“Chill airs and wintry winds,
My ear has grown familiar 
With your song,

I hear it in the opening year,
I listen,
And it cheers me long. ”

February 2025: 

As the year begins, there seems to me to be a sense of impatient anticipation. Of waiting and waiting, for a winter that has been rather later in the coming.

As the season deepens into midwinter, and the festivities and lights of the year gone by already begins to dim into memory and sink into the shadows of time, the familiar, simple, humble rhythms of my small life in these woods continues to hold me, while I wait for the wintering gifts that have not yet come to pass, in our neck of the woods.

Although december feels so far away already, I keep the joyfulness and hopefulness of that season alive in small ways inside my own cottage, cocooned away from Mother nature’s relentless march out in Her domain. 

Wool work is of course, central to my wintering work. This beautiful material from nature that allows me to root more fully and more instinctively, into a season that I might have otherwise struggled to feel at home in. Both fragile and resilient, strong and malleable, I feel the need to work with wool in more ways than just in making the insulating garments that hold me in their sheaths of comfort and warmth. 

In winter, I feel the need to have wool all around me. And to give this precious material life and form in ways that bring me joy and make me love a season that might have otherwise been one of darkness, despair. 

This has been what wool has given me. The gentlest armor that allows me to open myself to the cold yet potent gifts of midwinter. 

A mysterious contradiction about this season, is that despite the bareness of the tress, the hardness of the frosty earth, and the feeling that the earth is so very old, it is also a season which brings into sharp contrast the great riches that even the simplest life bestows on us. The simple acts of tending to your most basic needs, of cooking, baking, feeding your family, become even more imbued with significance and importance at this time of year. 

This is something I’ve come to realize only as I’ve grown older, that the more I live in tune with nature’s rhythms actually allowing my priorities to shift with the shifting seasons, the more Life’s riches open up to me. So that not even the hardness of winter can touch that inner wisdom; that life is so very full, and that nature is so very generous. 

In the hyper-modern technological era we live in, there’s an  overwhelming barrage of distraction, of attacks on our individual and collective sensorium. There’s a constant stimulation of sights and sounds and opinions on what it means to Live Well, on what Success and Happiness should look like. 

We all of us fall prey to the demand that we prove, that we validate our very existence by participating in the cacophony of the internet and media and consumption. 

And it is a trap. 

Because how can we possibly nurture and renew the all important, fertile ground of our inner life, of that silent and watchful core from which all our activity and creativity springs forth, if we are not allowed the time and space in which to continue growing, healing, restoring, and shoring up our life energies so that we may blossom into the fullness of our promised spring? 

In a culture that no longer supports nourishment of body and mind, that normalizes burnout, even glorifies it, that applauds productivity as the greatest merit, while demeaning rest and reconnection to nature as laziness and weakness, is it any surprise that our collective experience as humans beings have become so fraught with disconnection and dysfunction? 

I have lived the wrong way at many junctions of my own life. I have felt the impoverishment, of both body and mind and energy, of the deep depletion when you neglect the whisperings of nature to slow down, to dig deep, to shore up and wait for the time of activity. 

So this winter has been a returning for me. A turning inwards, a time of allowing rest, of taking exquisite pleasure in the smallest acts that frame these cold and dark days. 

And the deeper I allow myself the freedom to enjoy quiet moments, like walking through the woods and picking dried foliage for my vases, like taking my time to stroke the moss on our grandpa Maple tree behind the wellhouse, like lingering over the beauty of oso berry buds, that wait so patiently from october to march, without words or thoughts or the filters of the intellect to interrupt the flow of wisdom that happens when you are at one with the woods around you. 

The inner life is everything. And in it I have found the keys to my liberation and my thriving in this world, sitting and twinkling quietly at me, like frost glimmering on woodland paths on winter nights, waiting to be discovered.

Starting as George Orwell began his poetic piece on the arrival of spring, “Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop…”, came the winter I had longed and longed for. 

This past winter has seemed particularly challenging for me. I’ve waited and waited for the snows that used to come and go so heavily and predictably from October to January. But a snow that comes late is better than one that doesn’t come at all. 

