Keira McArthur

“..bright colours make the Spirit People happy, apparently” he said, while he rifled through ribbons at the fabric store, “in fact the whole spirit world is lit up with colours, though I wouldn’t know from personal experience.”  I said I’d long suspected as much, and he said “ya that doesn’t surprise me.  I wouldn’t normally talk like this but someone told me along the way you were one of us. Forget who it was…” He paid for his cotton & ribbons (talkatively) and left for Toronto en route to Mexico for a five-day sweat in the spirit world.

Four beats after the door closed behind my friend, the women who run the place relaxed and began to offer the ritual dose of aural wisdom in fabric & sewing to me. I always enter there carrying two questions and leave with answers to twenty.  This time I got a replacement bobbin pin for my beloved 1956 Singer, advice about mixing poly-cotton with cotton, and instructions on how and when to use a double needle.

Perhaps the reason I go in is to reclaim my gratitude for simple common sense.

One of us?  Not sure what he meant by that; language is a slippery thing.  Perhaps he saw one of these photos on social media – my exploration of the idea of prayer flags and spectrum colour – and felt he understood something about me.

I do suspect that colour is a form of communication more subtle than we generally acknowledge.  We broadcast far more than we are aware of, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if spirits were tuning in.  I wonder if they appreciate common sense as much as they do bright colours.

Right now I’m chewing on the issue of binaries, how troublesome they are just about always.  Easy to get locked into an either/or, a he said/she said – into oppositional thinking. Much more interesting to find a third response that opposes neither but makes proactive use of the ground between them.

Common sense would suggest there’s always something good to be done.  I wonder what the spirits think?