Our First Indigo Shibori Prayer Flags

Today we finished our first two sets of prayer flags. Somehow it is always a little bit strange how what is just an idea one day—an idea which excites us but which we are not sure will ever come to fruition—is suddenly completed, and we are not even sure how it came to be. What was most wonderful I think about completing one was how, by the end of the process, while we knew it was by our own hands it was made, it seemed in some ways as though it had made itself. Each of our own individual hands was printed upon it in some way, whether by dyeing the reused fabric with indigo or sewing it to the string, but it was not only one of ours to claim. By the end, it was all of ours individually, collectively, and somehow also beyond our own hand’s creation.

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Each of us in our own ways are confronting the challenge of making our own ways in the world, of applying the skills and knowledge we learned in school to the actions of the world outside the academic environment. We each have different yet overlapping backgrounds and interests. Alex studied design at Parsons during which she started a small design shop with other students and spent a summer learning from and designing with Mayan weavers in Guatemala; Sophie studied environmental education at a Warren Wilson, a small rural school in North Carolina and learned weaving from Appalachian women; and I studied political philosophy at UC Berkeley, focusing on nonviolent philosophy while volunteering and writing for environmental organizations on campus. I find our diverse backgrounds to be one of the most interesting things about us working together as we can contribute and teach each other things which the others may not have learned. And yet, it is also interesting how despite our differing backgrounds, we are all experiencing similar difficulties with acting in the world, figuring out specifically how to apply our learned principles to our work and action. For Alex, I think it is mostly the anxiety of attempting to insert herself as a designer within an industry which seems mostly populated by rampant consumerism and competition. For Sophie, it is learning how and knowing when to soften her internal voice chiding her for all the effects people’s consumption, including her own, have on the world so that she may truly act. And for me, it is matching my exhaustively thought-out theories, principles and critiques with concrete action. Thus, we are all in some way paralyzed by our thoughts, our knowledge. We have learned much and yet are fearful that our actions may go awry from our principles, that somehow we will act in a way that, if others were to do the same, we would criticize. School is often a place for great knowledge, but not always, we are beginning to learn, for wisdom. Wisdom comes through applied action, through being in the world. And while a well wrought critique or theory is always helpful to have in developing wisdom, if such thought only paralyzes, wisdom cannot be cultivated.

We started this collective as a way to align our principles with our constructive practices. What is interesting is that we did not overcome our paralysis before beginning to create, but are learning to overcome it through our creation, trusting that our core ideals and principles are not lost even if we are not always so consciously thinking about them. Our practice then is one of healing through doing. It is as much a practice for ourselves to learn as it is an action to celebrate our ideals in order to share with others.

When we get together to create, it is never a hurried process. We sit down, sometimes talking and sharing our thoughts on what we are doing, or something we are experiencing in our lives. Often times we just sit in the silence of our action. It is extraordinary to feel that not only can we make handmade things, slowing down our lives to create something beautiful to share with others, but we can also, as Alex put it, make handmade lives. Through our doing, through the materials we use and the processes we utilize, we are healing ourselves, our environments and others. All of our anxieties and frustrations somehow dispel into the space we create between and with each other. There is never a rushed pace, but just clear and focused doing, which really seems like no work at all. It is a space, I believe, which is a truly feminine space. We all are a bit apprehensive about reifying gender categories and laying strict dichotomies, yet we have also realized that truly understanding our feminine qualities and their masculine counterparts is, perhaps paradoxically, a way to overcome the confining aspects of such a dichotomy. 

Above all, our practice is an experiment in transforming our relationship to the things of this world. At one extreme, this relationship is one of destruction, overconsumption and wastefulness. At the other extreme lies an ascetic life, a life which perhaps one day we will willfully take, but for a love of this world, we believe the challenge is to learn to live among it, to be of the world and in the world. Beauty is a human need, we think, and while our desire for beauty can easily become a 'lusting after,' a 'needing­ to­ possess,' if properly nurtured, beauty can be a most intuitive way into understanding our relationship to the things around us. Our belongings then become precious relics rich in narrative, rather than expendable things to be eventually replaced by something whose value lies solely in its newness.

This is an experiment we are undertaking together, an experiment to align our political, aesthetic and social ideals with our individual and collective actions in the world.