The sweetness of snow arrived at last in February. Living on the lower slopes of the Olympic mountains, lorded over by mountain rain shadow and old growth evergreen forests, which loom and sway over the cottage on all sides, snow is a deeply needed bringer of light, and quiet, and an energy of restfulness that is actually quite magically invigorating. 

While that may sound like a contradiction, I think that in Nature there are no contradictions. Only Balance.  So, as the world around me was hushed and lulled to sleep by the snow, I felt like I woke up, for the first time all winter. 

Snow has an energy all its own. An ancient song, vibrating, and pulsing, and sweeping away the heavy cobwebs of wintry inertia with its cold and quiet  ferocity. I can feel it in the way the light in the cottage changes as the first snow settles on the boughs of the cedars. That deeply familiar, ancient energy of snow light settles into shadows and corners of the house, lifting everything up, breathing life and light and a sense of ease that makes you feel that all is as it should be with the world.   

This year, this winter-spring snow brought me out of the homebound doldrums of the weird mildness of November to January. I’m always as excited as my children to rush into the snow and enjoy every precious moment of it. 

Living in the pacific northwest means that your winters are never bare or leafless. There’s always the sea of ferns and evergreens that swell and sway from the deep blue of the pacific ocean to the snow capped peaks running the length of this peninsula. But in winter, the green is decidedly muted. Less alive. 

So when it snows….everything in nature seems gilded and uplifted. Just as I am, I suppose

Spring is often spoken of as the miracle of nature. But in truth, if you pay enough attention to Mother Nature and all her abundant forms, each season has its own particular flavour of the miraculous. Each is full of miracles, small and large.

And as the climate around these woods continues to change and shift so dramatically towards milder and milder winters, Snow seems to me to be the biggest miracle of all. With each passing year, it becomes harder to believe that the snow will ever come at all. 

And yet…here it is. Holding me and healing me in its quiet yet undeniable strength 

I feel an ability to surrender to the energy and physicality of snow, in a way I haven’t surrendered to any other elemental force in my life. For an island girl, born and raised just under 10 degrees north of the equator, this is a very strange feeling indeed. 

Spinning and Wool Work to bridge the Seasonal Gap:
Even with the sudden and welcome arrival of this winter-spring snow, I’ve found the transitional time between February and May to be a difficult bridge to cross.  Do you feel the same way about this time of year?

This year, I’ve turned to my spinning wheel more and more, as an anchor that moors me to the gentle but tangible threads of Hereness and Nowness, as I traverse this liminal time of Not-Quite-Thereness.

The familiar sounds of the spinning wheel and shuttle, flying through the air, join the even more familiar sensation of wool flowing through hands and feet beating an ancient rhythm on the pedals. They whirl and pull and dance, a primal dance my hands have never had to learn. A love language my whole body has always somehow known. 

This act of communing with wool and wheel and watching fiber form before my eyes, connects me to generations upon generations of women before me, with a startling immediacy and an inescapable awareness that the past is living and breathing right here in the present, as I turn wool into thread. 

When crossing turbulent waters, whether its managing the shifting cycles of nature, or the changing seasons of my own personal life, it’s spinning and wool that anchors me to the wisdom that all storms do pass. 

That no matter how perilous the crossing may seem, in nature as in Life,  one season does indeed turn fully into another, that the dregs of winter will pass away and that spring will arrive in its all embracing fullness. 

That no matter what comes, through snow and spring, I will be here, at my wheel, dancing wool into thread, breathing love into life. 

Quote taken from George Orwell’s essay “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad”.

What is the defining quality of a successful knitting project? Is it in the level of execution of knitting skills used during construction? Or perhaps, the visual ‘hanger appeal’ of the final garment? Is it perhaps in the tangible, touchable, feel of a particular wool or yarn and the sensations on the skin? Or is it how particularly photogenic a  knit garment might be, especially when these days ‘photogenic’ is defined, rather unfortunately for both the crafts of photography and knitting, as what is most ‘grammable’ or IG-worthy? My most recently completed jumper has taught me that none of the variables I’ve mentioned come close. For me, how successful a knit has been is determined entirely by its ‘reach-for’ effect.

