The Baby Wolf

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Sharie Monsam, Jutta Engelhardt, and Caroline Wise at Fiber Factory in Mesa, Arizona

It was 11 years ago at a Navajo Weaving workshop led by Sharie Monsam (left) at Fiber Factory in Mesa, Arizona that Caroline first started becoming acquainted with this corner of the fiber arts. Pictured are Caroline and her mom Jutta Engelhardt setting up a warp which is often considered the most difficult part of dressing a loom to start weaving. The Navajo rug that my mother-in-law started on this night was finished prior to her return to Germany, it sits on her couch to this day.

Caroline Wise at Yarn School in Harveyville, Kansas September 2007

Just the year before, Caroline and I found ourselves in Harveyville, Kansas, where she attended Yarn School with Nicole Lohr. The following year we again headed into America’s heartland of Kansas for another go at Yarn School. Critical mass about all things fiber was taking hold.

Caroline Wise with her first loom in Phoenix, Arizona in July 2010

By 2010 Caroline inherited a counterbalance loom and the die was cast. From May of that year, it would take until July before Caroline was ready to start weaving. The loom, by the way, was an ancient mess that required Caroline to look far and wide for information about how it worked. I wrote a short snippet back then which can be read by clicking here. Caroline’s guild member Bernie was instrumental in walking her through the warping process and several sets of towels were eventually woven on this loom.

Fiber Arts Books

Books, videos, tutorials, joining fiber guilds, attending conferences, joining workshops, visiting museums to explore exhibits regarding the history of the craft were on our schedule for the next decade. Caroline’s interest has few limits and certainly, geography is not one of the constraints if there are any. The ethnic history of what the peoples of the earth have explored with cloth is of profound interest to my wife. In her search for complexity and the novelty of finding things beyond the extent of her knowledge, Caroline too has a similar drive to learn more and is nearly on the constant lookout to extend what she knows. She has her own antilibrary that is considerably larger than my own but then her ravenous appetite to read is greater than my own too.

Caroline Wise with her new Baby Wolf Loom from Schacht

Through the various organic and synthetic fibers, yarns, methods of weaving, knitting, making lace, spindles, carders, and a multitude of other interests she’s worked through the uncertainty if she’d still be interested in all of this tomorrow. Turned out that she’s as deeply affected by her curiosity to know more today as ever. With that background, she finally came to the conclusion that gifting herself a treasure wasn’t so unreasonable anymore.

Caroline Wise and Carma Koester of Fiber Creek in Prescott, Arizona with a new Baby Wolf Loom from Schacht

With some arm twisting of assurance that she could spoil herself without feeling guilty Caroline had her eye on a special 50th-anniversary cherry wood loom from Schacht out of Colorado. This “portable” loom is known as the Baby Wolf and while Caroline obviously sits on the left, Carma Koester on the right is the owner of Fiber Creek in Prescott, Arizona, who ordered this beautiful piece of engineering that Caroline is likely to use for the rest of her life. As soon as fabric starts to emerge from the loom I’ll be sure to share more photos of the first thing she makes.

Antilibrary

JWise Photo of the Day

New Reading for John Wise in Phoenix, Arizona

Redefining my reading list and expanding the corner of our antilibrary* that is a large part of our small living space. The roots of this change in programming started earlier this year when I was in Frankfurt, Germany. A meeting with an old friend Olaf Finkbeiner triggered thoughts of media philosophy ranging from Joshua Meyrowitz to Jean Baudrillard. Then about a week later in Weimar, contemplating yet older thoughts attached to my readings of Nietzsche, Goethe, and Schiller, I started reminiscing on the intellectual proclivities of people who think. Upon my return to the States, I came across the blog of a guy I’d met a couple of times back in the ‘90s when I was living in Frankfurt, his name is Achim Szepanski. Back in the day, I learned of the work of Gilles Deleuze through Achim but by that time I was deep into other subjects and not interested in pulling in one more thinker of obtuse complex ideas.

There seems to be a convergence of thinkers whose work is entering my orbit. Again, I have to return to Achim, as it was his website non.copyriot.com that enchanted me with his complex visualizations of thought experiments, turning the page into a canvas to explore the current evolution of political and economic landscapes.

Then, over the course of summer, I see references repeated, again and again, spurring me to resolve why all of a sudden I’m seeing these patterns. At this point a kind of frenzy of curiosity grabs hold and I need to know more. Cursory investigations point in a direction that over time nods to particular sources and the degrees of separation dissolve to the point I must follow some of these threads.

One of those moments distilled my curiosity into picking up books by Nick Land (Fanged Noumena), Reza Negarestani (Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials), Alexandre Lefebvre (The Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza), Quentin Meillassoux (After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency), Alain Badiou (Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil), Paolo Virno (When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature and a couple of others). There are other authors I have my eye on and a couple of things I pulled from the shelf of my antilibrary as I look for something that seems just out of reach.

