Another Goodbye

Another Goodbye

Today I say goodbye to a large collection of my art. Again.

Ever since the great smoky weeks of 2020, I have worried about the large collection of my artwork that I keep at home. Here in the rainforest, it does not rain much anymore. The trees get thirsty and dry. Each year, the fire season lasts longer. I live in a fuel loaded forest that is no longer burned every other year to reduce the underbrush as was once the case, when the native people managed the land. Of course there were no houses then either. The people were nomadic and visited here on a rotation schedule.

These days the doom looms. No underbrush clearing, combines with global climate catastrophe, a so far twenty year long mega drought of the kind last seen a thousand years ago, and the tension is palpable here on windy hot days.

I think through the scenarios. I realize that I would be OK with losing a house, with all of its replaceable furnishings, but I would not want to lose the years and years of art.  

Hence, the yearly goodbyes. I pack it up in plastic and stash it at a storage rental place. But now it occurs to me, what if fire comes to the storage place?! There is only one storage rental in town that is not in the flood plane. There would be a flood, you see, if the BIG ONE happens. WHEN it happens. We could get a great quake here at any time, magnitude nine. There are eleven old dams, in need of repair, positioned above town, which is situated in the flood plane. So I have chosen a storage rental up in the forested, fuel loaded hills. Hmmm.

So today, I say another good bye to the art, the work of decades. This work into which I have poured energy, love, thought, care, time and money. It is a poignant, terrible feeling. 

I’m just practicing though. Why couldn’t I say goodbye to it before, by selling or giving it to the people who might love it too? Maybe because I love it more?

Do I love it too much? What kind of love is this anyway, to keep your beloved work wrapped up in the dark, in plastic bags, and shut up in a locked tin building?!

Someday too soon, the art will just be a pile of dust anyway, along with my body and those of everyone I have ever known. 

So each year, I practice this letting go, this saying goodbye. You never know when it is the last goodbye.

Who Owns This?

Who Owns This?

“Whoever thinks an idea can be copyrighted has already forgotten its source”

I mean, the founders of our country had a good intention when they established copyright laws and patents so creators could benefit from their work. But the legal thicket that has grown up around those concepts is now blocking and stifling creativity. And the protection goes on way too long in time. Also, the sense of ownership and entitlement of individual and corporate creators has grown totally out of proportion.

Culture is a group effort, not a business.

Let’s pare down the issue, for the sake of simplicity, and pretend for a moment, we are a culture with only an oral tradition. As soon as one teller speaks the story, it belongs to the whole tribe. The whole tribe then keeps the story alive. The story teller does not own the story. The hearers now own it.

All art, all music, all literature stands on the shoulders of the previous creator’s work. Without the progenitors, the later work has no context, so no meaning. It is a conversation in the medium of time. A conversation is worthless without a back and forth interaction. Otherwise you are just whistling into the wind, as we might say. Or the tree that falls in the forest that no one hears.

Speaking of these stories and aphorisms, indeed speaking of language, and of speaking, itself, this is, by definition, a shared creation. Ongoing. Where is the meaning or use of a language that is not shared with other speakers? Who first came up with this or that theme, this or that saying? After a while, it is simply a part of all of us. That is its power, and its value.

How about if I were to claim ownership of a letter in the alphabet? Every time you speak a word with my letter, or write it, you have to pay me royalties. Laughable? We can all buy letters, if we have enough money, lawyers, and power, I say. But soon, no one would allowed to write or talk! That is why I now own the whole alphabet. And every work of humans on Earth. And the sun. All of it is mine, but it is not all mine. It is yours too. Each cultural creation is a statement, nested in the context of all that has gone before it, back to the ancestors of the ancestors of the ancestors.

There is an awesome natural food store in Eugene named Sundance. Once upon a time, the legal team of the film festival that also goes by that name, approached the store demanding they drop the name Sundance because they claimed they “owned” it! As it happens, the store had been in business longer than the film festival had been in existence, so the greedy lawyers were thwarted. But the question remained, why did a group that takes its name from a sacred dance of Native Americans think they could buy such a so called property in the first place? The sun dance itself was created as a kind of painful magical self sacrifice ritual designed to make the invading Europeans go away, so, that’s rather ironic! But wait! We all live under the same sun. It is The Sun, the only daystar of the planet. Do not all of us descend from ancestors who danced under the same sun?!

