Attention

In a recent post, Co-Creation with the Landbase Requires Deep Attention Hecate asked:

How deep is your attention to your landbase? How deep is your landbase's attention to you? Who's leading the dance?

I read her post and I thought, well, I've been known to pick up trash along the side of the road, down the street from me in that patch of woods; I've also climbed down into the local mill stream and uprooted a purple loosestrife or two, which is a horribly invasive species in these parts, and if left to its own would swath the entire little river in purple and crowd out every last one of the native plants. I've done that several times, actually; I don't know that I will ever eradicate it, but dammit I'm going to slow it down as much as I possibly can.

And I thought, well, that's something I guess. Not much, and not as much as I'd like to do, but something.

And then I realized:

Oh. This yard.

I have mentioned this before, but let me explain it again: my father was a compulsive hoarder. He was also a mechanic, and worked on old Volkswagens from a garage on the property. He was here, on this land, in this house, since 1960.

For forty-odd years he not only didn't throw much of anything away, he actively went out looking for junk and brought it home.

This yard was, and this is no exaggeration, a junkyard. In the 90s, when it was at its worst, there were, and I am not making this number up, seventy-eight junk cars on the property. An acre and a half sized piece of residential property.

Seriously, you won't believe it (unless you are unfortunate enough to be related to a hoarder yourself) unless you see it. So I'm going to direct you to a video my sister shot back in 1992 (I tried to post it here but got an error, so I have to send you there). It's a little shaky, be forewarned, but it's here, over at my other blog, Tetanus Burger.

We have been cleaning all that up.

We have been working on it for ten years now, the last five without my father, as he had a stroke in 2006 and has been in a nursing home since. And believe me, that fact has made it much easier. It was very difficult, if not impossible, to throw anything away with my father still here. This is how hoarders are, if you don't know.

Lately, beginning last spring, we've been making a real push to get it done. We are, as of last Friday, down to nineteen junk cars. Looking at the video, and the pictures my sister took from back then, I'd say we're about three quarters of the way through it all, if not further.

Now that blog, though I am of course still a Pagan while writing it, doesn't much mention that aspect of things. Mostly because I am leery of coming out to an audience that may not be so friendly; but also because it's not much to do with anything, really.

But here I can talk about my relationship with my landbase in spiritual terms. About this poor patch of abused ground, this land that I know has had oil, gas, parts cleaner, brake fluid, Godsknow what poisons spilled on it, that has been burdened with so much junk, so many piles of rotting lumber, an old rusted farm tractor, old oil tanks, lawnmowers, plastic tubs and refrigerator drawers of parts, bolts, nuts, screws—I wonder, completely seriously, if there were actually a million bolts and screws and nails here at one point—old doors, windows, salvaged boards with I'm quite sure lead paint on them, car seats, fenders, car doors, transmissions, engines sitting out in the rain, fifty-five gallon drums of broken glass, piles and piles and piles of tires, even an old giant rubber life raft; but above all iron, so much iron. We have, since we've been keeping track, removed thirteen tons of iron from this yard, and there was more before that that we don't have receipts for. We are planning on bringing some more to the scrapyard on Friday, in fact.

Raking up a section of newly-clean yard the other day over and over again we would rake away the leaves and find bits and pieces of junk, little car parts, bent rusty wire, just plain hunks of rust, and I know plenty more is buried in the dirt that has accumulated with the years. I have no idea how deep it goes down; forty years, I guess. I don't know that it will ever really be clean here.

I have not thought of all this, this huge undertaking, this burden I have inherited unwillingly, as a spiritual thing, as a way to make things right, to heal this land, well, not consciously, anyway. It has just been this horrible thing I have no choice about doing. I have not even, really, seen it as claiming space, claiming my own power, but both those things, healing and claiming power, are exactly what it is. In other words: it is a deep, deep magic that I am doing. It is Work, and a working, though I go into this with no conscious intent except to get it clean. I have not really even thought about what I want to do with this place when it is clean. Because I cannot even imagine it. It is just on the edge of overwhelming, though it hasn't claimed me yet, and so I have little space to do anything except simply act.

