The Calling

I love travel. I love gathering. I also love time alone and space to myself. I’m an extroverted/ introvert type who deeply loves my home, and the land where I live.

At this point in my life, I actually love staying close to the rustic comforts of my forest home here in BC, Canada. But occasionally, something calls me deeply. Loudly. A musical event. A place. An opportunity to learn new skills. See new things. Meet new people. Invitations to expand, grow, and remember.

We Are the Weavers found its way into my world about one month before it happened, and there was never a moment where I thought, “maybe.” It was an internal yes from the moment I heard about it.

This six-day gathering was held by Weaving Remembrance and guided by Hanna Leigh and Katie Corning.

Spinning. Weaving. Dyeing.
Singing. Drumming. Fire.
Fiber. Land. Remembrance.

I am still integrating it. Still listening to what it stirred. Yesterday, I went to fill out the feedback survey and couldn’t even approach it without feeling gratitude tears just beneath the surface. The survey will wait.

For now, I want to gather my thoughts and reflections in one place.

So here we are.

The meadow where We Are the Weavers took place in the Methow Valley, Washington.

Arriving with Gifts from the Land

Before the gathering, we knew we would be placed into small groups of six and that we were asked to bring five gifts, one for each of the others in our group. Nothing bought. Something natural. An offering from the land.

Before heading south, I gathered willow I had planted on the land I steward in the Slocan Valley. I shaped the willow into small circle looms and warped each one with twine. I didn’t yet know who they were for.

When I arrived, I found out I was part of Otter clan. There was medicine in that too, in being matched with an animal and finding meaning in it as the week unfolded.

I loved that. It set the tone right away. This was not about showing up empty and consuming an experience. It was about arriving as part of the weaving. Offerings in hand.

Willow circle looms made from willow I planted on the land I steward in the Slocan Valley, warped & ready to weave as gifts.

Not for Show

What struck me right away was how real it all felt.

This was not a costume version of the older ways. It was not a soft focus aesthetic or some performance of simplicity. It was much more alive than that. People were deeply dropped in. Rooted and real.

These were women with grit. Mamas with babes wrapped on their backs. Real tools, real skills, real dirt, real weather, and real care. There was reverence, but not stiffness. There was beauty, but not polish.

The older ways can become aesthetic so easily. Trad wifey. A look, a mood, a fantasy of the past. A polished version of simplicity that does not always leave much room for complexity, autonomy, or the full spectrum of people who are also remembering.

This did not feel like that. It felt like folks leaning in deeply, with genuine curiosity and reverence. Each of us connecting with our own lineage in different ways. Remembering with our hands. Through songs. Through shared work. Through the small, ordinary acts that keep old wisdom alive.

It felt inclusive, grounded, full spectrum, and full of life.

The Sky Lodge was the central gathering place, with classes and skill-sharing unfolding in different stations around camp. Most days, the fire was lit here, and people gathered with projects, songs, stories, babies, laughter, and the small wild moments that happen when everyone is living close to the ground.

Children by the Fire

There was a ‘no cell phones’ rule at the gathering. There was basically no reception anyway, but the absence of phones created a palpable ease. No one was reaching for a screen every few minutes. No one was trying to capture everything as it happened. There were no photos until the final day.

It did something to time.

The days started to feel elastic and stretchy. Somehow, it took very little time at all for people to feel familiar. Threads of our individual stories weaving together. After only a couple of nights, it already felt like we had known each other so much longer.

By then, the skills had started moving through camp in their own way. People were working out their techniques on small hand looms and drop spindles. Projects on rigid heddle and peg looms. Fingers fumbling. Wool catching twist. Little frames filling slowly. Songs moving through the firelight.

During one of those powerful fireside song circles inside the Sky Lodge, I looked across the fire and saw a group of young girls right up close on the other side. Four or five of them. Smiles. Focused intent. Faces bright with the warm glow. Every one of them had something in their hands. Some had drop spindles. Others were weaving yarns on tiny frame looms. It stopped me. So profoundly beautiful. Innocent. Connected. A moment in time.

The drop spindle is simple, but it is not always easy. It takes timing, patience, dexterity. Fingers willing to learn. There was something so beautiful about watching these kids find their own way into it.

No one had to make it precious. No one had to over explain anything. The tools were there, and all they had to do was pick them up. The songs were there too, reminding us in their own way. Over and under. Spinning and weaving our way together.

Remembering our way back. Singing over the bones.

Kommano: Remember

The word that kept following me through the gathering was remember.

One of the richest circles I sat in was Hanna Leigh’s Proto-Celtic song circle. The class was meant to include singing, sharing, and weaving on small hand looms, but it became something deeper than that.