Since I blocked and dried the Floresta, I’ve reached-for it more than any other wool jumper, hand-knitted or otherwise, in my winter closet. In fact, I often have to come up with excuses for why I “should just wear something else today”. You know, to give the Floresta a break, and find myself inexplicably changing into this vining-twining beauty halfway through the day. There’s no getting away from it. The Floresta is the Knit of the Year for me, and I would happily wear it as my only knit for the remainder of this depressingly mild winter we’re having.

Designed by Elena Sollier, the creator of Xollawool, Floresta is a top down, seamless, yoke jumper, with a split hem. She describes it as:

And yes, the sleeves are definitely longer than any of my other yoked knits, and is a subtle yet completely essential element that adds to the relaxed elegance of this deceptively simple design.

The split hem is another element that takes what might have otherwise been a silhouette that veered a little too much to the ‘comical-boxy’ end of the spectrum, so heavily and unnecessarily popularised by instagram knitfluencers, and firmly but gently glides the Floresta into the arena of effortlessly elegant and eternally fashionable knitwear designs that will always look on-point, even decades from now.

The Floresta was originally designed to be knit in one of Elena Sollier’s own Xollawool yarns; in fingering weight Pastoreta, the 100% Ripollessa Wool that is one of the two yarn lines designed by Elena, who does the heroic work of taking wool from Spanish-breed wool flocks, which would otherwise been destined for the landfills as agricultural ‘waste’, and turning them into beautiful heritage knitting yarns, spun and produced with Elena’s careful attention and guidance. From her commitment to engaging with fast-fading traditional rural economies, through the use of family owned small mills in her local area that spin the wool, to her attempt to reclaim the value and importance of wool fiber, Elena does amazing work, and I look forward to someday working with the original yarn that the Floresta was conceived in.

However, my own Floresta was destined to be knit in what has now become my own signature combination of unspun Nutiden wool and Icelandic laceweight. The deep chocolate Nutiden was held with an almost identical shade of chocolate brown Einband, the Icelandic laceweight produced by Istex. And those striking Rosa Canina vines blossomed to life in Plotulopi, that grand matriarch of commercially available unspun wool. 

I've said this so many times on my youtube podcast; the combination of Nutiden and Einband is my wool fabric match-made-in-sheepy heaven. This magical duo makes the Floresta lighter and yet warmer and more insulating than any other jumper I have knitted in a comparable weight of a fully spun wool. The qualities of insulation without weight is so important to a garment fitting into the way I live. 

I need jumpers that can go back and forth between the wood-fired warmth of our one-room cottage, to the cold, misty, often damp and windy, outdoors of the foothills of the Olympic Mountains where I live. A fabric that breathes in the warmth and holds heat in the cold, that resists mist and rain, dries fast and feels familiar and forgettable on the body. A garment that does not constantly remind you that you have it on.

 I like my knitted fabrics the way I like my favourite people; unassuming and unobtrusive. 

Of course Elena’s pattern also just so happens to fit me perfectly in all the areas that most patterns seem to fail; shoulders and arms, which really is where the look and fit of any garment hangs on. You could get every element of a knitted garment right, you could knit it to exquisite perfection, but if the garment does not fit well in the shoulder girdle and upper chest, there is no distracting from it. I’m just so happy I’ve discovered a designer whose patterns seem made for my body type and shape. 

The reach-for effect of the Floresta is a result of these two beautiful elements, of fit and pattern meeting type of wool and fiber, and I can see myself happily wearing this beauty many, many years from now. 

A Small Life Lived Well: Season 1: Seeds of Change.

In this first season of the podcast we sow seeds for change. 

Wisdom from ancient ways of knowing and being are gently pressed into seed-pods, kernels of ideas, pregnant nuggets in question form, laid carefully into the fertile landscape of the imagination and intellect, the ground where all change truly begins.

Watered with the quiet intention for the ideas presented here to cause a fundamental change; in our mindset, in the stories and narratives that govern our day to day actions and imaginings, in our vision for our future as a species, in our vision for ecological and social change, in our vision for healing the soil of the planet that continues to birth us. 

If you are here you are already receptive, you are already envisioning that there is another way to Be on this planet, another way to Be human, to be Alive, to be A-Life.

