Back to the Garden: Weaving a Meditation Practice

Raven is finished. Here's the front of the tapestry:

I prefer my tapestries to look as clean on the back as the front. (Rather like the way I prefer people-the face one presents to the world should not be radically different from what arises when one thinks no one else is watching.)

The completion of this work left me with no more excuses to avoid working on "The Garden," the tapestry I abandoned, in the summer of 2009.  (Time flies when you're having experiences.)  Yesterday morning, I gathered my tools, yarns, dusted off the loom, found my seat and began weaving.  This is where I left off:

The dotted line along the cartoon marks the halfway point of the work, so I have some distance to travel:

Starting over was interesting.  Not only have I been blocked from this piece, Fear was sitting there, too. Fear arose as soon as I began weaving; if I was to continue, I had to have a plan to deal with it. It's also important for me to respect the limits of my physical body at the moment (and tapestry weaving is notoriously hard on the body), so I spent some time thinking of the best way to approach these issues while weaving again.  I decided to use this weaving as a meditation practice.  I set a meditation timer for twenty minutes, weave with full attention for that time and when the bell sounds, I stop. If that is all I can weave for the day, that's fine-it's twenty more minutes of weaving than I've done in the past five years. Here is where I am today:

As usual, Mick the cat is there to guide me.  Can you see him?

What strikes me most about this tapestry is the vibrancy of the colours I dyed and spun. These are colours I love; these are colours I used to wrap myself in.  The past few years have seen a shift to neutrals, which are lovely in themselves, but somehow, not "Me." Maybe, just maybe, this weaving will take me back to that Garden of colours that sing to me, the colours that vibrate my Heart Song. We shall see.

Namaste.