<![CDATA[Spiritual Self-Inquiry

<![CDATA[Spiritual Self-Inquiry - Blog]]>Fri, 14 Oct 2022 07:44:41 -0400Weebly<![CDATA[Introducing a Group for Therapists]]>Mon, 14 Oct 2019 12:48:43 GMThttps://www.spiritualself-inquiry.com/blog/introducing-a-group-for-therapistsA good therapy session has the quality of a conversation with a stranger on a train or bus. You don’t know each other, but partly because of that you can be completely honest. Your talk is deep, maybe an hour or two long. You talk to the stranger the way you might talk to a bartender, someone you meet in an airport conversing about partners or childbirth, or like you would talk to God. You couldn’t have this conversation if the person were “in” your life. The talk is protected by the convention of confidentiality and professional bylaws. And yet you meet weekly. The relationship becomes very deep; deep differently than any other deep relationship in your life, but deep all the same. You ask the best questions together, fellows on the journey of life. Who are we, Where are we going, What will we do when we get there? Is this what we wanted? Did we do the right thing.

Technically, of course, all the questions are your client’s questions. But you know they aren’t, really. They are all of our questions. And we ask them through our dialogue. The client becomes the other and together we are interlocutors of spirit, fear, history, and anticipation.

I am offering a group for therapists and those in related fields who would like to explore the questions that arise for them in the context of this work of psychotherapy. This is not a supervision group, although it will have great value in clarifying your relation to your clients or patients. Our inquiry will center on our own reactions, counter transferences in the language of Freud, projections, and the areas of our lives of which we are less aware. We will also look at an unarticulated agendas that may have crept into our work, and upon examination decide whether or not to affirm or alter that agenda. It can be helpful to see what has grown up uninvited within us, and to seek rejuvenation by reconnecting to our original inspiration. This inspiration may have changed, died, or need rebirth in a new form.

My technique is to offer a safe space and gentle guidance, recognizing that each person has extensive experience him or herself in this multi-faceted profession. I work to help the individual discover the true voice of his or her own inner teacher, and distinguish that voice from the multiple other voices that we all carry or absorb. By being more deeply conscious of the source of our reactions, we can attain the freedom to act by choice and not out of unknown attitudes.

I invite you to call with questions or email me as you prefer.

]]><![CDATA[Seven Topics of Inquiry for Couples]]>Tue, 10 Sep 2019 12:10:58 GMThttps://www.spiritualself-inquiry.com/blog/seven-topics-of-inquiry-for-couplesInspired by the book, Eight Dates, (Gottman & Gottman) and by a discussion in my Insight and Practice group, I've collected seven topics to help couples explore and deepen their relationships. Use these themes to inspire your own investigation. Cultivate curiosity, and leave fault finding behind on your journey. You probably don't want to discuss all of these themes at one sitting, but rather spread them out over several occasions. Borrowing from the notion of Eight Dates, consider these to be Seven Dialogues of Discovery. Take seven walks together, go for coffee on seven different mornings, or take any other opportunity to explore these topics each in turn.

1. How do you define health? Consider all aspects of health.

2. How can your physical environment support your health. That is; what should your physical space look like? Along with this exploration, consider how you feel about your possessions, and you feel about your partner's possessions.

3. What are your aspirations? Can you also describe your partner's aspirations? What might be in the way of these goals, for either of you?

4.  All relationships involve projection. Projection is the psychological device by which individuals map onto another person features that are really part of their own psyche. What have you projected onto your partner? How does that projection influence your relationship? Likewise, can you describe what your partner maps onto you? What affect does your partner’s projection onto you have on your relationship and vice versa?

5.  What does listening to another person mean? How would you like to be listened to?  What interferes, for each of you, in listening to your partner.

6. Compassion. What is healthy compassion? Are there ways in which being compassionate can hurt the one who feels the compassion? can it hurt the one for whom the compassion is felt?

7.  What resistance do you have to being fully healthy; physically and mentally? Can your partner be helpful to in your ascent to radiant health? Can you be helpful to your partner?

