Be softer. Be rounder.

Attend to the voice inside me that opens towards curiosity and exploration.

Don't listen to the dark voices that say that I am too old, or an imposter.    (Zak Foster's newsletter)

My design wall in Mexico xo

 

4:00 am

I thought about what Ned advised me.  Only do what I want to do.  So, I’m in my studio.  I’ve got the phone timer on for one hour and I’m going to figure out more for the blue circle piece.  It’s got a lot left to do, and it’s what I WANT to do.  

Not paperwork.  Not re-sizing and gathering images.  

Hold your mind empty and tranquil

 In 1979, Agnes Martin painted The Islands, a set of 12 paintings, very very pale.  Each of them 6 feet square. 

the beauty of the green earth

 In my window, with the sugar plum tree and the snow on the deck so high, I can hardly see it.  Tomorrow we go to Toronto for the opening and a lot of other things.  Today, I need to get ready.  But first, I’m putting at least an hour into my circular tree everlasting, the beauty of the green earth.  

Cape of Rain

The Margaret Atwood references for this title are actually two poems.  One of them is about survival. The other one has the line: I pull about me running, a cape of rain.  In my mind, I put them together. 

During that time

So much love that all that can be done with the overflow is to create.  It is not a matter of wanting to.  Not as an act of will, one solely must.  

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Poem Blanket

When women take embroidery and other textile arts beyond their accustomed uses; out of private, out of domestic, out of the female sphere, and make them large (like Sheila Hicks) unruly (like Louise Bourgeois) or ambitious (like the Bayeux Tapestry) it is a performative act.  

It performs gender.  It demands acknowledgment on a scale that tiny textiles do not.  

Janet Berlo