Like others in this tangled time on our planet, I grew up with very strong influences from more than one culture. These cultures were so different from each other that they could have been different planets. When the very smells and sounds and textiles of your baby days come from different worlds, and get all woven together in your emerging psyche; yet the underlying rules are spectacularly different (and often opposed) what do you do? As life unfolds, bits of yourself wind up here, bits over there on the other side of a chasm. You can vest in one story and reject or bury and mourn the bits that don’t fit (and live your life beset with ghosts). Or you can try and try and try again to throw spider silk guy-lines between the outcroppings, and create a web that can begin to hold more than one story.
I call it WaysWeaving. The word was coined for a novella, written in homage to the most important chief in the valley of the highlands of West Papua where I grew up as the daughter of missionaries (American father, Australian mother; more cultural intrigue). The changes that unfolded over the 40 years that my parents lived and worked in Tangma were colossal, and I honoured Aligat for holding an energy umbrella of “The Old Ways” over the valley, while creatively aligning himself with much of the new. I have done my best, in my journey through life (and over a fair portion of the planet) to emulate this art; to be a WaysWeaver.
In my late 30s, to my considerable surprise I found myself married with a five year old child and another in utero. I could no longer explore the possibilities of my world armed only with a backpack and a passport. New circumstances call for new methods. I began to read books based on the tremendously exciting work of Marija Gimbutas, an archaeologist whose importance in the domain of mythology should rival that of Joseph Campbell, because she literally unearthed thousands and thousands of years of hope for the human species. I can still remember sitting in a chair, reading The Myth of the Goddess (Baring and Cashford 1991), and the sense of discovery, exhilaration, joy. Wow! For thousands of years of early human history, we lived essentially in peace! And we rocked! Cultivation, pottery, arts of all kinds, and ceremony. Carvings and figurines and pottery from the time, depict ceremony, or are placed in ways, or decorated with patterns, that reveal their ceremonial significance. The central image over a vast geographic area was that of a Goddess, in many forms.
Art and spirituality have travelled hand in hand for longer than any of us could usually imagine, and to a WaysWeaver mind this is exciting. If we did it before, we can do it again. We can choose paths of peace. They are a familiar place, and we recognise them. It’s important to know, I believe, that when we get our hearts and hands into materials, colour, we are standing on the side of Peace. This is very literal. When as a craftsperson or artist we immerse in our work, we begin to calm, maybe to hum or sing, to enter a space that we could call meditative, or Shamanic, or the wavelength of true prayer. This can also be conducive to community and shared wellbeing. I facilitate a Women’s Felting Circle and the way that we engage while felting is quite different from how we would chat over a cup of tea. Art serves community wellbeing.
My particular interest is traditional Women’s skills, and it’s no surprise that these are being re-vitalised by so many in our time. The psyche calls for what she needs. Knitting, crochet, mosaic, felting, arts from a thousand lands. When we engage in these skills, we “hold hands with the ancestors.” This hand of mine that pulls a needle through a stitch, and winds up the slack in a figure 8, as my tribal “mother” Dorkat taught me so long ago, how many hands through time have made that motion, created a netted bag, a useful beautiful art?
How many hands have laid out wool, wet it and rubbed and rolled it to felt?
How many hands have fixed tiles to a surface and grouted between to make a picture out of fragments?
These arts all go back to an ancient time of peace and belonging. And I believe that when we engage our hands and eyes and minds in these creative acts, our brains re-connect with a deep Ancestral memory, when we were/are predominantly peaceful, and vitality and creativity can flourish. We are “home.”
The variety of artistic skills we have developed is exciting, because each will, in its own way, wend a slightly different path home. Art is always connected to Metaphor. The net of the Highlands, in which women carried their babies, as well as the food for the day, was also a deeply significant symbol of the whole cultural fabric of old. When a person creates a mosaic, I imagine this could be a profound metaphor for healing after a fragmenting experience, or a celebration of putting together many colours and textures into a new whole. Felting, with its use of water, its tactileness and its freedom, expresses something quite different on the psychic plane, from weaving, or quilting. Knitting in my mind has a resonance with Prayer Beads, and interestingly, it’s become a wonderful avenue to global involvement, as in the initiative Knit-a-Square. Spiritual significance shines in day to day actions and objects. And their everyday importance “grounds” the sacred. This is the world illuminated through the eyes of a time when our deity was the primeval Goddess of Life, Death, and Regeneration, and her realm was right here on earth.
Art also helps to create the context for heightened energy. This can be subtle. For instance, we have a beautiful hand-made mosaic platter by our front door, where we place leaves, stones or feathers that we pick up on a bushwalk. Set in honour on this platter, we take notice: “Look at this! How beautiful!”
I recently learned of an arts project in a nearby town, (Hurstbridge) where community members are collaborating to commemorate the original steam train of the area, by covering a metal fence with an enormous whimsical crocheted train! (yarnbomatraintoallwood.webs.com) This is another example of how art heightens energy, and adds value to culture and community.
And I believe that art will always augment and create context for the kind of intense heightened awareness that ceremony can bring. Allied with theatre and music, as well as more traditional means to invoke our connection to Spirit, it can help us to states of consciousness that are familiar and necessary to our psyches, as a species. We have been performing ceremony, in community, for time beyond telling. These times of intense “connectedness” serve us, and perhaps as we invite ceremony back into Western culture, some of our mental illnesses and dysfunctional substitutes will fade.
The domains of Art, Culture, Ceremony are what I love. Through them, I WaysWeave. In a time when on a global scale, our communities are becoming more and more of a mixing, colliding, melding milieu of cultures, I hope this may mean more than a personal exercise of making sense of my experience. We all have much to offer. Those of us who grew up as I did, dispersed in the chasms between our true loves, may find that we are particularly suited to a kind of creative speculation that is in service of our Planet, our finding our way Home.
| Elisabeth lives in the rural outskirts of Melbourne. She is a writer, artist, mother and facilitates crafts workshops. elisabeth@outofthepouch.com.au |