I began weaving again this past month after a forced eight month hiatus—forced by nothing more than the details of my life, too much weight being piled on a person pulled too thin to carry it. I have had lapses in my weaving before, but never since I learned to weave eight years ago have I said, No more for who knows how long… This break is indefinite.

It wasn’t a sign of quitting as much as it was surrender. Something had to go in order to save myself. I know many of us have been put in this position before. 

And then May came with a phantom virus that took me out for nearly two weeks, in turn creating a forced break from my job. During that hard pause, it became all too clear to me what direction my life should go. I have been at this crossroads before, many times in my life, but often didn’t have the clarity—or let me be even more frank, the support—to put me in the position where I actually had a choice. 

When I told my partner Brian how I was feeling, he said yet again like he had at every tear-filled breakdown, “Quit. We’ll figure it out.” Only this time, I listened to him. I turned in my resignation and have been following my heart since the end of June. 

Hence, the return to weaving.

I love weaving. The planning. The calculating. The figuring it out. 

I have a book of patterns, and when I say patterns I don’t mean like sewing patterns, not ones that tell you what to make or how big or how long or anything else. Instead, Marian Powell’s 1000(+) Patterns gives you a tiny sample, not much bigger than a square inch, and corresponding page that tells you how to create it. After choosing one, I only have to pick which design to make. I pick the colors and then do all of the planning. 

How wide should it be? How long?

I have a worksheet from my old friend, master weaver and teacher, Linda, which helps me with the calculations to figure out exactly how much yarn I will need. I plan everything else on graph paper. 

I liken weaving to playing music. What the pattern ultimately tells me is this: If you set the loom up like this and play these notes, this is the song you will sing. It’s wonderful really. So calculated. Room for error, yes. It takes finesse, yes. There is skill involved, sure, but to me it’s akin to placing chaos within parameters—like putting the bumpers up when you go bowling.

Sometimes, mistakes still happen. You might not even discover them until after the piece is finished, but they have a name for them. They’re called design elements. Sounds fancy, doesn’t it? Like a snowflake, no two pieces or weavers are alike.

But I can’t stand them. Once I see them, I can’t unsee them and they just glare at me.

You made a mistake, they say. You weren’t paying attention. You need to try harder next time. Oh, I hope no one else sees it. What will they think of me?

Here is the beauty though of the actual process…

I pay close attention to my weaving. I make mistakes, yes, but I almost always catch them. Sometimes, they will be six inches back in what I’ve woven and guess what?? I loathe them enough to painstakingly un-weave everything that’s been woven and once fixed, no one knows it ever happened. 

When Linda first heard of me doing this, her voice raised in a high pitch, Just leave them! she said, They’re design elements. 

But no, not for this snowflake. 

Weaving however, isn’t like life. We can’t undo what’s been done. We can do better, yes. We can change—lifestyles, behavior, diets, habits, attitudes, beliefs and so on—but ultimately, we can’t undo the life that’s been lived. The beauty about truly changing though, is that we can heal pain. We can show up to our lives as a more fully evolved version of ourselves and everyday, every moment, every exchange can slather a loving balm over the moments that didn’t go so well in the past.

But here’s the tricky thing when people die…

The story we shared with them is done. It’s been written in the storybook of our lives. We can get an interpreter, or a good therapist, who will help us see things in a different, more compassionate light, who can help us view our own lives and our growth, the bell curve of things, in a way we can’t on our own. We can effectively see things that happened in our pasts as design elements by softening our opinions about our growth, but this re-seeing isn’t a one time thing. It isn’t six inches of un-weaving, forever changing the course of things.

It’s a process, one that has to be revisited. Sometimes, when we least expect it.

Last year, I purchased a new computer on which I am writing Remember the Birds. It replaced my old Mac desktop which I had since 2009. That old Mac had been through so much, it saw so much of my life—of our lives, both Josiah’s and mine—much of which I had forgotten, not-so-neatly tucking it away by shoving it in the back of the closet. 

This past week, I finally took my old Mac down to the computer shop here in town. I needed help getting the contents of the failing hard drive onto a new one that I could mine for the important stuff—the photos, the documents, the old writings and Josiah’s school projects as I guard everything we shared fiercely.

Yesterday, I picked it up right before one of my writers hours at the London Writers Salon and rather than working on the manuscript, I excitedly loaded my old photos. A lot of what I saw were happy memories, but there was plenty that made me sad, old photos filled with good intentions, backed by uninformed decisions, forcing me to face parts of my past on a Monday afternoon, 15 years or more later, that I’d rather forget. I then slipped down a rabbit hole meant for reminiscing, but found it paved with regret.

What is the deal with forgiveness? We’re raised in a culture where we’re constantly told, You have to forgive. Only when they say it, they mean forgive other people.

What I have found since Josiah was killed is that the most intense part of grieving is the process of forgiving myself. 

It’s very easy for someone to suggest, whether a friend or even a good therapist, We all make mistakes! And that works well when our loved ones are still living, but the work is deeper, more challenging, when the one person we want to make it right with is dead.   

Now don’t get me wrong. I am neither a sinner nor a saint. I have oodles of self-compassion, self-love and acceptance, but still these kernels of self-blame and doubt exist. They lie at the center of the work I am doing, unearthed by the nature of writing.

The hours of writing I put into Remember the Birds each week is an infinite processing machine. I work daily with questions that help with reflection, fueled by a loving curiosity which gently asks, Why did you feel that way? Respond that way? What was really going on?. 

Inevitably, the writing is carrying me as I time travel through my past, seeing the mother that I was along with the one I wanted to be, that I set out to be when Josiah was still very young.

When I say, I love myself. A good question would be, Do you really? Even the icky bits, the parts you hope no one else can see?

The truth is, I’m a work in progress, learning to love the design elements of my past by facing them, embracing them and holding them unconditionally. 

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Liz

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