In Memory of Kyla Hidsen Lewis
Weave a shawl between yourself and your last happy ancestors.
Weave a shawl that keeps in mind all of your old timers who were broken by the world, who never had a chance, who were on the bad end of the enforced trading of homeland for homelessness, the ones who were hardened by Empire, who came to see this world in rigid ways, the ones who lived in fear daily of what others might do to them or what they might do to others, who lived in shame daily of what they let others do to them and what they did to others.
Weave a shawl out of the poverty that lies in between you and them. Weave a shawl out of time itself. Fashion beauty out of the ugliness so that those troubled and hungry ones might be fed by someone's willingness to remember them.
Weave a shawl for those forgotten and scorned ones; those banished and shunned ones. Those ones we never talk about. Those ones left out in the cold of our collective dismissal.
Weave a shawl that might keep them warm and you warm and those to come after you warmer still.
Weave a shawl that tells the story of your people and that leaves no one out.
Weave a shawl between yourself and your last happy ancestors. Them one edge of the loom and yourself the other.
Reach back and back and back until you find them, trying to find you. You, their redemption and they yours. Both of you doorways back towards life swung open and letting the Spring breeze sweep into the old dusty home of everyone and everything forgotten, this boarded up cabin of rugged individualism and not needing anyone, this remote shack of self-sufficiency.
You, the fruit, reaching back down along the twisting branches, tracing your way back to the roots from which you come and finally understanding this tree of life. Don't skip over the knotted trunk and gnarled or broken off branches. If you could step back from it you would see the beauty of it all and that the sap of life doesn't choose favourites amongst the branches. You are the fruit, hungry to be fed, coming to know the source of what feeds you and has kept you alive all this time.
You contain the seeds of more trees that may spout roots one day. You may become the forgotten old timers of those to come. And so show us how it is done, living not trying to be remembered, but remembering.
Weave a shawl between yourself and your last happy ancestors.
Weave in the ugly threads. Weave in the hard parts. Weave in everything you don't want to remember. Let the knotted parts of your history appear and wrap it around your shoulders.
Be willing to let those old ones remember you and stand tall under the weight of their remembering.
Be fed by the barely remembered times, and the times you remember but never lived. Be baffled by your own unlikely appearance, this fruiting face, at the end of this long branch and see how your growing weight makes this supple arm of your old timers stronger because of it.
Let yourself be held for a while by that from which you came until one part of you falls and another part of you keeps growing, both of you the chance for life to appear once again, both of you food for something. Let yourself be baffled by how all of this could have ever come to be and where that first seed could have come from. What a mystery.
Weave a shawl between yourself and your last happy ancestors.
See how it works now: your willingness to open to your life up here is what feeds them down there. Your gathering up the sunlight of your days reminds them of the time when they were you, sitting there, growing heavy on the branch themselves. They remember and would give anything to be where you are now but your fullness and sweetness is a food to them. Your growing beauty is a salve for what they had to give up then so that you might have a chance now. You feed them the sunshine and the breezes and they feed you the deep waters and then Earth. Watch as the food you send to them and the food they send to you passes through the trunk and branches that connect you, all of you a part of this same tree; alive, on this hill, its rich loam made from the bodies of all the other ones who came before you, their deaths feeding your life, your roots in touch with stories and memories older than the tree itself. The tree of your ancestry rooted in a deeper ancestry still, this old pageant of food and feeding.
Weave a shawl between yourself and your last happy ancestors.
Drape it across your shoulders and wear it for the rest of your days that we might see how beautiful is the one willing to remember and be remembered.
Or drape it across the shoulders of all those forgotten.
Or maybe those two sets of shoulders aren’t different at all. Maybe you are their shoulders now.
Weave a shawl between yourself and your last happy ancestors.
Beautifully expressed. Its a practice of mine to share the sweetness if life with my ancestors. I love the weaving of a shawl, such a beautiful living imagery to rest into. I shall be weaving one meditation with them. Thanks Tad.
This is beautiful, Tad. I started writing all the stories of my ancestors that I can remember. You are right, they are with us, as we are facing the sun. And we feed them as they feed us. Thank you.