The flowers you pressed in a book in California — they aren’t for later.

They’re for the glowing now. The now that refused to pick them later.

The stinging nettle is connected to the freshly dyed yarn. You released some of it in other states. Some of it lives here now, in the Amazon, in a home that feels cleaner than the one you left.

The plant remnants are like the strands of your own hair you keep. Oddly enough. And toss into the air wherever you are, because both of your parents said the birds would use them

Ocean grass

I noticed.

There is something about neighbors. Who know your comings and goings. Your friends out last summer. Your project, how did it go?

People who remember what changes have happened to your front door. People being decent, slightly-interested, right there.

The neighborhood scene is the ultimate anti-apocalypse.

Who else notices?

More from Colby, Kansas

I started looking for yucca by the side of the highway, after Liz, my Lawrence, Kansas-based fiber teacher, taught me how to scrape off the green and make cordage from what’s underneath.

On the car ride out of town, my stepfather mentioned there is a large yucca plant in our backyard.

I had been looking for it out there, and there it was. In the garden at home.

There is also a snake plant sitting next to our fireplace, full of fiber. It came from West Africa and has never been outside. There are cosmos and hibiscus in the backyard, excellent for dyeing.

What is actually out there, is in fact, in here.

Needle grass from Colby, Kansas. It’s terrible for both dyeing and weaving.

If you care to document the colors of a place.

It means what it meant at the Amazon Lodge, when someone gestured and out of nothing seen, there was a bird.

What does it mean that after a lifetime of looking at flowers, my stepfather picks up cosmos and sees that its petals might also tint washed-white wool.

Toxic red berries that previously didn’t exist to us have a name.

Pokeberries.

They turn the pot a blood red.

We put the vinegar in first

.

Why?

Because all of it is yours, too.

All the natural dyes from the plants.

All of the sumac leaves, goldenrods, osage oranges and black walnut.

In the words of David Whyte, everything is waiting for you.

Wear the crown.

Another friend described eating banana bread on the back of a motorcycle during a bike trip in Peru.

Who puts such things together? And yet these combinations are everywhere.

The more I let them enter my dreams, the more I consider: none of this could be scripted. Life is stranger than what I could generate with my own mind — if we permit ourselves to be as weird as we actually are.

The older man next to me was so engaged in conversation with his friend that I felt uncomfortable being on my phone.

How was I going to shrink into a screen with such relationity on display?

I started to cough mid-bite of my dessert. In an instant he looked over and offered me the glass of water on his table.

“Take this, I haven’t touched it.”

I immediately did.

And the crystallized humanity cut through my whole social universe.

I walked the street after, eyes wide. I was still recounting it to a friend after arriving in Texas.

How many days of tension does simple humanity generate?

My house is odd — tall, with very poor drainage. Mini floods happen. Weird corners of my kitchen turn into watery caves that will not leave.

I stood and asked myself, “But where does this water come from?”

It’s like my kitten, always waiting at my door.

There is always a small drainage issue making footprints unavoidable. There is also a meowing creature that demands my attention at four a.m.

Why? Because she wants to play.

There is a permanency to the chaos and affection of life itself. On its smallest scale, perhaps, it’s the most visible to me.

I used to do theater in high school. So many plays. I wrote plays. I directed plays. I acted in plays, and now I nearly never think about it. I wore a wig and white make-up in Amadeus. I played Mary in The Crucible, which had one line. I wrote a short play called “Sunday Afternoon” and slipped out the back of the theater during the performance, my seventeen-year-old self.

Maybe I like a real life that’s artistic but outside. Not performed but merely enacted, pushed forth like someone giving birth to each new thing,

odd word sounds coming out of my mouth as I form them.

For the record: I created a cozy and dark home inside that theater. I needed it.

But of all the things I have pursued in my life,

actor is not on the list.

Sunsets only happen once per day.

The rest of it is existence. A lot of it is just a body occupying an uninteresting space, in an uninteresting moment.

I am relieved by this.

We are human beings and we already exist.

That’s a lot better than the alternative.

You aren’t who you hoped.

None of us are.

You can remember that like all of us, we stand on an existential miracle and also grace.

You can receive yourself in the same way your recently lost and found kitten waits by the door.

The ultimate hospitality is our own.

I saw them on the checkered red and white paper. From somewhere. From some table in my mind I didn’t know I had a reservation at. But where? In what room of my own castle does this come from?

