Image: Barbara Ryther
Adventures in Weaving
I have recently begun teaching myself to weave.
I had hoped it would be a meditative process – the soothing repetition of gently guiding yarn over and under the warp threads on a loom, the concentration of trying more complicated patterns, the creative glow of experimenting with different materials. The ultimate meditative practice of emptying your head of everyday thoughts and being in the present. A suitable journey for Lent.
It. Is. Not. Going. Well.
Granted, any creative process can involve a certain amount of chaos, in the best sense of discovering the unexpected. And of course learning anything takes time and mistakes before you can even begin to consider that you might possibly know what you are doing.
But this experience has been less a creative artisan at work and more a fretful toddler who stubbornly insists that she DOES NOT NEED A NAP!
The chaos that climbed from the world into my head has fractured my already fleeting attention span, and my thoughts whiplash so rapidly that I choose and abandon my assortment of materials before they even begin to form a pattern.
The tension that moved from my head to my shoulders crawls down to my hands, making them tense and twitchy. Warp threads cringe at my touch, abandoning their orderly vertical alignment and tightening into a stranglehold on the weft.
This is the opposite of meditation. It’s more like possession. Rather than clearing my mind it is exposing it for the swirling repository of worry and anxiety that it has become.
And yet, I have hope. Hope and – dare I say it? – patience. Perhaps it’s good to expose what is possessing me, to see it in all its three dimensional messiness, to bring it into the light. To name it for what it is, or rather what it isn’t. It isn’t me. It’s something I have let live in my head and affect the rest of my body. I can’t do calm in the midst of chaos, so one of them has to go. The chaos can no longer be given that much space in my head or my life.
So I’m trying to let it go, one twitchy thread at a time. Slowly but surely I will make space for calm. I will re-warp my loom. I will pick up one type of weft material at a time, and feel it in my hands as I gently weave it over and under the warp threads, letting the warp and weft gently mesh until they create something more than either of them alone. Something I can’t see yet, even in my mind, but something that will be new and unique. And me.
-Barbara Ryther