Tapestry, Weaving, Life
Tuesday: My life is a tapestry I choose to weave.
Gather all that you will make your tapestry using, and prepare to play repeat as you create stitch followed by another: sounds like life to me!
Creation is powerful & admirable
Imagine enjoying the freedom to commit to mastery? That conviction that I, insert your name, can and will go about making something for a particular use. Am I the only person here seeing artists as majesties? I mean, let’s think about this for a second.
How many of us seriously enjoy the liberty to think through anything? I mean from conception to its transformation till its realization? Do you see? Artists are bosses, and I want to become one now!
I have been fondly reminded of my father’s village, a place we returned to from the city once my dad lost his journalist job in the capital city. Whose dad was also an activist and a damn right good chap? Mine was! Anyway, the real story linked to the tapestry is that once we assimilated to Luyengo, our worlds changed, and we learned that things could be made from scratch at homes and utilized there. Great, right?
Once I learned who my cousins were, their families, and that socialization, I was good to go. In essence, this meant that I could go to my neighbour’s homes, eat their food assortments and just be! Hooray! This part of the world is one where we are all cousins, and no DNA test is required. A funny story, maybe tied to the topic, was that some folks that either worked in the area, studied there, or God knows, took to calling us cousins, but look, we never cared as I am from cool people like that.
Anyway, below my father’s home was his cousin’s house! Again, this family shared a similar last name as my paternal grandmother, and that was an automatic cousin pass for dad! There are proven merits to forging ties as a society that I may not expand on today! But if you know, high five! Oh! This family weaved, no the mom did.
So, little tiny me, curious as ever, learned how to operate a real homemade weaving machine. This kind lady, she was Mrs. Dube, nee Ngwenya! Her kids were many, olala, but they were friends I walked to school with and played with many times. Look, I made a grass mat that I was so proud of and was kind enough to give it to my maternal grand-mom, who thought I was just a blessing.
To this day, I remember the pride I felt from touching the grass, smelling it as I used it in the weaving process that my loving “auntie” tutored me on. I may weave: using grass and a wooden make-shift machine here. Look, I want to revisit that powerful creation time in my adulthood. I yearn for groundedness in knowing that if I envision it enough: I can make it…poverty is a creation, and so are tapestries. I am taking my power back, a stitch at a time, in 2021 and beyond! Thanks for the prompt!
