Tag Archives: collaborative art

Gathering the Dream

19 Replies


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.

Umm sugar

8 Replies

I can be an unabashed braggart when it comes to food — moaning my approval before anyone else at the table has a chance to comment, for instance. But, you know what? Every now and then I just hit it out of the park! These sugar cookies sailed right over the Green Monster* into my happy, happy mouth (*for those who don’t know, that’s a Fenway Park reference).

The recipe is from America’s Test Kitchen: The How Can It Be Gluten Free Cookbook.

I don’t bother with their laborious flour concocting and instead use whatever gluten free flour is to hand. These cookies feature almond meal — always a boon for this nut-lover’s palette — and cream cheese, which probably accounts for the confections’ creamy softness. I happened to be out of vanilla (what? –  I know!), so I subbed a smaller amount of almond extract. Pow — these cookies are to die for. And that’s saying something for gluten free!


It’s Friday and it finally stopped raining. I’m reading Michael W. Twitty‘s food memoir and just got to the part about his conversion to Judaism and the parallels between Jewish and African American culinary traditions. Left me with a hankering for pastrami (I must trust my dear readers to be openly lusting for sugar and red meat in the same post!). There may be a run to Zaftig’s in my near future. There happens to be one near my favorite Christmas Tree Shop in Natick (please stop, Dee — too many confessions for one post).


I’ll end on a loftier note. Here’s the start of my contribution to a wonderful collaborative art/magic project that Mo is dreaming up (I Dream of a World Where Love is the Answer — It’s Crow Time). More to come.