Wait, but…who am I to think this? Best question yet! When inspiration and new ideas flow out of the heads and hands of us creatives, where does it come from? Is not the “original” idea, work of art, etc, what is sought and praised? Other work being dismissed as “derivative”? News flash: It is ALL derivative, folks! It is a natural unfolding and blooming created by the conditions and ripeness of the moment. It is true what they say: that there are no new ideas, just different ways to say them. You update them to the style of the times, to the changing language of the day.

There is also the well known phenomenon of several unacquainted scientists or artists coming up with the same inspiration at once. Why? Again, there is a ripening effect. A shared atmospheric meme space. These discoveries don’t just appear, they have context, and a long development stage preceding them.

It is only the egotism of immature individuals that wants to separate out the part from the whole. It is the child who picks off the flower head without even the stem to hold it up in a vase. The fruit that drops from the tree of culture or science into your hand is only the latest edition. It comes from the All. And the Forever.

You do not exclusively own the thing you made. And you surely did not make yourself. We are all connected, to a whole that goes back so far no one can remember, and is so big, no one can conceive of its enormity. So let’s loosen our boundaries, share, and build a cultural space for each other, with each other.

“Whoever thinks an idea can be copyrighted has already forgotten its source”- (doesn’t matter, right?)

A Colorist’s House

A Colorist’s House

Playing House with Colors

I love to play house. I just can’t believe it sometimes! I am all grown up and can set up a house the way I want to? 

It seems unreal somehow. And it is. In the sense of the Real things, the truly important things, it IS just play acting. For, by my definition, Real Things last forever. So these supposedly real, grown up things, are just toys and games to my artist brain, which is quite childlike. In a way, I am designing a kind of stage set for the theater of life.

So but here I am, fixing up an old house in just the way I would like! It is of course practical, but also, whimsical. It is aspirational, even symbolic, and with an activist dimension. It is the kind of thing you might expect when an artist plays house.

It is the colors you will notice first when you walk in. The stairs and hallway leading up to the second story dwelling, and the landing at the top, are white walled, with black trim. A neutral straight passage. But as soon as you get up there, wow, you see colors in the four directions. 

A bedroom on your left is glowing with a warm and inviting pink. I have dyed the curtains pink as well as painting the walls pink. When the outside light comes in, you are bathed in a wonderful pink glow as the light filters through the curtains. Though not a screaming pink, it is not bashful either. This makes me feel roses. And new beginnings. And love, security, coziness and comfort. So, I get some rose prints for the walls. 

The next room is as blue as the pink room is pink. The effect offers a blue light experience with the walls sky blue, illuminated by curtains I have dyed just the right amount of blue to bring in the light, but fill the space with blue sky peace. So I add cloud feature. (Maybe star stickers too, that glow in the dark?)

The bathroom is alive with butterflies. Monarch butterflies on the wall and shower curtains, and the space is trimmed in black and orange. The old, plastic, originally white, shower walls are hopelessly discolored with an orange tinge, so I just decide to go with it. We hang a nontoxic, neon orange shower curtain up, creating an amazing warm glow. Orange is always a friendly light to a naked body.

It turns out that the butterfly peel off sticker wall paper can be cut out to make individual butterflies. My four year old assistant and I watch as the butterflies get loose and  fly off. Soon they begin to appear on walls all around the house. On the tree. On the roses. Up in the sky of the blue room. Many land at four year old eye level.

This old house has some seventy year old sequoia trees nearby, smiling in through the windows, giving the impression, up here on the second floor, that one is in a tree house. So the kitchen is of course, green. Green walls, green curtains, infused with some sunny yellow. This is a veganish, green minded place of food. A kitchen for a plant based cuisine. I paint a tree mural on the wall, in the transition between living room and kitchen. I wonder if it should have fruit on it? Seems appropriate for a passage into the veganish kitchen.

The living room is a delicate lavender with green and white curtains covered with verdant vine patterns. A kind of spiritual neutral, open to the possibilities of the day; designed to contrast with the sequoias outside. There is green in curtains and couch, and this will also be a room where rainbows flourish. A living room is where you live, right? The full spectrum of possibilities.

The ceiling all throughout is newly refreshed, with a coat of white paint, that serves to convey the color and light in each room. It is a slightly warm white that nevertheless cools off in the light of the blue room. The door frames and window frames are also white: they carry the light energy and vibration of sky. 

But the electrical socket covers, and light switch covers, as well as the molding trim encircling all around the house along the wood floor, holds to the Earth, are painted in a warm brown. Grounding. Tree roots.

It is its own little world, this tree spirited house I am playing in.

