Creating, Unmaking and Recreating
One on one sessions
There's so many indigenous goddess archetypes of the spinners and weavers of fate and time, weaving the tapestries of our destinies. My favourite ones are from my viking heritage, The Norns, who lived in a hall at the bottom of the world tree, spinning time and fate.
But I am Hellena the Hellenist, because Athena is my home Goddess, she picked me at 21, and she also happens to be the Goddess of Spinning and Weaving, as well as helping people to find their own way.
Playing with fibre and yarns is so full of deep metaphors and ancestral archetypes, that it's hard to not feel a bit majestic when working them.
One of the richest metaphors is that of the yarn, which can be physical, or a story, or a representation of the thread of our lives, woven in with others.
And that yarn, which is a continuous thread, can be knotted up with tools or just your hands to take a form - and now this is the magical bit - then unraveled completely into it's essential nature as a continuous yarn in a ball, and reworked into something completely new. Yet with the same essence, and maybe more importantly, memories of all the different forms it's taken on its journey.
The parallels between that yarn that can be made, unmade, and then made again, and our lives is exquisite. I've lost count of the amount of times I've made something, and then completely pulled it apart. Left it alone till the new idea whispered to me, and then re-worked it into something that was so much better than it was before!
And I've lost count of the times that our family has woven itself into a community or an idea or a home, which has then unraveled completely into our essential natures and a period of nothingness, till we reform and regroup and express our yarn in a new way, while carrying the memories and lessons from the tapestry we were before.
And how many times I as an individual, have been one thing or another that was unraveled completely, rug ripped out and everything gone gone gone, till I started reforming myself again, into a better and stronger weaving, of my memories and learnings and experiences.
Since I found spinning, or spinning found me, I've been so blessed by another metaphor, that of how feeling the fleeces that you're spinning into yarns, mirrors the feelings that can emerge from within, to be honoured as part of the process.
And whenever I'm unraveled, I can turn to spinning or crochet or weaving or felting or knitting or rope making, as a meditation that gives an end result, that is a record of my thoughts and feelings as I made it. And shuts up that tangled mind enough to let my deeps and subconscious out.
Any problems or issues can be spun through into yarns that can lead me out of that mind labyrinth, like Ariadne's red ball of yarn led Theseus out of the Minotaurs lair.
When things are at their bleakest, I turn to fibres and yarns. I think I'd be safe to say that I'm the only person who created fibre artworks of Birth, Sex & Death as a response to my son getting leukaemia and spending months in hospital!
To me it is the equal and opposite of the fear and trauma that I was walking through, that I could spin into something meaningful, that most importantly gave me a path forward from the cyclic abuse of a terrified mind.
I'd love to know if this process would work for other people. I can't give you any answers or solutions to anything, but I can certainly give you some skills, tools and yarns that can help you find your own path forward, and help lead you out of your own tangled labyrinth.
I can help you consult with yourself.
If any of this resonates with you, I'd love to invite you to visit me in TUFT (my Temporary Utopian Fibre Temple ((the garage downstairs))), or invite me to come and visit you, and we can walk a labyrinth or two and tell each other yarns, and I'll show you the zen form of spinning.
You don't need anything for it except for your hands and anything that you can twist. I'll provide the stuff to twist.
Come sit with an earth mother in my TUFT, and let me listen and give you some skills to better listen to yourself, and spin your own yarn or rework your unraveled bits.
By donation
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