After | March 16

Each day dashes along and my inclination for poetry skips and stumbles to keep up. The thought of all the moments lost in the journey is sometimes weighty, but this life is only the beginning, thank God, and I don’t need to be afraid to let things pass by, lived but unrecorded. Un-lived moments are quite another case, of course. How many prayers I must lift heavy to Him to redeem. Redeemed they will be though, because this is only the beginning.

So friends, forgive all the unrecorded moments, and please accept the offering of the few I have.

Morocco was several weeks ago for me now, for I’ve been slow to write in the fast of the next thing on the itinerary. But my experience still beat quite strong inside. Being in a place for as short and as long as six weeks is an interesting phenomenon, especially for an artist perhaps. Six weeks of intake - purposeful seeing, recording, reflecting, producing - and I’m left with an intense feeling of only having started as the flight attendant points me to my seat with a weary smile. As I watch the sun’s first morning glow through the window, I take a deep breath and ask, what did I do these last six weeks?

At first I feel a little uncomfortable with the answer. I have only one piece of artwork entirely completed, rolled up safe in a pile of cargo under my seat. Deep breath, Carrie. Grace, Lord, grace on my industrial-bent thoughts. I must go deeper than numbers! I met Safaa Erruas and saw her work, as well as a number of other Moroccan artists. I had wonderful conversation with my host family and fellow art students about art and life and the weather and Morocco and beauty and endangered primates. Quoting has never been a strength of mine, not even of songs I’ve sung a hundred times, but as lyric-less humming brings the comfort of the song to mind, so the sense of all those conversations and their pauses are imprinted on me. They followed my thread through the canvas with the steady thub thug of my machine. They too are in the hold flying with me.

Before this time, I didn’t know the bewildering experience of responding to fast Arabic coming from a very determined speaker, her expectation of understanding blinking through her rimmed glasses. Smehili. Shwia Arabia, schwia, schwiiiia! The sound of the place - all it’s rooms and people and ideas - echoes in my mind. New life-line Arabic words crowd out old ones, tickling my tongue to use them, though no one here will understand. Ingrained by eagerness and desperation they lie rather offended on my mind while I dig out old Swahili phrases. For now they will have to be satisfied to be poetic tools, stored carefully beside the mountain shadows, rimmed glasses, and piles of rosemary and mint under my studio window.

Can you see how grace sweeps over that one piece of embroidery I labored on? My learning has included many things, not only new words and complicated stitches, though those are important. It has collected colors and shapes never seen before. It has felt the breathlessness of a crushed bus ride near sundown. Time spent in this kind of learning - experiences, thoughts, and glimpses - is time well spent indeed.