Warp and Weft

Winter                                                                            Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Other blogs seem to have a slant, a bias, a thing.  I suppose I do too in a general way, the idea of ancientrails, the Great Wheel, the garden, a po-mo pagan sensibility, but what I’m doing is more like an online journal.  On a bookshelf I have two rows of journals kept in various forms since 1971, many erratic in the entries, then, as life moved on, I became more regular.  At one point I had several journals.  A diary like one in which I wrote short entries about my day, a spiritual journey one in which I recorded my experiences of meditation, lection divina, contemplative prayer, scripture study, another in which I took reading notes while I studied Islam, the year after 9/11, several more with reading notes from a year + when I gave up writing and took to reading the classics:  Divine Comedy, Faust, Metamorphosis, works of that nature.  During the year I studied Islam I read the Koran twice, once just to see what it said and another time during the month of Ramadan as I fasted and read enough to finish the entire Koran in thirty days, as many Muslims do.  Yet other blank books contain notes on art history, taken over many years of continuing education at the MIA, ideas for novels, short stories, about writing.

Writing is the thread, the weft I have chosen to weave the tapestry of my life.  The warp threads, stronger by far, developed in body and mind, feelings and thoughts as this Self has moved through life since birth.  The stuff of my daily existence has been the weft when shuttled through with the language I learned at my mother’s knee and my father’s typewriter.

So, this blog is just another pattern,  a particular tartan for this phase of my life.  It may pass away at some point, I certainly will, but, as I wrote the other day, the Web may have granted us bloggers a type of immortality.

When Kate I and were on our honeymoon, in late March or early April of 1990, the last phase of our trip which started a block from the Spanish Steps in Rome, we took the train from Edinburgh to Inverness.  Inverness is the capitol of Celtic Scotland, the northern reaches of the Picts.  The river Ness, from the storied Loch Ness, runs right through town.  On a stroll one afternoon, Kate and I made our way to a tartan mill, a place where tourists could go in and watch tartans being woven.

That day, the master weaver changed over from one tartan to another.  What this involved has stuck me indelibly since then.  The master weaver carries in his head the particular combination of colors, of large spools of yarn, that make, say, the tartan of the clan Sinclair.  He achieves that  particular combination of colors and patterns not by computer, not by telling weavers what to do, but by placing, on a huge rack of iron hooks, individual spools of yarn.  The number of hooks across the top of the hook rack, maybe 25 or 25, below each hook came at least 20 more, maybe 25 more hooks creating a large frame of individual hooks slanted up.  By his placement of the spools the master weaver achieved his design for the yarn from these spools fed precisely into the looms which clicked and clacked behind them.

Later than night, after we had finished our meal at the Station Hotel, Kate and I walked along the river Ness, tendrils of mist floating up from it, weaving themselves forever into our memory.

Sortia and Me

Winter                                                             Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Dogs we have loved still live in my memories.  Today while the shoveling the walk I thought of Sortia, our Russian witch, a big Irish Wolfhound bitch, black with white socks, incredibly strong and a hunter of legend.  Before our breeders gave Sortia to us, her first placement hadn’t worked out, she took down a deer all by herself and guarded it with that combination of pride and territoriality only those who have an animal who kills will understand.  She brought back woodchucks, raccoons, squirrels, rabbits, mice, anything that moved on four legs.  Including, unfortunately, the occasional neighborhood cat that strayed inside our fences.

One New Year’s, maybe the second or third after we moved up here to Andover, I put Sortia in the Four-Runner and drove up to Lake George, about 15 miles north of us on Round Lake Blvd, the highway that runs north and south about a block from our house.  With an acre and a half of fenced yard and woods we don’t take our dogs for walks very often, but this morning I felt drawn to take Sortia out on the frozen lake.

We drove in, parked in the lot  and I hopped out, Sortia’s leash in my hand.  She jumped down and her nose began quivering.  New scents.  New place.  Pretty exciting.  We walked out onto the lake and made a tour of the many ice-fishing houses, all abandoned at 8 AM on January 1st, 10 degrees below zero.  We walked a half an hour, this elegant huntress and me, alone on a large body of ice.  I felt close to her then, closer than I had before.  We shared something that morning and it was a good way to start the year, just Sortia and me.