35,842 Words - Spinning a New Thread

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, trying to make something extraordinary for her friend, tried to spin the dawn.



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)