The white silk banner that Mo supplied for her healing collaborative project, Gathering the Dream, I Dream of a World Where Love is the Answer, got a thorough airing in the backyard. New England rain consecrated its weave. It hung out with the dog and with disintegrating but lovely curtains on the line. It mingled with hosta stalks. It received late summer sun and the shade of a catalpa tree.

Then it turned into fall and more walnuts than I thought possible for two trees to produce fell. They’re still falling. Even after one of the windiest nights ever, they’re still falling!

I boiled up some hulls and dipped in some cloth that I’d bundled ’round spools years ago and then abandoned. The dyeing came out okay, but what truly excited me was to discover that once unbundled, this reclaimed piece of silk shared the shape and dimensions of the banner — almost exactly! So of course they belong together.

The light walnut-imparted lines on the recently-discovered top silk, when stitched, reminded me of a map. So it got me thinking. What instructions might there be to a sane, peaceful world where love is the answer? Is there such a place? Why does it seem so unreachable?

The gap between cloths is prompting some thoughts, too — thoughts about the divides that seem to be doing us in here in America. Seething, toxic, destructive divides. How do we cross or bind the yawning gap? Is that the right question? Should we be trying to learn how to live with our differences, tattered-edged and unsettling as they are? In the United States, it’s no exaggeration to say that we have not been this divided as a nation since the Civil War. Think about that. I do. All. The. Time.

More to come.