Weaving

Sometimes I weave in my sleep. Deftly wrapping reed over reeds, these dreams are nothing but precision and flow. I coil around the pliable core folding each strand safely in, secure in knowing the process has been performed successfully before. My dream weaving is concerned only with creation, absorbed in the ins and outs, the overs and unders. Unlike other dreams, there are no discombobulating characters, no competing storylines vying for processing, no mixed-up symbology or psychological babble. Dream weaving gives me only deep peaceful sleep.

I weave awake filled with a conscious peace. My fingers move, willing my heart to still, leaving my mind to wander, I begin a basket. At each beginning I think of my ancestors. If my body was a basket my ancestors would be both my weft and warp. Leaving the perilous east, they wove themselves over land and water; carrying my grandmother’s teapot in the bamboo basket. I make a point to sip from the matching cup as I weave. Tea of marigold flowers. I think of my relatives that drank the same herbs, from the same cup, from a different plant. To weave and swallow golden tea, my most nourishing ritual. Over and under, over and under, I am filled with reverence for stitches passed; long disintegrated baskets; thatched rafts burnt in cremation fires. Around the coil I weave, repetition bringing inner peace, I connect the inner pieces of me.

When spiraling out from the core, I think of the frail teacher that once whispered to me, “weaving is women’s business”. This quiet proclamation was news to my heart and I wish I had told her of my grandfathers who kept the family warm and fed, by twining vine and bark for fishing nets and soft sleeping mats. These men who wove so I can sit here in the west and remember them. Younger me wove on silent and grieved for the way men’s connection to weaving has been erased in colonized lands.

Now I weave as a woman, gaining creative fulfillment between breaths of doing and being. Coiling further and further away from that umbilical starting point I ponder the erasure of the masculine and how this allowed for the denigration of weaving in the west - from a valued and imperative skill - to a craft women take up to fill spare time. I land on this thought and tug a piece of weft in tight. Somewhere before the harshness of industrialization there was a time when the word craft was ascribed to the gifts of artists, magicians, the work of the weaver. I weave with this in mind, instilling my craft with value. I weave only in peace and when I feel flutters of frustration towards the foundering patriarchy all I need to do is turn towards my daughter.

With wonder I watch her weave. Her style unrefined, youthful and loose, less influenced by stubborn teachers entrenched in tradition. I admire her flow, her abandonment and deviation from convention. She tucks bits of used colored plastic bags into places where once there would have been a bead, a shell. She writes secrets on the backs of old envelopes and slips them into her baskets core – a natural creator of fortune cookies that will remain unread and ever present in her useful creations. I think of future weavers, unborn generations weaving for different reasons with different resources.

Satisfied I hide the last strands in the end of a basket. I honor the power of the rhythm and usefulness of the woven form; the power is the same whether you use a dollar shop plastic needle or an ancient crone's bone awl. I love to weave, awake or dreaming, my hands move in sequences passed down, cellular memory performs the task of creating useful and beautiful forms. In the spaces between the overs and unders, the inhales and exhales, my mind is left to meander through the weaving of time and story, I feel at peace.