So I can't honestly say how much attention, never mind deep attention, I have been paying. I mean, it's true, I can tell you when the goldenrod will bloom in that patch behind the vegetable garden, around the disembodied front axle assembly from an old Citroen DS; and I can tell you that the locust and the catalpa are famously late to come into leaf, and since they are a good part of the trees in my yard it always looks bare when other places are out; and I can tell you, also, that I have three miraculous elm trees here, one quite large and thriving up by the road. I know that the snow crocus go absolutely nuts in the front yard come late winter and that there is always a family of chimney swifts in the huge old colonial chimney.

I guess that is attention after all.

I don't know what this patch of land thinks of me. I daren't even ask, yet; I need, I think, to unburden Her, this little piece of Earth, of Gaea, before I have the right to ask anything at all of Her, before I can enter into a real relationship, a free one. At least that is how it feels. That anything blooms or grows here at all is a miracle, is undeserved grace.

So I'm not sure at this point there is any dance. The priorities are different. I cannot dance with someone with a broken leg, can I? She must be healed, first.

Recipe

I am here, still thinking, still, well, Musing, on all this; it goes deep. In the meantime, here is a recipe I am limerently in love with. It's another stupidly simple one, inspired by a sale at the local supermarket of overstocked Italian stuff in jars, including sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil, which I had never had, and which have now made my life complete.

Zucchini with Sun-dried Tomatoes

What you do is open up the jar of tomatoes, then spoon off a teaspoon or two of the oil and put it in a good-sized frying pan on lowish medium to heat up.

Slice a zucchini up into rounds, probably a quarter to three-eighths inch thick (for those of you up in Canada, six to nine millimetres thick). Add them to the pan one layer deep (they should all fit if your zucchini isn't too big).

Pause for a moment and inhale the unbelievably gorgeous scent coming off the heated tomato-infused oil, but try not to swoon—your kitchen floor is very hard, perhaps even tile, and concussions are no fun.

You can drizzle a little more of the tomatoey oil over the top of the zucchini if you like. Flip them over somewhere in there; you'll want them browned a bit on both sides, even approaching caramelization. You kind of can't overcook these, unless they end up actually black and burnt. They ought to be quite soft all the way through.

Somewhere in there add a decent-sized spoonful of herbs. I like rosemary mortared and pestled to a powder (I'm not a fan of the little stick effect), but the more traditionally Italian tomato companions of oregano or basil would work too. Throw that in and mix a bit.

When they are getting towards done fish out about five of the tomatoes from the jar and slice them up finely. Add them to the zucchini for a bit to let it all warm up.

Then eat them, and see if you can prevent yourself from making another batch as soon as you've finished.

Tensions

Okay, I've hit a block. I am still quite motivated, mind you (and thank you), just that I've gotten to a place where I don't know what's next.

You see I've undertaken the rather large task of reworking and renewing my various web endeavours whilst integrating what exists with even more web endeavours. Wait, did I say 'large'? Because really I meant hugely ginormously gargantuan holy fuck what am I doing GIGANTIC.

Ha. This particular project has had me cross-eyed ever since I decided well gosh I really probably ought to do something of the sort, which dates about to CafePress's move to cut shopkeepers' commission in the marketplace back in what 2009 now? So yeah, a while ago.

Lately I've been diddling away at the edges of it, and, while I am certainly getting stuff done that needs to get done, it's come to me that I'm not, really, going to get too far on the details without understanding the whole. And that's where I just sit and blink, or, on bad days, when my head suddenly tilts to the side, smoke comes out my ear, and I hear myself say Norman—coordinate!

I mean I know in general, I guess. I know I want my gallery website to remain more or less the same as far as its function goes; I know I want the Obscure Goddess Online Directory to still do its thing; and I know I want my CafePress shop to continue (well, probably. I still don't trust the bastards there as far as I can throw them). And mostly I just want to add a couple other kinds of shops, from other companies, you know, the whole eggs in multiple baskets thing since they each have their strengths. Also probably it would be a good idea one of these days to offer a decent selection of proper prints, ya think? So I have all these ideas.