“You must never stop being whimsical!” -Mary Oliver

A Fiber Artist’s House

A Fiber Artist’s House


“Every aspect of our lives is, in a sense, a vote for the kind of world we want to live in.” 

-Frances Moore Lappé

We set out to convert an old house into an eco house. From top to bottom, we want to make it healthy and environmentally friendly, both for people inside, and the whole planet around it. We take a look at the situation:

First, we tear out the ancient wall to wall nylon carpet, and find enough finely matriculated dirt underneath to plant a small garden in! Plastic carpets like this are ecosystems for nasty pathogens. They can never be truly cleaned.




“There are two types of cleanliness: organic cleanliness and chemical cleanliness. Often chemical cleanliness is toxic and harmful. Natural or organic cleanliness focus on maintaining harmony with nature.” -Amit Ray




The hard wood floor beneath is solid; so we sand it as smooth as possible and varnish with non toxic plant oil based lacquer. These days, green chemistry makes it possible to find any kind of home care and fixing products now being formulated to green standards. The only reason they all used to be toxic, replete with scary warnings on every can, is we had access to petroleum that was cheaper than water, so companies developed all of their paints, glues, and lacquers with fossil oil. 




Most of the windows are single pane, and have long obsolete, rope opening pulleys; and will no longer open, so we order new ones: the best air is fresh air. 




As a back up, we get an air purifier. A couple of summers ago, we all hunkered down in a closed up house for a couple of weeks, surrounded by a storm of smoke, blackening the sky and blotting out the sun.  The record breaking fire was the result of poor electric infrastructure maintenance, bad forestry practices (the replanted with “monocrop tree farm forest” burned far more than the never logged forest areas), and mega drought, caused by global climate catastrophe.




We check the water supply. Our watershed, serving drinking water to 200,000 people below, is quite clean. This is due to a long term ban on the use of forestry chemicals, now partially suspended but carefully monitored and heavily litigated, and a lot of forest and snowy mountains above feeding it. There are no detectable contaminants, at any level. The filtration system has caught all of the charcoal and debris from the huge forest fires up there a couple of years ago. The water coming INTO the filtration system is so pure, most towns and cities would be overjoyed to have what is coming  OUT of their filtration system be that good!


The roof has a small leak, so we research how to fix it with the idea of eventually putting solar panels up there. We look into solar shingles, but conclude the technology is not quite fully developed enough yet.

The house has a dirty, diesel oil burning, heat system, which is failing, so we begin the process of converting to heat pump, which does both heating and cooling.

The stove is electric, but we recently discovered convection cooking, so we consider if it needs to be replaced.





“Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” – Archbishop Desmond Tutu




But for this fiber artist, the fun part is the soft infrastructure: the furnishings. We want this to be an all organic house. We discover that all bedding and furniture in this country is by law subject to being treated with toxic fire retardant chemicals. This is not in keeping with our organic goal, nor does it make health sense if you consider how much of your life you spend snuggled up with these pillows and mattresses! We find that some bedding is exempt from the requirements to spray these chemicals, the ones that are naturally fire retardant, such as wool.




But wool brings up another issue, how is this wool sourced? Are the animals cherished, or dipped in chemicals, shaved, and cut up to be lamb chops? The best we can do is look for organically grown wool. We order an all organic, chemical free, wool and cotton, futon and bed.

 I find a solid real wood bed frame, not chip and glue board, sourced from nearby forest lands, at a secondhand store.


What about sheets, pillows, and blankets? This leads me to a book, The Fabric of Civilization. Even though cloth is soft, and unlike gold, subject to decay, it has always held a position of great status and value in every culture, the cultural treasure of every land.

 Until modern times, anyway. Now we associate cloth with chemicals, cheapness, plastic pollution, miserable factory conditions, animal abuse, waste, and exploitation of land and water. When we wash our plastic nylon or polyester clothes, the water we use sends microplastics into the water, air, and eventually everywhere on Earth. It is now being found in the bloodstream of humans as well. This is not good.

How do we begin to change that? We start right here at this house, I resolve.








Cotton that is grown organically often has shorter fibers, and can be less soft, so often chemical softeners and other processes are added after the cloth is made. So you have to look for at least two different certifications: the Global Organic Textile Standard certifies that the cotton was grown organically. GOTS is the most widely recognized textile standard built upon the organic production standards. This protects the land and water, and not trivially, the people who work around the fiber plants in the field to grow and handle it. 




