During a studio visit,1 Weslien and I discussed her practice of collecting water at sacred sites, and I noted the resemblance of the embroidered drawings to maps. Could she walk them? Walking Kailash is a project born from these intersections.  Weslien has created a beautiful handmade paper "kit" to send to fourteen artists sited all over the world. I received one in Port¬land, Maine. The kit invites us to respond to its contents—a stitched map on cloth-like paper intricately folded in the form of a monk's hat, a vial for collecting water, a circle of red string, and a set of instructions asking us to translate this map into our own circular santos walk while considering the premise of compassion. Inviting our par¬ticipation and interpretation, Walking Kailash functions as a kind of open text. "The ‘open text,' by definition," notes Lyn Hejinian, "is open to the world and particularly the reader. It invites participa¬tion, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other \[…\] hierarchies."2 By sharing authorship in Walking Kailash, Weslien's project is more generative rather than directive. In Portland, I invited local community members to join me for a walk around Back Cove. On a blustery winter day, we walked and discussed the history of the location, recent city planning, littoral plant life and fauna, and the advent of algal blooms due to global warming. We collected water and learned from our diverse partic¬ipants. We made stops indicated on our map and held it, circled around together, as it fluttered cloth-like in the wind. Inherent to much of Weslien's work is a commitment to slowing down so that awareness is widened and deepened. This happened in Portland; walking with our handmade paper map in hand, we expanded our sense of compassion.   notes 1. This studio visit was chronicled in an article published in THE CHART vol. 2, no. 1: (September/ October 2016). http://thechart.me/collecting-water-katarina-weslien/. Excerpts from this article are revisited here.  2. Hejinian, Lyn. "The Rejection of Closure," from The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 43. paper production notes—andrea peterson It seems counterintuitive to cut cloth, macerate it into pulp, pig¬ment and form it into paper, and scrunch it into a ball—all to mimic cloth. As an admirer of momigami (the Japanese term for crinkled, kneaded Japanese paper), I have always wondered how one could mimic that look and feel using all the inherent qualities of cotton rag. After a number of experiments over the years, I was able to finish this research by working with Katarina Weslien on developing momiINDIANA, of which a sample appears above. The paper is made of 100 percent cotton rag beaten in a Reina beater, internally sized, formed Western style on an 18 x 24-inch mould, and pressed. I scrunched each damp sheet into a ball and opened it back up, laying it flat to air dry. Once dried, I burnished, starched, and ironed the sheets. The finished sheets shrunk down to approxi¬mately 16½ x 22½ inches.

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