Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Post #2072: Finished items and new projects – from knitting to radio.
That up there is a picture of me wearing the Beacon Shawl to work yesterday. That is my third finished object from the materials documented in the top left photo below (which I blogged about back here in September) :
For the record, the above items are a Woodland Stroll Cape, a Cappuccino Dress, and the Beacon Shawl. All three have now been worn – the first two on more than one occasion. Although we still have six more weeks of fall – this feels like the culmination of my autumn projects and that everything afterwards constitutes winter. This is probably true in that my current WIPs probably won’t be finished until winter officially starts in December!
Since the dress, my sewing has been at a bit of a standstill, though my knitting continues apace. On the needles currently are a Paulie Sweater (I’m halfway done the second sleeve!), a Christmas gift cowl, and the Cowichan-style vest that I blogged about a couple of posts ago. I’ve got a very busy travel schedule coming up and so I am not starting any new sewing projects – and really am not interested in anything that isn’t portable at this point.
In other project-y news, after some recent realizations about radio-worthiness, Brian and I are embarking on a new project together – the Live from the Urban Crow podcast. While we still have to figure out how to make our recording devices work (we own two, and a mixing board, plus computers – but have never made a serious study of audio) – we’ve got some big plans for a bi-weekly show featuring a lot of what this blog covers: making, recipes, how-tos, interviews, throwing great parties – and so on. The difference will be that you get to hear Brian and I in conversation about these topics, which might be hilarious (or not). So far we’ve got a bunch of segment ideas plotted, so stay tuned and when we learn how to use our equipment I’ll let you know.
It’s been awhile since we did a new project together (if you don’t count the fact that our whole life is a project together) – and while I have thought about doing a podcast before, I never thought of asking Brian if he would be interested in doing something like that with me. Turns out, he is very interested – and when we canvassed our friends for subject-matter yesterday, we realized that they are also excited by the idea. So I’m encouraged that this might actually happen, and soon.
We’re headed to the cabin tomorrow – and I’m really looking forward to seeing (and sharing) all the work that’s been done this fall.
Post #2071: I am no zombie expert, but I make a mean pickle….
It has come time to let you know that if you want to hear my voice, and my friend Garth’s take on the connection between community activism, capitalist collapse, colonization, and the zombie apocalypse – there is now an Ideas Documentary that covers all of that. Click on the image below to go to the CBC page on the show, and then click listen to hear a bunch of smart, and sometimes funny, people talk. I think that I come across as relatively sane, if a little too focused on food storage. Anyhow – the whole thing is worth a listen:
Post #2070: A death, a visit to the past, a meditation.
Sometimes when we meditate, the ghosts come knocking. This morning at the zen-do was one of those sits.
A friend from years past – Mike Low – died over the weekend, hiking the Cerise Creek trail outside of Pemberton. When he didn’t arrive at a friends for dinner on Saturday night, the RCMP were called and on Sunday search and rescue found his body in a crevasse. It’s been in the papers here, of course, though hiker deaths are not infrequent on the west coast so it would be easy to miss. I had glossed over the story about it yesterday morning, not realizing that I was reading about someone I knew until much later.
I hadn’t seen him in ten years – and it had been a full twenty years since we were anything approximating good friends. But there was a time during which he was a very good friend to me, and so his passing stings – because he was one of the good guys, the ones who *shouldn’t* die as young as 49. The fact that he no longer exists in the form that I might run into on the street is troubling – even though it’s very likely I would have never bumped into him again – so different were our social circles.
This morning during my sit, the memory of how he supported me when I was twenty and flailing – once driving me from Victoria to Port McNeil where I was starting a job, once taking me aside to counsel that my intelligence should probably get going to college instead of just dissipating in coffee shops and bars – came to me strongly. And with that slideshow, came all the other ghosts of that time in my life: the person I was, the moments I shared with others, that crew you see in the photo above (Mike is the furthest left in the photo – leaning backwards) who pretty much epitomize 1993 for me. And though everyone in that photo is still alive except Mike – the moment in which this snapshot was taken (late after a party at a bar called Rumors) is a ghost. It became one the second after the image was taken – that moment passed on, for the next one, and the one after that.
