Interweaving the warp and the weft: Part Two
The intricate weaving of words
An ordinary poet
I make my apology.
I have no right to shape your thoughts, clothe
your dreams:
mine are no different.
My expectations, I would guess, are yours too –
once naïve, idealistic, now altered;
altering.
I am serving my time.
Poet. The name is yet too proud: an
intricate weaver of words; hands
calloused and coarse, which yet
can stitch the most delicate strand.
Then, look on me as an ordinary poet. Life
and feelings no less full I share –
I have the material. What I lack
is the art.
Rachel Connor, 1986
At age seventeen, tussling with language, I write a poem.
Perhaps—in the hormonal fug of uncertainty—I am looking to define myself in ways that make sense. I situate myself as a poet, of sorts, an ‘intricate weaver of words’.
Even at this age, I realise that an awareness of how art is made is everything. It will be years before I also realise that this meta-thinking is far from new; before I discover the writers ahead of me who have already encoded in metaphor their own artistic practice.
I yearn to be a poet but worry I can’t be. I have the material. What I lack/is the art.
No. It’s the other way around, my English teacher says. This poem demonstrates that you have the art. You just don’t have the material yet. But it’ll come. You just need to live your life.
Material. Matter. The matter of writing creates experience, a fabric crafted through interweaving: the joining together of warp and weft.
The metaphor spans time, threading through and in between the lives of those women from mythology who turned the craft of weaving into subversive expression. Then there is a different kind of weaving—not that in the old shared, ancient stories but a kind of personal mythology, stretching back, I realise, through the warp of my life and stitching together the sense of it all.
In my fifties (the decade I am now) I enter a process of transition, a transition that leads me to reflect on my mission and purpose.
Who do I want to be? What do I want to bring to the world? There is a sense of spiralling back through time. I connect, or reconnect, to the intricate weaver I felt myself to be in my youth.
I have amassed more material. I (still) long to be a poet but (still) worry I can’t be.
At this juncture of my life, what am I weaving?
I’m beginning to gather the scraps of stories, the fragments handed down through ancestral inheritance, from culturally constructed narratives—home, school, community. And then, internally, there are the manifold parts of me: the child selves, the adult selves, the hidden exiles and the more robust, but armoured, protector selves. I start to strip back the layers so I can see them all, and welcome in these many aspects of myself.
I am given (by my coach) the word ‘harmony’ as one of my essence words. The word is a gift, bringing a realisation that it has been intrinsic all along, this ability to discern and connect things that are both separate and related. I see that I’ve always had a desire to embrace multiplicity and complexity and enfold it; that this, itself, is a practice as much as a state of being.
I am invited (by my coach) to define the word harmony for myself.
Harmony: ‘an interweaving of separate yet connected parts consciously arranged to produce a unified sense of beauty, joy, pleasure or peace.’ This definition, for me, marries essence (who I AM in the world) with values, one of my key values of creativity. What is creativity if not the bringing together of disparate and seemingly unconnected parts?
The joining together of warp and weft.
Wind back the clock from the present day to one a few years ago.
I am in the first few months of a new relationship with the man who will become my partner, the man I am now very much in love with. In these early days, we dwell in intensity and uncertainty, wondering how the relationship will unfold as we make sense of being apart and being together and what a committed relationship might look like with spaces between the togetherness.
We tussle with ways to honour the separate and the interconnected, and how to harmonise the two.
One morning, I wake with a deep knowing, the awareness of something profound – not the trace of a dream but a word that floats to the forefront of my consciousness. It feels like the word has been given to me, a word that resonates in my head and in my mouth. Another word-gift; another invitation to express who I am into the world.
The word is ‘interwoven.’
I text my partner. Yes, he says, we are indeed interwoven.
There is deep mystery in this. I realise there is something beyond our two separate egos trying to make sense of where we find ourselves. Connect, this bigger, louder voice is telling me; connect to the bigger thing and all shall be well.
Months later when friends visit us, one of them says: something has happened between you two--or to you. You’ve always seemed connected but now it’s as though you are felted. The fusion in your union intensifies the colour of the fabric.
Felted. The warp and weft of our relationship, of our love. The harmony of separate yet related parts.
Back to the present, to an art work on the wall of my living room.
It is a textile piece I commissioned from my artist friend, Julia. She made it to echo the view from my window, which overlooks trees, a river, a hillside. The view, the apartment, are both mine, exclusively mine, in this act of living alone for the first time in my life. This home is a space that supports my autonomy, my individuality. At the same time, it supports deep connection: with those I love who come to visit, eat with me, spend time with me; with those I work with online, one-to-one and in groups. This latter connection is virtual—forged at a geographical distance, both national and international—and yet the spirit of each person pervades my home. Each one is welcome.
The interwoven-ness of the real and the virtual.
The textile hanging Julia made for me is real. I touch it and feel the groundedness that emanates from its matter: the fabrics she has sourced—the hessian and wool, the cotton. Here, too, there is a story of making, a longer story to be fully told on another day. Julia describes how she harvested lichen and moss from the Yorkshire hillsides and boiled it up in a witches’ brew to dye the plain voiles that she wove into the textile piece. She describes stitching it into a patchwork that abstractly represents hills, trees, the fields I see from my window, interweaving the inside with the outside.
This fabric artwork tells another story: that of mine and Julia’s friendship, which has been woven through time, the yarn strengthened by the intimacy of mutual experiences. In parallel, we’ve raised our children and witnessed the key events of each other’s lives. We are, both of us, intricate weavers—not just of words, but of memories, too, and hearts.
Harmonising present and past, I circle back to my youth—to its fabric, to its poetry. Now, I have the material. Now, there is also a longer thread: the stitching of art and story, self and other(s).
Perhaps I’ve discovered that poetry is, after all, just this: the capacity to connect; to interweave.
What if you've been a poet all along and you just never noticed? xxx