I am making a collection of cabbage tree baskets to gift to the women of Coraki who have lost everything in the floods.
This offering has pushed me to the edge in two new ways. The first is that cabbage tree fibre is a new fibre to me and it is taking some time to get to know. Secondly, giving these away is challenging my internal patterns of perfection.
There is something emerging in me and in my Basketry Art. That is usually how it is - the two are one in the movement of Evolution. As I weave I have noticed a real new edge.
I could hear my thoughts battling for retribution to an unanswered dilemma. I would weave a basket to completion and then I would have niggly questioning thoughts:
Have I got this quite right?
Have I added in too much?
Have I added in too little?
Have I got the patterns how I want them?
Are the stitches the same size?
Sometimes I would undo the basket and redo the places where I felt the errors lay. Sometimes I would leave the basket and love it as it was. Neither time did I feel completely at ease...
Until one early sleepless morning while weaving I contemplated the dilemma of both of these. I saw they were coming from the same place.
A place of deciding, as a me, what the destiny of the basket should be.
Then as I dropped deep into my heart I began to ask different questions:
What spark of creativity is igniting through me ?
What is this basket asking of me?
What weaving technique would best suit this fibre and colour?
How can I be a vessel of creation with this vessel of creation?
What is this basket asking of me?
I began to weave form a different place, a place beyond the duality of perfect and imperfect. Where there is no artificial line drawn with perfect at one end and imperfect at the other. Where I didn't loved one basket and not another.
I began to weave from the place of sweet quiet listening - to the communion, the conversation, the stream of destiny between the basket, my being and the one it would be gifted to.
In this weaving, I responded and the basket responded too. I knew and the basket knew, and we created exactly what was destined to come through.
The baskets and I as one were coming from and returning to an endless place of depth and openness.