But then you must continue to follow your sheets, pillowcases, and blankets. OEKO-TEX® is a worldwide consistent, independent testing and certification system for raw, semi-finished, and finished textile products at all processing levels, as well as accessory materials used. They actually test the finished product, to make sure there is nothing toxic that has been added, on its way to you.




There are other wonderful plant based fabrics. Rayon is shiny, cool, and comfortable. If you have a sarong, it is likely it is made of rayon. But although there is an ongoing attempt now, to develop and purvey environmentally friendly rayon, most is still made using lots of chemicals and lots of water. Bamboo is a lot like rayon, and can easily be grown organically. Bamboo is less water hungry than cotton.




But it suffers from some of the same drawbacks as other plant based fibers after harvesting: these fibers grow in areas of the world where environmental protection and labor conditions may be poorly enforced, or land may be inappropriately converted to fiber production in sensitive areas. But at least, the fabric production process can then be confined to a facility, where, if there is insistence on proper labor and safety standards, it can be accomplished without harm to health and life. That is better than letting pesticides run all over land and water, as in typical cotton fields. 







“Organic farming is about buying out of a corrupt, illegal and dishonest system.” 

-Jerry Brown




But you start where you are, and you do what you can do. And every dollar is a vote. So I get some certified organic GOTS and OEKO-TEX sheets, pillowcases, and blankets.  I’m sure there are cheaters and counterfeits out there, but if we all make an effort, insist on harm reduction, and back it up with inspections, eventually the people and planet friendly ways will become commonplace. Toxic products are only cheaper when we do not include the environmental cost in the price. Better to pay now, for the kind of future we would want. So I put in my order for a clean healthy future, instead of a sick and contentious one.




And as for wool blankets, I got that one! I spin yarn from the raw fleeces of lovely happy sheep from my neighborhood. I know their names, and I know their people, who love them as pets and take good care of them. I weave the blankets myself. It is a true joy:

 Now I’m working on sewing a comforter using those sheets and my wool as batting.




What about pillows? We have been sleep testing different kinds, and I have been making those too. Natural latex, from trees, is chemically quite different from petroleum based latex.

Natural latex:

Dandelion milk contains latex. Its latex exhibits the same quality as the natural rubber from rubber trees. I step out of the house, and find it takes only four steps to reach the nearest dandelion flower. Natural alternatives surround us, we need only ask and look around. (In the wild types of dandelion, latex content varies greatly.)

I make some pillows with organic latex filling, wrapped in a wool batting layer. 

Homemade carded wool batting:

My favorite pillow is currently my buckwheat hull pillow. It is traditional in parts of Asia, but new to the West. My buckwheat pillow is really just a small, but weighty, and somewhat noisy, sack of buckwheat hulls, that I have sewn. It rustles when you move it. But I absolutely love how well you can shape it to your exact preference. And it does hold that shape with soft support.

Buckwheat hulls:

And then there is kapok. (KAY-pock) Kapok grows on tall trees and makes huge fluffy pineapple sized pods, filled with silken cottony fiber. Kapok grows year after year and needs no special care or chemical intervention. It is long lasting: some pillows made of kapok are still in use a hundred years later! It is naturally antibacterial. I have made some kapok pillows with the bale I bought, and like them very much. Unlike polyester pillows, you have to fluff them every day.

Kapok fiber:

“Far from being a “luxury for the rich,” organic farming may turn out to be a necessity not just for the poor, but for everyone.” - Raj Patel




The mattress topper I want will have to wait, because it is too costly to buy unless I save up. It is like a bed sized sheepskin, except no sheep are harmed! Instead the wool of happy well cared for sheep is used to thread through a base of organic cotton canvas to make a natural, thick supportive layer of bouncy vertical wool. It is made here in the northwest by a company called Holy Lamb.


Bit by bit, the eco house is coming together, and it is a learning experience, an act of constructive change, an investment in the kind of planet we want to live on, a work of art, and a spiritual offering.


“An organic farmer is the best peacemaker today, because there is more violence, more death, more destruction, more wars, through a violent industrial agricultural system. And to shift away from that into an agriculture of peace is what organic farming is doing.” -Vandana Shiva







Predator Glamour

Predator Glamour


When I was six, I went to a church run school, where I was introduced to bible stories for the first time. There was the creation story, where Adam and Eve eat some fruit, which somehow, was bad. Then, when they have kids, there is a competition for God’s favor: one son eats animals, the other one eats a plant based diet. I still remember being shocked that God liked the meat eater better! That was the beginning of my suspicion that something was wrong here.