]]><![CDATA[The ancients had the same troubles we do!]]>Mon, 04 Feb 2019 15:07:40 GMThttps://www.spiritualself-inquiry.com/blog/the-ancients-had-the-same-troubles-we-doOn Sunday, February 3rd I shared a few quotes in the meditative self-inquiry group. I'll post some of the quotes here for those who were unable to join us for the meeting.

Less than 200 years after Christ, Marcus Aurelius wrote:

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.

If any man despises me, that is his problem. My only concern is not doing or saying anything deserving of my contempt.
Never esteem anything as an advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose you self-respect.

Around 1300, Meister Eckhart wrote:

People say Alas sir, but I would prefer to stand well with God, to have the devotion and divine calm of some people, or I wish I could be like this or as poor as that, Or they say, It will never do if I cannot be here or there and do thus an so. I must get away-or go into a cloister or cell.

The truth is that you yourself are at fault in all of this and no one else. It is pure self-will. Whether you realize it or not, there can be no restlessness unless it comes from self-will, although not every person understands this. This is what I mean: people fly from this to seek that-these places, these people, these manners, those purposes, that activity-but they should not blame ways or things for thwarting them. When you are thwarted, it is your own attitude that is out of order.

]]><![CDATA[chase away the winter blues clay printing workshop]]>Fri, 28 Dec 2018 17:16:23 GMThttps://www.spiritualself-inquiry.com/blog/chase-away-the-winter-blues-clay-printing-workshopI'm going to be offering a 1/2 day workshop which will be open to children as well as adults. The theme is printing on clay. This technique, beautifully demonstrated in the video below was pioneered by Mitch Lyons.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0r5EMuMCsY

The purpose of this workshop is to enjoy art making and pushing back the winter blues. The workshop will begin in the morning with the demonstration at 10 am on Saturday __TBA__ but if you bring your lunch, you are welcome to continue work into the afternoon.

You will learn to make a monotype prints using clay, clay slips, tempura paints, stencils, texture and your imagination. You will be able to complete and take home a frame ready print, or several. You will work with color and explore the ways color can be intensified or minimized depending on proximity to other colors.

The group will meet on Saturday, 3/16/19. If you are interested in this workshop, please send me an email using the contact page on this website. Let me know your date preference and if you are planning to bring a child, the age of your child.

cost per adult: $85
add $50 if you are bringing a child with you.
fee includes all materials
I welcome feedback on this suggestion.

]]><![CDATA[First Thing]]>Tue, 07 Aug 2018 14:26:32 GMThttps://www.spiritualself-inquiry.com/blog/first-thingfirst thing

in the morning
I have my chance
to grab the day
and be ready
mind and spirit
body and soul

what choice
do I make first thing
as the sun rises
and I feed the cats and
I think on
the one hundred things
I want to do with a ‘free’ moment
like this
this morning

why isn’t every moment free-
what makes it free
other than my will
and how I do a task
and how I greet the day
that greets me?

in the morning
I have my chance
to say good bye
to yesterday’s follies
to bring this dawn
to birth with my
own intent
change night to day
change the many
scattered moments
to one
strong
willed
prayer
to
day

]]><![CDATA[Found Time]]>Mon, 30 Jul 2018 13:19:21 GMThttps://www.spiritualself-inquiry.com/blog/found-timetoday I laid my roses to rest
their long stems gently strewn to
criss cross in garden grasses and forsythia
and a thousand other plants
hungry to live and grab sky

blood red found art
with green skeletal lines
sixty blooms for sixty years
hungry for light
~ now it is all found time]]><![CDATA[Dawn]]>Mon, 30 Jan 2017 14:26:24 GMThttps://www.spiritualself-inquiry.com/blog/dawnWell here you are. In your life. It is not happening tomorrow or yesterday. It is happening now. Mystics might say that all is happening simultaneously: past, present, future. Yet you have only a grasp of your past, to some greater or lesser extent, and an anticipation of your unforeseen future. Is your fate already present in some way, opaque to you but easily read by some all seeing one? Is your fate inscribed in your will, your ambition, your blindnesses? Whatever it may be, it remains unknown to you.

