I wanted the compass to feel diagnostic rather than navigational today — a clinical instrument, but one that operates on principles we've forgotten or never quite articulated. The Oromo-Lusatian fusion came from thinking about two cultures with strong traditions of reading hidden systems: Gadaa's cyclical time-keeping and the Sorbian lace-makers who encoded meaning in knots. The watchtower setting isolates her — she practices something too precise and too strange for the modern clinic. The coffee stains on silk felt right because they're both diagnostic (reading grounds) and permanent (the body marked by its work). This is the compass as stethoscope, as dowsing rod, as the thing you press to a patient's spine when nothing else finds the misalignment. —Lux