This strange headspace has continued to this day. Everywhere on this violent planet, cultures admire the predators. Hawks, eagles, lions, tigers, bears, sharks. It is a plus if they are poisonous, like cobras, scorpions, or sting rays. We love to name cars, sports teams, and weapons systems after the predators. What is the attraction, the source of this admiration? A predator is a murderer and a thief, violently stealing life force from its prey.  

What is to admire in that? Who can blame animal predators that act on instinct, shaped by long evolution, fitting into their place in nature. Seems like the vultures deserve more admiration, then, for cleaning up the rotting bodies dropped by animals who have moved on and no longer need them?




Why is it that we seem to think if we are not the top killer, we must then be the prey, the victim, the loser? Why this duality? Why do we have to be the biggest baddest scariest predator?




The whole predator-prey duality is the same coin with two sides. We need to rise above the binary. Violence or hate can’t be defeated with the same; only love can encompass and then transcend the binary. As long as we are enthralled with the predator-prey duality, we will not be empowered to garden this beautiful world as the true leaders we fancy ourselves to be. 




We will just be the top predator, living in the self created chains of our fear, destined to be displaced in that role by the next predators to come along.




I have difficulty finding the right words to describe what we are on this planet, if not the apex predator. The masters of the planet? The property managers? The owners? Every description is stuck in this binary of predator and prey, dripping with rankist, dominator based, hierarchical language. 




We are in charge of running the planet? Ruining the planet, maybe. 


We aren’t even in charge of ourselves. We may say we want to have mastery over ourselves, but a lot of damage is being done right now by efforts to have control, not of ourselves, but to exert control over other people. And all of the creatures, and the environment, and even the future of all life on earth!

Maybe we are the keepers of the garden?




Why not be instead, the comprehensive cooperative compassionate gardener? Who is more wise, indeed, more truly powerful? Every positive loving thought, or love motivated action is ten times more creative and powerful than a negative violent one. 




Who is truly worthy of our admiration, the mother who spends years pouring gentle love and attention into the next generation, or the fighter who can kill some hapless animal or person in a single swipe? The gardener who skillfully and patiently works with nature to bring nourishment to many, or the hunter who pounces on prey like a lion?


 We are needed to take responsibility for the whole planet now, with loving care. There is no place for the nonsense of the glamorizing of predatory behavior anymore. Somehow, we must get out of this binary trap. 
The only way to rise above the dominater-victim duality is to stop being the predator and start being the gardener. To give a care, and take care for the whole thing. To think comprehensively, to take whole systems into account when making decisions.  To move in cooperation with the beings and other life forms who together make up ecosystems. To be aware of the trajectory of our actions on the axis of time lines that reach into the future, that have evolved to carry forth the wisdom experience of the past. To truly be in charge of our resources, instead of charging around destroying stuff.




“You can’t take sides when you know the Earth is round” -P. Sun

Travel Threads

Travel Diaries

We are traveling light. 

My fiber yarn of choice for traveling is my embroidery floss bag. 

I gather some twigs fallen from the trees as we wander. 

I like the kind with little knobs on both ends. 

One twig is a perfect equal cross, so it is just right for a God’s eye.

Ojo de Dios.

We are visiting my favorite mountain, and I gather the colors of the mountain and its setting of sky and trees from my yarn bag.

 The center, the focalizing point of the ojo is the mountain, of course. 

It is glistening, snow covered, a crystal outstanding 14,000 feet in the deep blue sky, with the forest greens all around.

First I weave mountain, then sky, then forest. 

Soon I will add tassels.

“Some people have had visions during sacred ceremonies in which they received guidance from Infinite Creator who appeared before them in many shapes, though the eyes of the God were so intense and overwhelming that many could only see the eye of the God. To show others the vision they had, they made the God's eye - woven on sticks with handspun yarn, colored with various types of berries, flowers, and other materials to capture the essence of their vision.” Wikipedia 

I Cherish the Sheep

I Cherish the Sheep

They say every spinner eventually gets curious about other fibers than wool. 

With me, it turns out the other way around.

First, I try various other animal and plant fibers:

The neighbor’s mountaineering pack llama fleece. 

My friend’s prize winning alpaca fleece. 

The guard llama, Blue, down the road from us, who ferociously watches over his own little sheep flock.  

The family dog.

The pet angora rabbit.

The angora goats we had for a while, before they tried to eat all of the native flowers on the land, and we gave them to another sanctuary farm, run by a friends who had a lot of invasive plants to for them to gleefully chew through. 

The cashmere goats we babysat, for a friend, for a few months.

