeks before the solstice, full daylight gets increasingly rare.


4 p.m. Monday evening in Gillams.

Fire and Ice

Where do you place yourself? Are you pointed in the direction you want to go?

The current state of Lucy's Central Park Hoodie - the body is finished and I have started the first sleeve.

The shift between New York and Newfoundland is always coloured by whatever happens to be going on at the time. It is a big shift - between city and rural life, between two countries, which may be similar but really have many, many differences, and between communities of friends and neighbors. Usually I feel a giant sigh of relief when we dock in Port aux Basques - home at last. Although Newfoundland is my adopted home, there is something of it in my bones, real or imagined. My mother's family being from here gives me the feeling that I returning to something that makes sense on a DNA level.

And yet.

When blogless Janine learned that I had given away my Kundert spindle, she offered to go get me another one, Kundert being about 1/2 hr. from her house. How could I say no? The new one arrived on Friday last week and is as wonderful as the first one. Lovely, lovely, lovely!

And yet, this year the shift has been a little tough. I have a little knot in my stomach - a little longing for what I left behind. I don't think of leaving Dan behind, btw, because we do see him regularly and we talk nearly everyday at least once. So, what did I leave behind? I am missing my sangha and my routine of being at the Temple for zazen and for caretaking practice. I guess if I look closely it is a fear that I will somehow lose what I have...gained? Uh-oh, that word is a definite no-no in the Zen world. No wisdom and no gain - we say it everyday in the Heart Sutra.

So what part of my practice did I really leave behind?

This is how Janine packed the spindle - in some raw, Icelandic fleece. Isn't it beautiful? And it worked perfectly as packing peanuts. Plus I get to spin it later. Raw fleece: the gift that keeps on giving.

So, instead of a settled sense of relief, I have been unsettled. One moment is grand, the next feeling like I am scrambling for solid ground. I guess that is about right for where I am placed right now and the direction I pointed myself.

Fire and ice.

Thank you for indulging me in this bit of navel gazing.

Homeland Security

Now this is a feeling of security.

Our woodstove is our main source of heat and we have a small but efficient one that works beautifully. We had a fair amount of dry wood stored and ready but not enough to get us through the long, cold months of winter, so we have been loading in some new wood this week.


Wood pile maintenance - it is an art. It is an art I have been mastering these many years as I have shift this pile around the basement more times than my back cares to remember.


They say wood warms you three times: first when you cut it down, second when you stack it, and third when you burn it. I would venture to say that some of these logs, or junks as they are called locally, have warmed me about a dozen times. But look how beautiful they are. Precious, precious wood!

The last two times I moved the pile, it was so that we could have some work done in our basement. The basement was dug under our house after we bought it in 2002. The house was built without a foundation and, many decades later when we found it sitting empty, it was slowly but surely sinking into the ground and starting to rot. Given that state, and the state of the windows and the near total lack of insulation in the walls, I shudder to think what winters were like in this house in years past. Actually, having met and spoken with many people who spent winters in this house, I know what they were like. They were cold!

In any case, a basement was dug and a beauty it is. It sat, holding its potential like a pearl in an oyster for years. Finally, we had the money and the good luck to convince the best carpenter in Newfoundland to come out and frame out what will be a guest room and some clean storage space. He put up the drywall and installed flooring.


Now it's my turn to begin taping and plastering. Then a ceiling and doors will be installed and soon enough we will have a place for visitors to lay their heads.

Was that an invitation? I think it was.

Gratitude

A million years ago, I mean, two weeks ago, when I was embracing reality up at the Monastery, I came to the conclusion that I have an amazing life. Sure, I may not be able to conjure up ginormous chairs like Vimalakirti, but it is pretty damn amazing nonetheless.



Things may go up and down*, but here we are! Please don't forget this.

* Road sign photographed in Louisbourg, Nova Scotia.

Fire

Some quick pictures of the hat I made from my handspun leftovers.

Very Gaia, if you know what I mean.



But it hasn't been all Mother Earth and Woman of the Dawn. I managed to spin out this mega skein of two-ply merino.


Very pretty, no? It is nearly 800 yds, too. I just listed on etsy under the spirit name of Fireside.

There is something about Newfoundland that brings out the 1970s in me.

Home

After a week of not having internet service, I find I have little to say. Maybe that's a good thing.

We arrived just before winter, apparently. It has snowed, at least a little bit, everyday since we got here. And cold, yes, it has been cold.

The beautiful Blomidon Mountains from our front yard.

We immediately reviewed our wood fire skills and I had to quickly make myself a hat since I decided I wouldn't pack any on the assumption that I would have time before the real weather kicked in. Dan's response to this dilemma - physician heal thyself. Fortunately I had plenty of handspun scraps around and head gear was quickly created.

Here is one of the locals who was pleased to see us arrive.


And we, her.

So nice to be home.

Send Off

I stole this illustration from this interview with R. Crumb in the LA Times. I am not really a huge fan of his - too misogynist for me (and I know he does it intentionally and all that but still...). Yet, I think he pretty much captures what's happening for most people.

