“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(My Aunt Mabel lives around the corner and two blocks down the street from us. When Jane and I went for our leaf-gathering walk in October of 1965, we picked up the maple leaves in our collection beside Aunt Mabel’s home; this is the section of the street where the maple trees grow, and one of these leaves made up tonight’s object.

(“Red and yellow, strips I believe, and a cardboard backing.” I used two of the maple leaves Jane and I gathered on our October 1965 walk as subjects for a watercolor painting. The envelope object is one of them. Both of the leaves were fall colors—red and yellow, with some green. There may be other connections here but we did not ask Seth. I don’t see the strips reference, or the cardboard backing.

(“It is something from a gathering. Bordered in white, I believe. Darker in the center, or at least outside of the white portions. And something that seems to go inward here.” This is Seth’s data in response to my request that he name the object. The object is something from a gathering—a gathering of leaves. Bordered in white can be a reference to the rough white watercolor paper on which I did the painting. I painted only the two leaves and their cast shadows, and left the rest of the paper white. Thus the leaves are darker in the center of the painting, outside of the white portions.

(“And something that seems to go inward here.” is interesting to me, a good description of how the two leaves curled at the edges during the several days it took me to make the very detailed drawing. The curling took place as they dried out; they had been damp from being outside. This curl cannot be seen in the tracing on page 91 to any degree. In order to get the object inside the first of the two envelopes I had to flatten it out. This pressure caused the leaf to crack in many places; it is by now very brittle. After the experiment I had to tape it to a sheet of paper in order to preserve it for the notebook in which we keep our envelope objects.