As if arriving at a party that has been going on for thousands of years, you attempt to take stock of the lay of the land. Decision after decision has been made without your input. In addition, your own talents and attributes are only partially in your power. You did not choose your parents (unless in some mysterious way before your birth) nor your height, eye and hair color. You have no control over what diseases may have come with your genetics, although you can influence your health in many ways. Like one of a handful of seeds cast into the wind you land, whether on rock or loamy soil, and consider.

What is in store for you? Are you angry or grateful? Do you rail against it all, appealing to fairness-shouting out to the vast, tangled beyond? Will you, like someone once told me, “Punch out God’s eyes” when you finally see him in fury at all that has befallen you? Punch His lights out to render your opinion of His gift of life? No. You pause, take a deep breath, and ask your first questions. How shall I live my life? What is my purpose? How do I design a life that reflects this purpose?

You have a feeling of urgency. Like some race horse before the bell, your eyes, partly blinded by dark leather, see only the path in front of you. You paw the earth and inhale the sweat of the trembling bodies around you. Then you burst forth, with no sense of direction other than that which is offered by your sliver of vision. Pounding soil, breathing dust, gathered into a ball of tight, insistent energy you rush until you have grown weary with the years. Finally you ask, Where have I arrived? Where am I headed? Sourceless, yet bound by the restless energies of life and passion to move ever forward- the grace of wonder opens up a question, albeit dark and terrible: Am I moving toward a destination or mere end?

If you have the wherewithal, you work to determine your life’s design with reference to a focus. And yet, merely to ask the question, what is my focus, you will have already used many breaths. No matter. Where do you want to go? You decided on the most insistent of the questions that knocks on your soul. Why am I here? A dialogue begins wherein you are both interlocutor and subject.

   I am here to find out why I am here.

   With what capacity can you even attempt to find out? Aren’t you profoundly    limited in your    abilities?

   I am, but there remains no choice for me. I must ask. The urgency I feel will    not allow me to rest my head if I cannot come to understand this mystery of    my life.

   Ah, so you recognize it as a mystery, then?

   Yes-a mystery that I am and see. It can be described with no less a word than    mystery.

   A mystery of terror and wonder.

   Yes, of terror and wonder.

Surprised, you notice that you are fully capable of two entirely different voices. You can question and answer easily. Like a sharp scalpel that you never knew you had, you twist the blade this way and that, conducting a surgery on the fathomlessness of your own existence. A new wonder arises. How is it possible that you can both ask and answer?

The blistering sun is reflected on a thousand peaks of water in the vast ocean of nothingness that stretches before you. Tempted to shield your eyes, you nevertheless open them and gaze steadily forward. Blinders removed, a new question rises up within in you. Am I Self? you ask. You are Self, you answer.

]]><![CDATA[January 12th, 2017]]>Thu, 12 Jan 2017 13:37:32 GMThttps://www.spiritualself-inquiry.com/blog/january-12th-2017If I were going to write fake news I think I would begin with some good old fashioned wish fulfillment. Psychotherapists use the phrase ‘wish fulfillment’ to describe the type of dream that pictures what the dreamer is wishing for but unable to attain in waking life. My first headline might be something like this, Surge in Giraffe and Cheetah Populations Confound Scientists. Or perhaps, Widespread Tiny House Movement Reduces Carbon Footprint. Unsettling as the fake news phenomena might be, it is also an opportunity to be creative. As I gather my wish fulfillment headlines, I would throw in: Artists to Receive Annual Grants and Artists to be Given Tiny House Retreats on the second page of my newspaper.

