Coming Full Circle: prayer flag #12

Honoring Diversity.

A dozen prayer flags in as many days.  (The 12th follows) So beginning left to right,  Freedom of Speech, The Sacred Hoop, Encouragement, Transformation, Freedom from Persecution, Metta, Standing Firm, Honoring Diversity (above), Into the Stillness, Holding Truth and Warrior Women

holding seeds

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Today’s releaser-of-prayers marks the end of a series–the end of an effort that has traveled full circle.  There may be more.  Or not.   Their mission has been accomplished and eco printing calls.

Although externally nothing has changed, internally I am more centered.  (I was going to say “on solid ground” but still reaching for that place.)   But I find myself better able now to stand and face the is-ness of #45 without totally losing my center–or my mind.

Today’s flag Coming Full Circle started as usual with no name and no real plan.  Handling scraps.  I came across the body–a pure white woven rectangle and the process began.   Initially I thought about purity.  Cleansing.  So they are embedded in this irrepressible sprite who refuses to be boxed in–thus the opening in the sky—a passageway–a portal for transcending.  She begged for color and before I knew it, her headdress and heart were  in place.  And a light-hearted cosmic dance was underway.

Hand dyed indigo backing.  

Thank you for accompanying me on this journey.

Grace and Focus

When I was in the 4th grade we had to memorize a poem. Any poem. One of our choosing. My dad, the least literary man I’ve ever known, thought it important to teach me his favorite. A sports related poem– a metaphor for life, actually, couched in terms of the dynamics of football of all things. A football game to be precise. Like having your back up against your own 5 yard line and all of that. It was about how one IS in dire situations. Dreadful ditty but over the years I’ve rephrased it into my own venacular. It popped into and out of my consciousness during this past week. Because this was a week that needed grace and offered lessons that could not be avoided. Had to be embraced in fact.

And there was little stitching, except to finish this:

Not a lot of changes from the last time–when was that?–but enough. And today it goes as a birthday gift to my daughter. Forty-two today. It was hard to finish, but it was important that I did so. Because she named it–Three Graces–and asked for it. And because today she needs this–not the cloth so much as the promise of grace bestowed.

And then this:

that started as a play with over-dyed fabric and merged as three oddly shaped critters with one thing in common. Focus. The red dot. Focus. And I needed that too, this week, that red dot in front of me, demanding attention, disallowing wandering thoughts, insistence upon staying present. Right here. Right now. And it helped. Is helping.

Fabric Dyeing with Roses from Amma

I thought I was going to post about “filters”–a concept suggested by Jude Hill–in an online study focus called What If Diaries #1.  The figure below–or at least this type of figure–keeps wanting to appear in my cloth.  I resist it.  She suggested I use it as a filter.  Filter?  Is filter the same as focus?  Or perhaps soft focus?

I wanted to explore that in this blog but the exploration immediately turned into a babble about non-dual reality and became so obviously NON focused that I stopped. Remember Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate” and the brilliant one-liner–“Plastics?”  Well this is my non sequitur transition.  From filter.  To . . .

Rose Petals.  Specifically the collecting of rose petals on the morning following Amma’s Devi Bhava program in Washington, D.C.

Rose Petals

I had gone to bed the night before around midnight. The program was to last until around 10 a.m. the following day. It didn’t. It ended early. I missed the grand finale but all along I was thinking about the flower petals Amma tosses down onto the people.   How if I could collect them inconspicuously, I could use them to dye cloth. That was my plan.

Out of curiosity I returned to the large hall where every thing had taken place. It didn’t matter that I was in my p.j.s.  Everyone else seemed dressed that way’  Devotees running huge industrial vacuums were quickly removing evidence of the night before. Flower petals were being sucked up faster than I could get to them. But a little boy, the son of a devotee, told me he would help me. He had just received his mantra the night before. He was eight years old. Precocious. Helpful. We stayed one step ahead of the giant floor suckers. And filled a gallon size plastic bag with multi-colored petals. He kept his own stash and I left with mine. These pieces of damask were dyed with those rose petals that Amma tossed down:

this piece which is only in the making, lacking clear direction at the moment, holds several spheres of the rose dyed cloth.  The cloth holds the color.  Holds the memories.  Holds a lot of energy.  And just for the briefest of moments, even smelled like roses.