A Golden Thread
How a Story Tied it all Together
Have you ever had something circle through your mind but not really grasp what it’s trying to tell you? And then you encounter some kind of catalyst that ties everything together, and click, it finally makes sense? That’s what happened to me this week.
Over the years I’ve read some articles/essays that relate life to a tapestry. Being a needleworker since the time my mom could trust me with a needle, I love using textile analogies about as much as I do art analogies.
Relating life experiences to an artform—particularly tapestries—is not a new or original idea, but this particular theme has been circling around my mind lately. Maybe it was inspired by some beautiful weavings on display at my local library. Or maybe it came to mind when a friend of mine happened to say that she feels like she’s living in a world turned upside down and backwards—and I witness that phenomenon every time I check the latest news. But I combined the two thought threads with a story I once read, (Moonstruck Madness by Laurie McBain) and CLICK!, you might say they were woven together in my mind. (See what I did there? Ha! My grandmother would be proud.)
What is a tapestry, anyway?
Maybe you already know about tapestries, but just so we’re all on the same page, let me introduce a little background. A tapestry is a heavy textile created by weaving different color threads horizontally (weft threads) behind and then in front of tight vertical threads (called the warp threads). When it’s finished, the vertical threads (the warp) are completely covered. Maybe you tried this weaving technique in grade school years ago. Or maybe you’ve seen one in a museum. In any case, the technique is ancient, and still done today. Watch this video on Youtube if you want to see how it’s done.
What do tapestries look like?
Medieval tapestries look like paintings rendered with fiber. Many of them depict a visual interpretation of a scene from a story or myth. There are also tapestries depicting crowds of people, village life, manor houses, animals and intricate flowers and patterns. For those of us who’ve come after, they give a sense of the time and the people who lived in it.
They took hours and hours—okay, let’s be honest. They took years to create. Some were huge. As in yards long in both width and height, and as intricate as a painting. Not something that could be whipped out on a weekend. They were hung on walls, used as upholstery and pillow covers, even permanently mounted to walls and held there framed in by the woodwork like wallpaper. They were quite costly, and some even had gold thread in them.
If you watched the video, you probably noticed the shuttles (or bobbins) of thread left hanging after the weaver threaded the color into the place where it was needed, until they will use it again in another place. Or check out this article from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.There’s a cool picture in it that shows light-colored threads stuck in a tapestry in a seemingly random fashion.
How do weavers know where each color is needed? Some look through the vertically stretched threads (Quick quiz: what are those called?...you got it. Warp) to a mirror that shows them what the front of the tapestry looks like. Because, of course, they are working from the back side, so what they see from their angle is opposite to what it looks like from the front. While weavers can create a design as they weave, many weavers actually re-create a painting or drawing. They look at it to guide their design, and sometimes even mark the outlines of the shapes and colors on those warp threads.
Needless to say, all the dangling threads and their bobbins hanging from the weaving make a rather confusing mess on the back side of the tapestry. (A lot like the criss-crossed mess of threads that you find if you look at the back of my cross stitch projects. I’ll cover the back side of my cross stitch, and no one will see it, so who cares? It won’t be hanging in the Met some day.)
How does all that relate to life?
Some of those essays I’ve read talk about the seemingly insignificance of a little spot of color on the tapestry. Why bother threading that bit of yellow right there, or three different colors of green rather than using only one? The truth is that even though that little bit of yellow might be less than an inch long and those light-colored threads might seem random, they have a purpose. Maybe they represent the light shining from something. Or reflecting on something else. And those three shades of green are what turn a solid, flat green shape into the leaves of a tree.
And then I remembered the golden thread.
It was in that story I read years ago, about a destitute family discovering a golden thread woven into a tapestry. When they looked more closely, they realized that the tapestry was really a map of old family property. The golden thread marked a path that would—you guessed it—lead them to a horde of family treasure, hidden from a conquering army. An aged aunt labored for years on this tapestry but never explained to anyone what the tapestry really showed. She just kept working on it, faithfully, year after year, still too afraid of the conquering army, too aware of what could happen if the truth fell into the hands of the wrong people. All the while, her family was starving and forced to steal to survive. Until, finally, the tapestry was finished, and she showed it to everyone.
That single line of golden thread held infinite significance, and could have made all the difference in the lives of her family. Would they have understood before it was finished, if they’d only seen the tapestry from the other side?
What are you thinking?
Truthfully, I think many of us feel like the world has turned upside down and backwards, and is one giant, confusing mess. Maybe we are looking at it from the back side, where unfinished threads are hanging, hiding what everything will really look like when it’s finished.
What if we could see it from the other side? Maybe the key is in the mirror image.
What would it show if it were reversed?
What are we not seeing? Not saying?
Are we looking for the golden thread left by those who came before us?
Do we understand its significance?
And what kind of message are we weaving into the fabric of our lives for those who come after?
All I can say is…
