Monday, August 20, 2007

Weaving

I have always been fascinated by the act of weaving. As a child, I have watched granny's fingers reenacting the motion of weaving as she tried to make sense of Krishna's rasakrida to a five year old girl; seen it in the motions of the ladies who wove the pinnate leaves of the coconut tree into roofing thatch to protect their homes from the cruel June rains and in the cyclical movements of the charka or the spinning wheel as it spun hard khadi clothes which became the trademark of a rajnithi( political ideology) gone awry

The motions of weaving were set in time immemorial - even though I understood the tenors and hues of weaving only a few years ago. In many Native American creation stories, Spider woman Grandmother wove the webs which became the filaments of all existence. 

The act of weaving was reenacted later by the calloused fingers of a "half naked fakir" who through the act of weaving taught us, the art of love and non-violence, in the act of proclaiming freedom. Weaving, thus happened, in many guises, tenors and hues. It became a metaphor for our existence, which preceded essence. 

Weaving is an act of love, an act of responsibility. Spiders showed us the way and we followed them instinctively. Spider webs grew on the walls. As the spiderwebs caught the light from the sun and reflected rainbows in its filaments, we too traced the filaments, and caught a bit of rainbow, as we continued to weave new webs from the old ones as we traced our way back to the centre which is the Goddess.

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