But I'm strangely stuck. I can't even seem to get a coherent outline in general terms down, never mind breaking it down into more detail. And thinking about it, I think there are some other issues here, bigger things than just the technical html/CSS/javascript sort of things. There are some fundamental tensions to this that I'm not sure how to resolve.

First is that this work of mine is primarily religious, and I have mixed feelings at best about selling it in the first place. Oh, I know, Paganism doesn't necessarily have all that celebration of poverty and focus on the spiritual at the expense of the material stuff; still, it's in the air around us just because of the general culture and I have to deal with it somehow. There is a seriousness to it that I must respect. And yes, I understand both that irreverence is in itself holy, and that further I am myself entitled to prosperity; also, that whatever the subject, I made the damned art and it is mine. Still I don't know how to come to terms with it; so far I've just been sort of studiously ignoring it, which can only last so long. In fact I'd say my time for ignoring it is definitely up.

Also, and this probably outs me as a cynical old misanthrope, but I don't do this to be of service. I'm not sure, actually, I believe in that at all. That people find my art useful and helpful is wonderful, and gives me great joy; however it is a side effect, not a conscious intention. I can only make my art for myself, ultimately. I simply don't have the personality to put 'service' on my to-do list. The world is an awful needy place, and I am only just learning how to attend to my own needs right now.

Which leads into the second tension: public versus private. My art has my name on it, my full name, which, though it is not my birth name and certainly sounds ridiculous enough to be some crackpot pseudonym, is really my real name now. That, right there, I have found, automatically mutes me to some extent. For example on Tetanus Burger, that (anti-)hoarding blog of mine, I only go by my first name; and though if you really poke around I imagine you could find your way back to here and my real name, still, I feel so much freer there, with the result I think, that I am more honest, open, and well, funnier. I mean of course there is a different focus there and I'm sure that helps, since a lot of it is just grousing and venting; still, it's different. Probably, also, I don't care so much; it's mostly just a bit of fun, if you can call Work like that fun, anyway. But this, my art, with my real name on it, I do care about. Very much so.

Part of it is that I am very introverted, and when I say very I mean for the past several years I have consistently pinned out at 98-100% introverted tendencies on any of the various Myers-Briggs tests out there (ISFP, too, by the way). So I'm uneasy being out as an artist in the first place. But add into it that my name is in some ways a brand, because that's how it works when you're an artist, and, well, that just squicks me right the fuck out.

So I don't know what to do, or how quite to get through or around this block about these things. Though I thought writing about it here would be a start. I am open to advice, accounts of similar experience, ideas, opinions, things I could focus on, that sort of thing; even a reading I could do or something along more Witchy lines, like perhaps, duh, a reading with the very cards/artwork I'm wondering about selling, hmmm.

Anyway thank you all.

Mandala for Late Winter

Looking through some photos I took last week of the first sign of the snowdrops, I was inspired to make this photo mandala:



I am always drawn to the eight or four sided ones for some reason. Grounding and stability, perhaps.

The outer ring of blue is last year's leaves, through which the buds are poking. We usually see them earlier, but last week was the first time the snow cover had melted enough. But once that was gone, things filled in fast. The snowdrops are out now, and the snow crocus are starting up.

Spring is coming, isn't it.

Here

Yes, I'm here, and hope everyone has survived the holidays just fine.

I don't know what I'm doing with this blog, or my art, or any of this. Perhaps I shall just make quilts for the rest of my life. Or perhaps I have simply been a bit chilly since the autumn and come spring I'll be obsessing about gardening, who knows. Seasons are what they are, after all, and we Pagans know it.

So I don't know what I'm doing here at Amused Grace. But what I do know is that this is the season for finding out, for visioning, for going into the dark places, for there is time enough dark on our hands, on our minds, to explore it in depth.

And I am doing work, or rather, Work; but much of it is internal, of course, and what is coming out, the Working in the real world (ha! define 'real'), is not particularly Pagan-related, though one could argue it all is, as it's about me, and I am Pagan.

