Captured as I was with "The Secret Knowledge of Water" I knew that I had to create it in stitch. Somehow I wanted to reflect the words I had read. Somehow I want to recreate water, hidden in the desert caverns, canyons and arroyos. I wanted to look beneath the surface and see it calmly gathering in pools. Perhaps bubbling up in places neither I nor any other human would ever see. "This was not the kind of water that could make war on the desert. It was a secret, a softly spoken word that the surrounding desert could not hear. If the sun ever found it, it would be gone in days. This was an artifact of the last rain, which had sheeted over the face of this isolated mountain and just happened to catch in this dark place where a block of stone had fallen, leaving a hole like the pulling of a tooth." - Craig Childs
This has been my reading, these cold, wintry days. A book by Craig Childs which takes in his two year quest for water in the desert. I wanted to put some of his words into this posting because he is such an eloquent author. Searching for pools, seeps, streams, ponds, rivers and even flash floods in our Southwest desert country - he took me on an adventure that I will never forget. "The desert breathed and then went silent at the first mention of nightfall, a kind of quiet that comes only at the edge of the earth."
Reading his words I was determined to capture a small few of them in stitchery. Thus came about this working of the threads in "Magical Water" - a piece that is still in progress. Don't you love it that we, with our hands, our minds and our hearts can capture moments, events and most of all our deepest feelings? "It is always like this finding the source of water - a second of silence, the clandestine enchantment of encountering something small and sacred, then down on knees to see where it actually appears, how far inside I can reach." - Craig Childs
