the Maiwa Symposium

this still taken from a video i made yesterday captures the spirit of our class at the Maiwa Symposium this week, working on a 'wayfarer's wandercoat'
it seemed to me that dyeing and stitching cloth was only a small part of it all

the intangibles...adventure, empowerment, affirmation, acceptance, companionship, contentment, generosity (both material and of the spirit)...were present in abundance

we gathered leaves from the pavements (the area around the Maiwa East studio has everything you could want) and participants brought things in their pockets as well

we re-shaped much loved pre-worn clothing, harvested pieces from other garments to build on and extend our coats

dyed samples

and bundled the coat itself to give it a blue blessing

photo by my lovely assistant Sophena

our five days together were about beginning the building of this coat

a wandercoat that can be worn and added to on the wearer's lifejourney

that has pockets for poems, petals and passports

jewels and journals

love and leaves

(i'm hoping my students will wear their coats if they come to hear me tell stories again next year)

some of us even wrote poetry into the cloth itself

there was the daily ritual of unbundling

each precious bundle opened with respect and wonder

and on one evening
i was invited to partake of supper on a boat
during which i felt as though i were in a faerie tale
and that at any moment the boat might take off
to sail through the clouds




this advice found on the fridge at the net loft (another part of the Maiwa family) sums it beautifully. i think we did all that this week.
some students told me they had begun queuing on registration day at 5am to sign up for this class and i heard that it was sold out in the first hour of registration, which has me somewhat stunned and humbled as well as deeply grateful.

there are places i travel to that i really like to return to

Maiwa is one of them.

happily i will be back at Maiwa next year, am off to lovely Lopez next
and will offer the last of my Australian extended classes at Mansfield, Victoria in November this year  after our journey into the arid lands in October

there may be the occasional shorter one offered when possible but presently my dance card is fairly full until the end of 2017...with some very exciting adventures on the horizon including a voyage up the Amazon and another along the coast of Croatia

for which i had better build a few more pockets into my own wayfarer's wandercoat... so that more people can slip poems into them
(as the lovely Suri did yesterday, thank you)

this beautiful poem by Mary Oliver that had not yet wandered across my path