Welcome to my Blog!
The Weaver’s Journal is designed to support a whole
life—especially challenging when it embraces circumstances and personal
objectives that typically clash! Pages From My Journal blog gives
examples of how I use life-weaving patterns to create continuity between the
two.
Grid, flow, binding, and textural
patterns are artful approaches to navigating
the difficult territory when collisions are beyond one’s control. This war-zone
is extensive and often includes: overwhelming responsibilities at home,
unrealistic demands at work, health issues due to stress, and constantly trying
to make ends meet financially.
The art of life-weaving transforms the
relationship between personal objectives and the ever-threatening world of
constraint. A friend summed up the cost, in her life, of imbalance between the
threads of personal objectives and dis-chords in the social fabric at
large: “I do not want my job to be what my life is about.” The key is finding
the right pattern to avoid a tear in your desired tapestry of life.
Life-weaving has parallels to the martial art
Aikido. My daughter’s Aikido instructor told her on the first day of class: “If
an assailant grabs you by the wrist, this is the only thing he is controlling.
You have the rest of your body to free yourself.”
Instead of colliding with a circumstance or
withering at its scalding grip, move closer in toward the problem. This is like
weaving an image of a flower to its surrounding background rather than trying
to structure it outside of its support, impossible to do.
An Aikido artist moves closer to the enemy
instead of fleeing. With less separation, it is difficult to wield a fatal
blow; the criminal cannot take aim. The right weaving pattern—a personal
strategy to create order (grid), ease (flow), bring a sense of solace
(binding), and meaning (textural)—can be more than personally liberating.
Another surprising focus in Aikido, according to the instructor: protecting an
assailant from doing something they will deeply regret in the future. Finding
the right pattern is how to assert the value of one’s life while preventing a
toxic social circumstance from its theft of a vital contribution to
society—that perhaps could be its detoxification.
Pages From My Journal blog is an ongoing story of the challenges I
face as I emerge out of the shadows with a very new process-based perspective.
I cannot control the circumstance of frequent difficult reactions or in many
cases, a lack of response. I have stayed in the shadows most of my life to
avoid personal objectives colliding with mainstream culture.
Thousands of heroes—both past and present,
with many different faces—have helped me by reinforcing the same message about
the wholeness of life. Also, I learned that, along the way, they unanimously
experienced dismissive or hostile reactions wielded by mainstream culture.
Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces* describes
the “paradoxical, supremely difficult threshold-crossing of the hero’s return
from the mystic realm into the land of common day.”
The status quo will never embrace challenges
to its accepted fragmented reality. Change is threatening; reactions have me by
the wrist. Campbell’s words resonate: I am “re-enter[ing] with [my] boon the
long-forgotten atmosphere where men [and women] who were fractions imagine
themselves to be complete. [I have] “yet to confront society with what [amounts
to an] earth-shattering, life-redeeming elixir, and take the blow of reasonable
queries, hard-resentment, and good people at a loss to comprehend.”
To avoid getting hit, I move closer to the
problem. The heat of an existential threat is almost too hot to bear. I feel
like a morel mushroom whose spores require a forest fire to germinate. At the
second before being incinerated by my circumstance, I re-discover my grid and
binding patterns so my spores can germinate undisturbed—in the heart of
the beast, the social fabric.
My grid pattern mantra is “stand silently
unmoved.” Not a lack of flexibility—in fact, just the opposite. I weave that
pattern by bending my ego very low to the ground, allowing many types of
blows from the land of the common day to whiz past. Standing silently
unmoved avoids ego-driven tendencies: be defensive, stick rigidly to my
principles, become self-righteous, or be tough. These make me vulnerable to
getting whacked when they separate me within striking range.
Bending the ego is a lively Aikido sort of
dance. I move silently, unmoved by the circumstance—using the rest of my body,
or grid pattern, to free myself.
In this situation, I also utilize my favorite
binding pattern: regular weaving, cooking, gardening, swimming, and biking.
These nourish and give me strength to stand silently unmoved. This powerful
binding pattern, a down-to-earth-life, helps me dodge the high-swinging and
sometimes low-blows from the land of the common day.
—Suzanne, March 2018
*Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, New Jersey, 1973, pg. 216
