Pure, clear, and fresh. These words come to mind as I weave my white linen. My shuttle seems determined as I pass it from hand to hand through the narrow shed in my little Brooklyn table loom, each pass of the weft is necessary, and deliberate, while at the same time I operate the hand levers, the shafts changing as if the warp is inhaling and exhaling. The long warp feels like an exhausting important journey to test me, and I embrace it.
But already I am anticipating the next, which will begin after I cut this cloth off the loom. I think about how it will be… a very simple and easy warp, also fine linen, also in white, also in plain weave, but with very sparse pattern, if any, as only my own soul knows how I’ve longed to weave. I am thinking about the beauty of clarity, and newness, and the meaning behind my white fine linen threads, how it is so much like freshly fallen snow. The white linen and the white snow are nearly parallel symbolisms to me because they are untainted and honest, they are raw and pure, they are elemental.
My mind drifts back to the absolute stillness of a winter landscape I remember from not long ago. In my archives I found the post of that day when the snow fell so heavily, and silently in the night, to have woken up to such a deep white landscape I’d never before seen up here. Now to remember it, bringing out the image of that view from my loft studio window, I can almost feel and smell the frigid air in my nostrils. While my hands march through the endless second half of the warp, I’ll drift in my mind to a snowy oasis, to stay driven in the weaving towards the finish.
