A Personal Change of Season
Lily and I went to a friend’s wedding last weekend in the mountains. We saw the subtle changes of the leaves creeping into the evergreen pine hillsides. The Autumn Equinox through early October is the prime time to witness such changes. Like thousands of other Coloradoans, we all witnessed yellows and oranges dotting the landscape as a chilly breeze blew and gentle shower fell. Sitting in a catholic mass for the wedding ceremony that day, I couldn’t help but realize how much I had changed from the time when I was forced to join the catholic church. So many autumn equinoxes had passed since I had let that indoctrination go, but still I feel like one of those aspen trees on the hillside, shifting my way through my own ever-changing nature. The words were ringing as familiar during the mass, but that rang hallow of any real sense of meaning. Certainly, I had decided to find my own sense of right and wrong, instead of being told by a religious institution that as lost its way.
I wish that the whole process of moving through the difficulty of sitting through a surprise catholic mass was that neat and tidy. If I am honest, I was shook. I arrived and saw the padre in his robes and sort of chuckled nervously to myself. The last time I went to a catholic mass was the funeral mass for my grandfather. It was during that mass that I rejected communion from my catholic priest uncle for the first time and took back some of the power over my own life. The look of dejection when I crossed my hands over my chest and bowed my head, signaling I would be accepting blessing instead of communion, was priceless for me. It was taking back power over my own sense of ethics and my own spirituality, after an entire childhood of catholic schools and mass. This mass was less chaotic, but it marked a new chapter in my relationship with organized religion. Gone was the need to participate in any way. I was just there to bare witness to the union of two friends. I didn’t even need to accept a blessing from the padre. In fact, Lily had to go to the bathroom, so the communion procession was the perfect time to sneak out and take care of our bodily needs. However, I had to remind myself that I was a witness, not a participant, in this ritual about 1000 times, repeating it to myself like a mantra to steady my residual nerves in what will always be a difficult circumstance of being in a catholic mass.
The peculiar thing that happened when I got back from that wedding is that my legs felt sluggish and tired and my hands had a need for speed. The Autumn Equinox always heralds some of the best bike riding weather of the year here in Colorado. Despite the coming of that season, it was my handcrafts that I wanted to explore this last week. Doubtless, this is likely because I needed a quiet, slow activity that would help me regulate my nervous system after being plunged into a surprise mass. Yet, it’s also a pattern for me to try to outrun my feelings, so I was very proud of myself for leaning on my handcrafts and allowing myself to sit in the difficulty of those feelings of religious turmoil. So, I made it a priority to get my dye pots out for the first time this year this past week.
In what turned out to be fortuitous circumstances, my internet pal Tom of Werewolf Raspberry had released a Fire on the Mountain-inspired shirt, featuring one of his quintessential collage-esq illustrations, earlier that week. I had toyed around with the idea of natural dyeing it when I ordered it as a way to contribute my own little bit to the Dead culture that Tom had already provided so much to with his work. I envisioned dyeing the shirt with Madder root and getting the classic terracotta orange that I typically get with the specific profile of the city water I use. I wanted to call the shirt: “James in his giant pumpkin,” as a play on the classic children’s movie James and the Giant Peach. However, this summer has been full of plans gone sideways with getting hit by a car and crashing my bike. Yet, the autumnal equinox portal saw me follow through on that plan, and boy, did I find so much meaning and contentment in tending to those pots and dyeing a beautiful red onto the shirt.
Below is a video of the whole process without all the editing that I had to do to make it into a reel for social media. Think of this as the Sweetgrass-edit where we can just present what it looks like for a beard-o (weirdo with a beard) to coax color out of some madder root and affix it to a cotton shirt with the aid of alum (aluminum sulfate) while the crows caw and I move my pots around across two days of tending work.
It struck me while I was dyeing that tending is one of the most real things you can do. Sure, I joke about only wool being real, but what underlies that little quip is that tending to any animal, human, or craft disconnects you from the illusory time of contemporary hyperreal capitalism and connects you with a deeper, cyclical time that isn’t governed by any clock. No, as was evident to me while dyeing, I was on a cyclical rhythm governed by the movement of the sun across the heavens and its interrelationship with the trees near me that created shade. I was moving my pot around my yard, bowing before the sun whose heat was helping extract color from my madder root and affix that color to the cotton fabric of the shirt. That is as real as real gets and connects me to humans who have engaged in the same crafts long before the social fiction of clock-based time was constructed.
