thinking aloud

September 12, 2014 by The Noisy Plume

I realize I was supposed to manifest a shop update today but yesterday afternoon, I looked up from the delicate work of my hands while perched at my bench in the studio and I didn’t feel ready to quit creating for the week. Later in the evening, I began processing my concord grapes in the kitchen and I sealed the deal on a postponed shop update by staining my fingers purple and blue, and when I say stained, I mean stained beyond repair. It will take a few hot baths to get these hands clean and photographing rings is not in my near future.

I will be glad for a few more consecutive studio days. I have nice momentum at the moment and since I have been hermited away this week, I’ve achieved a lovely, syncopated life rhythm that feels enduring and steady for the first time this summer. Oh wait, it’s autumn now, isn’t it!

A word about this necklace, it’s a continuation of the Hatch Matcher Series I have been working on for a few weeks now. I’m obsessed with this shape, and all shapes derived from it. That graceful, delicate double fin, or rumpled wing, or dogwood leaves or whatever you see in this shape…it is easy on my eyes. It is abstracted, which I like very much, so you can feel free to call it what you will. I do.

I wrote about the original root of this series and included the writing in my listing details for the original batch of earrings and necklaces in this series. Those thoughts read like this:

“The thing I love most about fishing (and hunting) is the way my senses are re-trained and heightened — when I am out on the river or out on the land, I can feel my senses reach a more full faculty and strength. It is understandable. The very quest for a creature that can run faster, swim faster, see, smell, and hear better than me demands excellence from me. I have to rise up out of the soft dullness of my humanness and move in a deeper manner. It’s the return of the power of my senses that I cherish most about picking mushrooms or berries, stalking antelope or reading river water and knowing, instinctively, where the cutthroat are stacked in the current during a bug hatch in a pretty riffle.

Fishing, hunting, gathering and being out on the waterways and mountaintops makes me a better human. The deepening of my senses in those wild places is a reality I carry with me when I return to civilized spaces. I continue to see my world in a deeper way, understand better why humans react the way they do, comprehend better the root of action or inaction.

Each time I stand on the edge of a river at dusk, watch the fish rise, select a fly to match the hatch, and begin to cast out over the water I establish my place in an ecosystem as a caretaker, a member of a simple, wise, honest society — and then my senses take me deeper.”

While that all continues to ring true, and while fly fishing is still at the root of this series, and the actual form in the photo above still reminiscent of rumpled bug wings unfurling, freshly hatched, skimming river surface and slurped up by trout, fly fishing is not the absolute root of this series. This is about the senses. This is about elevation. It’s about more than that, too. I’ll let you know as it comes to me.

I say work with a shape, with a form, as long as you need to in order to reach the very end of it, in order to understand it and where it came from — in order to understand yourself in relation to it. I suppose that’s why I’m keeping on with this shape.

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I have been listening to the The Dorsey Brothers Pandora station while out in the studio which requires me to break out in tap-dance routines between spurts of soldering. I am not trained in tap-dancing so I’m sure you can imagine how I look, however, I don’t tap-dance to look good, I do it because the music moves me, windmilling my arms makes me feel happy, and I like the sound of my boots on the studio floor.

There’s something spine aligning about a good bout of stomping in a sturdy pair of boots.

I’m also hearing a lot of Shakey Graves out there and when Unlucky Skin comes on I drop what I am doing and begin clapping wildly to and against the rhythm of the song, while I perform what I would term clogging — yet again, I have received no formal training in clogging so imagine my clogging technique at your own great peril. That song is so great. The video to go with it is weird, so shut your eyes and just listen…unless you like weird stuff.

Also, there is this, and I always sing along to it in a clean, swooping, third harmony. Everything about it makes me feel sad, makes me feel like a leaf slowly turning red, but those harmonies get in my bloodstream and sail against the current there like wooden ships on the wind. This is a song for autumn:

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I took a scroll through my Instagram feed two days ago and noticed that I’m not normal. I’m not abnormal, everything about me is tremendously human; my suffering, my success, my joy, my sadness. What I suppose I mean is that I don’t clearly fit into any kind of box. There’s nothing especially stereotypical about me that would position me strongly in any sort of sub-culture. I don’t fit anywhere specific in this world of ours. I am twenty different things, without really being those things enough to merit a title for myself or an accurate definition. I cannot even accurately define myself! I tried to make a list of the things I am here but everything typed out looked strange and felt uncomfortable or directly contradicted (on societal terms) something else that I seem to be.

