I have been quilting the blue fabric of the piece that I
described last week – all the hearts cracking open to let medicinal plants grow
from them. I tend to cut fairly long
threads to do such quilting as it’s just a running stitch that goes on and
on. Sometimes, I get little tangles with
such a long thread and I patiently pull threads this way and that, using the
needle tip to loosen knots that have mysteriously appeared. I have lots of time and I tend to work away
at these knots so that I don’t waste thread.
The other night, I cut an especially long thread. I was pushing the boundaries I know, but if
you never explore the edges, the liminal spaces, you never really know where
they are. After the first stitch, the
long thread got really tangled. I pulled
threads this way and that. I used the
tip of the needle to try to pull apart the knots that had once again
mysteriously appeared. I brought the
tangle under the light that I can adjust to shine right above my work. As I get older, good lighting is
essential. But, even in that light, the
knots resisted my efforts. After a few
minutes, I decided to cut my losses literally and I snipped off the knotted
section. The remaining piece was not
very long and I quickly sewed it into the quilt. You might say that this was an example of
less haste more speed. You might say
that I had pushed the boundaries too far and should have stayed in the safe comfort
zone.
But, that is not me.
I often find myself outside of my comfort zone spending time in liminal
spaces. Some call these zones, the
learning zones. If one keeps going then
come the danger zones. I try to stay out
of the danger zones (on a good day) because they are hard on my nervous system
and this is not a place where learning or creativity thrive. However, in the learning zone, outside of the
comfort zone is the place where learning and creativity do thrive. What I did learned on this particular crossing
out of the comfort zone was that it is not necessarily more efficient to have a
too long thread. It’s likelihood of
tangling and the time spent untangling or in this case cutting it off result in
less efficiency. At least I know that
now.
As I sew this piece which is meant to invite non-Indigenous
people to open their hearts in relationship with Indigenous people so that
healing can happen, I am learning from the piece. For me, this is how creativity works. An image or concept seemingly drops into my
head as inspiration. Then I start
working out how to represent this in the 3D world. I work in various media and so I never get to
be an expert at any of them. I often
have to invent ways of physically creating the image that dropped in. I don’t plan too far ahead. Instead, I find a starting point and then
figure it out as I go along. In relationship
with the piece and the inspiration, there are often surprises along the
way. For example, I am quilting the edge
of the big green heart in repeating waves to the edge of the circle. Originally, I thought that I would do waves that
were one inch apart and make it very geometric.
Instead, what happened was that the waves got closer and closer together
as I got further away from the green
heart. The piece demanded this. It was very insistent. I had imagined the waves emanating from the
big green heart. Instead, it appeared
that the waves were coming from outside of the circle, moving towards the heart
as if love was coming from the universe to Earth, to us, to our hearts. I can’t really explain this, it is what the
piece is showing me. It could be the continuation of the original inspiration. It is one of the surprises of working in this
way – the piece, the relationship, this conversation, is informing me as it
unfolds.
But, back to the knotted thread. I have been reflecting on the idea of
decolonizing – decolonizing my thinking, my actions, our collective actions, the
actions of our governments, as I sew.
The image of the knots reminded me of the frozen, stuck energy that is
running the show much of the time. When
the thread is tied up in knots, one can’t use it for anything else. If the knots can be loosened and the thread
untangled, then it can be used to create something new. Sometimes, decolonizing our thinking is like
picking away at knotted thread. The “way
things are” seems frozen, solid, and fixed.
Thomas Hubl would say that this frozen past is trauma and that only by
liquifying the frozen past can we begin to digest and integrate it. The image of untying knotted thread seems to
describe this process as well. Sometimes,
one only gets one knot untied at any particular time. And then that freed up thread is integrated
into our collective life.
As I learn more about the history of my ancestors in the
UK, I am met time and again with stories of scarcity, scarcity of food, land,
money, clean air and water, opportunity, education and the list goes on. I am beginning to see that many of the ancestors
that came to Turtle Island brought these stories. And we have inherited these traumas and
buried them deep. You could say that the
threads of these stories are all knotted and solid. It takes the slightest trigger for this fear
of scarcity to go viral. Think of the
run on toilet paper in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. I think we see this ancestral trauma of
scarcity raise its head when it comes to the government spending money to meet
its basic treaty obligations to Indigenous people in Canada. Even as one of the most wealthy countries in
the world, somehow, we “cannot afford” this extension of privilege to
everyone. That is a pretty solid knot. It takes time and effort and good light to
work at untangling the threads. Indigenous people are shining a bright light on
these traumas.
We’ve tried just cutting off these knots, “the past” and “moving
on” but it doesn’t seem to work as well as my sewing experience did. Any unintegrated trauma will just keep
going. It will keep us spreading that
trauma to the next generation and to everyone around us and we will not even be
conscious that we are doing it. However,
more of us are becoming conscious of these traumas. We are becoming conscious that there are so
many of us carrying the same trauma.
Perhaps, if we shine a light on this and work together, we can
collectively untie our collective trauma knots.
That would release a great deal of creative energy and those threads
could be sewn into something new. That is part of the work ahead of us and it
is work that only we can do. There are
more possibilities than just “the way that things are”. We can sew these threads into a new story.