Writing fake news is a wonderful assignment for a writing or therapy group. One option would be to describe your fear in the form of news, say Protectionism Leads to the Return of the City State, or Man Jailed for Cloning Tyrannosaurus. Imaginative exercises give us the opportunity to track the voices of our unconscious, and mine them for the jewels they shelter. There is great mystery to intelligence. We ourselves, while we take ourselves to be the source of intelligence are actually more like the recipients or witnesses of Intelligence. Of course, we quickly claim to be the cause of the wonders that unfold within us, but in truth we are no more the source of them than we are the source of the color of our hair or the height of our bodies. These gifts are granted us with human birth.

I would write headlines of a mystical nature. Woman Discovers that she is Emptiness, or Second Childhood Holds Key to Wisdom. Describing incidents occurring during live news on TV, I might say: Hit by Insight, Reporter Walks off Set. While I’m at it, I would revise commercials to say what they really want to say. The real message of every advertisement is that buying a particular item will grant you Infinity (like the car) or Inner Peace, (like a vacation) or Satisfaction (like coffee). Are we not better off when we drop the material representations of our psychic requirements and attempt to describe that which we truly crave without reduction?

The real questions, the ones which are answered pre-reflectively by what we are sold or induced to buy are profound spiritual and philosophical questions. What is Infinity, and can a human attain it? Can satisfaction be found within the contingencies of Space and Time? What is Inner Peace, and if it cannot be purchased, how is it to be attained?

Intelligence, the Intelligence that we are, has infinite creativity. While we take ourselves to be the source of this creativity, we are actually the recipients of it. Once, while walking along a stream and marveling at the rocks and the water-the water shapes the rocks over the aeons while placement of the rocks determines the flow of the water-I contemplated the muse. The way I experience inspiration is always as an interest and then as a question. My interest in this case was the mutual determination of the rock by the water and the water by the rock. Mystified, I began as series of sculptural vessels replicating this mystery in a multitude of incarnations. On this particular day my soul resonated with the qualities of the near eternity I saw in the rock, and utter fluidity of the water. My muse led me further and further upstream both in my reflections and literally along the water’s edge. What intelligence my muse has, I thought, what magnificent depth!

Then it dawned on me. I am the muse! This voice of mystery is mine; not as a finite individual ridden with flaws and torments, but as the Self which seeks to wake up as me.

New headlines flower forth. Waking Up is Natural if One Steps Out of the Way, and Woman Discovers She is Not What She Took Herself to Be. I continue my journey upstream. It leads me to read, in the symbolism of our activities as humans, all the barely hidden mysteries of ourselves as Self. Each advertisement is presented as if it is an answer to a koan. Each psychic complaint that my clients bring me are poorly articulated and yet perfect descriptions of their disconnection from Self. I can’t bear that I have to die, or I must be perfect but I always make mistakes, and I wish I didn’t need anyone. The study of our representations of freedom and self-sufficiency, whether in advertisements, our dreams or our made up fake news all lead us inward to self- discovery.

Still Point Arts Quarterly.]]><![CDATA[On Throwing Things Away]]>Wed, 28 Sep 2016 12:49:11 GMThttps://www.spiritualself-inquiry.com/blog/on-throwing-things-awaqy

It’s not easy to throw things away. Not for some personalities. That ugly fabric, there might be a use for it. The sandals that don’t look as fresh as they did, maybe I’ll use them for a walk on a rainy day when I don’t want to ruin my new ones. Single bed sheets-I don’t have a single bed anymore but they might do in a pinch. Not the fitted one, perhaps, but surely that top sheet can be useful?

Throwing things away means so many things. It means that you no longer have a purpose for the thing, and maybe it was a mistake to buy it. The notion of ‘mistake’ is a loaded one. It suggests fault as much as trial and error; waste and a carelessness in decision making. Perhaps it is the refusal to admit an error that keeps one from throwing something away. Do we live in an environment of our own making? One that we have outgrown? Is our childhood dresser still in our adult bedroom? Does our clothing fit well, or did we miss the fact that it is no longer flattering?