How do you define yourself?

Since realizing I am not normal, I’ve been thinking about not fitting in quite frequently, suddenly aware of the fact that by escaping definition I’m somewhat free. Free to be whatever that thing is that I am in any given moment. Free to discover the elegance of the wild. Free to be free.

I’m committed to simply continuing to be exactly who I am, any other way looks like shackles.

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I don’t claim to live this life intentionally. On the contrary, I rarely plan anything out, suffer from poor foresight but delight in the ability to fully submerge myself in the moment. I am known to bite off far more than I can chew on a daily basis. I live this life intuitively, instinctively, as the wapiti do while they spend their lives in continual ascent and decent, searching for sweet grass.

I am searching for sweet grass. I am searching for the sweetest grass.

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Lastly, I am writing again. It’s been a while.

https://www.thenoisyplume.com/blog/2014/09/12/9130/

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: thinking aloud

While Up On The East Bench

May 10, 2014 by The Noisy Plume

I am a bird on a perch overlooking my mountain valley. The wind is a force. I watch the clouds fly by on their strange, invisible currents and think to myself the only thing faster than the pronghorn of the interior West are the shadows cast by clouds as they gallop across the ridge lines on any windy day, reducing the land at my feet to patchwork of lightness and dark, as living as any living thing, zoetic and wild.

I am out scampering on the East Bench, above the Portneuf Valley, and am high enough now that I can see clearly in all directions, across the unfolding ranges in this corner of Idaho, and beyond, almost to Wyoming in the East, that wind bitten state and its glorious high desert, wide valleys and micro-ranges I often find myself daydreaming about.

It is expansive.

It is hard to believe that the planet does not lay out in a rumpled, irregular line, infinite and rolling forever into the new space of itself and beyond any points of possible exploration. I feel alone. I turn my back on town where it lays like shards of carefully arranged salt and pepper on a river valley floor. I look to the sky and anchor myself in the wildness I see there.

I want to write something smart today but I know if I try too hard I’ll sound pretentious, or worse, silly. So I let the words fly out of my pen and let my thoughts and feelings lead me out into deeper space. I don’t want to claim to find dichotomy where it does not exist. Today I am black and white but there is no divergence between those gradients, no strange blend of grey where those two tones meet in me, turn to mud, and gradually branch into separate entities. I am merely composed of the two certain ends of the spectrum, solid terminal points where white is as pure and strong as its opposite, black. There is a delicious certainty in absolutes. Today, grey is for the bellies of the clouds.

Lately, I have pondered at how much life needs death and how much death needs life; the seamless transition between those opposite realms, the interchange of energy and molecules that coast in and out of the world of the living (though never dead unto themselves), always returning as new things, new pieces to intricate puzzles. I think about the reincarnation that occurs constantly in the molecular and cellular realm.

A plant is alive. A plant dies. A plant is reduced to molecules and minerals and energies. A plant becomes a new thing and so on and so forth until the wildflowers are built of bonemeal and our marrow is made of Indian paintbrush. When this body fades away, what will my microcosmic pieces become? Even now I fade, I lose a blond hair and it drifts off into the breeze. I shed a skin cell, it lodges itself in a stone crevice. I shed a tear, and the salts of my body are absorbed by the earth. Already, I am a part of it all. This is alive. This is dead. Somewhere in it all is holiness, a great plan, the promise that my pieces are enduring and always part of a great whole. I am already turning to wildflowers. Is it enough to be momentarily beautiful on a mountain slope, bracing against the spring wind, the purple burning out of my petals as the days grow longer, food for a mule deer, meal for marrow? And what of my spirit? And what of my soul? Into what Great Hand do I commit myself — the wispy thing that remains once all else has turned to lupins and larkspur? Oh. I know.

I know.

