with a little help from my friends… and “Yǝhaw”

All styles of art work —including Chai Adera’s video “Earth Prayer” — are on display in “yəhaw̓,” the inaugural exhibition at ARTS at King Street Station. The exhibition features work by more than 200 indigenous artists. (Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times)

Hi readers,

I don’t know about you, but my spirits have been feeling kind of low lately. Now that my career-imposed blinkers are off, life feels much more raw and open-ended. Identity exists more as a fluid sense of being, waxing and waning every moment with ups and downs that arise from who knows what or where. One thing is certain: I have no one to blame–no lazy students or blowhard colleagues, no more useless committee meetings–for my doldrums. I have to own the blahs and dig myself out.

Yet something seems to have shifted for the better and the low energy cloud is lifting.  In the hopes it may help you, here is what happened.

It began in the morning, when I read an article by Brendan Kiley in The Seattle Times about the first exhibition taking place at ARTS, a new space on the second floor of the King Street train station downtown. Called “Yǝhaw,” this art show features work from indigenous artists working in the Pacific Northwest. That itself is cause for cheer, but it was the story behind the name that caused my personal turnaround…

As curator Asia Tail explains, “’Yǝhaw’ is a Lushootseed word pronounced ‘yee-howt’, but with the ‘t’ stopped, as if you were about to say it but ended when your tongue touched your teeth. It roughly means ‘do the work’ and comes from a story about some far-off past when the Creator brought lots of people together with no common language. At the time, the sky was too low and people kept bumping their heads against it. So they came up with one word they all understood: ‘yǝhaw’–‘do the work’. The people made poles for themselves. Then, in unison, they said, ‘yǝhaw!’ and lifted the sky.”

The message is: “There’s no hero in that story, no one single person. Everybody knew they needed to change the world together, and made something happen.”

Maybe that is what got under my skin. Because later in the day, I suddenly realized the way out of my blah mood: let my friends know it exists and let them help!  Emboldened by the New York Times article by Mike Isaac, about how “personal newsletters” are returning to vogue, I wrote a message to friends all over the world, and told them I’ve been missing them. I detailed some new items for sale from my little business, Honey Girl Books and Gifts, and some stuff I’ve been doing in town here, but it was mainly a personal message to remind them that they are important to me and I miss them. Vulnerable, open-ended, and a little bit lonesome.

And what do you know? it worked. Admitting the loneliness helped make it go away, because it made me remember that I do have friends and they are a diverse, talented, funny, and loving bunch of people (who mostly live really far away, alas).

In the meantime, spring began, the full moon shined down on us last night, and the adorable “Write YOUR Story” group of nine young writers, ages 7-11, met and began illustrating our collective book, The Spell of Unfair Fortune. That may also have something to do with my newfound cheer. Try spending an hour with a group of energetic kids all volunteering to create beautiful pictures–it’s happiness guaranteed!

What I’ve learned, and want to remember, is that you cannot expect people to read your mind. If you’re feeling low, maybe you should just say so.  (And not only grumble to your spouse and beloved dog who, no matter how nice they are, can only do so much to lift your mood.)  Sometimes you have to tell your friends what you need, so that we can all do the work together. Yǝhaw!

Advertisement

the strangeness of eleven: on Bachelard, attics, and a “Night” pillow

Eleven days is a strange amount
You’re kind of in and kind of out
Living in limbo round people and stuff
Stuff is easy, people are tough.

 

boxes boxes everywhere and not a sheet to write

Nice discoveries, love renewed.

a reminder of calm

I love this little room with its sunny windows, blue walls, and cozy feel. Here is Gaston Bachelard on attics, from The Poetics of Space:

“Up near the roof all our thoughts are clear. In the attic it is a pleasure to see the bare rafters of the strong framework. Here we participate in the carpenter’s solid geometry. … The dreamer constructs and reconstructs the upper stories and the attic until they are well constructed. when we dream of the heights we are in the rational zone of intellectualized projects. But for the cellar…” – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 39.

Bachelard on the way space absorbs emotion, solitude, and creativity

“All the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us, and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell.

In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.”

–The Poetics of Space, 32.

***

A pillow is born!

In this time of extreme agility and movement, of seeing people and dealing with stuff, quite a paradoxical effect has arisen. Instead of feeling overwhelmed or tired, I’ve had so much energy and creativity.

I’m happy to announce that a new Tranquility Pillow is born:  “Night”

(prototype forthcoming)

imagine this:

the Zen message: “Even when we enter disturbed waters, we can still align with the moon, until such time when we can see it directly.”

a pillow front of navy cotton in sky-with-gold-stars fabric

a Big poofy yellow or white satin Moon, a crescent moon

Waves in black, purple, navy and white or yellow satin, velours and flannel all rippling and converging on a distant horizon

detachable fabric “Stars” (instead of the original “Leaves”), but with a difference!

Instead of two leaves, this model has three. Three Stars to communicate your feelings. One in yellow satin (with “scary” back), one with pinkish satin (“soothing” back) and a third “Freak Out” Star with nightmare “scary” fabric on both sides. Perhaps this soft object might help teens and children express their feelings, is what I’m thinking… in this time of copycat suicides, it is crucial to act. When the nightmare’s on both sides of your imagination, you let it be known!

p.s. To the solitary reader: if you’re terribly sad or lonely, feeling hopeless, and you cannot afford one of my pillows, just let me know:  juliawsea@gmail.com. I’ll send you one for the price of postage alone.