I am excited to report that adulthood has mystery. It really does. Mystery that shows up in odd packages, exciting packages, packages you didn’t order and can’t return.

Mystery that turns into awe when community truly comes together. And the wrapping is the thing: collaboration, people, showing up.

This is the life I want to be living. And it’s the life I’m privileged to be living. Mysterious, blessed, beloved community.

And so it is.

For more: https://annakohlersmith.com/blog

I realized this yesterday, drinking coffee with my niece at the mall. There I was, fifteen again. That’s all it took.

There’s a candle burning quietly in my apartment most of the time. That must be why I light it day after day.

The hands-stretched-in-prayer is a good stretch for textile artists. It brings me back to the quiet center line of years of yoga practice and teaching.

The pink satin pillowcase my partner’s mom just fixed is the same one my own mom gifted me. It’s the color of a kid who is cared for.

Little loops want to close. Things tend toward their own full circle.

Let them.

Whether or not the cat took up space on the sidewalk didn’t determine whether we saw her. The human, either.

Really seeing something implicates us in it. Another word for this is witnessing.

Seeing throws coins into the situation. Often more than we’d like.

It asks us to have a small shelf somewhere — a place where the existence of the other can go. The street cat. The person sleeping in a doorway. The thing we walked past yesterday.

This just happened to me. A kitty on my block who seemed to see me back. My gaze shifted. Now she’s sitting next to me.

But I keep thinking about all the other homeless cats.

It applies to all of us.

What we may be witnesses to ourselves, just as we witness the suffering in the world.

May we also be witnesses to our true emotions, the emotions that come with caring and truly seeing.

May we remember— as this fellowship has taught us — that witnessing itself is an act of love and the true foundation.

May we not force flowers, but honor the real timing of things.

May we not open the box before it is ready. May we find patience and grace in the deepest corners of our own darkness.

May we continue the slow plod in the garden, one step taken after another. May we honor real grief and real heartbreak. May we allow confusion to fill our cavities the way light fills a room.

May we not abandon ourselves. And when we do—— may we return quickly, and without cruelty.

May we stay with ourselves. May we practice awareness toward ourselves the way we have practiced witness toward each other.

May we be witnesses to our own transformation.

May we know that love is ours. That art is ours. That all of the tools and community are ours — and that is not changing.

And may we sit —

quietly,

in the stillness at the center of everything.

Not the way fingers accurately detect the feeling of a keyboard as you write this.

There’s a sensory awareness in there with no clean name. It’s only partially made known to us — in dreams, sometimes. In that moment just before waking when you almost had it.

AI doesn’t write in my voice. It can get slightly close. But it doesn’t pull in whatever last night was dreamed about. It won’t generate the randomness. It can receive randomness, and order — but not the kind that comes from a truly conscious mind, which holds both at once without trying.

At a spiritual or metaphysical level, the great human mystery doesn’t come from commands.

It comes from what we don’t know but can only vaguely grasp at. Often poorly. Often wrong. It requires a forgetting and a remembering. It requires clouds to burst through until something inside of you breaks open to remember them.

Who knows why.

What do you think? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

It comes through the act of making — the same making of textiles that has wrapped us since birth. Right now it’s my obsession with threads, with ancestry, with family — with joining the circle of women who have created and gossiped and shared stories since humans started doing it at all.

Five thousand years of this. The looping method came before the loom did. Before ceramics did.

Which means more hands, more creation, more lineage, more patience. More human.

And perhaps a better understanding that optimization was never the point. The messy threads are.

Yesterday I went to the beach in Lima.

The Pacific doesn’t perform. It simply continues. With or without me standing in front of it, with or without my offering anything to it. Without my will or conscious effort or even existence. It holds all and returns nothing. It moves with a kind of power that isn’t interested in being witnessed.

The repetition is total. And yet I never caught it repeating. That’s the thing about the ocean — it’s doing the same thing endlessly and somehow it never is.

For a couple of hours the soundscape filled every available channel. Nothing else got in. Pure input. Gracious input. The kind you don’t have to do anything with.

The ocean rang and I answered.

It doesn’t belong just to this moment. It belongs to the eons — to everyone who ever sat inside a dark night of the soul and decided to take a long, loving look at the real. We are in excellent, excellent human struggle company.

That includes you. That includes all of us. For those tired of slow internet, loud traffic, and selfish decision-making.

They didn’t hit fast forward. They just kept going. One step after another.

And so it is.