A while back we came across Alan Watts’ 1968 Lecture ‘Stop Thinking About Life’ in which he describes the Chinese character ‘Li’ as a form of natural order, beautiful patterns which record the trace of flow. This idea resonates deeply with us, we’re all about flow, and believe our cloth to be an archive of the experience, the communication between hand and yarn. We offer you this little excerpt and hope you enjoy it as much as we do:
'But when you look at a plant it’s perfectly obvious that this bamboo plant has order. We recognize at once that that is not a mess, but it is not symmetrical and it is not geometrical looking. It looks like a Chinese drawing, because the Chinese appreciated this kind of order so much that they put it into their painting. Non symmetrical order. In the Chinese language this is called Li and the character for Li means, originally, the markings in jade, also means the grain in wood and the fibre in muscle. We could say too that clouds have Li, marble has Li, the human body has Li, and we all recognize it and the artist copies it, whether he is a landscape painter, a portrait painter or an abstract painter or a non objective painter, they all are trying for Li. And the interesting thing is that although we all know what it is there is no way of defining it. But because Tao is the course, we can also call Li the water course, because the patterns of Li are the patterns of flowing water and we see those patterns of flow memorialized as it were in sculpture, in the grain in wood, which is the flow of sap, in marble, in bones, in muscles, all these things are patterned according to the basic principles, that is the fa - Tao Fa - the Toaist principle of flow. So Li means then, the order of flow, the wonderful dancing pattern of liquid. Because Laoze likens Tao to water, ‘The great Tao’ he says ‘flows everywhere, to the left and to the right’, like water … ‘it loves and nourishes all things, but does not laud it over them.’ ‘Because,’ he says elsewhere, ‘water always seeks the lowest level, which men abhor because we are always trying to play games of one-up-manship and be on top of each another’. Laoze explains, that the top position is the most insecure,’ that the basic position is the most powerful.’
Excerpt from the Alan Watts Lecture ‘Stop Thinking About Life’ 1968 via The Alan Watts Audio