 Towards the end of that incredible week, especially on the final stretch as I sat stitching with tired hands late into the night, the whisperings of answers to many of those questions that had started to gather around me at the onset of the work, began to drift into my work-stilled mind. 

How does this work, that looks for all intents and purposes a simple piece of clothing as it hangs here in anticipatory silence, stand apart from something we might identify as fashion or garment or pret a porter? Does even the term ‘couture’ capture the essence of what is crystalizing into my distinctive way of bringing a work of wearable textile art to life?

I approach my construction of pieces like this far more as sculpture than dressmaking or sewing. The vast majority of time on this kaftan was spent with my basting needle, tailor’s basting thread and pressure steam iron. I spend far more time molding and shaping the fabric in my hands, on the form and on my wooden pressing tools, than I do in taking stitches through the fabric itself. Thread tracing and manipulating warp or weft threads sometimes down to individual ones. But when the stitching actually begins, all by hand of course, the vast majority of even that is spent putting in and taking out basting stitches, over and over again. And of course there’s the all important finishing work. That most deceptive of words which can give the unwary artist a false sense of completion-close-at-hand. Which, in the case of my first commission, turned out to be but a mirage of dry land after long hard days in the bosom of the Blue.

As I woke up after less than a handful of hours of sleep to nurse the baby and rush back to the studio to complete the finishing, as I meticulously basted and hand hemmed the kaftan while it was weighted in exactly the drape I wanted it to hold, I realised that at any point I could take the decision to make it easier on myself. To use a fusible to hold the hem up, to run it quickly through a machine baste and cut out some time spent meticulously hand treating it etc. But it is in the decisions I take to exclude a certain set of practices entirely, to restrict myself to processes that add time, effort and focus, instead of reducing it, these decisions are critical to why this piece is a work of art to me, and not just a beautiful garment. 

 From the outside it might look like a combination of old world tailoring & french couture techniques. And yes, so far as I’ve related the story, there are almost perfect similarities in the processes between haute couture practices and this kaftan here. But I’ve only related one half of its journey. And not even the longest nor most demanding portion. Because above all else, this was Indigo Work. 

Dyeing a piece of fabric in indigo and making a garment with it is one thing. But dyeing such a large piece of completed wearable art in an organic vat, attempting to achieve a depth, smoothness and complexity of color, while paying exquisite attention and care during multiple dips in the vat to all those hand stitches used to mould the garment into shape, to delicately prepared areas like the neckline interior,  is another world entirely. Added to this the challenges provided by dyeing such a large piece in a small 10 gallon vat, and you have the steepest and most rewarding learning curve with textile work I've been on to date. The time needed to gently but thoroughly scour this precious handwoven khadi cotton, planning the hours between dips to ensure full oxidation; at some points choosing to neturalize the fabric mid-process just to get the best idea of shade being achieved so I can decide how many more to do; making the time and giving the effort to ensure I take my devotional time with the vat at the beginning of each morning and at the end of each day’s dye session, so that the fabric is dyed in the most sacred ambience, supported by the most potent vibrational energy; the gentle, slow, careful handling throughout.  All of this knowing that there’d be a baby who needed her mama at any minute, knowing I would need to work at that sword-point place of complete involvement and total detachment, so I could drop the work and go to her as and when she needed me…  Well, is it any surprise that this piece was the making of me? An act of devotion and the birthing of the artist within. 

I was raised by a woman who was not just a trained textile artist but a finely trained painter in her own right. I never once thought the word artist would apply to me in any way, nor did I aspire to it. But it seems to have found me. I'll stay with it for a time. See what it wants to teach me, before I no doubt shed it and walk onwards. Transformed, unattached, to the next great adventure. 

"All Blue is Not Indigo, but Indigo is all Blue".