I seem to be in an aniconic phase. The altar in my bedroom is dusty and unmaintained, I have not done anything special for a Sabbat in I don't know how long, it's been ages since I've done a spell, and I've never been interested in any kind of daily practice; but it's not as if I'm having some sort of spiritual crisis or major rethinking. I am Pagan to the marrow of my bones. I am simply keeping it close now for some reason. I feel gathered into myself, looking out at the world with a sharp eye, and though I'm reading plenty of blogs I somehow always stop myself from commenting or participating. I've never been much for community, it's true, as I favor the model of the Witch living alone on the margin of the wood rather than the college of priestesses one.

The holidays do sort of bring out the bah-humbug curmudgeon in me, I admit. These last few years especially the frantic lighting of lights and cheeriness seem forced, seem rooted in denial. This is the dark time of the year. Let it be dark, then, and quiet, and still.

I can't see with all the noise.

AEDM November 21-28

Wow, that, uh, wasn't meant to be a whole week's worth post, but oh well. I have been doing plenty of stuff, still. So here we go:

First I did another of the square quilts blocks, in the light green stripe. I only made one, as a test, and I'm not sure it's going to hold its own with the stronger colors of the other blocks. Here it is with one sherbet and one chocolate block:



But mostly what I worked on, quiltwise, was these totally addictive four by four squares:



I made a few more of these, but they had either too much contrast or not enough, so they got weeded out.

I also did this little mandala sort of doodle, which I found very weirdly difficult to do. I thought I'd just let the colors come to me but it was really awful. I don't think I'm over that block yet. Or, maybe, I just don't work that way? Whenever I do something like this, with no plan, it always comes out looking the same, just sort of random rainbowy colors and I always hate it. Hmmm.



And last, I spent most of the time working on these little Etruscan Sims ladies:



The dresses (and heads) still need a little tweaking, but they're pretty good so far.

Oh, and yeah, I made three freakin' pies and some banana bread Wednesday night, as well as a complete turkey dinner &c on Thursday. Whew!

AEDM November 19th & 20th

Yesterday on my various errands I acquired some more stripey cloth, which I washed and dried. Today I ironed it, cut the pieces out and assembled them, giving me another five of the consquaric blocks in ice cream and sherbet shades. I would have gotten six out of them, but I cut one single triangle off by a quarter inch, and it would not line up. Holy cow though it's tricky fussy cutting those out and keeping track of them, especially when the repeat of the stripes is just a little smaller than the height of the triangle you are cutting. ('Fussy cutting,' I should explain, is when you cut out a piece of cloth following the pattern on it.) Somewhere in there I just started whining, Fussy cutting is fussy, waaaah! but I soldiered on through.

I tried a single square out of a red yellow and black much smaller stripe; I'm not sure it's going to work (it's at the middle bottom, though you can't really make out the black of it). I think I want all the stripes to be kind of on the large side. Here's a picture of the new ones, posed with the ones I did a little while ago in chocolate shades:



The smaller one on the extreme left is the first one I tried, to see if I liked the idea in the first place. I intend to make some larger ones out of that cloth, which is a bright red and orange. I'm not so keen on the sherbet and ice cream color scheme, though it works well enough on that cloth, and I like the effect in the squares, and how each one is very different; I'm going to throw some bright reds and yellows in there so the finished quilt won't look so 'trendy' to me. (Don't get me going on that fad that just won't die of brown paired with aqua.)

I also got a chunk of striped cloth in shades of green, which should go nicely, though I didn't get as far as playing with it.

AEDM November 16th, 17th, & 18th

Catching up a little here; I've been making plenty of things but fell off track a little with the posting part. So here's what I've done in the last few days.

I made a single square (the one in the upper right) on this Trip Around The World quilt. It's meant to be a doll quilt, and the squares when done are two inches across. Yes, it's stupidly tiny. Yes, it takes forty-five minutes to hand-sew a single block. Yes, it's kind of wonky since it's teeny and hand-sewn. Yes, it needs to be ironed. And yes, I love how it's coming out so far. I am tempted to make it a full-sized quilt, except I don't expect to be alive for the required thousand years.



I also put together another row on the orange-yellow-and-black quilt, which means I have more than half of the nine-patches done:



I did a little block, just to see if I liked it. I had in mind some very colorful high-key exuberant quilts I had seen. I think the contrast is a little too pronounced in it, and that it would work better with a lighter blue, so hmmm.



