Small World

“She displays a tendency to focus on the details of a subject and failure to take in the bigger picture” - Mrs Blair P1 school report

“Patience with small details makes perfect large work, like the universe” - Rumi

A shift in perspective from the macro to the micro.  Stepping out of one’s role in the overwhelm and becoming omniscient author in a more manageable world.

Through the process of foraging our perspective shifts.  Patterns, forms and characters reveal themselves; shyly at first then gradually, greeting us warmly, as old familiar friends.  We recognise patterns and systems from within ourselves; our breathing, gestating, transforming, living and dying natural selves.

We meet our natural self with grounded certainty.  Our constructed human ego abates with a wave of relief.  Our complexities settle into the great web of life, we step back, relinquish ego, embrace insignificance.  Seedheads, Birdsong, light and breeze rise like mountains, we slip into the valley between them, dwarfed by their magnitude we can finally just be.

Entering the garden with empty hands we practice a permaculture process.  We are open, responsive, curious.  We learn to be led by the particular contours and gestures of that season and moment.  We have to become deeply engaged in the here and now and let go of preconceived ideas to create in partnership with this place.

“Just by looking at nature, I feel as if I’m being swallowed up into it, and in that moment I get a sensation that my body’s now a speck, a speck from long before I was born, a speck that is melting into nature herself.  This sensation is so amazing that I forget that I’m a human being, and one with special needs to boot.” - Naoki Higashida “The Reason I Jump”

Maia works systematically; gathering, ordering, arranging; patterns, shapes, pathways, worlds.  Her head hung snowdrop low, inverting and abating the world completely.  As she places; petals, seeds, leaves the barely audible babble of her narrative streams.  She voices the story that is unfolding in her tiny hands.  Gently, inwardly leading and following the story of the small perfect world to which she is guardian.

Images by Kieran Perry

She seeks, places, narrates in perpetual motion.  A tightly woven cycle with no beginning or end.  Is it the placement seeking the narrative? Or the narrative speaking the placement? Impossible to tell now the wheel is spinning a seamless interaction between object, hand and thought.  Perceiving, placing, narrating; weaving a rhythmic trajectory we know in our bones.  A pattern carried down through generations of women sitting by the fireside, spinning and narrating.  Spinning, words, spinning stories, literally spinning a yarn.

It is the rhythm of women waulking cloth into felt, of fishermen rowing boats, of monks counting beads.  It is an indigenous pattern that is instinctive, connective and creative.  It anchors us in mindfulness to each other, the moment, the process and material and through this we relinquish ourselves and allow space for transformation.  Yarn is spun, stories unfold, journeys are made and visions alight.