Indigofera Tinctoria, true indigo, Indian Indigo. This is the indigo native to the Indian subcontinent & first domesticated there many thousands of years ago. There are at least 750 species of Indigofera around the globe. Of these only a few have been significant in the production of blue dyes throughout human history. And even of these species of indigo almost all of them are native to, were originally domesticated in, the tropical zones of the Indian subcontinent, African continent and Southeast Asia. There is a lot of misinformation about what true indigo actually is. The term 'indigo dyed' has been used to erroneously describe archaeological and historical finds that have been dyed with other botanically obtained blues. Sometimes, even dye obtained by woad has been mistakenly referred to as 'indigo' because woad, like many other blue giving plants, contain indigo precursors in its chemical structure, which allows the seemingly miraculous extraction of the colour blue from this family of plants. Textile historians are starting to revise many 'discoveries', for example in ancient Egypt & even as far afield in more isolated ancient civilizations like the southern and central american cultural spheres, that have been labeled as being 'indigo dyed'. It's possible that some of the most ancient blue dyed samples found in ancient Egypt may have actually been colored using woad, and not by an Indigofera extracted dye.

Most importantly for me, and for the story of indigo, as excavations & findings about the Indus valley Civilization continues to put the dates of our South Asian history back to at least 8,000 years ago, but possibly even further back towards the Neolithic of 10,000 years, it becomes clear that the cultivation of Indigofera Tinctoria, the establishment of a highly refined process & culture around indigo dye extraction, use of indigo in day to day material culture, and the use of it as a trade commodity, were all happening at a large scale in cities like Mohenjo-Daro.

This emerging history is not yet mainstream 'Wikipedia history', so misinformation about the history of indigo is still widespread. While a quick glance at Wikipedia will say that the oldest example of indigo dyeing was found at a site from the Central American civilizations of Peru, there is no evidence for any kind of extensive establishment of indigo technology & indigo culture in these parts of the world. Often these are singular samples found without evidence for any wide scale use of indigo in the general material culture of these ancient civilizations. Certainly not to the scale on which it unfolded on the Indian subcontinent.

Where you do find evidence of very ancient knowledge structures around indigo dyeing is in the Indian ocean cultures of the subcontinent, eastern north-Africa, west-Africa connected to South Asia via the North African corridor, and more recently, Southeast Asia and Japan. This was the original Indigo zone of the ancient world, interconnected by trade, exchange of knowledge, of plant species, customs, techniques and textile motif vocabularies. It is important to note that while blue can be extracted by many plants containing indigo precursors, even from within the true Indigofera family of plants native to the Indian Ocean zone only a few have the capability to produce a sufficient quantity of extraction that can be used to dye fibers and textiles on a significant scale. And all of the varieties of Indigofera that can produce this larger quantity of indigo dye are either native to the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia & Africa, or spread by dispersal to East Asia. The clue is in the fact that the Indigo species of plants thrives in humid, tropical, subtropical climates with long hot dry seasons,while doing poorly in mountainous, wet, cold regions where the summers while being warm may not reach the levels of heat and aridity that this plant seems to prefer. Indigofera seem to do okay in certain temperate belts, but for the most part no significant amounts of indigo can be extracted from plants that do not have the combination of both humidity and long arid spells in the growing year.

Even with the dispersal of Indigofera plant varieties around the world, and the existence of indigo cultures in all the terrains that Indigofera is native to, where India stands out in this story is in the unique continuity of knowledge systems and culture surrounding; a profound understanding of indigo dyeing coming down in an unbroken line from the Indus valley Civilization itself, approximately 8000-10,000 years ago. The dye technologies were passed down in long lineages, the knowledge protected from generation to generation, kept within the same families, often concentrated in specific villages & regions across the subcontinent. In this sense alone India is unmatched in even the ancient world in its indigo culture.

In Greek and Roman times understanding of this extensive, continuous Indigo culture on the Indian subcontinent was well known. better known than it is today due to distortions introduced by colonial historians and the preeminence given to western archaeological processes; i.e. if a western archaeologist didn't find it & declare it in a western University, it wasn't 'history'.

Talking recently to my mother, a textile artist and academic herself, she said that the textile history of our part of the world is one of the most widely misunderstood aspects of a history that has already been distorted by the colonial historical narrative. However, the tragi-comic irony is that the distortions are only in the history books!

The evidence for this continuity of indigo dyeing is to be found not just in archaeological or historical sources, but in the textile cultures of the Indian subcontinent to this day! Albeit in a severely reduced, abused and traumatized form, but after so many thousands of years of history...it still survives.

Of course even with such a long caption this is just a summary of the story I will delve deeper into, exploring further as I bring Indigo home. Through projects planned that will be released slowly and quietly.

