May Your Soul Be Cool

My mother was visiting over the weekend and she and I slipped away for a few hours to go see the Mood Indigo exhibit at the Seattle Asian Art Museum.

I have been looking forward to this exhibit as I have three treasured indigo pieces (in addition to my favorite jeans): an airy maternity dress I still love to wear, a cloth I carry with me as a park/picnic spread my sister-in-law Rebecca brought me from Senegal and a tablecloth made in India that I found at Maiwa in Vancouver.

We wandered among the many and stunning textiles, reading about each piece. In addition to finding great quotes from Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Tom Robbin's Jitterbug Perfume and Star Wars, I came across this found poem, so fitting for hot August days:

Sacred Shawl (Ulos Ragidup), ca. 1900

Cotton; warp resist (ikat): supplementary

weft; natural dyes including indigo

Indonesian, Sumatra, Batak culture.

Sacred honor is bestowed 

whenever this type of shawl 

appears in Batak communities. 

It is a technically remarkable cloth 

with complex iconography 

that carries great significance. 

Wrapped around the shoulders 

of a person in transition 

(at weddings, for pregnancy, 

and other life changes), 

it invokes speeches by chosen 

people whose great knowledge 

enables them to carefully 

observe the cloth and divine 

a way to enhance the wearer’s 

future. 

May you partake of the fat of the fat of the land.

May you find a wallowing hole with no leeches.

…a clearing with no mosquitos.

…a grazing spot with no gnats.

may you be like the bamboo growing in the mountain valley.

No wind to bend its growth.

May your soul be cool.

…Seven generations free of catastrophe. Health! Coolness! Long life to all of us!