Healing Handcrafting

Tag Archives: cycles


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The Drone and The Chant

I am dyeing wool right now, after a bit of a break. Flowers that I placed in jars with water about a month ago to collect sunlight have been waiting to be turned into dye paths. As I sit outside next to my pots, I can appreciate the fact that they waited too long. They are generously sharing their riotous scent. Maybe odor is the better word. Wow. My cats seem to love it, but I think I might be smelling this in my memory for years to come. It will be an experiment. I dyed with marigolds earlier in the summer after a 24-hour sun soak. Will this dye bath produce different colors?

This is a heavy time. While sitting and tending to my smelly pots, I tune into the drone, drone, endless drone of the crickets and grasshoppers. I’ve really appreciated them this year, but today for some reason, I’m moved by a different feeling. Sadness and maybe a touch of apprehension. How long will this song go on, or as I think about it, I realize that I’m imagining the wrong song to be the constant.

I love bagpipes. When I hear them, I start to cry almost instantaneously. One of my favorite memories is of a time I was taking a walk with my son on the beach. It was a beautiful dusk, he was a baby, in my arms, warm and cozy. I heard bagpipes and turned and there was a man, facing the ocean, playing this ancient instrument. I made my way closer and sat down, holding my boy, rocking him to the sound of the waves and the magic music. I cried because I felt grateful and like somehow, in this moment, I was holding on to a rope, connecting us to our ancestors.

Most bagpipes have at least one drone and one chanter. The drone is what makes that one, long constant sound around which the chanter is played to make the melody.  It occurred to me today that really, what I’ve been considering the drone of grasshoppers and crickets is really the chant around the drone. That specific, hypnotic sound is part of the melody of summer and early fall. It changes in volume and pattern throughout the season, as does the chant of frogs, birds, water flow, energy and even life and death. These things I get so attached to and imagine as constant are really just the chant around the drone of something so much more constant. I suppose that’s where religion, philosophy or other things come in to play. I remember reading in college about an astronomer, Tycho Brahe I think, who believed that the planets all made their own unique sound as they rotated around their axes. That may very well be the one iota I recall from that class, but I loved it then, and it resonates now.

Anyway, who ever said that dyeing wool and working with flowers and raising children and thinking about life was straightforward?

Here’s some recent pics:

What is this funny bug nest on a willow leaf?

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Tiny willow branches in a warp/weft attempt.

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Then what happened…

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Collection of willow leaves and branches for my next dye pot.

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I’m starting to gather lichen from bits found on walks (not on live trees!) and from wood delivered for this coming winter.

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It takes a while to collect lichen. As it should.

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I had come to call this “our deer”. An orphan, we watched this deer grow up all summer, losing its white spots, enjoying the wild flowers in our field. I think I just saw it dead on the side of the road coming home from dropping my kids off at school, having been hit by a car. We always told each other when we saw it, keeping an eye out for it, wondering where it would go this winter. Just the other day, we talked about rehabbing our wearing out play fort to make a comfy spot for deer to sleep if it got really cold. I wish people would slow down when they drive, put their phones down, remember that there are animals around. I guess it was seeing our deer, dead and alone on the road that made me think of what chants are swirling around the constant drone. I know this is just part of it, but damn…

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The Coyotes Called Last Night

This is the time of year that marks the beginning of my favorite season. In summer, when it is hot, humid, froggy smelling and quiet, I am a better version of myself. It is easier for me to gain perspective and to slow down. Heat requires a different pattern. I learned that from my brother when we lived in Florida. He owned a landscaping company, and he and his crew went out early in the morning, to beat the suffocating heat of summer late-afternoons. 


For me, summer has become the season for washing wool and imagining all I’ll do with it. I occasionally enjoy blasts of creativity and the drive to work up an idea. Last night, I listened to the coyotes, screaming, yipping, barking. I’ve come to crave that sound on hot summer nights. It reminds me of last year about this time, when I sat up late and experimented with hat designs, almost too hot to be handling wool, but not quite. Then, like now, the coyotes did their wild thing and I felt comforted the way I did when I heard snow plows working in the middle of the night the month after we had our first baby. 

I may be finally starting to get the hang of understanding and riding the waves of seasonal rhythms. Rather than charging through each day as though it’s a job, I’m longing to respect the specifics. We are not really meant to do the same things day after day, with the same timing and the same momentum. It seems to me like there’s a reason for energy surges that visit some of us in the spring and fall months~ there’s a lot of work to do to bring a garden up and put a garden to bed! There’s a reason for the home-ing in that winter calls for (and that’s so often challenged by our steadfast cultural allegiance to busyness); we need a time to go within. To rest. To regroup. To gather the insight and energy required to face the coming seasons of outward growth and physical labor. And to let go of those things that have died away. 

For now, I’ll enjoy the early morning garden tending, the wool processing, the swimming and playing with my children, and the planning. And I’ll relish the moments I get to hear other life happening outside my open windows, in the pitch dark during the deepest hours of night.