THE EVOLUTION OF A DESIGNER

My daughter Shiloh “Chief Laughing Cloud” gave me the title “The Evolution of a Designer” and asked me to address it for the Cosmic Cowgirls Conference Call in terms of how my experiences from childhood had influenced my process in becoming a designer and a writer.

The designer/writer proximity reminded me of a conversation I had with my friend Nancy. We were talking about how we would define ourselves if we could use only a single word. I said my word would be, “Poet.” She emphatically said, “No! You are a designer!” I explained that though my career had been in designing and manufacturing women’s clothing I think of myself as a poet because that is my first creative love and the process to which I have been the most devoted.

Nancy, being Nancy, was adamant. “Yes, I know that. I know your writing, and what you do is design. You design and shape the way words are to be arranged on pages and how they are to be spoken aloud. You are a designer!”

I found her definition astute, lovely and relevant. The creative process and living our lives as a creative process, no matter what we do, is about design.

Design is about seeing a pattern that enables us to assign meaning to our lives. Our response to the plethora of technology and products of today’s world, probably more than at any other time in history, elicits the question that plagues the Existentialist: What is the point? This, probably more than anything else, stops our creative process dead in its tracks. The point is, we must design a point for ourselves. In order to do this, we have to pay attention. Not to just the big things that shout at us, but to the little things that whisper.

We must begin to notice the feelings and images that keep showing up for us and assign value to them. Design is about collecting and putting together these emerging pieces to define a context in which we can live creative lives. It is about finding that thread of the things that most define us and call to us, catching hold of it, and following it through to the very end, or, as the case may be, to the beginning, or even the middle.

Early on Shiloh caught hold of the scarlet thread she noticed running though her experience, caught hold of it and continues to use it to weave not only the tapestry of her own legendary life but to weave hers into the tapestry of the legendary lives of others. She takes her thread and ties all the fragments together, stitches up that which was torn and broken, that which is good and beautiful, and she supports others in discovering how to do so.  Most of all, design is about the triumph of order over chaos.

The thing is, that the design does not just arrive on our creative door step tied with a red ribbon or thread. It only comes to us through the creative process itself. You are not going to even notice that you noticed the red thread until it reveals itself to you in a poem or a painting or a dance. All of a sudden, there it is! There it is again! And you realize it has been there all along.

It was not until I took copies of all the poems I had written (up to a certain point) and spread them out on the floor that I began to realize there was a thread or theme that kept emerging in a majority of them. This realization led to publishing my first chapbook with the title “Spells”. It wasn’t until I wrote my artist’s statement that I realized that my spiritual path, my professional path, and my creative path were all shaped by the “spells” cast by actual paths I have walked, and by the people in my life and by the creative acts they taught, modeled, and inspired. And there was the presence of this light illuminating each memory.  I realized that there is always this “light that shineth in the darkness”. Now that I have noticed it and named it I can always see it and follow the paths and the people upon whom it shines.

Noticing things and daring to lasso them with our scarlet thread or golden lariat and weave them into tapestries for and with one another is indeed, not only the work of the designer, but it is the point. Nothing says it as well as these gorgeous lines excerpted from Rilke’s Duino Elegies:

Yes! The Springtime had need of you.
Many a star awaited your gazing upon it to glimmer.
Many a wave lifted itself from the past
to meet your seaside arrival.
You passed beneath an open window
when a violin yielded itself to someone.
All this was a sacred trust.
Did you rise to the call?
***
Here is the time for the unutterable word,
here is its home.
Speak and make known! More than ever
the things that we live by are falling away,
and are displaced by an act without image.
An act beneath crusts it will readily rip open,
as its inner working outgrows them and seeks new limits.
Between the hammer strokes
the heart lives on, as
between the teeth the tongue
remains the bestower of praise.

….And these things, these things
that live only in passing, understand
that we must praise them; fleeting,
they look unto us, most fleeting of all, for rescue.
They want us entirely to transform them
within our invisible hearts,
into—oh, infinitely—into ourselves! Whoever we are.

Earth, is not this your deepest desire: transparently
to arise in us? Is not your dream
to be one day transparent? Earth! Transparent!
What is your urgent command, if not transformation?
Earth, my beloved, I obey.

Notice—perhaps most important of all—that Rilke makes the point that it is our  responsibility to answer the call.

I know that each and everyone of us can recall some moment such as a wave lifting itself especially for our benefit, or an unexpected strain of music calling to us, or a star that seemed to have awaited our gazing upon it to glimmer. We must notice these things and take ownership of them so that we can transform them into art to be shared with others.

