Patterns

From a beautiful Peruvian textile, a new way of seeing

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Go slow now. Take time, feel gratitude, forgive.

Remember what matters: Spirit, authenticity, justice, words.

Every day: Watch things grow. Live with silence. Reflect.

Housekeeping

Dear readers,

I’m moving the weekly publication date from Monday morning to Saturday evening.

I noticed that many readers save the newsletter to read on the weekend, when time (for many) slows down.

I’m also adding paid subscriptions. Not to worry; you’ll be able to read every word whether you pay or not. But the option will be there if you want to support my work.

Please, do not feel obligated in any way. But a few readers have indicated they would sign up when paid subscriptions were available. Thank you, all of you.

A woman with her priorities straight:

I clipped this quotation from an old quilting magazine (I didn’t note which one):

I never get tired, I just love to quilt. I’d druther quilt than eat on the hungriest day ever I seen.

Attributed to Ethel Hall of the Left Fork of Mason’s Creek near Viper, Ky., in a 1983 interview, as noted by John Rice Irwin in A People and Their Quilts (Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 1984).

Pattern recognition

~One image unleashes a cascade of synchronicities~

A man named Mitchell Goldstein, who works at my assisted living facility, gave a presentation on traveling to Peru. He accompanied the expedition’s leader, “Amazon John” Easterling, who was working with the Shipibo-Conibo tribe along the Ucayali River, a major tributary of the Amazon, to export South American botanicals. Mitch was FDA counsel for the Amazon Herb Company.

Easterling, the husband of the late singer/actor Olivia Newton-John, founded Amazon Herb (it merged with TriVita in 2012) to promote what he considers the true treasure of the Amazon—native plants with healing properties.

Among the mementos Goldstein brought home from his 2004 trip were textiles woven and/or embroidered by the Shipibo women.

Notice also the pattern of the carpet at the top of the photo.

I know those patterns, deep in my being. I think they are in the collective memory of women around the world and throughout history. Maybe men intuit them as well, but women are the traditional workers of textiles.

The first hit I got was stippling, a fill pattern many machine quilters use. Here’s an example drawn by Kathy K. Wylie, a quilter from Dwight, Ontario.

In the way of synchronicity, I kept seeing similar patterns in the following days. And then more patterns like those patterns.

Right now I’m looking out my window at visible tree roots that form a recurring pattern. I’m not going to be able to photograph that pattern because I can’t cover the rough ground around the roots in my wheelchair. Here’s a tree with a root pattern taken by a photographer known as pure Julia of St. Petersburg, Russia.

Russian roots via Unsplash.

This seeking of patterns, of knowing them unconsciously, was explored in the seminal book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter (1979). It is a book I had forgotten about. Now I can rediscover its beauty as part of this month’s resolution: Reconnection.

We reconnect not only to lost human connection, but to things, images, ideas. We remember, we review, we reweave the fabric of our being. Look at those roots. What do they remember?

Fabric patterns

Recursive patterns are everywhere, once you start to look.

A quilt made by my sister, Catherine Sanborn of Cork, Ireland, with a rainstick lying obliquely upon it. The rainstick has its own pattern. Notice that the recurring pattern of the fabric squares is reflected in the patterns of the fabrics themselves.

A fabric panel reverse-appliquéd and embroidered by a Hmong woman. I bought it at the Portland Saturday Market maybe 40 years ago.

From a shawl Robert brought back from Turkey:

Some fabric from my stash

The old carpet at Rose Schnitzer Manor.

Printed things

Patterns of all sorts adorn the cover of The Salt Path by Raynor Winn (a splendid book about which I plan to write later).

The stipple pattern on a tin of Fisherman’s Friend lozenges.

And other things:

Bubble wrap

The faux blond wood of a very cheap piece of furniture

Food

Recurring patterns are everywhere.

Maksim Shutov for Unsplash

Today’s lunch. Collard leaves wrapped around peanut butter, miso and sliced daikon, carrot, onion, yellow pepper. Also, “the condiment”: minced lemon peel and ginger.

And remember the mango? Popped inside out and ready for life.

Now, you do it

Start noticing patterns. It isn’t hard. Symmetrical, asymmetrical, random, sporadic, justified. Oblique, even.

You might even notice that most things have a pattern. Those created by humans, and those of nature.