Twenty-two years (and millions of moments) later – I am looking at a snapshot of myself and others who no longer exist. Those selves *existed* but the present incarnations of them (right this second) exist.
And so I feel a tug at my heart for Mike’s passing, but more than that – what came sailing through during my practice this morning – was a gentle grief for all of who we were together many millions of moments ago. And who I was, at twenty-one – flailing, brash, unafraid of the world – replaced by the person I am now (who I also like quite a lot, really, if that old me had to pass on to become me now, it’s all for the best)…..
I’ve been reading Brad Warner’s book There is no God and He is Always With You in which he talks about this relationship between death and meditation – the moment by moment nature of being and non-being – and this came back to me in part this morning:
One of my favourite stoner rock bands, Om, has a song called “Meditation is the practice of Death.” It’s an interesting phrase. It sounds sort of morbid. Or else it sounds like it’s implying that meditation prepares one for death the way practicing bass prepares one for playing bass onstage.
But there’s another way to interpret that phrase that neither sounds morbid nor implies that we are preparing ourselves for something that will occur in the future. Meditation is how we practice death as it occurs in the midst of life. It’s how we see for ourselves our own annihilation and what it really means. It’s how we learn that annihilation isn’t some scary thing that happens at the end of life. Annihilation occurs all the time, faster than we can even be aware of it.
We imagine that we are a single being and that we exist across a series of moments. But that’s not really what happens. There is no real different between the moment in which we exist and we who exist within it. “Each moment is the universe,” is how Katagiri said it. It makes no sense to fear annihilation when we experience it every moment. Annihilation is nothing to fear. Annihilation is the meaning of life.
And so it goes. We sit. The ghosts come to speak to us. And then we let them go.
Peace to you Mike – the world is less without the fact of you in it.
Post #2069: Knitting on the edge of the Salish Sea.
I’m sure everyone reading this knows that today is election day in Canada – and it’s important! By tomorrow morning we’re either going to have a new government or a constitutional crisis on our hands – and either way it looks like voter turnout is high. (In case you haven’t been following along, Canadians really, really don’t like the current government, but we’ve been having some trouble getting our shit together to vote them out).
But since all of us Canadians are on the edge of our seats and will be until sometime tonight – let’s not talk about that. Instead, I want to talk about another Canadian thing that I’ve been learning about recently – and that thing is Coast Salish style knitting. That hat above is an example of the knitting technique which produces something that many of us on the west coast grew up with – the so-called “Indian Sweater” also known as Cowichan knitting even though it doesn’t particularly originate with the Cowichan band (one group of Coast Salish people). As the style was practiced by many people along the BC coast, it is most rightfully known as Coast Salish style because that’s inclusive to all the peoples who practiced it (and doesn’t reduce all native people to a single band, which they are not).
Anyhow. I grew up on Vancouver Island in the seventies and eighties – during which time pretty much every household had a toque or a sweater in this style. Made of bulky wool, in a base of three shades (black, white, grey) – I can’t say I thought about them too much. Like any colonial legacy, Coast Salish knitting was just part of what was, not noticeable even though a very rich history and tradition surrounded these items.
For a full history of this style of knitting, I recommend that you pick up Sylvia Olsen’s book Working with Wool: A Coast Salish legacy and the Cowichan Sweater from your local library – which is the only account that I know of and full of fabulous historic documents and photographs.
Anyhow. I have been learning to knit (since June of this year) and one of the things I love about learning a totally new craft is that it doesn’t matter if I’m bad at at it. That is, I’ll try everything knowing that it’s probably going to have some problems, because everything new has problems – this is a liberating thing! So at the end of September, I signed myself up for the Fringe and Friends Knit Along which I thought looked pretty straight forward. I mean, I hadn’t done colourwork before – but still, how hard could it be to knit a Cowichan-style vest?