 

a few of my favorite things

 

 

Today I declared a personal snow day and canceled all three of my appointments. They were friendly visits anyway, and we’ll all see each other soon. Instead of driving around and dealing with the traffic and weather, I stayed home. Rich made bread, which means that the house was warm and smelled soooo good for several hours this morning.

Favorite thing: Honey Girl and her warm fuzzy greetings every morning.

Favorite things: exercise and meditation. I got to catch up with my Morning Routine which felt restorative.

Favorite thing: I organized all the fabric in my studio (aka the guest bedroom) and took stock of the inventory. Wrote stuff down. That felt good.

Favorite thing: I moved forward on the three pillows I’m finishing this week, plus the quilt. Starting to feel like a real artisan.

 

 

Favorite things: There are many things in these pictures to love:

1. an adorable French postcard now messed up by living in the kitchen but that makes it even more precious
2. a pepper mill by the French brand Pylones (a “must” whenever you’re in Paris, n’est-ce pas? soo cute!)
3. a beautiful round loaf of Rich’s crusty French bread,
4. the “fabricard” I created to accompany the Limited Edition Literary Pillow. This one accompanies No. 1, The Ladies’ Paradise, by Zola. The citations will zero in on key moments in the book to give readers a satisfying sense of what the book is about.
5. Pillows that I am working on, with my sturdy 1928 White Rotary sewing machine!  The full repertoire of Honey Girl Books and Gifts is due Friday December 15, for the SPARK class graduation at Saint Mary’s College. I’m almost ready. Snow days are helpful. And being on winter break from teaching too.

Speaking of which, the website for my new business, Honey Girl Books and Gifts, is now available!   https://www.honeygirlbooks.com/

It’s not quite “official start” ready yet, because the purchase function and A.V. stuff aren’t plugged in yet, but you can email me at juliawsea@gmail.com if you want to get a jump on the crowds!  I’ll accept pre-orders from readers of this blog.

***

Now back to the contemplation of favorite things.

As I was moving around in silence this morning, enjoying the light snow outside and the cozy sounds of this old house, and Rich and Honey Girl moving around downstairs, I suddenly felt a Zen sense of detached observation.

Watching the quick industrious ways my mind and hands were working together, I thought of an article read in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. It is one of the most startling and useful metaphors for how the mind works (along with William James, to whom we will return one day), that I have ever seen. And, as a professor of literature for 30+ years, I’ve seen a lot! It made me feel serene, and affirmed more than ever the new path I’m on. Change, physical vitality, and hope: that’s what is making me feel so young these days.

Citing the work of Sigmund Freud to explain the antecedents of Oliver Sacks’s discoveries, the reviewer Nicole Krauss writes, “Freud wrote that he had come to explain psychoneuroses ‘by supposing that this translation has not taken place in the case of some of the material.’ In other words, that our psychological health depends on our ability to constantly revise and refashion memory to allow for growth and change, and the absence of this process–the stagnation of a memory, the brain’s treatment of it as something fixed–leads to pathology.”

“This is an extraordinary insight,” continues Krauss, one that helped to establish our understanding of the self as flexible instead of static, and our sense of the past as an imaginative reconstruction, ever evolving, both of which make therapy possible.”

The reviewer notes rightly that Oliver Sacks, as a neurologist and brilliant writer, “deepened our understanding of the dynamic, creative abilities of the brain by uncovering, again and again, the unusual ways the impaired brain may deal with its handicaps, compensating in ingenious ways, or by creating plausible explanations for the nonsensical, thus preserving a form of coherence, however subjective. ” [Sounds like some of Sartre’s characters.]

As Krauss explains, Sacks’s work is particularly powerful for young writers, who suddenly are able to see how “for the brain, the coherence that narrative forges is paramount to an accurate account of reality.”

I agree with Krauss that narrative is a primary human activity, without which we waste away.  That is what my narrative quilts are all about!

***

See Jane E. Brody’s piece on loneliness in today’s New York Times. After reading that, I reflected on 1) how lonely I used to feel last year, and 2) what has made me feel better.  Here are the things I am grateful for:  1) reading Byron Katie and learning to do “the work” on the thoughts that come into my head; 2) learning to practice T’ai Chi and meditation daily; 3) sewing; and 4) being able to channel my creativity into things I love, instead of trying to please external censors. As a businesswoman, I will see if there are any buyers out there. As they say, Some Will, Some Won’t, So What. Surely there is some lonely soul out there, or a grandma or a lover, who would like to give one of my soft and lustrous goods to a beloved?

At any rate, I don’t have to worry about some jerk at Stanford any more.

I wrote to Jane Brody, actually, with a compliment on how her article made me realize things, and an offer. I proposed a complimentary quilt from my new business, to see if she might agree that it has therapeutic effects.  We’ll see if she replies!

In the meantime, it appears that we weavers of meaning, artists of cloth, paper and pen, are all entirely “normal.” Whatever that is.