Red Light

When I lived, briefly, in San Franciso, I would venture up through the wine country to Calistoga and lower myself into one of their famously thick mud baths made of volcanic ash and mineral spring waters only found there.

I think of that skin-changing moment now as I touch this sea of red silk - silk bathed in layers of mud from a particular river delta in China, millennia in the making, and dyed with a yam extract. Magically, a skin blooms (like I remember mine blooming after that mud bath) - a silk smooth, delicious, rich, cool to the touch.

I wonder what makes the magic of of this red light. Perhaps it's the care with which it is tended by human hands over many months. Or the secret ways passed down through those who live on this delta.

Maybe it's because it's baked in the earth.  Soaked in the mud. Washed in the river.  Stained with the goodness of a wild yam.  

What, I wonder, could make me feel more at home on this earth than a second skin that bloomed from the heart of it?

to light - in any color,
Susan Hull Walker