visible repair

January 8th, 2020 § 0 comments § permalink

“Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.”

Leonard Cohen

Two posts ago, I had just left the boat and had just arrived home. Home was Pittsburgh, New York and Georgia, which is to say that arriving home was no simple feat, and is still, in a way, happening.

In an attempt to think things through and hear some type of inner voice (and also, quite frankly, to absorb a portion of the sudden homelessness I was experiencing), I did a work-stay at a retreat center in upstate NY. The first snow of the winter came the day after I arrived, and I spent my time there shoveling snow as an “active meditation”. Between shoveling shifts, us workers could attend the meditation and mealtime activities, and co-mingle with the visitors, staff and full-time devotees. I was an interloper, just blending in, and I sat my cafeteria tray down in the rustic dining hall to a new group of stranger-comrades every day.

If there is one thing I can do, it is strike up a conversation with a stranger. It’s really just as easy as asking a question and then letting the other person answer for awhile. One evening I asked a dinner companion about his jacket – it was a heavily embroidered denim coat, tidy but also heavily worked, practically rendered. My hands drifted to my knees, feeling the satin patches on my jeans, stitched and re-stiched over the years with golden thread.

He appreciated my noticing the coat – “It’s visible repair!”, we said in unison. I showed him my jeans.

Visible repair is what you do when you are too stingy or nostalgic to let your belongings die of natural causes. On the boat, we were both. In Japan, sashiko embroidery in the style of high-contrast “little stabs” is used for boro, the patching up of tattered but valued material. On the Indian subcontinent, saris are recycled into blankets and cushions through kantha. Closer to home, industrious folx convert favorite scraps into quilts. His jacket was a calico denim blazer, in the sashiko-boro style. I remember the texture, as I ran my hand down the sleeve.

Your favorite soup bowl, accidentally dropped, may be repaired with gold powder, the walls around you with mosaic, colorful plastic blocks, or a lovely hunk of nature within reach. Accidents and erosion become the opportunity for artful care-taking.

So much of me right now is under repair. Sometimes I don’t know if there is enough textile for the stitches to bite. How much of me is me vs. the repair? Will I come out rough or smooth? In the groggy meanwhile I float above the operating table, hoping for this extended surgical procedure to take. If there is any lesson from my time under fiberglass, it is that everything is fixable.

concept to thing

June 3rd, 2016 § 2 comments § permalink

Sea life is a challenge for me for many reasons but mostly because I go down the rabbit hole on details, which is oftentimes a “barrier to implementation”, to put it mildly.

I spent an absurdly long time cutting and stacking rags today:

image

I made a zoning code for boat storage:

image

Then there was the chore wheel of course:

image

And the cat recovery campaign:

image

And whatever was happening here:

image

But yet I still find it an insurmountable task, for some reason, to hang up our curtains. Four curtains. Pulling the trigger on installing any tangible thing brings a new species of anxiety and self doubt. Over curtains.

It is my home but it still feels like a monster. A monster that just spits out lists of jobs I am not particularly good at. Nothing in my current comfort zone will slay this guy. I have to start drilling holes in things and hope for the best.

blurg

January 13th, 2016 § 4 comments § permalink

I’m just going to leave this right here:

trump

The Exorcist (Google Image Search on Photoshop)

Over the holidays, my parents brought down my Grandpap’s massive SW radio that we have had in storage since his death in 2002. It has been really great to tinker with and also to be “visited” by my most tinkery ancestor. Even if it is a spooky thought, I often hope my Grandpap is looking on as we stumble through (especially the technical aspects) of the boat rebuild. He was an organized dude.

I tell you that to tell you this. I have set the SW to turn on at 6:30am, with soft public radio sounds to ease us into the day. This morning, we awoke to an interview about the recent federal ban on microbeads in bath products, and the larger problems related to plastic plankton. It is rare, but sometimes media places information in my way that I am actually interested in.

The Trump Show has been the dominant feature for me online and in the news…he sticks in my brain-baleen, he gums up the works, fouls the nets. Like so many jelly blobs before him, humanity is faced with the challenge of responding to a nuisance bloom.

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