My aim is not to set the record straight, because when it comes to human history there's no such thing as a 'straight record'. Rather, my mission is to clarify the record, to remove the inconsistencies, and distortions. To root indigo back in the brown lands surrounded by the blue of the Indian Ocean

Namaskaram,

Daki

Brown Hands Blue.

I had a different post planned for today but couldn't pass on sharing this beautiful picture my Beloved took while I was deeply lost in the unfathomable depths of නීලකාන්ත. The blue-black one. The one so completely beyond the dimension of color that only In-digo can ever be used to depict...that-which-is-not.

This is also the way, at the tiny age of 7, I was taught to cook my first ever meals. Three clay bricks in a triangular formation, sticks crackling into flame, eyes full of smoke and a heart full of joy. A typical Lankan set-up. While that simple meal of rice and potatoes in coconut was finished with lashings of ash and sprinklings of soot, I also remember thinking it tasted more amazing than anything my little self had ever eaten.

Now, doing my work with Indigo in the same way, feels so seamlessly like second nature. Like an unlearned, unschooled, purely imbibed sense of knowing and feeling which connects me immediately to that phenomenal textile heritage I am a part of.

There is no thought, not even a hesitation when I work with my Brown Hands in Blue. It is an elation, a Homecoming of such intensity I'm failing miserably at putting it into words in the middle of the night, as I dash off these few words before settling in to sleep with my baby.

Sitting deep in a South Asian squat, (which I choose any day over standing or seating of any kind!), my little pumpkin wrapped in Indian hand looms on my back, trying to catch smoke with her bare hands. My own brown hands turning bluer and darker in my sweet organic vat, raised & maintained using traditional methods, without metal salts or mined processed materials. In the midst of this sacred communion I feel quite protective of this newly birthed baby. You can see it in my eyes I think. Knowing how much has been taken (polite for stolen), the elation & anxiety seem to come in equal measure.

But, I am still Sky Dancer. I promise I'll find my way through the murkiness of the legacy left to our Brown Hands. I will transcend the anxiety & fly with the joy of Bringing Indigo Home.

Namaskaram, Daki

In the picture above

you can see a Bengali tant cotton Sari sitting in a pure plant mordant, waiting to go into an organic indigo vat. In my indigo work I use entirely organic, directly plant sourced, unprocessed, no mined materials from Mother Earth, to both mordant my naturally dyed fibers and fabrics and also to maintain my organic indigo vat.

Although I had felt this calling to source colors directly from nature I always hesitated to start natural dyeing myself. The reason being that whenever I looked into the popular techniques for natural dyeing I was presented with a list of materials that looked and sounded anything but 'natural'. At least not according to my understanding of that word. I came to realize that the materials used by natural dyers in the western/-ised world, specially in mordanting but also in raising indigo vats, would have me armed to the elbows in rubber gloves, masked against toxic inhalations, dedicating specialist pots and containers for dyeing to prevent cross contamination. I always kept asking myself, these are fruits and vegetables right? Many of them edible, the majority not toxic in their natural state even if inedible. So why all this fuss? I began to feel that all too familiar ring of dissonance, when faced with the realities imposed on our collective experience by the continuation of colonial practices in every sphere of material culture.

The materials I kept seeing in books and online, while being technically 'naturally' or 'organically' based, have been processed to such a degree that they are for all intents and purposes ‘chemicals’ by the time they are packaged and sold for industrial and textile processes.

When I started to look more deeply into the manufacturing processes that are used to mine things like metallic salts, I realized that there was a far greater network of consequences and environmental impacts involved in the creation of materials used in the making of fibers and textiles that are still labelled as 'natural' or 'earth friendly,' and sold on the market at the price point that these labels conveniently bestow.

My explorations inevitably led me to contemplate on this important question; how did our people, my ancestors, thousands of years ago, operating in large city complexes like Mohenjo Daro, Harappa and the agrarian societies of Vedic civilization, dye fibers and fabrics not just to supply the populace of the region, but also sufficient quality and quantity for trading with other larger civilizations of that time? How did these people work with plant dyes, without manufactured or industrially mined materials for mordanting, dye extraction and, in the case of indigo, achieving reduction in a vat?

