Tag: Embroidery
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Amber
“And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.” – Ezekiel 1:4 Traded between the continents as early as 12,500…
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The Dragonfly
The Brazilian poet Mário Quintana was quoted to have said, “Don’t waste your time chasing butterflies. Mend your garden, and the butterflies will come.” As a gardener, I can say that birds will come as soon as there’s a slightest sighting of fruits, flowers, a water puddle, or even just freshly tilled soil, but it’s…
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The Water Lily
“And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” – Matthew 6:28 In his Sermon on the Mount, while speaking to his followers upon their anxiety about clothing, Jesus evoked the image of the flower lily. Particularly notable is his skillful…
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Blackwork
Blackwork is the term for impressing design patterns onto the skin with black, sometimes red, color pigments, including temporary dyes such as henna and tattooing dyes such as soot. Produced with combs, needles, and cutting tools, using techniques such as hand-tapped, hand-poked, skin-cut, and skin-stitched, numerous societies practice blackwork to express cultural identities, rituals, histories,…
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Journey to the Other World
In Polynesian parable, to lift the sky meant to expand the known world. Each discovery enlarged the habitable world, raising the height of the sky. Polynesians envisioned the Sky or the Heavens as a huge cupola covering their sea and islands. The sky cupola housed all the stars and heavenly bodies. When the Europeans appeared,…
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The Fish Hook of Maui
The story of the Polynesian Demi-God Maui fishing up islands explains the creation of the Hawaiian islands. In Polynesian lores, “fishing up islands” means to discover different islands, or to fish islands out from the sea. The story of Maui wishing to catch a big fish as an analogy for uniting the Hawaiian islands goes…
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The Rainbow Bride
In the history of civilizations, there is but one record of fusion of two separate cultures: the Indo-Greek Kingdom, covering modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northwestern India. During the two centuries of their rule, the Indo-Greek kings combined the Greek and Indian languages and symbols and blended Greek and Indian ideas. The diffusion of the Indo-Greek…
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The Ides of March
“Soothsayer: Beware the ides of March. Caesar: He is a dreamer. Let us leave him. Pass.” – William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar In ancient Roman times, the ides marked the full moon of each month. Since their calendar began with March, it was the first full moon of the year. As the ides were sacred to…
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The Look of Love
If the 1960’s popularized twig-like Mod girls in mini-skirts and go-go boots and the 1970’s rebelled with the punk rockers, then the 1980’s ushered in the decade of the business woman. While women still earned less than their male counterpart, more and more were entering into high-status, high-paying jobs, and into power dressing. For a…
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The Pink Flamingo
To muse about the pink flamingo, one must first look back into the history of American landscape design to visit Andrew Jackson Downing, considered the father of American landscape architecture. A devotee of the English school of garden design, Downing designed landscapes for country estates throughout the Northeast early in his career, while aiming to…
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