I feel my mind whirl. I lay my head back against a stone and look up at the sky where the clouds are white bastions of a larger, greater thing — holy and swirling on their way to the East, propelled by the supernatural power of the wind, islands in a great, wide open blue. I see stray raindrops, plummeting towards my upturned face. Each one that strikes my skin is a shock, a gentle surprise. The raindrops turn slushy and then comes a smattering of small hail pellets. Still I sit with my face turned upwards. I am receiving a benediction. I fold my hands in my lap and close my eyes in prayer. This isolated flurry will pass as quickly as it arrived. I keep sitting in my stone nook, sheltered from the wind, feeling the heat of intermittent spring sunshine warm my legs through my jeans. The black ink of my pen runs and smudges when the rain strikes the pages of my journal and still, I sit tight, allow the pages to flutter in the wind, as though each one is animated and awaiting the conversation that drips from my pen tip. So I sit up straight, push my back into stone, and continue to write, to find meaning in everything, to answer the questions I ask of myself and my world. And slowly, the answers come.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: explore, holy of holies, idaho, outside, the existential, thinking aloud

This and That

May 7, 2014 by The Noisy Plume

To be perfectly honest, I’ve been pregnant — CREATIVELY pregnant, for months. HA! Fooled you!

Ok, but it’s been horrible, at times, and I am sure that the symptoms have been similar to the real thing, in a metaphorical sense (that is to say, zero braxton hicks). You know what I have tried to do? I have tried to be patient and I have continued to show up, over and over again, in my studio space. I have worked through it and tried my hardest to stay in the habit of working because I find a lot of creative power stems directly from momentum. There have been moments of glimmerings but on the whole, metal has felt slow to me. I must be honest though, I have been shooting skyward in other directions. I have officially taken on a few photography gigs, on a professional level (by that I mean I am actually being paid for my pictures…). And a shockingly wonderful rash of magazine articles have been published or are pending publishment and these are articles, not interviews — big difference, my friends, big difference. Here’s one for you to check out, as a matter of fact. It hit the news stands on May first!

This is all to say that maybe the pregnant nature of the metal studio, complete with musical toots, is actually just what I needed to curate the blooms in my other creative realms. I don’t know. All I can say is it’s been a swell winter, my sweet buddies, regardless. A swell winter.

Tonight, while I was running, I watched the Portneuf Valley and the Bannock Range settle into the sunset hours while being scrubbed clean by blue sheets of isolated rain showers. I was high enough on the mountain, as I ran, to see a wide horizon which is always good for me, a prairie girl who prefers a long view. It was a spectacular night to bind up my heart in wispy, silken ropes and settle my soul. A gorgeous night. I ran through one of those spring showers, felt the rain curl the tendrils of hair about my face, felt my cheeks grow red in the cold, called the dogs back to my heels as we began our descent, kept an eye peeled for pheasant tail feathers, tumbled down the mountain to the rhythm and syncopation of a hundred different birdsongs — pure heavenly wildflower magic cloaking my shoulders as I passed through aspen stands, scrub maple and sagebrush.

Running is my bliss. May I run forever.

More importantly, tonight while I flowed through my regular 9 mile loop up on the mountain, I felt something, I had an idea, I had a vision, and I am going to put it to metal as soon as I can.

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It’s been a long nine weeks here (has it truly been that long???). Robert is in Green River, Utah, tonight — on his way home from his southeast deployment in a white US Forest Service truck. I will wrap my arms around him tomorrow morning around 10AM when he lands on the front steps of our home. Then we will meticulously plan three weeks together and probably head to Utah to do some rafting and fishing. I can’t wait. I need him. I have needed him. With all my heart.

Lastly, there’s this. You can thank me, but you should also thank my baby sister who sent me this in the first place (she’s awesome, by the way…little Toby Beth Georgia…). Two INCREDIBLE and unique voices. I DIE! You’re going to fall in love and then you will swoon and when you wake up you’re going to wish someone would “catch you in a bed sheet and rattle your chains“…aaaaand then you’ll be so sad that they don’t kiss at the end of the song. So sad.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: process, thinking aloud

March 17, 2014 by The Noisy Plume

Did I tell you Robert deployed for early season work in the southeast a couple of weeks ago? I probably failed to mention that, and a thousand other things. When he is away, I tend to fall head over heels into work. I had an explicit text from him last night that simply stated, “You are a crazy hard worker. Please take a day off. That’s an order.” Days off work don’t really exist for me. A more accurate phrase would be “taking a day out of the studio” — which is what I am up to today.