What I’m on the hunt for is an understanding of humanity’s direction both socially and economically. I’m trying to glean some small insight that will let me feel I’m not on the outside of our trajectory.

Do I have hope that these texts and treatises will help light the way? In some small way yes but not in the profound red pill kind of way. Maybe they can act like slivers that penetrate the body of my mind infecting it with a non-lethal mix of tiny new inspirations that the antibodies of thinking can harness while strengthening my neural pathways into taking roads unseen.

* Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in his book The Black Swan: “A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”

Sunn O)))

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Sunn O))) live in Mesa, Arizona

Sunn O))) is a kind of Druid aural embodiment of alchemy set before the temple channeling earth’s power to allow the laity to intuitively understand the work of bacteria on a global scale. You tremble before their sonic storm of vibrational lucidity as you are brought to the precipice of being reduced from human to simple organic matter. We are rendered as constituent elements of the primordial earth, while before us is the sun that energizes life. With the help of our star, wakefulness rises and the opportunity to explore is gifted to the various species of earth. Cosmic illumination from the galactic center explodes into our senses. For fleeting moments as measured in the infinity of time we attempt to discover some sense of meaning, but the intensity arising out of the totality of reality is too expansive for minds that only relatively recently left the cave. So we continue to explore the boundaries on our search for what any of this means.

Translation: we went to a concert in Mesa last night featuring the Seattle, Washington, band known as Sunn O))).

Katharina – Salt River Wild Horses

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Wild Horses at Salt River in Arizona

Today is Kat’s last day in America but that didn’t mean we’d not try to do something spectacular to close out this leg of her gap year and brief three-week vacation in America. We woke shortly after 4:00 in the wee hours of the morning with about 90 minutes to go before the sun would rise. After dropping Caroline off at her office our niece and I continued across the Valley of the Sun over to the Salt River.

Since Katharina arrived on the first of July from New Zealand we have traveled over 2,192 miles with her here in the Southwest, which at 3,528 kilometers is about the same as driving from Barcelona, Spain, to Moscow, Russia. Our destinations have included the Petrified Forest National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, Chaco Culture National Historic Park, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, the Navajo and Zuni Reservations, the San Juan Mountains, Heard Museum, the Desert Botanical Garden, the Colorado River, Sedona, and a horse sanctuary right here in Phoenix. These places took us into the northeast corner of Arizona, the southwest corner of Colorado, northwest New Mexico, and we dipped into southern Utah.

Our niece has tried Mexican food, Korean food, a Piccadilly (Navajo shave ice), various pizzas, pancakes, pizza cookies, and cheesecake. All the while she was able to maintain being a vegetarian which she chose to practice while in New Zealand. She got a judo practice in, visited the gym a few times with her Aunt Caroline, rode a mule into the Grand Canyon, went horseback riding in Sedona, and obviously from these photos had the chance to photograph and visit with the wild horses of the Salt River.

Along the way she’s been offered countless cups of coffee (she doesn’t drink it), cigarettes (she doesn’t smoke), marijuana in Colorado (it’s legal for recreational use but she doesn’t smoke that either), tattoos weren’t appealing, we couldn’t get her to cuss so I made up for it by cussing all the time. Even when we tried to turn her to another kind of vice by offering her beer or hard alcohol she was able to abstain, good thing too, as she’s only 19 and we’d have been contributing to the delinquency of someone to whom it’s illegal to give alcohol. She didn’t want a haircut, she vigilantly wore sunblock, she stayed awake for our long drives, didn’t get car sick once (she’s quite prone to that), she didn’t complain about me listening to Rammstein or dubstep in the car but I don’t think she liked either. Boba tea didn’t go over well, nor did deep dish pizza but she made up for most everything with enthusiastic laughter.

Wild Horses at Salt River in Arizona

Like all young people, and creatures too, our niece is only now stepping out on her own and still has lots to learn. She may not know it yet but she’s got a big journey ahead of her where each step offers her experiences that will help define her evolving perspectives which will hopefully grow as she continues to mature. We learn best when others give us nudges that help keep us on the right path and just like with the horses she adores, sometimes a sharp bite or solid kick (metaphorically speaking) is needed to bring attention to a drifting awareness. Most of all though we need compassion and love and while we may not be well-practiced in how to best share that, it doesn’t mean we don’t try our best to give of ourselves and find compromise when we are not getting our way.

Wild Horses at Salt River in Arizona

It’s been nice to run around the Southwest with Katharina and show her a different way of life of two people she hardly knew when she landed here. She left the winter of New Zealand and dropped into our summer heat in the desert and has done great keeping up with us and helping us think about the way we do and see things so we might better understand a teenager. I’m guessing that the next time we spend some serious time with her she may likely be in her career following the next four years of university she’s returning to Germany for. For now, she still feels like an adolescent to us oldies but given a bit more time she’ll join the ranks of adults, and if she’s lucky she’ll still be laughing and ready for other adventures.