This question of 'how did our people do it for thousands of years?' keeps guiding me in my attempts to both rediscover the traditional techniques and technologies that made the South Asian subcontinent such a center of textile excellence for millennia. It continues to feed my motivation to keep finding the most truly earth friendly ways of approaching my dance with fiber and plants.

As I walk this path of resurrecting ancient techniques that served our people for so long, lost and abandoned under the all crushing boots of the colonial-industrial complex, I'm realizing exactly how much has been lost. It's turning into quite the detective story, but it is a story aligned with my Dharma in every way.

Namaskaram,

Daki

නිල් Nila.

Color of Nilakantha, the blue-black one with the sapphire throat. I.N.D.I.G.O. One of the many meanings of Nila in Sanskrit literally means to be dyed with Indigo. A color synonymous with the Sacred Subcontinent.

The centrality of India to Indigo, so perfectly held in the name itself; 'a substance from India'. A seemingly miraculous substance, lusted after by insatiable European colonial appetites. As more is unearthed about the Indus Valley civilization it becomes clear that a high level of refinement and sophistication of indigo dyeing was established and spread out of the subcontinent to its cultural, geographical neighbors. Nila & India have danced for 1000's of years.

Recently, while reading an article about German block printers in a popular magazine, I came across the idea that block printing spread to Europe due to 'lively trade relations' in the early modern era. I couldn’t help but giggle internally. That the fleecing, poaching, unashamed robbery of an entire subcontinent's knowledge, skills, innovations & cultural artifacts can now be termed 'lively trade relations' is typical of the collective amnesia that defines the denial of colonial crimes to this day. Let me tell you bluntly kids, they stole our stuff. To this day they haven't given it back. To this day academics, historians, archaeologists and passionate, concerned citizens of South Asia are fighting to get our texts, our treatises, monuments & spiritual treasures back home.

Why do we not talk about the actual lively relations between the subcontinent & our neighbors to the east & west? Ancient, ongoing ties with east-African kingdoms; with South-East Asia, directly connected as part of the Indic Hindu-Buddhist cultural sphere; the strong cultural-spiritual ties with far off Japan? Zones of Indigo culture inter-connected by history, by belonging to pre-western trade networks of busiest ocean in human history for the longest time; the Indian Ocean. In Benoy Behl’s documentary to support the book of the same name, exploring the history of Japan-India relations “Hindu Deities Worshipped in Japan” there is an interview with Japanese ambassador Yasukuni Enoki where he makes the following astute observation; "It is very important for the Japanese to know that at the bottom of Japanese culture, Indian culture is very firmly imprinted". We now start to have a sense of how deep this textile story goes.

How much of this knowledge, of the ancient ties between South Asian, East Asian and Indian ocean peoples, of the common roots which feed our cultural evolution, have been taken away from us? Systematically. What happened to the birthplace of Indigo as we know it? Who talks about the destruction of our truly ancient native indigo culture by those who poached, abused, supplanted with a mishmash of foreign techniques & then abandoned generations of farmers with blue in their veins...to dust? Do those who claim to love this color of our land know that the banks of the Brahmaputra ran blue with blood & abuse & colonial excess? Do we look twice at the strange tick of dissonance in our collective cultural mind when the new generation of experts now sell this stolen, white-washed 'expertise' back to us? Does the culture of indigo that is reappearing in fledgling form on the subcontinent bear any resemblance to the native one that evolved over 1000's of years?

If you look around at those writing the books, claiming expertise, writing histories, culturally & socially 'placing' indigo, you would be forgiven for thinking the word Indigo & India were only vaguely related. Perhaps even by accident. Such has been the success of white washing, of colonizing indigo culture.

When indigo started whispering to me, I looked and wondered....where are all the brown hands blue?

Where are the voices and faces of South Asian experts, teachers, dyers, indigo workers? Why was I having to look so hard to source dyed fiber from descendants of the land that gave the dye its name & significance?

Why has the Indic been made IN-visible from IN-digo?

I'm bringing indigo home. I feel it's time. I start to hear the message behind the indigo whisperings I singing to me last year.

Indigo comes home. Brown hands are once again.... blue.

Namaskaram,

Daki