riding the rails

i deliberately scheduled a railway journey into New Orleans at the conclusion of our wandering in the land of enchantment. somehow i knew that i was going to need a good bit of thinking time, undisturbed by too much making or doing and preferably without the need to concentrate on driving

so

on April 2 i found myself sitting in a railway station

with a ticket for my destination

humming a song about being

"on a tour of one night stands

my suitcase and guitar in hand

and every stop is neatly planned 

for a poet and a one-man band"

none of which is true for me but

it's one of those songs that has stood the test of time

:::

i had secured a roomette to myself

and so could loll about in it in comfort

watching the whirled go by

and making soothing noises to myself

on the cedar flute newly acquired in Santa Fe

also

i made pictures with my batfone.

which was most entertaining, despite the fact that one of my favourite apps,

Autostitch, doesn't seem to work on the most recent version of the Fruit phone

 so i played with the Panorama setting instead 

which can be amusing on a moving train.

also i wrote.

the 31 hours on the train were enormously productive.

train travel allows the spirit to sit quietly on your shoulder

(it can sometimes fall off and get lost in flight)

at night i lay gazing at the stars until i was 

rocked to sleep in my little cradle shelf.

at some point in the night i awoke to see one streaking across the sky

in the hours before dawn the waning crescent moon rose 

i caught glimpses of my favourite constellation, the Pleiades.

train travel also allows poems to find you (sometimes when they stand by the roadside waiting with their thumbs out i'm simply travelling too fast to stop in time)

train travel can also put you into interesting social positions.

i discovered to my surprise that my ticket included meals.

on the first evening i shared dinner with a gentleman who had driven across America with his father because he didn't want his dear old dad driving a pickup across the country alone to his new abode in the Pacific North West. the trip back home was his first ever train ride. i think he said he had been on a train for four days already.
happily he was still enjoying it.

for breakfast i was directed to a table at which sat an older couple, on their way to share birthdays in New Orleans. they were quite clearly well off and seemed sweet but reduced me to the state of a stunned mullet when they left the table and he scooped up half the tip i had left for the server. (he had put down $5 for the two of them, i put down $4 for me and he then took $2 from mine. basically robbing the server).
i am rarely rendered speechless but by the time i had found my tongue they had gone.

my faith in humanity was restored by sharing lunch with a brother and sister (he slightly disabled, she taking him home from the west coast to live with her in Mississippi). i think, but i am not sure, that they were both adopted. the other person at our table was a grandmother of eighteen grandbabies who cheerfully announced that she was living day by day due to a brain tumour which, as she told us, had to be managed by "opening up my head every three years and scraping the surface back because the can't take it out" and that after that procedure she has to learn to walk and talk again but that the pain was worth it and she's just grateful to be here. 

the train crawled into New Orleans at sub-glacial speeds, which is probably just as well as the tracks are in a sorry state. and today, seeing the wobbly wooden trestles that the double-decker train had been balancing on, i was grateful for the slowness. 

(last night i was not so sure)

re-treat to Tin Can Bay

seven days ago i fell out of bed at 4am to catch an early flight to Queensland where i was met at the airport, given a cosy corner in a comfy back seat and (between snoozing and waking and a delicious lunch) transported further north. 

by the time we reached Tin Can Bay i had been very firmly asleep (and quite possibly making bear noises) for at least twenty minutes - waking/arriving and wandering across to this view had a rather dreamlike quality to it

it was Roz's idea to offer a retreat at Tin Can Bay - she's been familiar with the area for over thirty years, so her offering to share the magic was particularly kind. i had only been there once before, for one night some five years ago. this was to be as big an adventure for me as for the others who joined us there.

i've long had an affinity for tidal areas but have come away with a new love...mangroves.

 everything about them is beautiful...the way their long seed pods line up in the waves

the tidelines drawn by their crumbling leaves (punctuated by more recently fallen leaves toasted orange in the sun)

the seedlings growing from well-fallen seed pods that have managed to plunge their way into the mudflats and take root

while other roots fingered their way upward from beneath

drawing another story on the sand

this was a time to wander

consider

experiment

sample

be still

and listen

and though participants drew, painted and wrote

made bowls, bundles and bags
for me the important thing about the days spent there was not the production of finished objects
but the intangibles
the things that cannot be quantified, described in words, photographed or sketched
seeds that were sown to sprout and bloom, who knows where, who knows when. rather like the mangroves.

so i will hand the last word to Bill
whose writing is as fresh as when the ink first dried on the page so many years ago...
these found by chance through randomly opening a page in a book acquired by one of our number on the first leg of the journey homeward.

