Three Lights Continue On to the Great Flow

Weaving, at first blush, appears to be a straightforward, meditative endeavor. Yet, beneath that current of calm and simplicity, weaving contains a churning, cosmic dance of shadow and light that is waiting for the weaver to find. Yes, weaving is nothing short of the craft of death and rebirth. It is the craft of the spider, who weaves a web each day as the world comes into its enlightened brilliance to take it down as the darkness descends. The story of this weaving, “Three Lights Continue On To the Great Flow,” is the tale of how I came to peel back the veil to become part of that dance.

I found that commission request email from my dear friends in my email inbox and it called me to embrace a new direction in my work.  My friends had lost three young loved ones quite suddenly and hoped that I could create a weaving for them to honor them.  I was extremely honored that they had invited me into their healing process and felt that one of my weavings could be a vessel for their loved ones to continue on. I knew this was an incredibly sacred responsibility that I was being invited into.  

I immediately sat down to sketch and came upon a surprise. The designed poured out onto the sketch pad with little effort, as if the tiny ones already knew what the design was to look like. Three hemp flows appeared on the sketchpad, which came as a sharp departure from my recent geometric work and a return to a style I used to move through the grief of my own mother’s continuation. I chuckled a bit at those flows. I had not completed a piece in that style since “Elemental Flows” (See Below) but had recently been teaching folks how to create organic shapes in that style.  “How interesting,” I thought to myself. The little seed that that I had planted in my work to teach people to weave for free had now bloomed in this new project.  “Could this be my payment for those classes?” That thought echoed for a few moments, as I lost myself in the synchronicities that brought me to that moment in time.

Having completed the sketch, I sent it to my friends with a simple request. “Can I pay you for this opportunity to be of help to you,” I asked. In that moment, it just became so readily apparent to me that what I was experiencing was nothing short of magic.  What had I done to be allowed into this most sacred responsibility of helping row my loved ones to the other side of the shore?  I had no answer, but, like any druid, I had fully embraced my sacred responsibility to follow through on what the universal flow had set out for me to do for my loved ones. Little did I know how much I would actually learn about myself and weaving in the process. 

I opened up my sacred grove, calling in my ancestors, connecting to the earth, inviting in my spider guides.  The weaving, still in its infancy, was sitting right in front of me.  I invited my ancestors of blood, tradition, and land, to lay their hands on the weaving with me and pour our blessing into the piece.  The earth extended its roots over our hands next, encircling our hands and the weaving in the radiant green energy of nywfre.  Finally, my golden orb weaver spider guide descended and wrapped the bundle in its pulsing golden silk. We all sit suspended in this beautiful moment of blessing until I asked my mom to invite in Hugo, Archie, and Rufus into the circle. With her guidance, the three little ones arrived and placed their own blessing on the piece.

Throughout the creation of this piece and when it was complete, I brought this piece into my sacred grove again and again to bless and protect it through ritual.  I really have no idea why I did this. Looking back now, it just seemed appropriate. Previously, as part of my gifting process, I blessed weavings before I gave them to my friends and family. However, I had never actively done a blessing where I brought in the departed that I was hoping to honor with the piece. That gesture just intuitively felt right in the moment. It wasn’t until I received the help of some friends that I realized how this was connected to all the rest of my work.

It was another coincidence that helped me realize that death has always been central to my work. While weaving this piece, I was shooting off photos of Natalie’s (@combedthunder) work to my stories, feeling very inspired by her technical and storytelling ability with her fiber work. Moments later, I got a notification that shot me out of my stream of conscious descent down the rabbit hole of my feed. I clicked on the notice. Natalie had posted a piece of mine with a touching description that mentioned my work being associated with meditation and death.  I paused, thinking “Huh, I have never thought about my work that way.” With a few simple words, Natalie held a mirror up to my practice to help me see a new facet of my work; all my work did have to do with death in one shape or another.

Weeks later, my good friend Hannah Haddadi of Mourning Light Divination introduced me to Death Work in a post on her IG page.  Hannah wrote eloquently, “I often get asked, ‘what exactly is death work?’. . . Death, Rebirth, and Transformational work is the ground work of life. It’s using the tools that we have internally and externally to move through lifecycles whether they be the tough, exciting, or unknown variety. It’s about learning how to accept that these cycles are a natural part of our lives and mother earth at large. This work is also about honoring ourselves, where we’ve been, where we are at and certainly where we are going. To honor the process and be able to sit with that process - offer it a seat at the table, offer it tea, and some grace.”

After reading those words, nothing was the same. Something shifted in me, and I found myself in a new world.  I realized that my weaving was not just about death; My weaving has always been and is death work. My weaving practice is rooted in death work, having learned how to weave in order to finished my mom’s unfinished business of wanting to learn how to weave. My woven language series is the work of rebirthing symbols important to my mother in the hopes of passing them on to the next generation. Finally, with this piece, I have been invited into the sacred process of using my weaving as vessel to help others move through the death and rebirth process. In other words, the universe invited to become someone who practices fiber death work. 

I nestled the weaving into my canvas bag, zipped the bag shut, and placed it in the basket in the front of my bike. I pedaled along the sleepy roads on a chilly, late winter morning. I reached my destination some 15 miles southeast of my home and met with my friend Hannah, who led a ritual to help bless the weaving.  Still a novice at magically preparing weavings for their homes, I wanted to be sure that this weaving fulfilled its purpose for those three little ones. I was not disappointed. Hannah’s ritual, which she crafted specifically for this purpose, perfectly closed the circle on this bit of death work. The work seemed complete and ready to send away to its home.

In the days after the ritual, I kept thinking about how my own life seemed to be moving in an interesting mirror image of the weaving.  Some two months earlier, I received a text message that changed my life. The picture showed up on my phone, and the test listed the result as “pregnant.” I sat at my desk at work excited and nervous about the time to come.  Lily and I had done so much work to become parents spiritually and mentally and we were pregnant. I was going to be a dad. What I would come to realize in the weeks that followed was that that Lily and I became pregnant around the same time that we received the commission request from our friends to honor their three little ones.  What an interesting and beautiful synchronicity to have the cycle of life so present in the life cycle of this weaving. I suppose this happenstance just brings into relief the subtle magic at play in weaving and art more generally.  Aren’t all pieces of art the marks of a coming and going, a hymn to the unending flow of life and death? Isn’t art the way that we mark those moments of transfer across those golden lit thresholds? That seems to me to be the case at least.

So here I am, a novice death-working weaver, a soon-to-be father, a person living in pandemic times.  What am I to do next? It’s not lost on me that I am once again set into this space of profound transition with the delicate dance of light and darkness. It was not that long ago that, in a span of two years, I watched my mom continue to the next plane, finished a PhD, got married, moved across the country, and started my weaving journey.  This too feels like the wheels of history are speeding up again. Yet, this time something feels different.  It almost feels like I am riding on the top of the wave rather than being crushed under it.  I feel like all these wonderful things have happened for a reason, and I am meant to be of service to ya’ll. I guess this is my way of saying, Do any of y’all need a weaving to mark the continuation of a loved one?