Weaving tapestry, words and worldview

My experience of the Vadafone mobile broadband is mixed. It gets the job done, but only if you are patient. It takes a couple of minutes to load the typepad to this page – after which it works OK. It will do, but only if i allow it to double as a patience tutor,

The hiatus between
moving out of our previous home, and moving in a week later (this Wednesday) has been good as a rest, as reflection, but it does
nothing to reassure that this move will work, or even that we will like the
house we will now have to live in! We havn't seen it since we viewed it!!

So walking by faith isn’t so much a choice,
as an inevitable result of previous choices. Perhaps taking up tapestry again
is a way of creating new patterns as I work out from my own mind the
intricacies and colours of the next stage of life. There is something
sacramental in the slow, precise working of canvas, the choice and blending of
colour, the subtle shaping of form using only 45 degree cross stitch, angles
and tones, canvas grids and colours, intersecting in the woven texture of
created work whose unity is dependent on the mind that brings them together.

So at times of major
life change, and when my own life circumstances need significant attention, I
revert to a Reflective Journal. My inner world has, as long as I remember, made
most sense when I use words. So at times of significant change I use words to
redescribe the world, to weave together images that help make sense of
experiences that are confusing and disorienting. That's why this morning I was reflecting
on my taking up tapestry again – I've never completely let it go, but I was
wondering why it is now something I have returned to with a sense of relief,
even urgency. And so the image of weaving and tapestry, combined with the
weaving of words, becomes a way of paying attention to who and where I am.
Stitches precisely pointed, words crafted to context, images growing on canvas
and paper – the creative spirit reconfiguring colour and words, shaping the
outer world as a way of reconfiguring an inner world in transition. 

For me words are amongst the most precious gifts we have. To be cherished, crafted, used with integrity and ethical wisdom, offered as gifts of care and communion, the fabric of conversation and truth-seeking, a palette of expressions to be mixed into meaning in the construal of inner worlds and the shaping of outer worlds. If all that sounds over-rhetorical, a tad overstated, I'm not arguing. But those are images that help me describe the importance of words in my own approach to God, the world and that inner reality that is me!

Time I was moved into the new house and with more to do than wax eloquent about weaving, whether tapestry, words or worldview.

e