Multimedia Mulching

Multimedia mulching:

Friendships as two pieces of art and a swing

Good morning. I am here to talk about friends. I am navigating a big hearted heartache at the loss of some friendships and I am living in the inbetween the next sense of fullness and the previous sense of fullness. Someone put it this way: look for friends who love themselves how you want to love yourself, and trust yourself to fall a little bit in love with them. My heart aches for them now. 

One friendship looks like one color but is woven by many strands of blues and oranges, and raspberry and warm browns and yellow, black and white. It's dense and thick. Something happened with a few of the red strands, too much tension perhaps? A couple knots? This has made the piece complete, for now. I can hold it gently in my hands. It's warm. Oh, I see. The red strands have been snipped. No one's fault. It has to do with fine print. It's almost overlookable. But it's connected to the heart. It feels that for now, the piece is finished. It's hard to look at and to not be growing. Growing this friendship has been at the center of my life in varying capacities for many years now. As I look at the fabric I notice gaps that occur in the round in fierce black and yellow. They add dimension and depth. Will this time create a gap in the piece, or is the piece finished? I look at my hands. I see the scar tissue from the threads passing through my hands. This weaving process has dried my hands out, left some marks. I'm not afraid of hard work, strength building. Vital callous. And I don't want to open up some of these wounds again, yet. 

Making art can feel like this. It's an act of friendship. Nothing is forever. It's lonely knowing that. When you are in transit between projects, you are living in the ephemera. Silence is the closest thing; the beautiful part of this music is its nothingforeverness. 

I have another friendship that feels like a swing. I am a kid in a swing and the branch is high above. The tree is in the ground and I am the swing. Me and the branch go way back. We're separated only by time. Made of the same things. Wood seat, plant rope, live oak. The swing tugs. The branch holds. 

Another friendship is of pinks and yellows and peaches, orange and some purple. This one is tightly woven. Some stitches dropped along the way. Then a stretch of strands pulled taught and long. They end up, like guitar strands, separate and combed out. The ends held in wax. My heart aches to melt the wax and braid those strands together, even and slow. I have no control of the heat, so the wax may or may not melt. Sometimes I want to cut through the wax and scream. This is a great reason to not cut through the wax. I can play the strings of this friendship though, and there is a murder mystery soundtrack and laughter that echo out when they are plucked. 

Now I'm thinking about flowers. Could I plant flowers to weave in and out of these strings? Can the thick woven piece feed, hold, give air to, support some new buds? Is the grass going to grow long and tickle the bottom of the swing in the tree's shade? It's March, the air is not cold, and the spring is pushing up daffodil greens already. A lot of friends offer themselves back up to you in the form of buds. Ideal scenario: I can't make these buds. They are of their own volition. They aren't always there but they are totally reliable. I don't have to worry about them going away because they will. And I don't have to worry about them coming back because they will.