Bet you would be surprised at just how many 'soap boxes' I will leap onto at the drop of a comment.
Or, maybe not, if you are a long time reader of this blog...
My top 2 are - of course - ergonomics and wet finishing. However, I have others.
Today someone asked about filtering the air of their studio. It is something I have talked about for literally years, when my doctor suggested my shallow cough was the beginning of 'brown lung'. Think 'black lung' - not coal dust but cotton fibres clogging up my lungs.
When I first brought the subject up, it was long before the internet, and most people I was talking to were 'hobby' weavers and I watched their eyes roll back in their heads when I suggested filtered fans and that carpet was a good preventive measure because it 'trapped' the cotton dust at floor level rather than a hardwood floor when every walk through the studio stirred the cotton linters up to float around in the air - and enter your lungs.
Eventually I stopped talking about it. I realized most people didn't weave at the rate I did, or make even a tenth of what I did on any given day and probably it wasn't an issue for them.
I talked about ergonomics for a lot longer because it was obvious more people were running into problems with repetitive motion injuries, or sitting poorly, and having physical problems - especially as they aged.
For the past year and a half (since the brain bleed) I have asked myself repeatedly why I am still here, and since I am, what am I supposed to do?
I'm pretty quick to use myself as an example - sometimes a bad one, just because sometimes I *am* an example of 'bad' - and have spent much of this blog (when I realized I was not going to die in 2008) and being a warning about what 'bad' practices can lead to seemed like a good deed that needed doing.
At the time being able to reach out to lots of folk via the internet was still very new, and since I like to write, I decided that this blog would do as a platform to promote my special interests - weaving, and doing it as well as a person could do based on understanding the hidden information that was almost never discussed.
To that end, I have tried to provide the best information I can, and encourage people to learn more. Understand more. Filter the information that is 'out there' through their own experience and their own personal abilities and goals, factoring in their particular aims and objectives.
Because if you change one thing, everything can change.
So there are guidelines, general principles, but then everyone needs to apply them to their own personal circumstances.
When I began to write Magic in the Water, I was very unsure of myself. I had a couple of private supporters - both extremely knowledgeable and both of whom encouraged me to keep talking about wet finishing, even to the point of reading my very rough draft because I wanted to know if I was actually conveying solid information, not just speaking from my own personal 'reality bubble'.
One of them read my very rough draft, noted a description to explain part of the process and commented that he had never thought of it, but I had captured exactly what the process looked like. And he noted no errors of fact in the rest.
With that assurance, I felt I could go ahead and publish and present the best information I had been able to discover and not lead people astray.
Yesterday I obtained another potential 'helper' in my goal to reduce my pain. It is not a 'pain killer' as such, but says that it helps support healing of damaged nerves. It is not a magic bullet fix, but a slow, potentially healing action.
Once again I am stunned and amazed that any of us actually survive. If I thought weaving was a complex endeavour, it seems living is also a level of complexity that astonishes. The more I learn about the body and the mechanisms that attempt to keep us alive, the more astonished I become. Hopefully - if this new supplement works - in about 2 to 3 months I will have a significant reduction in pain - if that is actually my problem. Is it? A number of people assure me that it is part of the problem. And frankly, I'll take a reduction in pain, whatever that looks like
In the meantime I need to carefully cultivate my tiny sprig of hope. It came very close to not making it through the past couple of months. But now I have a new plan, and it has a number of branches. So I remain stubborn and hanging onto the frayed rope that is me/my life.
And trying to clamber onto one or other of my soapboxes and keep writing about the mysteries involved in taking thread and making cloth out of it.
Once again I thank the people who have reached out and given me support. I told a friend the other day that the brain bleed was the shit cherry on top of all the rest of my physical issues. I have begun to re-shape my approach to weaving. I can't begin to sell everything I can weave. So I gratefully thank those people who have shaken the pom-poms of encouragement for me. We are tip-toeing into a new year, and no one knows what that will look like. I will give a nod to our Prime Minister who flatly states that it may be a very challenging year. We will get through it by supporting each other.
Sending 'gold dust' out to everyone who needs it. Keep creating. When so many are trying to destroy, we can keep creating and building. One tea towel at a time, if necessary...
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