Day: November 19, 2015

The Fiber Chair is becoming a centerpiece and a focal point of our life at Bedlam Farm, it seems, something about it is drawing people and animals to it. Minnie sits on in the sun all day, even Fate likes to sit with Maria quietly when she works.

Maria works on it every morning, and has for the past year or more.  It changes every day. The chair was a disintegrating old rattan chair with no seat, Maria has brought it back to life and see it’s potential as a work of art, which it now is.

This morning, she told me she had given the chair a name. She has named it Rapunzel, after the Grimm’s Fairy Tale which tells the story of Rapunzel, a beautiful maiden locked in a tower. She has beautiful long hair, she lets it down and it permits her lover Shahnameh to climb up to her tower and set her free.

In the Disney telling of the story, Rapunzel is a prisoner in the tower, where she has spent much of her life along with her Chameleon friend Pascal.

I see why Maria chose it – she is drawn to tales of liberation and freedom involving women. Her art has always have a feminist thread.

She is working her magic on this abandoned old chair with macrame, a form of textile-making using knotting rather than weaving. So the Fiber Chair is reborn and reborn again. Now, a name to give her identity. Her name is Rapunzel and she has beautiful hair as well. Soon, we will put Rapunzel back in the barn as the winter approaches, Maria can continue working on her there, next to the hay bales, the source of the green twine.

 

The New Colossus

 

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand,

A mighty woman with a torch,

whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name,

Mother of Exiles.

From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mile eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp,”

cries she

With silent lips.

“Give me your tired, your poor,

your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless,

tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

 

–  By Emma Lazarus,

her poem is  graven on a table within the pedestal on which stands The Statue Of Liberty in New York harbor. My grandmother Minnie often told me of the tears she and her family shed upon seeing this statue, her first real sight of America. I knew, she said, that I was at last safe, and at last free.