Katharina – Horseback Riding

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Katharina Engelhardt horseback riding in Sedona, Arizona

We woke at 5:30 in order to be on the road by 6:00 to provide us some “getting lost” time in finding M Diamond Ranch. Katharina is going for a 3-hour ride on Cinnamon into the hills near Sedona with Jackie as her guide. The cowboy on hand took Kat over to a stand where it’s easier to mount horses and made the final adjustments to the saddle so our niece would have a pleasant ride. Without fanfare, they quickly moved out of the corral and disappeared into the thicket.

Katharina Engelhardt horseback riding in Sedona, Arizona

I’m calling this one “German Woman on Cinnamon among the Cactus.”

Katharina Engelhardt horseback riding in Sedona, Arizona

Caroline and I returned to the ranch after breakfast around 9:30, and although it was getting hot, there were no signs of Jackie and Katharina. Then, shortly before 10:00, I see their heads emerging out of the heavy brush up the trail, and I’m thrilled that Kat stayed out for the duration of the scheduled ride. We hear about her horse being a well-behaved ride, that she passed on cantering, saw some petroglyphs along the trail, and generally had a great time riding a western saddled horse out in the desert on a summer day. Normally, she rides English saddle in Germany, where the desert is an exotic concept, and she’d never been on a horse for three consecutive hours. The young woman might look young for her age, and she can definitely work on her communication skills (most of us can), but she can be tough when she chooses.

Katharina Engelhardt and Caroline Wise taking a selfie at dinner in Phoenix, Arizona

Later in the day, it was time to head back to the Foothills Recreation and Aquatic Center in Glendale for another practice round with the Desert Judo group. The only problem was that others hadn’t arrived yet, and things didn’t look good for the practice happening tonight, so we went to dinner instead. Over at Claim Jumper Restaurant, after an already impossibly large meal, Kat felt intrigued enough by the monster-sized chocolate cake that she simply had to try it. Most of it came home with us; I wonder if we’ll still be looking at it in our fridge after she leaves Saturday morning?

Katharina – Going to Sedona

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Fire near Crown King, Arizona

Picked up Caroline from her office about 30 minutes early and headed north for an overnight up in Sedona. Turns out this fire up near Crown King was burning Sunday night when we passed through the area on our way home from the Grand Canyon, but under the cover of darkness, we couldn’t see the smoke. Katharina has an early morning appointment near Sedona that would have required us to leave Phoenix shortly before 4:00 in the morning, so grabbing a cheap room up north felt in order.

Katharina Engelhardt in Sedona, Arizona

We made it up to this corner of the red rocks before sunset, allowing Kat to capture some of the sights she’ll likely miss in the morning as our route will take us south out of town. Matter of fact, we’ll be heading out so early that besides Denny’s, there won’t be anything else open for breakfast. Once up this way, I wanted to run us up to Oak Creek Canyon for the drive past Slide Rock up to Flagstaff, but remaining daylight is not in our favor, and most dinner options on a summer Tuesday night in Sedona end at 9:00, so we’ll need to tend to that too.

Sedona, Arizona

We only had time for a few short impressions as the sun was going to set at 7:40, so we stopped for a quick shot and continued further up the road.

Katharina Engelhardt in Sedona, Arizona

Everything was going great until we recognized that Kat seemed to be getting too much sun. We’d been trying to convince her to drink more water and wear more sunblock, but she thought .25 liters of SPF 50 per day was enough. Now she knows that in the Arizona desert, you wear SPF 250 and drink gallons of water, or this happens. It’s a shame to see our 19-year-old niece seeming to age right before our eyes.

Caroline Wise in Sedona, Arizona

The constant knitting, weaving, audiobooks, tea, and folk music have allowed Caroline to age gracefully, and even as she approaches her senior years, I gotta say that my wife is still one of the hottest women I’ve known, and if she were to ask me again to marry her, I wouldn’t hesitate. Sure, the wrinkles are getting thicker, but those eyes still pull me in, and I just melt as we smile at each other.

John Wise in Sedona, Arizona

As for me, well, spending more than two weeks with our niece has exacted a heavy toll on my nerves, and the stress has turned my hair white and generally made me look like a candidate to play Santa Claus this coming Christmas. I’m seriously considering some plastic surgery and maybe even dying my hair after she leaves this Saturday. Let this serve as a warning to others that 19-year-olds hanging out with you 24 hours a day will steal your remaining youth and turn you into an old person prematurely.

Sunset in Sedona, Arizona

Oops, almost missed the sunset while playing with that stupid FaceApp that Brinn brought to my attention. After a couple more photos of the fading light, we made our way over to Cucina Rustica for some very reasonable Italian cooking that would draw us back. Then, under the full moon stained red by the smoke that had been drifting up to Sedona from the fire we passed earlier, we were at our cheapo motel and trying to get to sleep quickly for our 5:30 alarm.