you are not alone
This is the fourth meditation among ten which comprise
Sacred Entwinement
“beneath the surface”.
This sculpture enfolds the
Black Chokeberry eco-print,
which was transformed
by practicing kintsugi.
The botanical print is embossed
with the veins of leaves,
wrapped with vintage lace and sailcloth,
mono-printed with a leaf woodblock,
and sculpted around the trunk of a
dogwood tree.
As the spring unfolded and we saw signs of the earth's renewal, I waited, wondering if my dogwood survived the winter.
She is old, as old as I am, almost 70 years. I can peer inside her trunk, cavernous and bare.
Will she bear fruit even though her bones are brittle?
Her trunk is so beautiful, open to the sun, wind, rain, and stars.
Fearing this might be her last spring, I was inspired to record her beauty. I soaked in a flour and water solution yards of sail cloth which had been preserved by a Pearl Harbor veteran. In the frost of early spring, with brisk wind whipping around us, I wrapped her body.
Was this like wrapping a loved one who had just died? I spoke to her and asked. I remembered how my mother looked as she was dying, frail and small, wrapped in white linens, only her arms and beautiful hands exposed to the air.
It was with that sense of deep reverence that I wrapped my dogwood’s trunk, careful to tuck the sailcloth into her crevices and hollows. And there she stood one day and one night and one more day. All her wrinkles were pressed into the cloth. When I unwrapped my dogwood’s covering and brought the cloth into my studio, the sculpture could stand on her own, with her curves and undulations. I could see now her beautiful body.
It was as though I was looking at the shape of my body.
We were one.
She stood in my studio for several days. I mused how best to assist her unfolding, her metamorphosis?
I chose to work with one of her hollows...brittle bones...the shell of the bone preserved and the interior empty.
A divine silence swept through me and then I knew. I soaked strips of vintage linen that I had previously painted and wrapped the strips and the sailcloth again around her body and through an opening of her trunk. I placed on the outermost layer of the cloth the ghost print of black chokeberry, which I had embossed with the veins of leaves. I felt as though this now would reverently reveal her inner life, waiting to unfurl.
I completed the dogwood and black chokeberry union and wrote this poem on April 28, 2021, two days before my mother’s birthday.
the beloved
limbs of silken furls
reach with brittle bones
to feel your hands
warmed
by the wind