Mistakes can weigh heavily on the soul. Maybe that’s why, when I am exploring fabric dying with a squirt bottle and a damp cloth spread out on plastic on my table I am reluctant to toss an ugly piece. It really was beautiful just moments ago, before the dye spread into such dark blotches. The mountain scene looked stark and powerful against the old tweed. The tweed was a previous mistake, dyed while being washed in proximity to one of another color and hence condemned to practice. Why don’t I declare ‘uncle’? Sometimes my art studio resembles the house where Dr. Seuss’s Thing One and Thing Two carried on a rampage.

Not yet prepared to toss my ugly fabric I wait before making the final judgement that is actually already obvious. I go through the motions of washing the cloth in cold water to set the dye. Then I dry it and iron it, my playful joy fading with each step. I still won’t let go. It’s as if my beautiful mountains remain there somehow hidden by the color’s violent expansion. Finally, with relief and determination, I toss the stuff. My good sleep the night before and the fresh morning light helps me. I am immediately relieved. It’s gone! I can begin fresh. There is a much nicer piece pinned to my bulletin board (a success by the way! I used a neutral fabric to upholster a half inch piece of foam insulation. With two panels I was able to create a wall-sized surface on which to pin my work.)

Art is a series of decisions. Which lines to keep, which to cut away or paint over. How to frame. The glass artist, Catherine Newell, showed me how to create a frame with four strips of cardboard. She showed me how to move it around on my image until I found the portion I liked. There is a moment, when you make a choice, that the soul says, ‘Ah, that’s it!’ This satisfaction, mysterious and certain, offers relief to the wandering soul. We seek harmony and meaning-the reflection of certainties deep within us that we long to see and express.

There is always a movement toward simplicity that acts on the underside of an acquisitive society. Perhaps it is the medicine needed by the capitalist world where every open public space is littered with advertisement. Marie Kondo urges us to keep only what ‘sparks joy’-ruthlessly tossing everything else. She is followed with ardent fervor. Those who succeed in attaining her stringent discipline of discarding are new people, converted, with thanks, to the Spartan school of beauty and need.

Others long for a tiny house, seeking a cure to their malaise by purging their excesses: get rid the thousand moments of self-indulgence that now lay scattered in ever too small spaces! In my art, I too, purge. That added bloat of spread dye, the extra embellishment that ruins a piece, the interesting turned grotesque by too much texture-all swept away once I resolve myself to the rule of rendering only what is needed, and not more.

Aristotle compared good writing to the human body. In the body every part has a function. There is nothing in the body that is not needed. When we see the slim and fit we enjoy, not just lustfully, but as meaning. Socrates, when he described the levels of representation, used the body as an example of an early representation. What is wanted in the Form of the Good is first seen in the athlete.

The Shakers, too, discovered purity in vision by removing all excesses. Who doesn’t sigh in relief upon seeing their simple, elegant forms-inventions dictated by use and translated into graceful wooden tools, baskets and chairs. Their barns, tall and regal, stare out at us with faintly stern but edifying grace. We hunger for something that their song suggests, “Tis the gift to be simple, tis the gift to be free…”

One of my own feelings about art is that it should be beautiful. A simple enough statement, perhaps, but witness the expanses of idiosyncratic art. Art made as self-expression where beauty is not relevant. Art that is there to express the strange, or the different for difference’s sake. On the other hand, art that depicts the universal has staying power through the centuries. The essential in art parallels the universal in philosophy, where the mind can finally come to rest. Picasso’s mother and child is every mother and child. Rembrandt’s woman is every woman.

A temptation might be to throw out the idiosyncratic. Are the wrong lines of our lives merely self-insistences? Do we reveal our misguided visions by elevating out individual significance over the universal? Are we all just bad art?

To answer this we have to turn to the mystics. It is not our goal to eliminate ourselves in service of the real. That is the failure of religion. Rather, it is to step aside so that the real can appear. Here, truly, is the ultimate mystery. How are we ourselves representations of the Real? Can we know ourselves as both ‘this one’ and Self?

