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Loneliness goes up in Smoke Signals
Soon the Scout was fully present. Even his hands made from the orange velvet seem to be tweaking the blanket to get just the right meaning in the puffs of smoke he is sending as he looks up attentively. The back side of the material used to make the fire made a kind of feather head dress.
As a 5 year old I felt very lonely because there were no children in our neighborhood to play with. Revisiting this time in an IFS session I'm reminded how much I loved Indians, and particularly Indian scouts who could walk silently in their much loved land, and were able to communicate to their tribe through smoke signals made by breifly blanketing a fire that they made without matches.
In this remembering an Indian ally came forth and when my child was ready to be unburdened of her loneliness, he helped her give the burden to fire and air though the vehicle of smoke signals.
I feel great joy when I sense how to begin to put the images, thoughts and feelings into the form of a wall hanging. For this creation, I went to my favorite fabric store, Sewfisticated, to gather materials.
As soon as the fire was in place I saw how to extend the blanket across the fire's aura. Then I wound a string around some gray fabric to make the puffs of smoke.
But I needed the sky itself, so back to Sewfisticated I went. And there was just the right amount of a piece of material that had sparkly bands of black, gold, silver and red, perfect sunset sky colors.
Now the awe inspiring natural elements were in place but I still didn't know how to make my hero and ally, the Indian Scout.
I found a wild fabric with bright oranges that could turn into the fire, and an abstract pattern of little gold and black sequins that could make the essence or aura that comes out of the fire. Miraculously there was also Indian blanket fabric. Some orange sparkly gauze caught my attention and I bought it too, though I had no idea what I’d do with it.
Two types of dark cloth that I already had, a volcanic looking cloth and a black cloth with wavy sparkling patterns, made the ground. Onto this I pinned the fire aura and then pieces of my fire.
I cut his face from some soft orange velvet and this first face persisted. Even though I tried other more 3 dimensional versions none had the noble character of the first. When I settled on his two dimensional face I knew he wanted to look like a vision rather than something made out of solid cloth.
The orange gauze suggested itself. I began to sculpt it into leg muscles and back muscles, arm muscles and feet, coming up with a fluid, not quite solid looking person.
I'm always toying with the question of how solid, how real are all of these IFS images? In some sense they have more reality and substance to me than images I find in my everyday world, images I can take with a camera. Yet still I can only see them in the IFS sessions, and revisit them sometimes afterwards.
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I thought this wall hanging was finished in Aug 2012. But as I kept looking at it, there was no way to see the loneliness being unburdened. So I took off the blindfold of my girl part, moved her out of the sky and set her next to the fire. She still floats a little but now she's much more grounded.
Now I wanted to make my 5 year old part who is sending this burden up in smoke signals. The place that artistically seems right for her is in the sky across from the Indian. She too came quickly and when I made her head band/feather it slipped over her eyes like a blindfold. It felt right. I made a hint an arm and a hand with the very last piece of orange gauze. This hand reaches out to feel the puff of smoke.
I also added some black lace across the top of the wall hanging to mirror the horizontal element of the blanket that extends across the fire. The negative spaces in the lace look like heads and torsos of people making a line across the sky. No, this is not a lonely place at all.
Hidden in the smoke clouds are more hands, seeking more ways of connecting.
I moved the bottom of the fire over to give my girl part room. There she was looking up at the smoke signals and I realized that one form of her loneliness was a longing to be connected to something bigger than herself.
In puzzling how to covey this kind of connection I got the idea of hands coming out of the smoke signal clouds reaching beyond to the twilight sky. The first hand I made out of orange felt was big and three dimensional. Then I made a more abstract hand out of the back of the fire material to reach further into the unknown and the sky. In response a shimmery silver element comes out of the sky and reaches out to hands. I added a child's hand at the bottom of this hand chain, for after all, it is my five year old part who is giving up the burden of loneliness.
August 2012 version November 2012 version after more work
Finally I used some sheer gray material to go from the lonely heart of my little girl part to join with the smoke clouds as they travel up in the unburdening process.
Now it is November 2012. We'll see if this wall hanging is complete.
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