On the Downhill Side of 50,000

I’ve passed the 35,000 mark where the NaNoWriMo people tell you that things will start clicking. I haven’t heard any clicking except for my fingernails on the keys. I have however come to a place where instead of feeling like I’ve got my hands tangled in forty eight different skeins of snarled, fouled up yarn, I feel like I have it straightened out and separated and I can see that it is just possible that it might come to together. Maybe. Someday.

So here I am sitting with six strands between each finger getting read to try and figure out how to weave them into something coherent. Do I need a loom or do I just braid? If I need a loom, what kind? What will be weft and what will be warp? I believe I will write about braiding today as well. And I will leave as today’s entry here one of my favorite poems and paintings, which tells about a poet who wanted to weave with the dawn. Most of you have seen both painting and poem before, but they do fit beautifully.



Spinning a New Thread


I.
The poet goes out in the darkness
in the last lifeless black bone of night
She walks barefoot up the mountain
to a dwelling where eagles take flight
She waits there on the Edge of Forever
where the hard winds of Almost blow cold
She seeks an alchemical turning
the metallic night turning to gold.

Sunrise spills over the mountains
eternal surprise fills the sky
The first blazing beams ignite riches
white clouds burst to gold as they fly
The alchemy lasts only seconds
but the poet knows alchemy’s charms
She leans precariously into the void,
bundles gold dust in both of her arms.

She comes down from the Edge of Forever
her arms full of something that shines
Barefoot in the mist of the mountains
as morning lightdances the pines.



II.
Long has she woven with words,
she has learned to twill image with light,
Today with an armful of dawn
she seeks an additional rite
She quests to spin wishes material
To use them to string up her loom
To weave justice and blessings to being
to gift grace where grace so ought to bloom.

As she cards the sky stuff to fiber
And winds it around on the whorl
She finds it distilled down to fire
the color of a heartbeating pearl
She finds when she took nature's birthing
and brought it down from above
When she pulled it through hands seeking blessing
What her spindle was wound with, was love.

So she sits to learn how to spin blessings
fire constantly flows through her hands
Until tears fall in sparks on the spinning
as the poet at last understands . . .
She smiles through the sizzling prisms
that blur the fast spinning thread
“I meant to spin something ingenious and new,
but I’m spinning plain ‘hope’ here instead”
And then the poet laughs out loud
at her strange spun state of affairs
“I brought down the dawn and held fire to find:
I’ve always known how to spin prayers.”

So she spins all day and into the night
and the fiery golden threads grow
Soon she will string and warp the loom
weft her shuttle with fibers that glow
Then she’ll weave again, as she’s done before
with quiet knowledge that needs nothing proved
The weaver knows quite simply
prayer and hope are what get mountains moved
No matter the raw material
It has always come from above
The poet has known forever
it all flows directly from love.

But she smiles at her thread, regardless,
“‘twill make a weaving that is vivid and bright
Like glitter the dawn of the mountain will shine
through my blessings, my worddancing light
‘twill be woven and rolled and sent
to the one who needs it soon . . .”
The poets eyes go unfocused and wide . . .
“I wonder . . . could I pull down the moon?!?”


©Edwina Peterson Cross
(((For Megan)))