back country, back story

if you click on the image above it should take you to the Moleskine site

where you can read the back story to back country online

when i receive my print copies

of which there will only be three

i will be annotating them in pencil and ink

one for the gallery

one for me

and one to go across the seas

coming soon

i've been working on the booklet

promised to participants in the Second Skin classes

that will take place in lovely Mansfield, Victoria

in November this year

unlike The Bundle Book

which contains explicit step by step instructions

on how to print on cloth and paper with leaves

string me a story on shapeshifting

will be 32 pages of ideas

jumping off-points

sketches and photographs

i'm hoping Second Skin participants will add to their copies

by writing extra notes in the pages

perhaps even tipping in a few extra ones

adding their own drawings

the odd swatch

other inspirational images

so that it becomes a highly personal working tool

this will be a strictly limited edition

100 copies only

numbered and signed

testing the water for that other publishing idea

that i floated a while ago

and Sidnee?    i owe you a dress [as well as the first copy of the above]
...those pix i shot of you in Portland last year 

have been getting a hammering

also

i think we need to do another photo-shoot

with a real photographer

in New Orleans

now that would make a fabulous publication

just sayin, is all

woooooot!!

it's done!
now 2.41 am in the wee small hours of the morning
but
i am off to bed
because
the student celebration book is done.

if i've messed anything up, please forgive me
but i've done my best
with the materials supplied

and because it weighs in at 216 pages
which makes it rather pricey in the paper version

i've also made it into an ebook
- the only drawback being that some of the image sizes had to be reduced
for better viewing on "retina displays"

so thank you, those of you who sent in pictures and words.
i hope you like it!

i made y'all something special for Christmas...

back in January of 2011 i set up a few experiments in order to test a theory about the alchemy of archaeology. the first results were unpacked in the middle of 2012
and now
right at the end of 2013
i've put together a book.

quite a few of you have asked for online classes
but somehow i couldn't yet bring myself to do that
so, being a little old-fashioned, i've written this little book instead.

it contains a technique you can do even in the smallest of apartments
and that i think you will want to do over and over again.

i was thinking about the mould problem that occurs while we wait patiently for bundles to ripen
and about the chewing-and-running-away-with problem that has popped up when certain puppies decide to play
and about how hard it is to wait
unless
we secure our bundles in such a way that they look so gorgeous we will be able to resist
and the good thing is that this process produces brighter results from those delicate anthocyanin-rich leaves

stuff, steep + store
is 48 pages, 10 x 8 inches so it fits easily in a bag
costs a good deal less than it does to attend a workshop and you can read it in the bath.

ai = love

i worked all day saturday
and then on sunday
i thought
i will just pop in and do a few stitches
and then i will go out and wander somewhere
take a look at Portland

the Dogs had other plans
when i looked outside
it looked like this

that window is my studio

i think it may be
that i am in love with blue
it is a colour that takes me to a quite specific place and time
James Tate wrote beautifully about it
[click on the audio icon to hear the poem being read aloud]
there's a good reason why the Japanese word for blue is the same as the Japanese word for love 

or so i have been told.

today i was thinking about our blue planet
and how the maps we have available are always too small
especially for someone has left footprints on four of the seven continents [gazing at Egypt from the deck of a boat on the Suez Canal as a toddler sadly doesn't count as stepping in Africa]; who keeps a bicycle in New Orleans, a cat in South Australia, her heart in San Francisco and "einen Koffer in Berlin"       ##
 
so
i played around in Photoshop
and made a map that is really useful for planning trips
because
it allows you to compare distance easily with a piece of string [well, except for the curly bits around the poles] and goodness me, what a lot of blue!!!!

got any good maps you'd care to share?



## i plant trees to make up for all this wanton wandering...

a LOT of pictures of the big apple

i have a confession to make.

i have been in New York since yesterday morning

and not set foot inside a single museum

instead i am living in the present

taking note of the everyday

and wearing out my boot leather hoofing it around town

blessed be the waitress at the Diner on 9th avenue

who made my day by asking to see proof of age before supplying me with a margarita

 

even though i am as wrinkled as the vinyl on that chair

 she probably just forgot her contacts

but it made my day

New York is full of marks and signs

delicious bookstores and really interesting clothing stores

like Mieko Mintz, where Eiko kindly let me take her picture

loved the road markings laid out in ducktape

 who knew that wedding gowns had a season

and that they were stored when it was off

the boots have the last word