Q: What are the best ways to prepare my children for the coming chaos?
A: You can teach them to sew, to farm, to build. Techniques for calming a fearful mind might be the most useful though.

(Jenny Offill, Weather)

Last June I took part in a G20 Arts Collective outdoor art trail in the Westend of Glasgow—it was cold and raining—not ideal for some artists’ paper-based impressions of “Tenement Streets”, the title of the project. My contribution was the “Clootie Bridge”—you may remember my article on it.* I had asked passers-by on the local footbridge over the river Kelvin to write messages of gratitude, concern, connection, and well-wishing onto strips of fabric and tie them to the railings. This was reminiscent of the Celtic tradition of attaching “clooties” (lit. pieces of cloth) to trees near healing wells. They looked like colorful prayer flags, flying high in the fierce wind, in shades of teal and blue, mixed with kingfisher reds, orange and purple—my beloved old IKEA duvet cover torn to shreds for the project. Judging from the willing participation and comments of passers-by, the project was perceived as a meaningful ritual with a clear ecological message: don’t spoil something so beautiful and essential for our survival. Take care—“we rise and fall together” as one of the messages read.

I decided, somewhat ruefully, to take down the strips after four days. The clootie bridge had taken on a life of its own—further messages and even jewelry appeared on the railings, but some clooties had been cut off, and I wanted to save them for a next stage of the project, a G20 Art Collective exhibition based on the trail. At that stage I had no concrete idea what this might entail. I kept them, together with the remaining charity shop bought bedlinen in a couple of large bags under my bed—a simmering presence, alive with people’s feelings and longings, with the sound and movement of the river and with creative potential.

Nearer to the deadline for the exhibition, I picked up a spark of creativity in conversation with one of the other artists, a photographer and suddenly it was clear: I would knit the material together into a long, river-like piece of fabric. This would be an interlacing of many strands: honoring people’s heartfelt words, recycling the material in yet another way, an allusion to the river and an homage to the roots of human craftmanship. My mother taught me to knit. Hers was a generation for whom making things with their hands, knitting, crocheting, sewing was an essential, unquestioned element in the texture of life—far more than a hobby. Recycling was a necessity—we were poor and she would save buttons and zips from garments that were no longer useable. In many cultures, it is very common to recycle used clothing, such as saris, into other useful objects like bags and rugs.

I bought the longest, thick circular knitting needles I could find and soon found myself in the soothing, repetitive rhythm of it. There is something about the regularity of the movements and sounds—the same, but slightly varied—that recalls natural phenomena, such as a flowing river. It quiets the mind without switching it off altogether. Sometimes, I knitted while listening to a podcast, giving it half my attention. At other times my full focus was required: re-reading the messages, cutting some out for further use, stepping back to see the whole piece, making decisions about which colors to place next to which, and sewing the strips together. I enjoyed both, the immersion and taking the bigger perspective, in ways similar to meditation practice.

There was no plan for what the piece would look like. I was working within given parameters—these particular strips, these colors, this weight and width of fabric—and let it emerge in an improvisatory way. This is the great pleasure of the artist’s way of being, whether or not you would give yourself that label. We inherit materials: family, culture, circumstance, the particular mess and beauty of the moment we happen to be living in. There are risks and uncertainty and the choice between going it safe or open to the adventure, to the great unknown. As Derek Mahon says in his poem “Everything is going to be alright:”

There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart;

(The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation)

When I cast the piece off, I left a long strip of cloth hanging, not sure yet to what purpose.

Then I decided to make a video, as part of my presentation at the show. During the project, I had taken photos and video clips with my phone camera, just in case, and I knew I would need some additional footage, documenting aspects of river pollution. So I set out for a walk along the river walkway, on the look-out for slimy, dangling plastic bags and rusty, dumped shopping trolleys. To my astonishment, I didn’t find anything of that sort—the water looked a little dull, there was a preponderance of wild leek, but someone had collected all the rubbish, my guess: The Friends of the River Kelvin.

So I headed the other way, towards the housing estate, and soon enough, found plenty of material for my movie. Clearly, care for the natural world is unevenly distributed along lines of community and class. During the event, I was delighted that some of the rougher-looking folk passing by also stopped to look at the messages. “Feel free to touch and leave in a different shape” was the message I wrote on the remaining strip, and many visitors at the exhibition did so, becoming partakers in the experimental, collaborative spirit of the project. “Beautiful” was a frequent comment and I let that land, rather than deflect it. There can be a view, in environmental and activist circles, that attending to beauty is a kind of self-indulgence—that when the world is in crisis, making something lovely is at best a distraction and at worst a form of looking away. I don’t believe this. Beauty does something that urgency alone cannot: it opens people. It creates a pause in the relentless forward motion of anxiety and makes room, briefly, for something else, something more sensitive, contemplative, resonant, attuned. We are more likely to protect what we love, and we are more likely to love what we have allowed ourselves to find beautiful.

I wonder what activities in your life, whether solitary or collective, might renew your restorative and caring connection with nature? What activities might soothe, refresh, stimulate and connect you to something older than yourself? Projects that you start without fully knowing the outcome or that may have a secret ritualistic element to them, weaving a charm of protection. It might be gardening, cooking, a craft half-forgotten or an abandoned form of creative expression. Or it may be meditating. Let yourself believe that such activities are a way of bowing to the web of interconnected life and contributing to its health.

So what will happen to the knitted piece next? Eventually, it will, more obviously, cease to be “mine”—it may unravel, be eaten by moths—who knows? Rivers don’t end, they transform.  For now, I have folded it and placed as an altar under our wooden Buddha figure.

*  Clootie Bridge: An Art Ritual to Awaken our Ecological Selves (BDG)

See more

Everything Is Going to Be All Right (Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation)
The Friends of the River Kelvin

Related features from BDG

Notice the Beauty in the Present Moment
Opening to Beauty
The Beauty and Grief of Being Alive
“Beauty that Floats on Mud”