august diary / weaving in thailand, knitting in airports, harvesting indigo

hiking in the NT, harvesting the garden

I wake on the morning of my flight to Thailand with the realisation that it has been ten years, almost to the day, since I last visited the country.

My last trip to Thailand marked the beginning of a transformative chapter that I now feel I am in the process of closing. I feel invigorated by the coincidence.

I take the Rosery Jumper on the plane. I am knitting it in Bendigo Classic 8ply in Chilli. I take interchangeable circular needles so I can take off the needle attachments and put on a stopper without losing my stitches if the airports take issue. They don’t. I knit all the way to China and I knit during my 12-hour layover. People see me knitting and they want to talk about their knitting stories and it is nice to connect with people that way. I finish the back panel and start the front.

I land in Thailand and start a week-long private backstrap weaving course at a fibre studio outside Chiang Mai. I sit on the back veranda while the afternoon storms come and go and the women sing as they dye and sew and teach me to weave. Moving the shuttle back and forth is meditative. I lose myself and forget to think. I weave for 17 hours that week. It feels like no time at all and I want to keep doing it. I leave with 2.5 metres of fabric and no plan for its use. The fabric doesn’t matter. I just want to keep weaving.

I harvest indigo in a field out the back of a Baptist mission with some of the women. We sit on a tarp and pick the leaves from the stem and they teach me how to activate the colour with a bowl and some lye. The liquid turns from blue to indigo and it is easy to see how it was once a symbol of wealth and status. It shimmers.

Most mornings before class I sit at a Thai cafe and write in my journal. I write 30 pages of a story about peaches and sex that I will later re-read and discount. I have a habit of forcing the metaphor.

I meet a young missionary, fresh from college, less than a year into marriage, fumbling in the Global South with big, blue eyes for Jesus. I feel like the devil crouching at her door. She tells me that the people she has met in Thailand want her to run art classes, but she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t really like teaching. She tells me that maybe this is a sign that God is calling her to teach and that she should listen to that. I tell her that maybe God is trying to communicate through her, and that she should listen to that voice instead. I want to tell her how long it has taken me to realise that my inner voice is not a sinful one, and that the full-time pursuit of meeting others’ needs can be a detrimental one, but I don’t. We ride our scooters into a nearby village and get coconut ice cream and say goodbye.

My partner joins me, and we head to the mountains near the Myanmar border. We stand at the mouth of a cave at sunset and watch 300,000 swifts fly into the darkness, while thousands of bats fly out of it. Carp hover at the waters beneath, trying to catch the birds that fly too low. Tarps are laid on the floor of the cave, and locals harvest the animal shit for fertiliser during the day. We are the only people there. The birds are like arrowheads caught in a cyclone and I am speechless.

I ride my scooter through a mountain village and feel an old friend riding pillion. He died during lockdown in a deep well of sadness, but I feel his joy there with me. I had just read Ocean Vuong’s latest novel and he was on my mind and maybe he was with me in spirit. I thought I could hear him say yasss queen, but maybe it was just the wind.

We fly to an island off the coast of Thailand. I think about making the same journey ten years ago. I think about the earnest, wide-eyed young woman with undisputable trust in the goodness of people. I love her and this time I don’t forget she is still with me.

We swim in the hotel pool and ride scooters around the island and everything we eat is delicious. I knit in the hotel bed under the air conditioner.

We fly home via Darwin and drive out to Nimuluk National Park and hike for 5 days on the Jatbula Trail. We hike from waterhole to waterhole with friends. We watch a glider move from one tree to the other, suspended like a kite, with stomachs full of dehydrated Ratatouille. I hold a gecko, marvel at the spikes on its tail and its eyelids.

On the first night, my body wakes to a quiet camp but my eyes are glued shut. I try with all my might but I can’t seem to open them. I feel a great whoosh of what can only be described as two balls of energy surging past my tent. I see a bright, white bar of light beneath my eyelashes. Something inside of me says this isn’t for you to see. I go back to sleep with a sense of fear and awe lodged in my limbs. This is my first experience of what is often called sleep paralysis.

I fly home. A new home. I move in with my partner on the same day we harvest our vegetable garden.

Cabbage: 3.2kg
Lettuce: 2kg
Choy sum: 2.1kg
Rocket: 160g

2 chillis, a carrot and a snowpea.

We make:
2 jars sauercraut: cabbage, salt, carrot, beetroot, turmeric, garlic, ginger.
1 jar pesto: choy sum and carrot tops, parmesan, pine nuts, lemon, garlic.
27 spring rolls: cabbage, choy sum, carrots.

I carry my art and my kitchen into the house and we arrange furniture and delight in merging two lives together. I buy a secondhand 3x4m Persian rug. I read my 31st book of the year. I wake to the cat wrapped around my neck and spend my mornings knitting up the sleeves of the Rosery Jumper. I am knitting both sleeves on one needle, a trick from my mum. When I finish knitting the sleeves, they’ll both be done, and I’ll be ready to sew it up and sew in the ends.

I eat curried egg sandwiches in the sunshine with El, the cat on a leesh. I give people lettuces straight from the ground as if they are flowers. I talk to a friend on the phone for an hour and a half while her baby feeds and gurgles. The days roll on.

I am now preparing for September’s trip – packing gear onto a bicycle, packing the bicycle into a box, and wrapping it in tape for a flight. I have a portable loom ready to warp with yarn and strap to the outside of my bike so that I can weave on the road.

Before I go I will grout the bathroom tiles, paint a number on my bright blue letterbox and make a batch of lavender soap.

It is finally the end of winter.