This piece was originally written as a ‘monk in the world’ piece for Abbey of the Arts here.
I am currently spending a year exploring the elements in the company of the Kinship Photography Collective. My practice group (a special mix of people who are able to meet on zoom during the day in the U.S. and Canada so I can join with them here in the U.K.) are exploring each element by paying attention to the land-based calendar of the Celtic Wheel. Thanks to the cultural background of one of our members, we are also able to compare and contrast this northern-hemisphere/white/western-based spiritual ecology with the Lakota Medicine Wheel, a moon-based seasonal understanding of the elements as teachers of certain human characteristics, or ‘spirits’. We are then exploring how this might expand our somatic understanding of contemplative photography with the more-than-human world. Artistically, I am stepping way out of my comfort zone, since the group is encouraging me to make grids of my subjects, experimenting with how pattern, rhythm, movement and repetition might inform my understanding of the season of air (Spring Equinox/Beltane/Pentecost).
Since I am also a poet, I am bringing the photographs I make into an ekphrastic dialogue, hoping that together, the words and images become more than the sum of their parts. This image brought to mind the practice of slow stitching, and in particular, the fine art of Sashiko: a distinctive zen-based method of embroidery used to repair, strengthen and decorate a new textile from worn materials, traditionally creating complex white stitched designs onto an indigo ground.
air viii (‘sashiko’)
(29.5.25)
in the ground of my beseeching
I stitch a quilt of indigo cloud
bind tight the found-made rags
those torn shreds of holiness
fluttering surrender at the scelra.
it quivers a praying connection
into being
weaves shredded nerves
into synapsed patterns
expels my body’s breath
into miasma.
it blinds
and flits
and settles again:
the ancient rhythm,
that rising, that falling,
it directs the contrapunctuated
marks of my needle
and slowly, gathers each corner
of my vestigial attention
into folds.
it restores the spaces between
patches anew beyond the shadows
beneath the tucks of bone-deep knowing
and finally, reinforces my quotidian function
as mere receptor of the one great
gift.
image into ikon 