I throw out more of what doesn’t work. I am energized. I assign myself the task of finding peace in the balance of colors, the allure of space. I will work until my mind finds peace even if that means I will work for a very long time.

]]><![CDATA[Shibori, an Exercise in Seeing]]>Mon, 04 Jul 2016 12:02:57 GMThttps://www.spiritualself-inquiry.com/blog/shibori-an-exercise-in-seeingI am sharing my upcoming essay for Still Point Arts Quarterly here as a teaser for a new group I am forming. The group is called Art and Perception. Each session will begin with an art exercise and be followed by a discussion exploring the meanings to be found in our work. If you are interested in this group, please contact me.

~

You’ve probably seen it without knowing what you’ve seen. You might mistake it for simple tie-dye, although shibori is much more exciting. It is showing up in clothing, pillows and sheets and even rugs.

This ancient technique of hand dying originated in Japan and comes to us through the centuries with the beautiful aesthetic of Japanese culture. As they did with poetry, refining and clarifying until they had created the most elegant forms (think haiku, the three lined jewel, tanka, a five lined poem which ventures to more personal themes than haiku, and haiga, which combines haiku with an image-just to name a few) the Japanese explored and refined shibori until they had created an elegant and surprisingly precise language of pattern. Using indigo dye and natural fabrics these patterns were dislayed in kimonos, robes and costumes. The modern fabric artist can borrow techniques centuries in the making.

Matsukaze arashi means ‘Wind in the Pines.’ It is a shibori pattern formed by wrapping cloth counterclockwise on a pole at a 45 degree angle. Thread is then wrapped around the fabric on the pole in the opposite direction. Then the fabric is compressed on the pole and the pole dipped in an indigo vat. Both predictable and yet random since the maker can not know exactly how the pattern will emerge, arashi is stirring, like wind, and evokes a feeling of both movement and detail.
Boards and clamps are used to create the kikko pattern, or tortoiseshell. Here the fabric is folded and clamped into a neat triangular stack. After submersion in an indigo vat, the fabric is unfolded carefully to reveal a precise but trippy pattern of hexagons with shadowy triangles meeting at their points in the centers.

Folds, clamps, resists were explored and cataloged until each pattern can be reproduced. The folds, clamps and various methods of resist prevent the dye from penetrating the fabric all the way, and hence create a pattern. Thread brings in another set of binding techniques. Midori shibori is a pattern called ‘willow leaf.’ It is produced by pleating and binding sections with thread. Modern shibori dyers can use rubber bands, but don’t picture the garish star-like patterns of 1960’s tie-dye. The refined resist and indigo work of ancient Japan transcends this splashy version.
In my own work with shibori I gratefully accepted the modern person’s conveniences. My indigo vat didn’t come from my own cultivated indigo plants, but was ordered from Amazon as a kit. Rather than thread and twine, I used rubber bands. My poles were pieces of drainage pipes and my binding wood pieces were the stir sticks givenaway by paint shops and squares of balsa wood from craft shops. My patterns emerged equally entrancing nevertheless.

I started with raw, slightly tinted sheets of linen. Washing the fabric first to remove any residue coatings, I bound and tied my pieces before submerging them briefly in cool, clear water in my sink. After pressing out the extra water, I dipped my wrapped pieces, one by one, into my vat-a cobalt blue Lowe’s bucket on my counter filled with the indigo dye I had mixed. In the indigo vat a foamy froth develops on the surface, a bit like the foam that can form in a homemade soup. This foam is called an indigo ‘flower.’ My instructions say I should remove it, but I am too reluctant to do so, as if this foam contained the essence of my indigo. So I leave indigo ‘flower’ that had bloomed on the surface of my dye and simply swish it aside as I dip my fabric. Careful to avoid introducing oxygen to my vat, I help my pieces down with copper wire hooks left over from some other project and now adapted to a selection of hooks in various lengths.