The biggest shock to me is that the shirt turned out a deep red. My hope for my Giant Pumpkin shirt went down the drain throughout the day as I kept checking the pot and moving it to different spots in the sun in between finishing work tasks. This shouldn’t be that much of a shock to me if you know natural dyes. Madder is known as a great source of natural reds. However, I have only ever gotten oranges from that dyestuff. I chalked that up to the PH in my water leading to differences in what color I extracted from the madder root. However, it turned out to be the amount of madder I put in the dyepot. I have always used a .25 weight of dyestuff to 1 weight of fabric for all my dye recipes. While this may be perfect for strong dyestuffs like cochineal, this isn’t enough madder root to pull a ride dye bath out of. No, in this case, I used a .8:1 ratio of dyestuff to fabric weight recipe and was absolutely wowed by this incredibly engaging orangish red. That’s such a typical human move to blame the typical orange dye result on some uncontrollable factor, such as the water PH, rather than experimenting with different dye recipes. In this case, I hadn’t dyed all year and had forgotten my typical recipe I use. Consequently, I was back in Abigail Booth’s “The Wild Dyer,” looking for her recipe suggestions. Booth’s typical recommendation is a 1:1 recipe. Because the shirt was still en route in the post when I started the dye bath, I made a guess at the shirts weigh based on the weight of the typical blank from that company and adding an ounce for the ink used to screenprint the design. If I had done better guesstimating or waited to set up my dye pot until after the shirt arrived, there is a world where this shirt is even more vibrantly red! Can you believe it? I really can’t and am still sort of awestruck at how much fun can be had engaging in this simple little bit of science.
The other wonderful lesson that I pulled out of this dyeing process was how much nuance there is to cyclical time. When was the last time that really charted the movement of sun during the day? As a natural dyer that tries to solar dye (dye with the sun) as much as possible, I try to know where in my wee little yard we will have sun at specific points in a day. Let’s just say that I am still learning these rhythms after substantial growth to the trees around us the last 3 or 4 years. I consistently would come out of my hermit lair (basement hehe) to find my dye pot in the shade. “Dagnabbit!” I would curse to myself and would feverishly move my pots into a part of my yard that was full of sun. As someone who tries to live in cyclical time, not production time, as much as possible, this was a great reminder to notice and learn about the relationship between the sun and my plant and tree kin. There is so much detail to discern about these cycles and it is constantly changing as the world goes round, so there is always something to learn and notice. I would much rather be engaged in rooting into these cycles and all the presence they invite us into than be chasing around conceptual phantoms on the WWW (Weird Woven Web).
I coupled that dye job with some spinning, skeining, and blocking of white and custom grief colorway yarns, which I posted about on instagram just to keep my wee little pirate radio station lit for those who want to stay up to date with what I am doing. While I am not really doing any storytelling on that platform, I really just enjoy leaving little breadcrumbs for folks to inspire them into an active, engaged life of building their creative wealth, which William S. Copperthwaite defined in A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity, as:
“Creative …wealth includes all those possessions with which you enrich others. This includes knowledge that is shared, talents or skills that are used for the benefit of others, and those unique and wonderful realms of wealth wherein the more you give of them the larger grows your store. Chief among these are love and friendship, along with kindness and care, enthusiasm, health, and joy. Shared music is doubly enriching. Creative wealth is nonviolent, based on sharing. To acquire this form of wealth no one need live on the back of another.”1
When I share these little stories, its a form of creative wealth building, because I am earnestly trying to show you that there is another way to live your life outside the illusory culture that we all inhabit. This is why I have gone back to giving stuff away for free or trading. However, all those little breadcrumbs are like so many spells uttered on the wind. I won’t stop doing them, but I have no illusions that they in any way will change anything. I just think it is better to actively share of my storehouse of budding loom, spindle, and dye pot wisdom while I am still able, rather than horde all that wealth for myself. Happiness is best shared.
In this way, I am not unlike James Halliday in the final scene of Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One” in my dogged determination to discover and promote the real. Halliday says to Watts when handing over control of the VR company that he built and dominates life in the world Cline built:
“Lis-ten," he said, adopting a confidential tone. "I need to tell you one last thing before I go. Something I didn't figure out for myself until it was already too late." He led me over to the window and motioned out at the landscape stretching out beyond it. "I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn't know how to connect with the people there. I was afraid, for all of my life. Right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it's also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real. Do you understand?"2
Maybe it is much simpler than all the social theorists make it out to be. Maybe we just need to realize, as Halliday did, that only reality is real and that its the only place where we can find the sort of contentment and satisfaction that we all crave. I know that was the case for me this last week while being a parent, tending to my pots, and doing my wee little fiber arts. While reality can really bite sometimes, I believe its the only place that I have really experienced the real. I hope that the WWW will go back to just being a place that augments and improves the experience of that reality. I hope that for me and for you.
Be well, dear reader. As I say each week for the paid essays, I so appreciate you and share all the best stuff for you. I am so proud of this essay and am so excited I get to share it with people who care so deeply for my work. I hope you have a great week!
Best,
James
William S. Copperthwait, A Handmade Life, pg 76.
Ernest Cline, Ready Player One.
I love the red madder color you pulled out ❤️