Exotic animals; yak, camel, etc.

Flax.

Organic natural colored cotton.

Rayon. 

Hemp.

Silk. Then raw silk, in which no harm is done to the silkworms. The abandoned cocoons are gathered, picked from the mulberry trees, actually. We even tried to grow some mulberry trees!

This is probably my weirdest fiber collection: It is all of the whiskers that my vegan cat (not his choice I admit) has shed onto the floor, which I have gathered, while vacuuming, over these last several years. 

It is only after trying almost every other fiber I could find, that I take a real interest in the most common natural fiber in the world, wool; rivaled only by silk and of course, cotton.

(Cotton is really the best fiber, when it is grown sustainably and with nontoxic and regenerative methods. The humble tee shirt, and blue jeans, are truly the apex of our civilization, in terms of fiber accomplishments. This is what the royalty of yesteryear would have worn, if they had had it. It is indeed what you see the corporate royalty of today wearing! 

(What Would Jesus Wear?):

But the bulk of these tee shirts and blue jeans are today still being made with pesticide laden, land degrading, water wasting, labor exploiting, fossil fuel polluting technologies. We soon really must do it right, because we can. All we have to do is want to. If we valued our beautiful textiles as our ancestors did, we would take care of them and not lay waste to the planet in their production.)

But I digress. Cotton is really hard to spin by hand, and it makes a dust I do not care to breathe when I try to do so. Silk is usually made by killing the silkworms to make the processing easier and make more profit. So silk has lost its shine for me.

So, slowly, I discover sheep wool. Of course, wool too, today is mostly from unethical and exploitative “big ag” operations, so called farms. There is even a breed of sheep they call a “Polypay”: it is bred to kill for meat AND to then use for wool! Overcrowded sheep are “dipped” in pesticides to keep them from being infested by parasitic insects. They roll across overused lands disrupting and mowing down native plant systems. As with silk, and cotton, we are doing a very bad job with the way we get wool, in general.

But I do find a few sources of what I consider ethical wool for handspinning. There are conservation and heritage breeds and programs. 

This yarn is spun from a threatened heritage breed that has learned to thrive on seaweed on a sparsely vegetated island north of the British isles:

Here are some yarns from another heritage breed farm:

There are neighbors and farms that advertise the way they care for their sheep. (See quote at the end)

We could certainly do this on a wider scale. All we would have to do is, again, want to. It is like organically grown food, if people want to value it, and pay the true cost of the product instead of in effect stealing it from the commons in the form of a pollution debt passed on to the future, we can do it right. 

We do already know how. We could then truly take care of our textiles instead of throwing them away and having them hit the landfill within a year of purchase, as is the case today.

Done right, wool is second only to cotton as a wonderful and ideal fiber. I have fallen in love with sheep, and wool. Sheep wool is really fun to spin. It has a crimp and a bounce. It moisturizes your skin with its natural lanolin oils as you spin. Knitted, it makes a natural elastic. 

 Wool can keep us warm, and shed water. It can hold up to a fourth of its weight in water and still feel warm. It is strong and durable, coming in fiber sizes from tough as needed for a rug, to soft as you would want to use next to a baby’s skin. It comes in a wide range of naturally occurring colors, and takes dye well. The dye need not be a toxic type, and low water dye processes are being pioneered in places like Southern California.

Do not be dazzled by the fancy fibers made of plastic cheapness being cooked up in chemical factories today. Unlike the various fibers made from petroleum industry byproducts, natural fibers completely degrade. Plastic fiber derived cloth just breaks down into ever smaller pieces, and these microscopic bits are now found in air and water everywhere on our planet. Each bit attracts and binds preferentially with pesticides and other toxic chemicals. Once released, these poison bits are all but impossible to remove or reclaim, and are now building up in the food chain, and in the bodies of people and animals worldwide. 

So I buy organically grown clothing, and do my best to use ethical sourced natural fibers in my spinning, knitting, weaving, and art. And I try to take good care of my textiles. 

But individual actions are only a start. While providing personal demonstrations of sustainable alternative ways as object lessons, we also urgently need to convert all of our production systems to sustainable, “cradle to cradle”regenerative methods, by means of fair regulation, figuring in true cost, so harmful methods can no longer out-compete ethical methods.

“We mostly have sheep with a few alpacas, horses, peacocks, geese etc. Any animal here is here for life. We just all do the best we can. I decided years ago that I couldn't save all the animals but I could save my own so that is my focus.” - the farmer from whom I get most of my spinning wool