It feels about right for me this morning as I slowly recover from the trauma of reading three poems out loud in front of about 40 people last night as part of our fall ango art practice presentation. We are assigned a topic - this time it was about sickness and medicine and how all the world is sickness and medicine, taken largely from the Vimalakirti Sutra we studied. I won't bore you with too many details, but each person presented three items from their practice - some took up visual media, other musical, movement or words.

I force myself to get up and read whatever it is that I wrote because it is so utterly horrifying. I know for a fact that I was about 10 shades of red and my hands were shaking so much I could hardly read my words. On the plus side, perhaps another person in the audience who didn't present because of feeling too shy and fearful, saw my terror and thought, look if she is doing it, maybe I can too.

Yes, that's what I will tell myself as that cringing feeling slowly fades...

This isn't really what I planned write - it just came out. What I planned to write was that the next post will be sent from beautiful, cold, grey Newfoundland. See you then!

Last Chance!

As part of preparations for our trip northward, I will be packing up all the items in my etsy shop and sending them to Devon House, the Craft Council shop in St. John's. So, if there is something you had your eye on....now is your chance. If you buy something, mention this blog in your "Message to Seller" and I will refund you 20% of your total purchase. On Friday morning, I will be putting the shop on vacation mode and any and all orders will be mailed then.

Stayed tuned, however! I will be re-stocking with new items once we get the wood stove lit and get settled in. I seem to remember a substantial stash of fibre left in bins. I think I hear it calling.

Meanwhile, a couple of things have appeared, even at this late date.

The fabulous hat made with islandsweet wool (and a little bit of Malabrigo).


It was a delight to make - each stitch was like saying yum.



And this hefty skein of merino - I carded a hand painted roving that was just meh with some undyed merino (with help from the blogless Janine, who made a rare NYC appearance) and spun it thick and thin.



The result is quite lovely, I think. Much more subtle and less cloying than the original roving. Not to mention super soft.


If you are interested in either of these two items, let me know directly - I'll send you the details. I don't think I will list them on etsy, being all lazy, I mean, busy, like I am.

Some People Like Taking Their Time (Two Videos)

Two videos I recently stumbled across - very different but sharing a common sense of use of time to make something new.

Do you use time or does time use you?

Kim Rugg from Cool Hunting on Vimeo.

What is this thing called, Love?

Decisions were made, to misquote Ronald Reagan.

The workshop at WH was cancelled. I rescheduled our ferry reservations for an earlier date and we will be heading to Newfoundland very, very soon.

No problem, to quote Alf.

Instead I zipped up to Zen Mountain Monastery for an intensive retreat titled Embracing Reality, led by the two teachers there. It was run nearly like sesshin - early morning zazen and oryoki breakfast. With the exception of the workshop session, most of the day was spent in silence. This was a lovely surprise and one I deeply appreciated since I won't be spending time there until late spring, at the earliest.

After the activities of the weekend were over, one of the monastics pulled me aside and showed me a little bag she had been given containing a homemade spindle and some rather rough wool fleece. She saw the Spindle 7 video and remembered having this bag waiting for her attention - she wanted a spinning lesson. Naturally, she had to really convince me to drop everything and teach her because, if its one thing I hate, it is getting people to take up spinning. I know some people might suggest that my attitude towards sharing a love of spinning is closer to how a tobacco industry executive would feel if he were let loose in an elementary school classroom to discuss the merits of nicotine. But it isn't so. I let her finish her sentence and everything before agreeing.

We were a little frustrated by the equipment and the wool, which had become a bit felted during storage. Never one to jump the gun, I waited until this afternoon to send her a better spindle (my dear Kundert!) and some nice BFL fleece from Capistrano Fiber Arts. I mean, if you're gonna play, play.

Meanwhile, this other object was in the bag with the wool and spindle. This, she gave to me. What is it? Is it a spindle too? Do you know?







UPDATE: Finnian came up with answer! Somehow he knew that it was a Mexican chocolate whisk called a molinillo. But can you spin wool with it?

Mrs. Flux

That's what Dan called me yesterday.

It has been that way this fall. Plans all made to be broken. Going to Newfoundland in September? No. Maker Faire instead. Finnian applying to high school? No. The Dept. of Ed's bureaucratic mistakes that made it impossible (to the relief of all, I suspect). We will have another chance next year if Finnian wants it. Going to Newfoundland in late November? No. It appears that my dyeing/spinning workshop is not happening (enrollment was insufficient...as my wise friend said, people like free workshops). So, perhaps we will head north a little earlier than expected.

It is all ok. Staying on until now allowed me to participate fully in the Vimalakirti Sutra class, not to mention spend just about all my spare time at the Zen centre, soaking up the aliveness. Finn and Lucy got to participate in one of their favourite homeschool activities - a role playing adventure game in Central Park. We all got to attend the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.

No regrets. Please, just remind me of that when we are being dashed about by the 20 ft. waves in the Gulf of St. Lawrence....

In any case, today is the day Mrs. Flux makes all her decisions.