flag

Last year our dear friends moved down to live on their boat in LA.We hope they won't be gone long, and we miss them terribly, sometimes, but of course we also wish them the most fabulous adventure possible. So I made them a tiny flag, last year. I had no idea what I was doing, and just sewed it up out of some little scraps of bright-coloured non-absorbent fabric. Well of course, a few months into it's bright-hot-windy life atop a California sailboat, there is pretty much nothing left of it. So I had to make a new one. This time I actually went and bought light-fast rip-stop nylon flag material from the Flag Shop in Vancouver, where the staff was all extremely helpful (and amenable to my wandering unschooled kids' curiosities). I managed to get all the fabric I needed from their scraps (thereby avoiding buying 10x the amount I needed), and got a wealth of valuable flag-making advice from their seamstress.

So here's the new flag; about 15 or 20 times the size of the last one, I think, and hopefully a lot more durable!! Suki and Jon's reactions and happiness were really SO worth the many many hours it took me to make this.

The sun is supposed to catch the light of the real sun... in this case it's a black hole sun, with Suki's coat showing through!

And now I've come to understand what a flag is. It's like a quilt or a tapestry. It's a piece of well-intentioned energetic magic, when it's done properly. The many many thousands of stitches (never mind that I used a sewing machine; it's still meditative) are a conduit for a constant flow of thought and energy. This flag has worked into it so much love and joy that it can't help but be the carrier of that energy into my friends' future. The symbolism grew out of that meditative work, but it's also a traditional part of a flag's power. The island on the flag is, of course, our island (the one they've left, with so many people who keep them in our hearts), and the wind in the sunlight is to give them good winds for coming and going... so they can adventure but will always be able to come back home when the time is right for them.

So that's my journey into meditative product-oriented energy work. Hm. I like it!