I also cut out the remaining pieces and assembled this square, adapted from a mandala doodle I did. Maude is, alas, not impressed, to judge by her yawn.

Alchemy

This is the sort of thing I would usually talk about on my other blog, the one dealing with my father's hoarding and its aftermath. But of course one can't really separate one's life so neatly, and it is all related and intersecting. So I will make this observation here: what we are doing is in large part a spell.

I suppose I should give a bit of rough background. My father was a compulsive hoarder and a mechanic. Have you seen those TV shows? I haven't, actually, because I know I would find them triggering and enraging; but from what I have heard he may very likely be worse than the people on them. Because, no matter how bad they are, the very fact that they have agreed to be on those shows mean they recognize something is wrong with them. For my father? Not so much, no.

For forty years he filled this yard (and the garage, attic, breezeway, and two outbuildings) with junk like whole rusty cars, car parts, engines, tires, scrap metal, galvanized heater ducts, pipes, lumber, boards, milk crates of cedar shingles, cans and jars filled with nails and bolts and screws, refrigerator drawers, wooden drawers salvaged from old bureaus, broken furniture, and on and on and on. At one point there were seventy-eight cars on this acre and a half lot. I wonder, quite seriously, if we have actually had a million bolts, screws, and nails here. I am in no way kidding. How many nails fit in a gallon tin can? And how many of those have we found, and gotten rid of?

So, anyway. What my sibling and I have been doing in whatever time we can spare is to clean this up. (This is only possible, I should say, because my father is now in a nursing home and no longer lives here.) We have already taken a huge amount of stuff off the property. We have made (according to the receipts) twenty-six trips to the scrap yard to get rid of iron, so far (that number is probably a little low, actually, since I don't think we have all the receipts), and taken more than eleven tons.

Yes. Eleven tons. And it has barely made a dent, honestly. It doesn't look very much different.

So back to the Witchy aspect of all of this. Besides the obvious ways in which this clean-up is honoring the Earth (or really, just being decent to the Earth), and the ways in which it is making this bit of land more hospitable to faeries (what are faeries famous for hating? Iron) or the way in which it is more personally connected to my own growth and feeling of freedom, not to mention the whole working out of issues thing, it is also in some very real ways a magical process.

Because it is alchemy. We have been gathering up base metal, copper, brass, iron, and yes, literally lead, and transforming it into gold, or rather, cash. And that is a magical process.

And so I recently took some of that money and bought myself something which really seems quite appropriate, given the author's interest in alchemy and transformation. Can you guess what it is?

Here's the package which arrived today. It was quite large, and very heavy.



Yes. It's a book. Can you guess what color?



Why yes. Red.

O happy happy. I have only had time so far to page through the illuminated part and read most of the introduction (I had to put it down to help take several stacks of tires to the tire place), but I can already tell it is going to change the way I make art.

Good.

AEDM November 15th

I know y'all believe me; still, I like having pictures. I'm very visual, and if I can't see it I forget it exists (which is one reason I tend to live out of laundry baskets, because if I put my clothes away in the drawers that means OMG I have no clothes!)

So I got another two rows done on my Hallowe'en/Samhain/November yellow-orange-and-black quilt, bringing it up to seven of the fifteen rows of twelve, nearly half (as far as the nine patches are concerned). It's starting to take over my floor, hmmm. Given the layout of my studio room (which is an attic room), my project wall (a hunk of batting hung up that you can pin pieces to, then step back from, so you can get a look at it, and rearrange) is actually my floor and the rug, since with the tilty ceiling, built-in bookcases, doors, chairrails, the futon, &c there is no blank piece of real estate on the wall. Except this quilt is probably going to end up about the size of the entire rug. Hmmmm.

I rearranged it by color, so it would be easier to keep track of how I'd already combined the colors. I'm shooting for no repeats. Looks pretty good so far!

AEDM November 14th

And again with no pictures of what I did. Oh well. I cut out more (and more, and more) of the squares for my orange-yellow-black-and-grey quilt; I've finally gotten enough now to start up sewing together another batch. I've got sixty nine-patches done already, and I think the finished size is going to be twelve by fifteen squares, so I'll need one hundred eighty altogether. So that's one third down, with one hundred twenty to go. I still need to find probably about four yards of ash grey cotton for the plain squares in between.