Perhaps, you notice, as do I, the way light falls at a certain time on a certain thing and casts a spell calling us to a creative path. Mine goes like this:

A Heritage of Spells Cast by
Persons, Paths and Light

Hark to the breathing,
the unbroken word that builds itself out of silence.
One must taste traces of eternity by degrees.
Rilke

My very first memories are of being caught in the spell of some creative process— reading and writing, singing and dancing, drawing, coloring, painting, sewing, crocheting, knitting, carpentry—making things, the feel of a tool in my hand. Even when I was a little kid, I knew there was not going to be time enough. I started taking notes and making lists.

My love of poetry and drawing started before i was old enough to go to school and came from spells cast by my father, Gene Grant— poet, musician, carpenter, fisherman. He used to sign his gifts and letters to me: “Love, Trust, Dare.” I added “Create, Pray, Dance” and made it my slogan. I remember my father’s hands in the lamplight and amber glow from the dial on the console radio, as he peeled  the wood with exquisite precision from a yellow #2 pencil with his pocket knife, the smell of tiny shavings and lead scrapings drifting from the emerging, long, shining point; my ecstatic anticipation while waiting to feel the pencil between my fingers, and the excitement of the exact moment when that point would make contact with my clean, white, 8 1/2 x 11 inch sheet of paper, and then— getting to watch where that little trail it laid down would lead me. It has led me to produce over a dozen chapbooks of poetry, and even win some awards. It led to cartooning, fashion renderings, and oil painting.

Sitting in the light of the fireplace with my stepmother Lillian Grant—also a poet—I fell in love with the Bible. Her romantic approach to everything in life cast a spell over the scriptures that brought the people and their stories to life. I continue to want to know all about them. What tribes were they from? Who did they love, hate, go to war with? Who were their children, their children’s children? How did Creator use them? Where did they go? I feel like a detective, my excitement growing as, following clues and making notes, I relentlessly track them through scripture and history and into the world—my world, into my own heritage. I published a book about women and the Bible, Rachel’s Bag, In Search of the Qabalah of our Mothers.

Though both Mama and Daddy were builders and handy with tools, it was my stepfather Daddy Ed who taught me how to use a hammer, starting with the claws to pull and straighten two penny nails from old lumber so that not only the boards would be salvaged but also the nails reused. I was so amazed at how few strokes it took him to drive a nail compared to my battering away at the things. I remember how it felt with the summer morning beginning to cast its spell of heat over the Sacramento Valley as he showed me just how and where my little hand needed to grip the hammer handle in order to be at one with it, line things up, strike, and follow through with intention. It was the same when he taught me how to shoot a gun—the way it feels in the hand, the heft of the thing, how to stand and sight and shoot. These things led to my loving and knowing how to work, how to salvage, value, and make use of everything, how to hold my ground, and how to hit the mark.

My love of fabric started with the delightfully printed cotton sacks in which feed companies used to package grain for farm animals. As a child, I watched my mother, Eden McCloud—also a carpenter, artist, poet, and story teller—empty these sacks to feed our chickens, and then magically transform them into beautiful little dresses for me, whirring away on her treadle Singer sewing machine. I will always see that gesture with which she became identified—rubbing a piece of fabric between her fingers, “testing the goods”.  Whatever I could draw as I grew up, she could cut and sew, from doll clothes to prom dresses to wedding gowns. The fabrics graduated from feed sacks to satins, taffetas and velvets, but the spell that was cast was informed by feed sacks with little flowers on them, the feel of warm powdered dust between bare toes on a path leading to a chicken yard, the sound of soft cluck-clucking, the smell of scattering barley, sunlight in Mama’s apricot colored hair. Little did we know that that dusty little morning and evening path would continue to lead to a career in the fashion industry for both of us.

I can’t end this without acknowledging how very much I learned from my brother Bob who taught me to play chess. And yes! there was light! Hours and hours of light from lamps, radio dials, fireplaces, candles, sun, moon and stars, and even an occasional flashlight after mom called “Lights out!” Hours of light casting the spell over those hypnotic sixty four squares and thirty two playing pieces dad had impeccably carved, as I struggled to learn the game that was talked about in the exotic verses my father read to us from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Hours under the spell that informs one’s understanding of the nature of reality and the universe in ways known only to chess players. Here was the ultimate training that shaped the mind of this designer to see patterns and paths and visualize outcomes.

While my main focus now is writing, I am still involved in the visual arts, painting, stained glass, and working with fabric, tapestries, luxuriously funky scrap books— the one thing crossing over and informing the other, as all skills do. Putting together the pieces. Following the thread. Watching the light….I’m too old and slow to play much chess anymore, but yesterday, driving into town, there was this girl on a bicycle, sun just all tangled up in her flying long red hair and… and…and there is this way that the light loves the cheekbones of my beautiful children…and…and…and….

LOVE . TUST . DARE . CREATE . PRAY . DANCE