Woke up thinking about Navajo Weaving. On the breakfast table I had laid out the book, The Navajo Weaving Tradition: 1650 to the Present. I started leafing through the book looking for blue dyes. Indigo seemed to be the most prevalent blue– set with fermented urine as not a mordant (or fixative) but a “strong alkaline solution as a carrier”, p. 134. Used until the late 19th century.
The study now begins for me of what blue is now used and what blue will emerge in my studies with Sarah Natani. Using natural fiber and natural dye seems very important in creating a carpet from the earth. I want an earth carpet. Something that integrates the elemental earth, all aspects.
The Navajo have the beauty way, the way to harmony. This step seems important in weaving to hold this feeling of harmony as I approach this study.
Earthues in Seattle uses natural dyes. Combined with my study with Sarah Natani, I want to travel to Seattle to study with Michele Wipplinger who teaches wonderful classes on natural dye. My long time friend and carpet lover, Joyce, has shown me the samples that she brought back from a class, really lovely. We share the love of a good natural fiber either hand tied or woven into a carpet.
I digress. This morning I received an e-mail from Patience who is a wonderful friend and mbira teacher from Zimbabwe. I was reminded of the water spirit that I had met in my travels to Zimbabwe to the mountains village of Dzivaguru where the spirit mediums live. I wondered what this carpet weaving on the Navajo reservation could mean. Why was I being called to weave in a tradition that had so little water, no wide expanses of blue. This was my reason for looking for blues in the Navajo carpet and for any small sense of elemental water.
The Shona have no “spider woman” lore. Though the spiders are huge in Zimbabwe. I need a spider woman in my life, a grandmother spider woman, creator and holder of a power that is grounded and harmonious. This fearful image also brings life. In a Jungian sense, is allows the shadow a place in one’s home.
I want to weave a carpet with the image of spider woman. This might take some time. Looks simple but first there is much practice of stripes and zig zags. Vertical lines, horizontal lines, diagonal lines, all must be practiced.
Somehow there seems to be time to think of practicing. I who have been up against time, seeing that it no longer feels unlimited and looking for ways to take my patterns into the world of spirit where they might remain at least in traces of memories after death.
What survives? I watch my parents lose touch with all the things they thought to be important except family, a bit, and glimpses of greater love. Who are they now? What is the function of these later years that flirt with death even with a cosmology that embraces death, what part of that cosmology has failed my parents, and has been failing me now.
My search is for that peace, to allow beauty. To sit with people who allow beauty in simplicity, survivors of a harsh white world.
How can a bit of wool and a simple loom be the gateway to another world, the world where spider woman awakes. More on that thought to follow.