Untangling Knotted Threads

 

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.