The beautiful passage (below) from Rebecca Solnit, seems appropriate for All Hallow’s Eve. It is a lovely evening in North Texas and even don’t get a lot of Trick or Treaters, I like to be ready. I am sitting near the door, spindle in hand, watching the sun go down and hoping everyone has a safe holiday.
From Rebecca Solnit, a meditation on thread.
"A thread is now a line of conversation via email or other electronic means, but thread must have been even more compelling a metaphor when most people witnessed or did the women’s work that is spinning. It is a mesmerizing art, the spindle revolving below the strong thread that the fingers twist out of the mass of fiber held on an arm or a distaff. The gesture turns the cloudy mass of flax or wool into lines with which the world can be tied together. Likewise the spinning wheel turns, cyclical time revolving to draw out the linear time of a thread. The verb to spin first meant just this act of making, then evolved to mean anything turning rapidly, and then it came to mean telling a tale.
Strands a few inches long twine together into a thread or yarn that can go forever, like words becoming stories. The fairytale heroines spin cobwebs, straw, nettles into whatever is necessary to survive. Scheharazade forestalls her death by telling a story that is like a thread that cannot be cut; she keeps spinning and spinning, incorporating new fragments, characters, incidents, into her unbroken, unbreakable narrative thread. Penelope at the other end of the story archive prevents her wedding to any one of her suitors by unweaving at night what she weaves by day on her father-in-law’s funeral garment. By spinning, weaving, and unraveling, these women master time itself, and though master is a masculine word, this mastery is feminine.
Women were spinsters before the word became pejorative, when distaff meant the female side of the family. In Greek mythology, the three Moirae, or Fates, spin each human life as a thread, measure and cut it. With Rumpelstilskin’s help, the unnamed girl spins straw into gold but the wonder is that every spinner takes the amorphous mass before her and makes a thread appear, from which comes the stuff that contains the world, from a fishing net to a nightgown. She makes form out of formlessness, continuity out of fragments, narrative and meaning out of scattered incidents, for the storyteller is also a spinner or weaver and a story is a thread that meanders through our lives to connect us each to each and to the purpose and meaning that appear like roads we must travel”
Excerpt from The Faraway Nearby (2013)
Wonderful! Thank you! Blessed Samhain to you!
y'all, she has a mouse on her head!! ❤️