I also sat down and listed a bunch of unfinished object projects, and then laid out the next series of steps to do for each, which is very helpful. Because I'd like to use November also to help me learn to finish things (I am notorious for the amount of UFOs I've got kicking around. How many quilts have I started now?)

Earlier today (well the 13th, I guess) I went scouting around for lumber on the property. I may have found a good hunk of something to use as the two inch thick piece for the top of the bookcase I designed last week. Except, looking at it, all I could think of was Gandalf's remark about Barliman Butterbur's mind: it was 'like a lumber room: things wanted, always buried.'

Hmmm.

AEDM November 13th

I did a couple little watercolors (and when I say little, I mean like one and a half by not quite three inches) to scan in for little Etruscan Sim wallpapers. Again, though, I don't have a scanner just now (the sibling was supposed to bring it over for me to borrow it today, but forgot), so I don't have anything to show.

I'm making stuff, honest!

AEDM November 11th & 12th

Yesterday I did some journal-type writing; I guess that counts as art, but again, I've got nothing to show (or nothing that I'm willing to show, anyway). Today I played around with little texture maps for Sims stuff (it's a hobby), in the hopes of making a little Etruscan woman (my goal is to make an entirely old Pagan Sim-world). It looks a little odd, since it's a texture map, and stretches to fit around the 3D mesh, which in this case, has two braids in the front, and several more hanging down the back. I had thought that given the shape it would work well with an Etruscan-style hat; but when I tested it in the game it turned out that whoever did the texture mapping had gotten the color for the braids from the top of the head, so they were showing up the same color as the hat. So I think that I'll have to ditch the hat, alas.

AEDM November 10th

Well it's another day where I don't have a whole lot to show. I decided that even if I didn't know what I was going to do with the grey parts of that Hallowe'enish quilt I started, that didn't mean I had to stop working on the orange and black nine patches. So I cut out a bunch of black squares. I didn't get as far as cutting more of the yellow and orange ones though, so I don't have anything to assemble together yet (since I used up all the ones I'd already cut).

I'm counting it, even though part of me things that's really pathetic. But then I have this habit of discounting what I do. The year before last (I think?) I also participated in the year-long (and rather more laid-back) version of Creative Every Day, also hosted by Leah. Part of that was keeping a creativity journal. I was really surprised to find what I counted and didn't count as being creative.

Because when I wrote down every little creative thing I did in a day, I had this huge list. Every day. Things like blog posts, cooking stew, sewing, knitting, twiddling about on the guitar, things I discounted as not Art, capital A.

And I'm realizing that not counting prep work, which is what cutting out fabric for a quilt is, is a way of disappearing the energy put into it, which is not good for the soul. Because you end up at the end of the day tired and thinking you did nothing. Which is not true at all.

So. It counts.

AEDM November 9th

Well it was another one of those days (well, okay, I'm talking about Monday the 8th here, properly) where the sibling and I spent several hours cleaning up junk and sorting stuff to go to the scrapyard. However, I did manage to squeeze a little bit of art in there.

Namely a little bit of dyeing. Last month I did a batch of yarn in black walnut; today I strained out some pokeberry dye, tied some of the black walnut yarn off tie-dye fashion, and plunked it into the pokeberry solution. This is real low-tech dyeing, I suppose I should mention; I'm just going to let it sit there for I don't know a week or two maybe and see what I get.

The black walnut dye, made from crushing and soaking the hulls, makes a really marvelous rich brown. If you dip it a few times in indigo you can actually get close to black, too. Pokeberries of course make a bright magenta, though the color isn't that fast. Though I have heard if you get the dyebath acidic enough, the color is permanent and won't yellow (which in this case means it goes to a dark red, or at least the batch I made last year has gone from purple to rich deep red. Not a bad color itself).

So we'll see how that goes. I didn't get any pictures, though it's not much to look at, honestly. Just a bunch of bright magenta stuff in a five-gallon bucket.