Following the Thread by Juliette Jarvis- Witchy Moms Magazine February 2023 Issue
Much like the readiness of an avocado, my journey into string magic was a slow cultivation, full of tender pokes testing for readiness until a sudden culmination declared the time was * now *. On the surface it appeared as if nothing much was brewing, yet there were trackable signposts along the way. The fleeting early childhood memory of sitting next to my Grandmother weaving at an enormous loom. Purchasing a bag of wool on cones decades later with the notion they were for weaving “one day”. Decades later still, while in the midst of pandemic isolation, being given an old Canadian table loom to love back to life. Even then, I was not quite ready, but I kept my fingers on the thread and patiently followed it.
A few years ago I hit a wall of burnout in my spiritual teaching and community ceremony practice. It came with soul level exhaustion and a palpable resistance to hosting gatherings began to creep in. It felt very much like the ocean’s tide had changed course. My energy and focus, once full and outwardly giving, now naturally ebbed and receded. There was a part of me that deeply felt a need to dive into a medicinal immersion of the arts where I could recover and reclaim myself, but I wasn’t sure how I could support my family while doing so. I had moved us to live in our rural coastal cottage and began the perhaps impossible task of burn out recovery while still working. I converted a lot of my in-person offerings into online formats and hosted fewer engagements, but I still kept a full calendar of appointments and deadlines amid the soul tending aspects of country life; foraging, time with the sea, building sacred spaces, intentional painting, spirit doll making, slow cooking… but the thread I was following led somewhere even deeper and slower still.
There was a poignant moment for me when the country declared its “two week” shut down, and with an inky pen, I consciously crossed out the appointments in my chock full planner. The last imposed expectations and structure that I was hanging on to had crumbled. It left that particular sense of other-worldly grace felt when one’s world is suddenly thrown across an initiatory threshold. Instead of the quiet spaciousness so many others felt, for me, it became very loud energetically. The psychic noise as folks around the world struggled with their situations was more than I could easily defend against. When it became clear that two weeks was turning into something much much more and those first pandemic days truly set in with shortages, isolation, heightened anxieties, combined with a crisis involving one of my children and the forced separation from my fiancé that a closed border caused. I found myself in a long period of very dark nights of the soul. The overload became physically painful and my own heart ache was literally crippling. I could barely function, often needed assistance to walk, and knew I was in no place to support anyone but my immediate family and the most urgent responsibilities within my practice.
It was in this place that a table loom was gifted to me by a healer who had been helping tend to my wounds. It needed a little repair and vital accessories, and I had no idea how to weave so I reached out to the local fine arts club to inquire with their guild. At the time, all departments were largely shut down and so weaving was again relegated to “one day”. It was around this time that I acquired a large ceramic kiln in exchange for one an online sacred living program that I was still running. It had been 25 years since I had my hands in clay and I knew I needed to learn more before venturing into creating ceremonial ceramics on my own. I reached out to the fine arts club again and found the pottery side had just begun running on a 24 hour schedule with a strict Bubble Buddy system. As luck would have it, a super talented woman of the most Fae sort welcomed me to be her buddy and offered her mentorship. I would travel 25 minutes to our closest town twice a week for 6 hour shifts and began setting up a pottery studio at home in the temple space where I had been holding ceremonies. I dove fully in. This medicine way was saving my soul. The grounding nature of hands on mud work became vital to my well being. The high concentration and constant tending that clay demands brought be respite from the depression that had settled in. The ability to press intentions, medicines, and healing energy into my pieces pulled me out of the dry well that I had fallen into.
When the weavers began to meet, my fae friend crossed the floor to learn traditional skills at the loom and encouraged me to attend. I was still too deep in recovering myself to learn the complexities there, but I could hear their laughter and excitement from across the club. Shortly after, a nomadic witch stopped at our cottage as part of her travels and brought me a beautiful dismantled loom to borrow. I still wasn’t ready, and couldn’t even begin to figure out how to assemble it, so it waited patiently for me in a corner of our temple space. After a year apart and a myriad of government hoop jumping, my fiancé was able to return long enough for us to marry. We didn’t know it, but it would be another year before he could move home. It was only after he had that I began to feel right enough to follow the thread into string magic a little further, and all the stored energy there began to unwind with such rapid synchronicity that I truly felt a divine essence had a hand on things.
The witch returned with a request that I find wool for her to spin, and when I picked some up from a local wise woman I was gifted a drop spindle that had traveled halfway across the country. The next day I had my first lesson in spinning and her words spoken to me of, “spinning chaos into order” rings in my ears even still. The witch had me keep all that wool and it came with a deeply seated sense of ancestral skills being reanimated. The very same day, I received a message asking if I might home a small loom already dressed with a project on the go, complete with the needed shuttle and bobbins. The answer, of course, was a full bodied Yes.
It was then that I looked into our family’s genealogy history, and found the stories of 15 weavers, spinners, and flax dressers. Without knowing how to weave, I followed nudges coming from the other realms and listened to the loom itself as I figured out how to tie up the treadles, repair shaft strings, what a series of numbers written on a scrap of paper meant, and I managed to complete the already started scarf using the wool I had picked up so many years ago. When I sat at the loom, I could feel my Grandmother and our lineage sitting right with me, urging my hands and feet. I finally crossed the floor to join the weavers guild, assembled and restored the cherry wood loom waiting in the corner for me, and found I had space in my thoughts to soak up all I could on the steep learning curve of a new craft.
I kept spinning too, letting the feelings I held or the medicines I was working with infuse the fibres as fluffy clouds turned into yarn. Counter clockwise for undoing. Clockwise for calling in. Aspects of both when plied together. Stories of the Fates determining lives begun and ended, of magic strings leading heroines to safety, creation stories of spider’s silk, contests between Gods and mortals, all began to swirl in my awareness. The old old magic of knot making, the power of women’s weaving and fulling chants, rituals of binding and severing flooded into my work. Prayers and blessings infused balls of string for sacred rituals. Intentions became woven into the fabric with each pic thrown. The elements called to be included in the finishing processes, the essence of medicinal plants appeared to be woven or dyed into the fabric, colours and patterns of significance and meaning began coming through, and drafts shared from diaspora of the old world were collected. There is a healing and restorative peace that I sit in when when at the loom or spinning wheel. It gave me a map to navigate my way back to my whole self and finally find morning within a new dawn. The meditative repetition of both spinning and weaving lend themselves well to entering non ordinary reality through altered states of consciousness. This is not new, but was a new method for me. With a lifeway of living with one foot here in our eating realm and the other beyond the veil, these traditional skills beckon with a beautiful path of tangible spirit working.
This is the creation story behind each piece of ritual wear that I make. It is why string magic has come to be featured more strongly in my ceremonial work. It is how I followed the thread into string magic.
~ Juliette Jarvis
Sacred maker at the Selkie Sanctuary and spiritual facilitator for 3 Fold Balance
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