A very long time ago, there was a giant tapestry. It was all over the Earth and maybe even
larger. No one knew how large it was and
at that time, it wasn’t the size that mattered.
What did matter was how strong it was and how it held everything in
life.
Some of the threads were thick and some so thin that a
human eye might not be able to see it, although a fly’s eye probably
would. The pattern was so intricate and
complex that it was hard to see it all.
Seeing it all didn’t matter then as much as how it felt; how it felt to
be held in that strong tapestry with everything else.
There were the usual ups and downs, comings and goings of
life and some life forms disappeared from the tapestry while others
appeared. The tapestry needed constant
attention from weavers. Some say that
the weavers were young women and some say old women. Some say that the tapestry was woven by a
spider. I don’t know for sure. But weavers were always creating new designs
whenever the threads were damaged. They
were always repairing the tapestry so that it was strong and so that it held
everything. The life in the tapestry
learned to weave as well. Even the tiny
helix threads that held the codes learned to weave new life.
There was no higher or lower. That came later. There was no inside or outside of the
tapestry. That came later as well when
some of the humans decided to use their imaginations to imagine that they were
outside of the tapestry looking down on it.
The tapestry was so complex and intricate and captivating that they
began to pull it apart to look at each strand.
As they pulled thread after thread out of the tapestry and then pulled
each thread apart from itself, they learned many mysterious things and so they
kept going. The holes they left in the
tapestry were repaired by the weavers and life went on.
But after hundreds of years of more and more humans pulling
the tapestry apart, the weavers were no longer able to keep up with them. Holes began to show in certain parts of the
tapestry. Still curious, those humans
travelled to other places on the tapestry and pulled those areas apart as
well. The weavers were kept very busy
repairing the damage. More and more
pieces of the tapestry were left lying about, unconnected. More and more humans were left unconnected as
well. When they were no longer
connected to the tapestry, they began to feel sick. They tried to weave small tapestries of their
own to fill the holes, but they couldn’t connect their small tapestries with
the larger one and so they were not held when the ups and downs and comings and
goings of life occurred.
The weavers could see that the curious ones were in
trouble. They could see that the holes
could get larger and larger. They
remembered that the thing that mattered was the strength of the tapestry when
it held all of life. The curious ones
had forgotten what mattered as they only followed the apparently insatiable
curiosity in their heads.
The weavers had many meetings. They made sure to listen to all of life in
order to reweave the tapestry. Some of
the weavers had forgotten what the tapestry used to look like. They had to consult with the very tiniest
threads in their cells that held the codes, the maps, the remembering. They decided to work in the areas of the
tapestry where they found themselves.
They took the strands of the threads that were lying about and patiently
rewove them into thicker strands. They
patiently reconnected those threads to each other and to all of life. What they found was that after some repair,
other weavers appeared, weavers that remembered, weavers that listened to the
coding in their tiniest strands.
The weaving didn’t always look perfect. Sometimes the colours didn’t complement each
other. Sometimes, knots stuck out. But the weavers knew that they could keep on
repairing and weaving as time went on.
They concentrated on putting the strongest threads in place first, like
the threads between the humans and the trees.
The trees were expert weavers and once in place, they filled in the
tapestry around them.
More humans learned how to weave as well. They learned much from the trees and the
spiders who had never stopped weaving. They patiently found the strands and pieces of
thread lying about. They listened to the
humans who still remembered what the tapestry looked like. They listened to the coding in their
cells. They listened to the tapestry
which amazingly began to weave itself as well.
As more humans learned to weave, they remembered how to
weave themselves back into the tapestry.
They loved the feeling of being held.
They loved the pull of the tapestry that told them of the ups and downs,
the comings and goings happening everywhere.
They loved following the threads to parts of life that they were curious
about. But instead of pulling the
tapestry apart to understand it, they were now able to understand the
connections and how that affected all of life.
The humans began to feel healthy again.
They told stories from within the tapestry where they had been all of
this time.
The tapestry now looked different than it had before the
holes appeared. And it kept on changing
as it was repaired and renewed and it was always beautiful. I still don’t know how big the tapestry is. But I do know that its size doesn’t
matter. What matters is its strength and
how it holds all of life with the threads of relationship.
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