Evil Seamstress at work

They say people are contructing false personas for themselves on Facebook; that they are just inventing themselves as anything they want to be. What a good idea! What's not to like about it? Was life ever any different anyway? Sure we'll cope.

Be afraid.

Dr Who is getting a new companion, it says in the Radio Times. Of course, they have not yet trumpetted my own role as the leader of a newly discovered evil empire. I'm going to be the Evil Seamstress, with pincushion punishments lined up for sinners. My army of Facelesss Cats is going to take over the known universe. The Stitch Police will be out there checking to see if anyone does any stitch which is malformed in any way and not properly spaced. No-one will ever be more than 15 feet away from one of the Faceless Cats, who will operate underground. People will come to dread appearing at the Chequered Tablecloth.

I slept about 9 hours last night, after falling alseep twice yesterday. The Evil Seamstress puts a lot of effort into her operations; windsurfing has nothing on it in terms of the energy drained. I'm working on Ps 104, in which Leviathan takes centre stage in a subversive way.  He's a valued part of creation, representing chaos, which has a rightful place in the grand scheme of things (glad to hear that). He is 'God's rubber duckey', there to play. See Arthur Walker-Jones 'The Green Psalter; Resources for an Ecological Spirituality' where these observations are made. The poetry of this psalm, he says, 'portrays a world similar to that described by modern ecology - abundant, diverse, interrelated and independent.' You can see the launch of this book in 2009 here: Green psalter book launch . Even before I read his comments, I had organised a green ground to be the starting point for this effort. Success is not guaranteed, but it will have to do. An embroiderer's life is never easy; there's the hand of God in there, several hands in fact, meant to be holding out some kind of wheaty food, and it has turned out looking like flowers, or perhaps we could think of lemon jellies or custard tarts that God is ready to throw at us. Purple-headed flaming mountains, and creatures of darkness, and destructive flames for sinners are all there.

But there are some writers who can do much better art than I can, getting a picture straight into the brain of the reader with no need for messy paints or anything. Artur Weiser in mid-20thC wrote of Ps 104 that poetically it is '..one of the most beautiful in the Psalter. The relation of this nature-hymn to the story of creation in the first chapters of Genesis is like that of a coloured picture to the clear lines of a woodcut.'

It's very dry here, undoubtedly drought has set in - so if you read this, please put out some fresh water every day for the birds, even if you don't put out food for them. It's the least we can do, whatever the cause might be of the world of Ps 104 being a bit messed up now.