May 14, 2012

A gorgeous morning, mostly sunny and blue, no wind, no rain, everything green and fresh and bright!  A cardinal out there has been singing since I got home, even the leaf blower did not chase him off, and a host of small birds chattering flew up and settled back down again.  The back yard is like a cavern of green, sun only at the edges because there are so many leaves on the trees now. 

My students turned in their beading project, brick stitch amulet bags, and there are some outstanding designs and some interesting combinations of colors, which is half, well, more than half the fun of doing this kind of class.  These girls once they understand the basic pattern are always looking for something different to do with it.  Starting Friday, that will be their final exam, to take a simple pattern and make two more complicated variations of it, change the bead size or type, vary the width of the pattern or make a pattern of their own using the type of work, mostly a modified chevron stitch.  I will be interested to see if anyone makes the correlation and devolves the pattern back to the original chevron, that would be a real surprise to them and to me!  I can't wait to see what I get for this project, it will tell me if they understand how different parts of the design relater to each other and how to use units of the pattern to make the elements their own.  We only have two more weeks of school, then they will be out for the summer.

This morning's poem is about language . . .

Words    

The world does not need words. It articulates itself

in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path

are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.

The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.

The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other--

illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.

Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands

glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow

arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot

name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.

To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper--

metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa

carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,

painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving

each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.

The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always--

greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

Dana Gioia 

I don't know if things are less real because they have no names, or because we don't know them; however, I do know I get pleasure out of naming things, and knowing the names.  Somethings don't need names, all the varieties of sunlight and shadow in the back yard, there are not names for those, not names but perhaps words.  I don't know if stones are less real to those who don't know the names of granite, or jasper, or obsidian or agate, but the pleasure I get from recognizing what the rocks are called is real enough.  The sunlight might need no praise but, yep, I praise it often, as paints everything brighter colors, more vivid, more . . . noticeable, lifts my spirits and makes me smile.  It's interesting to know there are all kinds of names for clouds, but a lot fewer for the light.  Perhaps the light, being so pervasive cannot be defined the same way cloud structures can, that light is too fluid to be contained by our . . . airy words.