Nature’s are the most astounding, of course.

Fran Gardner photo

And now. And now.

Little dark-eyed juncoes are hopping around the roots of that tree outside my window, the one I can’t photograph, pecking for seeds. Even their jerky little leaps have their own cosmic pattern.

I think I am going to cry.

Keeping positive

~A few last thoughts about negativity~

I used to be a grammar traffic cop, but I’ve turned in my badge.

I no longer have the resources to waste on trying to determine if everyone else is playing by the rules. I can’t be offended by the bad editing in a book or a missing fact in a newspaper story. It’s not my business if someone parks in a disabled spot without a placard.

It’s not easy, but I’m trying to crowd out critical thoughts by being present. What matters now is what is now. I am present here, this moment. No past, no future. Now.

Criticism is anti-feeling. It’s reactive, self-justifying. It arises from low self-esteem, even from self-loathing. We justify ourselves to validate ourselves.

Years ago, I intuited that copyediting could be toxic because it validated the critical. Yet, there is a use for it. It’s necessary to make the exposition of ideas work in the world. I’m just glad I don’t have to do it any more.

But criticism for its own sake, finding the little snake of imperfection in someone else’s creation—that has to be left on the platform as the train that is the rest of my life pulls away from the station.

I wish it were easy.

Healing from a peculiar point of view

When I was writing about being critical, I also wrote: I am hoping the disability would just go away.

Faith says yes, it could. But while I’m waiting for that particular mountain to move, I can get comfortable with disability. To understand that some things have to go. Dancing. Walking. Tapping my toes.

Would their disappearance had as positive an outcome as giving up criticism.

No, disability is part of me now. Healing is not the same as a cure.

And yet—there is healing. All these things—forgiveness, living in the present, giving up what does not serve me—they all move me toward healing.

Whatever it is in your life that lives in the past, that is scabbed over, never cured, but not healed either—maybe you can approach it quietly, with compassion, listening without reproach.

Damn, it’s so easy for me to tell you how to heal. But only you can do it. I wish I could help. I would trade my blessings, so many there are, for your pain. If I could. If I could.

Check out

Slowing myself down

In the short term, I might pull back a little on publishing (i.e., shorter posts) because of two things:

1. I’m moving to a new apartment here at Rose Schnitzer Manor.

2. I want to go back to quilting more. Here’s one I recently completed.

Quilt made for my friend Kalah. It’s the only one I’ve made using a single fabric line. Also, I like red. Fran Gardner photo

This month’s resolution

As mentioned above, “reconnection” is March’s theme.

I’m all about avoiding connecting with people I’ve lost touch with, although I did rely on a lot of old contacts to get the word out about Becoming (this newsletter). After all these years, and the necessities of newsroom life, I’m still loathe to pick up the phone. It’s just not a way I’m comfortable communicating.

So I am fudging by saying I’m going to reconnect with forgotten idea, such as “thin spaces.” I’m hoping that writing this confession will light a fire and get me over the threshold into rekindling relationships.

Finally

Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson is a favorite book of mine, one that I reread every few years.

The strange thing is, I couldn’t really tell you the plot. There’s a mystery, and a little romance. Numinous bits of info are bandied about cyberspace. The description at the Multnomah County Library site unhelpfully describes it as “the story of one woman's never-ending search for the now.”

Wikipedia is a bit more helpful:

The novel’s central theme involves the examination of the human desire to detect patterns or meaning and the risks of finding patterns in meaningless data.

The book introduces a character named Hurbertus Bigend, a Belgian who runs a mysterious enterprise called Blue Ant. It’s mysterious because I don’t understand it.

Pattern Recognition is part of a trilogy, the other titles being Spook Country and Zero History. The thread tying them together is Bigend.

I found Spook Country hard to penetrate and gave it up. Not every trail of crumbs leads to a gingerbread house.

At the risk of repeating myself

~(Too late!)~

Please, keep writing. It’s your life. Grab it!

Here are the four noble truths for writers from my favorite book on writing, One Continuous Mistake, by Gail Sher.

1. Writers write

2. Writing is a process

3. You don't know what your writing will be until the end of the process

4. If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is to not write

Writing and being, Sher writes, are the same.

Write "without memory, without desire, without understanding."

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