A balanced weave
Notes on creativity and attachment
Hey there, dears;
“Reeds and Rattles.”
Truthfully, I didn’t think much of the name. I knew that’d be a stumbling block for myself; waiting for the perfect title to land in my lap, using its absence as an excuse to put off sharing any words at all. I woke up and drew the name out. It fit.
It originates from weaving. “Reeds” and “Rattles” are both parts of a loom. “Balancing a Weave” is a practice of evening the space between warp threads and weft threads, binding disparate things together in equal patterns.
I like the sound. It makes me think of marshes: the soft rustling and clacking of reed stems together as they rattle in the wind. That’s a quiet space, in my mind. A perfect place to write.
A few days before naming the blog, I drew the Queen of Wands as my daily tarot card; in my deck, “The Mythic Tarot,” meanings are portrayed through Greek Mythology. The Queen of Wands, representing deep inner conviction and intuitive faith, is told by the story of Penelope.
Wife of Odysseus as he traveled for many years, she was overrun with suitors. There was no way of knowing whether her husband was alive, but she sensed that he would return. She could not marry, she told the world around her, until the shroud she wove was finished. For three years she wove her cloth by day and unraveled it by night.
Working and unworking, unattached to the fruits of her labor, her creation was an act of clever deception and deep faith.
In a remote cave somewhere in the cold reaches of midwestern North America, an old woman weaves the world.
According to Sioux Nation legend, she routinely rises from her work at the loom to stir the cooking pot in the mouth of her cave; in it simmers all the roots and seeds of the world’s plants. As she tends to the fire, her old black dog rises from its sleep and tugs on the loose thread of her tapestry, unraveling it. Instead of cursing the destruction, she sits again, weaving a different, perhaps more perfect pattern than before.
Creating and destroying, it never grows in length, but never shortens. Life continues as she weaves. If she were to ever finish, to tie off the rug, she’d tie off the thread of the universe.
Occasionally in life, I’ve had sensations of deep serendipity and meaning. Without storytelling, without explanation, without thought, my heart whirs in minute vibrations and my body becomes electrified. Each step feels sacred, each breath full of life. I’m moved to tears. I weep without warning.
Walking through the dappled light of cottonwood trees in Bandelier National Monument, pleasure mixed with puzzlement spread outwards from my heart. I knew this place.
It was late May in New Mexico, 2018. Reaching nearly 100 degrees during the day and dipping to the ’30s at night (about 40 to 0, for Celsius folks), even the weather couldn’t seem harsh in this valley of carved stone.
An ancient volcano had spilled ash in long gushes over the desert landscape. As this hot, light material settled into cool stillness as rock, it looked like no oasis. But over hundreds of thousands of years, water carved and shaped it into a deep valley. When ancestral Puebloans found this place, about 1150 AD, it became their haven for nearly 400 years.
Tuff, the strong yet soft rock made of this volcanic ash, became Puebloan homes. They carved the cliffs of tuff, scraping out small rooms and flattening floors. They smoothed plaster on walls, painted them brightly. In places, you can still see splotches of that ancient color. Human hands carved bricks of tuff and laid them into expansive yet simple, multi-tiered houses with windows and doors.
I sat on the bank of the meandering creek which shaped this valley. I could feel, almost see, people around me. Squatting to tend gardens of squash and beans. Mending a shallow dam in the creek. Running with children. Laughing in a language I’d never known. My heart felt light and longing.
In many of these small, out-carved homes, circular divots about the size of tennis balls were dug into the floor. Each time I saw the divots, I was puzzled by their regular yet distinct pattern. I touched the hollow spaces. I sketched them in my orange, dusty field notebook.
“During this period,” I read later in the park center, “men often used looms in cavates to weave cotton cloth.”
Each divot held a leg of the loom in place. Amongst obsidian, pottery, meats, and animal skins, these cotton weavings were one of the Frijoles Canyon’s greatest trading commodities.
I ambled through the gorge, avoiding all living people. I was sensing too much to speak.
Following the trail deeper into the canyon, I climbed four worn, wooden ladders to what was once called the ceremonial cave. Looking out from the lip of the eroded overhang, you gaze into a valley of Juniper and sloping hills of sagebrush and cactus. A kiva was reconstructed there; a circular shelter dug into the rock floor, accessed by a ladder and hole in its roof.
Leaning on the tuff bricks of the kiva, resting in silence and solitude, tears started flowing. I didn’t know why. I couldn’t control them. I still don’t know. I still don’t have control.
A loom lays on the carpeted floor under a bed in my grandmother’s basement. It’s framed in light-colored wood, and layers of red and blue wool cling to the bottom, begun, and left unfinished. It was my mom’s. At some point in her teens, she took up weaving as a craft, eventually overtaken by singing or writing or some other form of art.
I’ve never seen any of her weavings—considering how brief that creative stint was, I can’t imagine they’d be all that good. But that’s not the point of making.
My mother taught me that creation and creativity are acts, not products.
Every day I’d see her with a brush, spread out on the floor of some cluttered room, crafting something colorful out of chaos. Or sitting with her reading glasses balanced on the tip of her nose, red curly hair flowering from her face, looking up from whatever book she’d pulled from the shelves, writing in the margins. Or lying in bed, freckled ankles crossed, typing up a script, editing a poem, drafting an epistolary essay via email.
Don’t know how to watercolor? Pick up a brush. Never drummed in your life? Everyone has a rhythm. Hands too clumsy for knitting? Let’s make some fumbling knots. Intimidated by writing? Slap words on a page, just see what shape they take. That was my guidance; that was her gift.
In her book on creativity, “Big Magic,” Elizabeth Gilbert aptly says:
Perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat.
I refuse to be run off by that dame of fear, dolled-up as she may be. My mother was the most creatively courageous person I may ever know. If she could half-pluck a song on ukulele and bellow out her words to an audience of one or hundreds, then so can I.
It’s attachment that traps us. Attachment to our product, what we can offer, what we can give, what people think. To work without attachment to outcome is the practice of Karma Yoga.
In my mother’s preferred translation of the Bhagavad Gita, Stephen Mitchell writes the words of Lord Krishna:
You have a right to your actions, but never to your actions’ fruits. Act for the action’s sake. And do not be attached to inaction.
In writing these essays, I’m forcing myself to practice creative nonattachment. I may think I know what I’ll say, but once words begin to flow, I’m carried off and away into a different corner of my mind or the world than I’d ever expected.
I’m on a journey that I don’t know the destination to. Perfection is not my aim. But I do hope for diligence, exploration, and joy in the process.
For our entire lives, we may never have anything unique to say or give. It’s all reiterated elsewhere, uttered by more important people, whispered on the most remote lips. Some may think that depressing, but I find it quite beautiful. We’re all just singing out universal sounds, taking part in something beyond ourselves, whether we realize it or not.
The older I get, the less impressed I become with originality, Gilbert writes. These days, I’m far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.
These writings may be wholly individualistic, irrelevant to the world beyond myself. I will never promise you a revelation or even a single new thought that you haven’t already had. But in sharing this, and in your reading it, perhaps my experience rings around your experience, and yours rings mine, and mine rings yours, again and again in this wild spiraling attempt at self-development that draws us onward.
It’s all lost, eventually. In the dark night as we sleep, Penelope stealthily uncrosses thousands of threads. The black dog holds a loose end in its mouth, tail wagging, as what we have created turns to tangles on the floor. The cotton cloth, made through hours of labor nearly a thousand years ago, has long since dissolved to dust. An old loom lays on the basement floor, work unfinished.
If it’s all made only to be unmade, why don’t we be bold in the making?
