my trip Downeast

The desire had been building for this trip. At night when I closed my eyes, I would see favorite glimpses of the ocean I've come to treasure from many drives down (up???) the coast. Its been raining for weeks and we have all been shut inside our houses, mildewing and feeling cranky. I decided I had to go.
It didn't really matter that my car began to break down at Perry's House of Nuts- I was on my way to Deer Isle!
Accompanying my drive was Willy Claflin's sad old folk song about a Downeast Cafe closed for the season which sang in my head. Then I was there. The magic was waiting. I don't know what the magic is exactly. A certain energy powerful enough to choose it as the home for wonderful craft school . People find themselves unable to leave and move to what feel like the end of the world forever.
So I was blissfully pondering these things and hunting for baby mussel shells, talking to Postmistress of the Stonington post office about the dire straits of the economy, watching the tides and the fog and rain come and go and trying to take photos like John Marin's cubist watercolors of Stonington of nearly 100 years ago. Nothing important and all of it memorable. I am planning my next adventure.

being the Heirophant

This morning, as part of my journal-keeping practice, I made a list of the parts of my life which have provided me with greatest stability over time (I see I am talking like Hierophant already). The list was simple: work and my spiritual practice, specifically the Tarot.
That being said, I returned to the chaos that is my studio. I was looking for a painted table cloth which had been the beginning of a quilt which I wanted to return. I searched downstairs without success and decided to try the plastic bins in the guest room closet. In one I found 3 quilts all just begun sometime in the last 5 years and all very interesting. (completion is not my strong suit) I remembered only one of them. One in particular excited me because the color combinations were just so weird and the idea behind it was appealing. I have been given several falling-apart quilt tops from the 1930s and 1940s and this appeared to be a quilt in which I intended to preserve at least parts of these old quilts in an interesting way. I realized with great excitement I was being the Hierophant, preserving tradition, just as it seems to be my destiny to do. (I went to graduate school in the history of art) I remembered an article by Thalassa
in "Llewellyn's Tarot Reader" from 2007 ( I think) about being Tarot and this morning felt like the proverbial Helen Keller moment.

so what was it about "less is more," anyway?

Sometimes I do take a peek at myself in the mirror before I leave the house. This morning, for a second, I got a big surprise (see below) then I thought, "I guess I look like my quilts and people in town should be used to me by now."
Although I live in New England, austerity does not become me or maybe it would be better said that I really don't understand it. I seem to respond to Modernist aesthetic in the same way. Clean, pure, simple Zen-like white boxes really do sound like peaceful places to live and work and be contemplative, but what about pink and red and purple...together. Where would I put that decorative scarf? Detritus of daily life quickly forms itself into an altar or some other little collection. (Some people call this "clutter".) The first large quilt I made in response to moving to Maine is "A Mayan Child Moves to
Maine in November." This quilt suggests a landscape; the stones are there, the spindly trees without their leaves, the night sky in all its winter purity. If one looks closely at the different kinds of embellishment used for different
purposes, one can see a glimpse into my brain: "Oh, an empty space, fill it -quick."

beginnings of a love affair

23 April, 2009
thursday.
Long before I was a studio assistant at Haystack or an off season visitor to Round Pond, Maine, there were Robert McCloskey's books with their lyrical texts and wonderful illustrations. My love affair with Maine began at the figurative knee of Captain Kangeroo in the morning and the real elbow of my mother reading to me at night. I am not sure if it was the book, "One Morning in Maine" or, my favorite, "A Time
of Wonder" which cemented my romance and curiosity about this piece of the world off the beaten path.
Last year I encountered this enormous fallen tree on Monhegan Island with treasure accumulated among the roots. I remembered Sal had found a similar tree scouting about her island on her own. The contents of detrius tangled among the roots seemed like faery treasure.
It is these alluring moments that cause me to remain here, a Southerner bred to the bone and most assuredly a fish out of water.