Tangling and Interweaving

Nest Leslie Avon Miller

Here’s the sexy white hot truth about creativity. 

It’s a religious experience. 

It’s a transcendental adventure.

 It’s the losing of the daily self and entering the magic kingdom. 

You come back bigger. 

You come back satiated. 

You come back sweeter. 

You come back with wings and fins and new toes that seek for higher ground. 

You never come back the same.

~Tama J. Kieves

Nest II, Leslie Avon Miller

I watch as the art, the creation takes on its own beingness.   

What didn’t exist now does. 

Messages come to my hands and the materials weave and 

move and engage with one another. 

It’s a time of making. 

The more I make the more I want to make. 

The more I make the more I think of to make. 

You know how that is.

 

It’s also a time of giving, so I won’t show you everything

 so as not to spoil the surprises.

 

Cedar Root Coil, Leslie Avon Miller

Roots. 

Tiny tendrils at the terminal ends especially delight me. 

These precious cedar roots have been coiled and waiting.

This particular coil is bundled so beautifully I can only call it art and leave it as it is.

 

Nest III Leslie Avon Miller

Nest III Leslie Avon Miller

Cedar Root Coil

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting, after the long season of tending and growth,

the harvest comes.

                                         The Seven Of Pentacles by Marge Piercy

 

Nests Leslie Avon Miller

Materials: cedar root, cedar bark, morning glory vine, sweet grass, excelsior