The weave of unity is infinite, ever flowing & creative.
-Patricia Albere
Words related to the ancient art of weaving are often used as metaphors, especially when expressing the deep, intricate nature of life and human awareness. My curiosity was peaked regarding that relationship of words when reading about the history of weaving — and learning that women were the first weavers. “The facts of women’s experience of life are primordial,” poet and author Barbara Mor wrote.
“The first God, Mother Earth, was the sign of a human response to an experienced fact,” Mor explained in The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. “The first arts and religions, the first crafts and social patterns, were designed in recognition and celebration of her.” From earliest times — giving birth, sustaining life, and nurturing that life — women recognized themselves in Mother Earth. And women told their stories (were women also the first storytellers?) by communicating that innate, fertile connection to life through art — creating clay vessels, weaving fabric, making paint, and painting on rocks and structures around them — linking their experiences to the Divine. And they recognized themselves in Her reflection.
Barbara Mor shares that “religious rites were combined with industry. Women’s religions were organic, a unity of body and spirit, of daily life tasks and cosmic meaning.” All of life was sacred, interconnected, shared. “The sacred is the emotional force which connects the part to the whole,” philosopher and poet William Irwin Thompson wrote.
“Cosmic mind and human mind are not essentially different, or separate, nor are cosmic body and human body,” Mor emphasized. “Everything is interconnected in a vast webwork of cosmic being — a universal weaving — in which each individual thing, or life-form, is a kind of energy knot, or interlock, in the overall vibrating pattern.” The intimacy in Barbara Mor’s words here conjures the essence of nature’s magic. I stare into a spider’s web and lose myself in the interrelated universe she has woven, clearly guided by a Divine source. Following their own instinctual nature, did the women who invented spinning and weaving — twisting something raw into filament-like threads, then weaving them into something whole — do the same? Beyond the practical attributes of string and cloth for early humans, was there a desire to express something ‘sensed’ within themselves?
No comments:
Post a Comment