The answer to that, of course, is mixed. No, it’s not particularly hard, but if you don’t know the technique for trapping floats *and* you knit continental – well – there just aren’t a lot of people out there who can show you how. Also (as I learned on Friday) true Coast Salish knitting requires that you trap the floats with every stitch, creating a backside to the fabric that is pebbled and where no strands are carried without being trapped – and there are no videos online that show that (but there will be soon). So I started out on the vest, trying at first to do a gauge swatch and trap the floats – and pretty much immediately got stuck. I just could not see it from the Fair Isle You Tube videos. Also, I was working with bulky yarn and big needles – something I found much harder than I thought I would – so rather than powering through, I set the whole thing aside and figured I’d get back to it next year.
Cue: Perfectly timed workshop.
Early last week I noted on Ravelry that Sylvia Olsen was coming to Vancouver to teach some Coast Salish knitting workshop *and* one of them happened to be on Friday night when I had nothing else planned. So I signed up (how could I not – that was stupidly fortuitous) and went over to Wet Coast Wools to learn about this knitting form that was so dominant in the place where I grew up. Sylvia got us started with the knitting project, and while we were doing the unstranded grey brim of the hat, told some of the story of her history with Coast Salish knitting, and the colonial relationship that it developed out of. So we learned both the style and some of the history of what is Canada’s *only* indigenous knitting practice (by which I mean something that emerged from Canada in a singular fashion, Coast Salish knitting is the fusion of European-brought knitting and Coast Salish weaving traditions).
While I can’t say that I trapped my floats perfectly – I think I’m only averaging every other one here:
I did start to get the hang of the technique and by the end of the class I had started the colourwork and was on the way to my hat. Saturday allowed me lots of knitting time and fueled by my desire to practice I powered through to a finish!
Not only that, I wore it out of the house on Sunday when I went to pick up chickens from our friends who raise meat-birds in the interior, and everyone in that little hunting/farming crew of ours were very impressed. It’s not hideous! But nor is it perfect.
Yesterday I pulled out the KAL project again and since we were having a lazy Sunday after errands, watching TV and eating moose meat tacos for dinner (such an easy thing now that we have a freezer full of the stuff) – I got lots of knitting time in to start off the project. Again, this has some issues – the bottom band cable got screwed up and I was well into the project before I noticed, and it’s hard to get even stockinette on large needles with bulky yarn – but it’s really just another piece on which to practice Coast Salish knitting techniques so that I can prep myself for a really large project like a sweater for Brian.
This vest requires that I knit and purl (it’s knitted flat) which mean that part of yesterday’s practice was figuring out how to trap the floats on the purl side – which I think I’ve got down now that I’m partway up the back panel of the vest.
Election watching at the bar tonight means that I’m not going to get anything done on this today – but I’m finding the colourwork process addictive – and I’m hoping that this panel will be finished by the end of this week (I’ve got a ferry ride to the island on Friday and one home on Sunday – that’s several hours right there!), plus Brian is out of town for a few days….. Not to get too carried away, but I could have this vest done before the end of October if I dedicate myself to it (and abandon my other sweater project for a couple of weeks)….
If you are interested in this style of knitting, or want to know more about Sylvia Olsen’s workshops, books, and stories – please check her out at her blog – she told us in class that she will be posting some technique videos to YouTube in the next couple of weeks – which I am looking forward to. In-person workshops are great, but videos really help to reinforce the learning.
As a final note, I want to acknowledge that the Coast Salish knitting techniques come out of a brutal colonial relationship which my people were a part of perpetuating in the interior of British Columbia (as homesteaders in Secwepemc territory), and which I perpetuate as a white person living on unceded native land. This does not erase the fact that I am from this land, and that Coast Salish knitting has a strong resonance for me and my family because is is such a place-based form of handwork – and so I learn it in respect of the people who have always lived here, and in the hopes that we can change future relationships through acknowledgement, reparations, and mutual governance of this place where we live.
Post #2068: Counting down the days
(Photo by Jonathan Moogk – My band Lone Crow Jubilee playing last Saturday night)
I haven’t much to say today except that we are three days away from the Candian federal election on Monday and I have read every single constitutional scenario for a minority government outcome on the Internet. We have had minority governments before, not that long ago, but this is a bit different because of the intense unpopularity of the current Conservative government. I’m curious to see how it all goes down, and am hoping ferociously that we will be all done with Tories after next week.
Either way, I’ll be crying on election night. I pretty much always do.
Red Cedar 