The Loom of Life

“The Handwork Helper” created with Midjourney by Nicole Sallak Anderson

When my children were younger, they went to Waldorf schools. There are several aspects of that experience that I loved, but one in particular was handwork. Early on my children, as well as myself, were taught to knit. This would lead to a lifelong love for me of all things woven. I would eventually even acquire two adorable Pygora goats that we’d shear in the spring and after sending the fiber off to a mill to be cleaned, I’d spin the batting into skeins of yarn.

One thing schools need, especially elementary schools, are volunteers. Every school my children attended required 40 hours a year of volunteer work. One year, I chose to sign up to be a handwork helper. I still remember the first day of my duty. I prided myself by that point as being a fairly decent knitter and had imagined myself helping the children knit, but instead, on that first day I was assigned to untangle a basket full of yarn.

I sat in a sunny corner on a wooden chair, a bit disappointed that this would be my task, yet it was an important one. The children often made mistakes, requiring an unraveling of their work that sometimes ended in a ramen-noodle-like mess, tangled and unusable and thus, thrown into a basket only to tangle itself up even more with yarn from other forsaken projects. In the Waldorf school there is a deep commitment to perpetuity—nothing that is broken can’t be fixed. Anything can be reused. In fact, it is a spiritual exercise to align one’s life with repurposing. Thus, I was to repurpose the scraggly mess in the basket into something useful that would eventually be woven into a new project.

That first day, I made little progress. Untangling yarn isn’t as easy as it sounds. Sometimes, the tangle has to be cut out and in the beginning, I did that a lot. The handwork teacher, however, said I was wasting too much yarn. It was better to work the tangles, to find where it started and then follow the thread into the mess, massage it, move it, turn it upside down, and cajole it into letting go. I listened to her and found that indeed, if I let go of my narrow focus and allowed my eyes to see the bigger picture, I was not only able to find a way to untangle the mess, but I also learned to appreciate the mess, for the different skeins of yarn tied and locked together were beautiful even if they weren’t useful. Indeed, with time, the yarn would give way under my hands and allow me to unwind the binds between the yarn, separate it out of the mess, and then rewind it back into a neat ball, ready for little hands to give it another go. All it took was for me to relax and enjoy the process. To this day, I’m still a master at unknotting things. Give me a mess of twine and I can sit with it for hours. I love to see the balls of yarn piled up afterward—neat, and colorful, ingredients for a future project still ruminating in someone’s imagination, and ready to be called into action.

My husband retired a year ago and we’ve taken to having our morning coffee together. Often we play Wordle, but we also discuss the news and current events. Last week, our talk roamed from the strife of wage workers in today’s economy, the college for all model and how it not only increased the costs of college but also decreased the number of people in the trades, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the Russian/Ukraine conflict, the 2024 elections, ecological collapse, and the conflict between males and females in the modern age. It was a wide-ranging discussion, but in the end, all I could see in my head was a basket of tangled yarn, each issue an individual skein wrapped up into one another without thought or purpose but connected none-the-less. A beautiful mess in need of a patient handwork helper, sitting in her chair in the sun, tending and coaxing each one into releasing under her fingertips, that it might be used to create something beautiful.

I allowed myself to deepen into this image, seeing the next step…a tapestry of life, woven by each of us, connecting every living thing to the other. The collective, the noosphere, the book of life, the Akashic record, the living energy of the cosmos, the music of the spheres. This tapestry sits on a loom, not finished, never finished. If you’ve ever opened yourself to the impulse of love, you have known it. If you’ve ever acted out of inspiration, you’ve participated in the weaving. All are welcome to sit at the loom of life, but many refuse, instead opting to become tangled balls of yarn in a basket, separated from the song of life, far from the weaver’s touch. Why do we do this and how do we get all the yarn out of the basket? Do we step in and untangle them? Do we have that control? Can any human be the handwork helper in this situation?

When I offered my meditation to my husband, I asked him these questions and he answered, “perhaps the handwork helper is God?”

I love the image of God as an old woman in the sun, picking up each issue of our society, and inviting it to unravel in her hands. The key is that we need to be willing to surrender to her patient touch. Until we can do that, the tangled knots of our consciousness—those ideas that keep us killing, raping, taking, fearful, small, hateful—all remain. We must learn to relax into the hands of God as she massages us, teases at the knots, picks at the threads. We can allow ourselves to unravel in her loving hands. Then, when she’s rolled us up into a neat, useful skein, we are the ones who enter the loom and begin to weave. We participate in the tapestry of the more beautiful world we know is possible, because we are one again. Finally, we are out of the basket in the corner and participating in the creation of society and life.

It's scary to be a part of the one. It means we must be willing to feel everything the other feels—not just humanity, but the earth, animals, stars, wind, water, even the wildfires. It also means every other part of the tapestry knows our feelings as well. It is reciprocity that sometimes hurts and sometimes glorifies, yet collaboration is the only way society is created. It is art, music, sex, children, grandparents, seedlings, soil, insects, the skin on your face. All of it is woven by us when we’re willing to step up to the loom.

In other words, it’s up to us to decide the health of our society and the role we take in its creation is crucial. Are we the knotted-up ball of yarn, thrown into the basket by a frustrated child (i.e. the events of our lives), or are we the weavers at the loom of life?

One of the reasons it took me so long to finish my eHuman trilogy was my desire to create a story that provides a mythology of where we could go if connected to the loom of life. Creation myths answer the question, “Where did we come from?” Science fiction answers the question, “Where can we go?” It took me a while to find a solution, one that would unite those who wanted to live in unity. I call it the Empathy Collective in the novels, but that’s merely an allegory for the allegory of the loom of life. The weaving of our stories and our creativity is happening whether we’re conscious of it or not. Yet when we sit at the loom, blessed by the touch of the handwork helper, we are so much more capable of inserting beauty into our world than we are when we continue to be tangled up, thinking we’re all alone in that basket because we refuse to see the collective, instead priding ourselves on our independence.

The irony of it is, you’re not alone in that yarn basket. You’re tangling yourself up into other messes, making more messes, refusing to become a part of the beauty of the loom. Instead, you end up buried at the bottom of the pile, weighed down by the never-ending cycles of dysfunction.

The solution isn’t in cutting out the tangled parts and throwing them away, whether it is your own pain or the person you seek to destroy. The solution isn’t vanquishing the villain, it’s convincing the villain to put down the resistance, to surrender to the handwork helper as she tugs their yarn out of the mess. The solution lies in encouraging the radical forgiveness it takes to surrender to the divine, unsure of what comes next, but knowing a life of bombs, debt, slavery, and darkness are never, ever the answer. Surrendering to our task as weavers of the loom of life, allowing ourselves to be unraveled and untangled and then weaving ourselves into something beautiful together, this is progress in the sense of abundance, and it is our birthright.

I imagine that’s what “turning swords into plowshares” means. It can’t be forced; it can only be offered. All are welcome at the loom of life. May we each take our untangled yarn, attach a thread, and continue to create the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.