Psalm 104

Just as psalm 89 plopped into the washbasin half-formed saying 'use me', psalm 104 seemed to have a life of its own, and it was planned on a  train journey to Durham for the SOTS winter meeting. I just listed all the natural phenomena and filled in the grid plan for the pockets with one of each, starting at the top, and that was it.

Working from the bottom up

Of course, there was a bit more to it than that, and as time went on, this one seemed to develop real soul. I was very much taken by a book on the psalms and ecology by Arthur Walker-Jones, and how he sees this psalm as very much an egalitarian one - nothing is mediated through monarch or temple - and human beings are just a part of the created order and not its pinnacle. And so it seemed appropriate to make a kind of green ground through which to thread it all, and it became one big interacting life-supporting network just like the earth is. Within it are small supportive networks. Here you can see that I have just got to the place with the animals in the forest at night in v 20. Then there is Leviathan snaking his way across, before he is confined to his sea. Leviathan is formed here from a piece of kumihimo braiding I made specially in the Japanese manner, made on a stand called a maru dai. See a you-tube of it in action: Kumihimo braiding

There is a God in this one, 'wrapped in light as with a garment', and I couldn't help being reminded of the White tornado. I have a degree in theology from Durham, and my God is like a white tornado! I'm very sorry about this; I had excellent teachers, but they were unable to save me from my own visions. I hope you like it anyway.

But what, I asked myself, made me put a little triangle of tatty pink stitches in the middle near the top, when all the rest of the shapes 'are' something? I always said this was the psalmist's joy.

But let me leave you with a close-up of people at work (v 23) - the QWERTYUIOP keyboard is in there, and numbers, since are we not creatures of words, who compute? Is this the special quality that distinguishes us from the rest of the animals? How would YOU have represented human beings?