It’s frightfully springy-stormy this morning with clumsy splatterings of rains and high winds whipping at the house and wind chimes — the perfect kind of day to hike up a mountain and find a little shelter from the elements in a nest of lichen, fir and stone. I am packing my bag with tea, water, camera, sketchbook and a sundry of snacks to sustain me while I’m gladly wandering. It’s going to be such a beautiful afternoon and evening out there. I can feel it in my bones.

Which reminds me, did you all see the full moon rising the other day? I was out running on the mountain with the dogs in the early evening when I saw it push up over the snowy peaks of the Pebble Range into a pure blue sky and weigh anchor in the sagebrush — perfectly round and golden. I felt that moonrise in my bones, too. Oh, did I feel it.

Have a delightful monday, you little wildlings. I will too!

https://www.thenoisyplume.com/blog/2014/03/17/7820/

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: morning, photography, tea, thinking aloud

March 10, 2014 by The Noisy Plume

[I have been working. Steadily and quietly. Happily and freely. Building a small empire of rings to set free in my shop sometime this week. Stay tuned.]

I get better, as years go by, at putting my head down and quietly working. I wasn’t always this way. I used to squander my energy on all kinds of useless things, all kinds of tragic relationships, all kinds of confused, ego-driven contrivances that only served to dull my light (and I should clarify when I say ego, I am referring to my own). I’ve changed a lot over the years, I am grateful I have, grateful for growth and earnestly eager for more depth and strength to arrive to my wobbly little frame, as depth and strength will arrive, on the edges of blades and the whims of wind. I recover faster from heartbreak these days. I wouldn’t say my skin has thickened, I don’t want it to. I value my sensitivities. I can tell you that I break just as badly and easily as I ever did. I shatter like a glass window under the stress of a piercing high note when I am in a thorny pair of indelicate hands. And, quite sadly, I have known a lot of thorny, indelicate hands. Haven’t we all? The good news is this: something in me pushes back hard against the violence of life. I heal faster than I ever did before. I don’t have time to wallow in the miry clay. I feel what I must feel, take the blunt, punching force of consequence directly on the chin, as I must, from time to time. When I am angry, I literally run the fire of my rage down to ash and cast it off into the wind before it burns me black from the inside out. I don’t have time for the things I used to make time for. But I digress. In the here and now, while I quietly work, the space falls silent around me, I wear peace like a cloak and I find I have so much appreciation for the grace of my studio and the big windows that look out past the jungle of my yard and into the rolling face of beautiful Idaho.

Today, I am in the studio and Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” has started to quietly and powerfully trickle out of the speakers below the workbench. I’ve left the lights off, as I do most days, the sky is pouring in the huge window that looks steadily West. The song begins to crescendo. I sing along. Out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of broad, flittering movement from South of the house, a swaying of slight shadow that seems to stem from the very roots of Scout Mountain where it stands gleaming and wide, slapping thin air at 9000ft. I raise my head to look, to see, to understand the thing that has caught my eye; I see a mumuration of starling as it sweeps over the yard and up into the prickly tower of the blue spruce where it hangs in careful shades of teal over my quirky little farmhouse. The tree bends and shifts in the wind, carefully catching birds, one by one bringing each to bough. It is raining. The whole world outside my big window is wet, wind beaten and bleeding blue under a strange spring sky. The spruce is loaded and bursting with birds. A lesser grouping of starling sweeps in, swirls and settles in the catalpa tree. I look up once more from writing this in my sketchbook to see the starling leave as wildly and briskly as they arrived, I hold in my breath as I watch the mass of dark flapping, up they go, across the sagebrush and then gone. Fleeting. Their presence was fleeting. I exhale.

I feel lonely. Those birds owned my heart, if only for a short while.

Sometimes I belong to a beautiful thing for a matter of seconds, mere minutes, short days, tidy weeks, a month or two, a quick splay of a year…no matter the length of time I am bound to it, bound to a beautiful thing, I miss it when it goes.

https://www.thenoisyplume.com/blog/2014/03/10/7776/

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: carried on the wind, in the studio, jewelry, rings, thinking aloud, when a pinch of grief mingles with many wings