After dipping, I left my cobalt blue bundles to rest for a good hour. The excitement was pressing. Even as I did my other tasks, I couldn’t keep my mind from drifting back to the tight indigo presents I had made for myself, siting on my plexiglass covered kitchen counter.
When I finally rinsed and then unfurled my pieces I was delighted and awed. My inexpert handling of the fabric and dye yielded marvelous variations; shading and pattern repetitions with ghost-like octaves in fainter and fainter blue.

As I went on into my day (which in my case means meeting with my psychotherapy clients) the images of the shibori seemed to be whispering in the back of my mind. The cognitive understanding that I was undertaking with my clients as we explored their relationship patterns was haunted by an echo. This echo was the repetitious and varying patterns of the shibori cloth I had made. Pattern, so disturbing sometimes when to the person who has unknowingly been living one has the opposite aspect in art.

Later, ironing my jewels and marveling again at the indigo markings-strange, pattern-like yet shifting from the sterile regularity of factory made cloth-the conversations from the day returned. ‘Aren’t these the same patterns,’ I wondered. ‘Yes, they are the same, for sure,’ I thought. It seemed to me that the patterns of human relationship were replicated in the cloth. This is after all what concerns us. Working its way through the layers of our unconscious, the representation, like a lotus flower breaking the surface of the water, emerges in art. The swishy burst of Willow (yanagi shibori) is the pattern of closeness then distance between a husband and wife. The dizzying pattern of mokume shibori (Wood Grain) pictured a dense and conflicted family. Itajime, with its pleasant repetition of softened triangles is a healthy and restorative relationship supported by personal ritual. Here they touch, here they grow apart-painted in indigo the dance of our love lives finds its voice. The indigo shapes seem to shift in a comforting rhythm, almost like music. I felt quite sure that the patterns were communicating to me. Pattern is, after all, what we both hate and love depending on what is repeated.

Ordinarily, among the people who come to see me, pattern is frightening when discovered. Perhaps, as is often the case, you find that you married your parent. Of course, not your actual parent, but the pattern of your childhood has been instinctively reproduced against your conscious intentions. Perhaps this is the truth that Sophocles recognized when he wrote Oedipus Rex.

Not all patterns are stultifying. Some we create and will, especially, perhaps, when we create ritual for health or celebration. The body loves repetition. Sleep better when you keep a pattern for sleep. Be stronger when you build your body with a pattern of exercise. The moments of celebration we choose for the fabric of our lives can be happy repetitions. The generations themselves are repetitions of discovery. Each child discovers the butterfly, what walking and tumbling is, what love is.

There are dark patterns, too. The darkest blue indigo-almost black-you feel trapped as if guided by an unseen and diabolical hand. You are steered steadily and without knowing how to repeat what you so yearn to be freed from.

I don’t know where my explorations of shibori will take me. I feel that I am listening to a voice as much as I am creating. That which is beautiful in the abstract-repetition with small variations-can be frightening as lived. From where do these patterns arise? Could we, with great care and perception identify ourselves right there, in the pattern we have created? Is the distastefulness of a blotched pattern a strange representation of what it means to leave the security of a pattern that we live? If we venture too far outside of the norm of our society, is the life we encounter splotchy like an aborted pattern?

I am certain that pattern speaks of meaning. At the Johnson Museum on the Cornell campus, just up the hill from where I live, there is an exhibit of aboriginal Australian abstract art. Paintings in bold colors of line and dot are displayed with small typed explanations. What might appear to us to be a childlike drawing is in fact a story of personal history, or even a map of home and that which is not home.

Perhaps, by undertaking a study of pattern we could indeed discover depictions of relationships. As I iron my cloth, letting the deep blue become a permanent part of my fabric, I reflect on the nature of choice and artistry. As if some unseen hand guides us, we follow our muse and determine what seems beautiful. We are not the source of our determinations, however, any more than we are the source of what inner workings have led us to love one person and not another. Our freedom, in as much as we have it, lies in discovering the meanings that are already present. Our actions and our art reveal our hearts.

I am indebted to the book, Shibori, The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dyeing by Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada, Mary Kellogg Rice and Jane Barton for technical information about shibori.]]>