The art of weaving

A message from the season of change

I come alive in October. It's the time where the gradual slowdown of daylight hours yield more space to sit with the inner world and grasp our shadows. I can sense when I'm entering a period of transition when I clock in less hours of sleep in my usual schedule. It's a special kind of insomnia born from an energetic, uplifting restlessness rather than from stress. It feels like a comedown from the brief high of crisp, golden sunlit October hours. The day suddenly releases you into dusk with a lingering charge of energy that follows you into the night. It would be a waste to just lay in bed with eyes closed.

Routine and discipline fade away and become just memories from seasons past. Reading books in bed before 9:30 p.m., organized wind down routines, and all the little moments that maintain a sense of structure and form fall to the wayside like leaves to the ground.

Instead I meet the return of organized chaos. Lately it looks like sitting on beaches with wine on a weeknight, just to shiver and watch the sunset while enjoying the company of new strangers. Or having insufferable day dreams of slow mornings with sunlight and hot lemon water. It's in the sly gamble of almost missing a flight at dawn to savor just one more minute in bed.

I'm wired awake from falling in love - with people, ideas, and details of mundane life. At times I'm too engrossed by just noticing the quality of my own inhale and exhale. October is a period of contraction that arrives after cycles of expansion. I return to the same season with different perspectives, holding gifts of wisdom from the spring and summer months. This mood is a part of a bigger pattern at play. I’m familiar enough with it now to understand it’s a natural side effect of weaving.

Around this same time last year, I purchased a Lap Loom for the first time to practice weaving wall hangings. I remember the tiny thrill of selecting colored spools of wool yarn and spending hours weaving them across warped cotton string. The visualization of abstract shapes in my mind directed my hands to execute on every lift of the shed stick and weave of the tapestry needle.

a work in progress, 2020

As weavers, we begin to not only notice patterns but we become them with time. Through this exercise we can experience the sovereignty of creating patterns at every needle point that we make. We can understand the ways in which patterns repeat themselves until we learn or decide on how to choose differently. In some instances our decisions lead us back to where we started, only so that we learn more about ourselves in threading backwards to unravel the yarn. Depending on the project we are trying to conceive, we may have to tie knots in our yarn and weave in new threads of different color shades onto the loom. It's all a part of the process. Even within the fibers of our yarn there can live a microscopic weaving between our past, present, and future visions.

On the physical level, I remember how weaving would come to life within the two braided plaits in my hair that my mother would create each morning before school. They were just two modest braids on either side of my head, designed to protect me from the hazards of being an active child on the playground. By the time I reached my exploratory years of young adulthood, the same braids of hair unravelled into a free flowing curly shag cut with bangs. They are the same curls that now cascade down to the freckle on my mid-back then crawl over my arms and sometimes sneak in to sit between my chest like stray vines today.

For years before I had a loom I've been practicing weaving. I’ve weaved through periods of receiving as a child, to giving myself away as a young woman, and now crossed back over to a place of receiving again as a wiser woman, finding new ways to overflow and give from a more sustainable source. And with no child of my own today, I channel my instinct for motherhood by drip feeding a current of nurturing energy back into my every day life.

I notice this process of weaving to be like what poet Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls the “practice of untangling of Life/Death/Life nature over and over again.”¹ For this meditative and daily practice she reminds us to ask ourselves:

“What must I give more death to today, in order to generate more life? What do I know should die, but am hesitant to allow to do so? What must die in me in order for me to love?...What life am I afraid to give birth to? If not now, when?”

1. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves (New York: Penguin Random House, 1992), 159.