Ever since I wove my first basket, something in the weaving felt like a truth was becoming in me, in ways I did not understand at the time. Weaving began to open up a sense of curiosity and imagination within my body and mind that I had not felt within me since I was a young girl. Weaving was teaching me something; I was starting to feel a deep sense of harmony and balance within the rhythm of weaving that was inviting me to feel a different pace of time, a relationship that felt softer and deeply needed within my bodily ecosystem at the time. One that existed long before the breathtaking pace of the capitalist mindset and is ever-present within the lifeway of basket weaving.
Through deepening contact with the nature community, I feel part of and interwoven within my environment and the plants that create my baskets. This sense of interrelationship has felt like a reweaving of my roots with earth, reattaching and entangling myself with my more-than-human kin. This reweaving has brought me a deep sense of intimacy and belonging within the world. I strongly believe that nature-based crafts or anything else that brings our hands into the soil, where we meet with the aliveness of the land and all creation is deeply transformative to the human soul. Working with our hands and being out with the land enlivens our senses and is an invitation to remember our home within the nature community, rather than separated from. When we participate with the earth, when we nurture, tend and weave our prayers and longings back with the land we feel part of the greater webbed-embrace of being human. For this we can feel a sense of gratitude for all the gifts, beauty and abundance that we are provided and in turn we feel part of the greater reciprocal flow between us. This is the heartbeat of my work and weaving, curiosity and enchantment within the living world.
Through this participation within the natural world, we can sense ourselves as part of this web of life, entwined and entangled within the same cycles and seasons, something that has always been part of our coexistence with earth. It is only that this is masked by the globalised world of industrial “progress” that it is so hard to see and feel. Yet we are not machines designed to grind our bodies until we break, constantly living on the edge of discontentment, just about keeping up with the pace.
“Weaving continues to teach me how my own body and nervous system are part of the same cycles and seasons, something that has always been part of our coexistence with earth. I feel this is one of the greatest teachings that nature-based crafts can offer us in this time of cascading crisis and separation from nature - an invitation to remember a way of being in the world that honours the pace of the living world, of plant and root, and soil and sky. It constantly teaches me so much about relearning and returning to live a pace of life that gives me peace and feels harmonious within my internal ecosystem and the wider natural ecosystem outside my body. When I am weaving I somehow feel part of the wider creation story and the energy of that in my own participation with my environment”