We began in circle, then were invited out into the meadow with a page of old Proto-Celtic words. We were asked to root ourselves in place. To listen. To notice the sounds around us. Eyes closed. Letting our fingers move across the page and see where they landed. To taste the words in our mouths. To sing them. To let them find shape in sound.

When we came back together, something opened.

Women started sharing the words they had chosen, and the stories that came through them. Some were tender. Some were heart-wrenching. Some carried grief. Memory. New beginnings. Darkness. Light. Belonging. We sang. We listened. Tears rolled.

The weaving we had planned to do on the little looms did not really happen until the very end.

But of course, we were weaving.

Hanna Leigh named that too. She wanted to honour the container of the class, but also be real with what was coming forth. We could continue with the planned weaving, or we could keep sharing and listening. In that moment, the stories themselves had become the threads.

In the end, I had not spoken yet. Sometimes in circles like that, my practice becomes listening. Deeply. I don’t have a problem sharing. Maybe I overshare too. But in that circle, listening felt like the work for me. I could hear aspects of my own heartache in every story. My own joy. My own yearning.

Eventually, Hanna Leigh invited me to speak.

What was alive for me was the image of the women I had seen out in the meadow. From the outside, each one of us looked like a figure standing alone in a field. But after sitting in circle and listening to what people were carrying, I felt the truth of it so clearly…

WE CONTAIN MULTITUDES.

Every person in that field held whole worlds inside them. Stories, griefs, longings, lineages, questions, prayers. So much invisible life. So much we cannot see from the outside.

That felt like one of the teachings I wanted to carry home. To remember. To move through the world with more kindness. To remind ourselves that we do not know what lives inside another person. We do not know what someone is carrying.

Her Bone Bundle by Carolyn Hillyer, the Proto-Celtic word source connected to the song circle and spindle meanings.

When I found KOMMANO, remember, it felt immediate.

Of course.

That was the one.

Remembering did not feel like thinking backward. It felt like practicing something back into life.

With our hands. With our voices. With our bodies. With each other.

My handmade KOMMANO drop spindle by Hanna Leigh, meaning remember.

Returning to the Drop Spindle

I love my spinning wheels. I especially love my Ashford Country Spinner 2 for spinning big, wild art yarns. A spinning wheel already asks me to slow down, but the drop spindle asks for something even slower.

It is more hands on. More direct. More clumsy in the best way. There is less between me and the fiber. Just hand, wool, twist, gravity, and patience. The spindle drops and spins, again and again, and my fingers have to stay close to the whole process.

I do not see the drop spindle as worse, or better, or more pure. It just teaches a different rhythm. It brings me back to the root of spinning in a way that feels simple, awkward, beautiful, and alive.

My KOMMANO drop spindle with fibers gathered through the week, little pieces of place, people, and story carried into the twist.

The Peg Loom, the Fiber Shack, and the Shepherdess

Another doorway opened for me through the peg loom.

I have woven on many looms. Swedish counterbalance floor looms. Jack looms. Table looms. But never a peg loom. There was something humbling about that. Sometimes the simplest tools have the most to teach.

I worked on a sitting mat made mostly from unspun roving mixed with my art yarn. Truthfully, it is still attached to my peg loom. Oops. I meant to take it off before leaving Flow’s guiding hands, but it did not happen.

Flow guided this work. A full-on badass shepherdess who had travelled there with her sheep. She had the curved staff and the cloak, but it was not an aesthetic. She was not dressed as the old way. She was living it.

There were sunset walks with her sheep, letting them snack and roam. Her fiber shack was full of tools, wool, and knowledge. She showed people how to move from fresh fleece, sheared at the gathering, toward fiber that could be worked into the weavings themselves.

The peg loom reminded me that weaving does not need to be complicated to be powerful. Pegs, warp, fiber, hands. Over and under. It carried the feeling of something that could have begun with sticks in the dirt.

Another kind of remembering.

My peg loom sitting mat in progress, woven with thick wool roving and handspun art yarn.

Natural dyeing was another thread that came alive for me again.

In the plant dyeing class with Janessa of Rainbow and Yarrow, we worked with marigold, walnut, avocado, and dock seed. We focused not only on the plants themselves, but on mordants too. The quiet chemistry of helping colour bind to fiber.

Throughout the gathering, there were bubbling pots of colour. Some came from materials foraged right there on the land, like lupin and pine cones. There were indigo baths too. Pots to watch. Bundles to dip. Fibers slowly becoming something new.

Handspun yarn dyed with walnut and marigold during the plant dye workshop.

Then there was mushroom dyeing with Tess Barlow. That class opened a whole other doorway. It was rich with information, possibility, and wild colour. Tess brought the kind of wisdom that felt dense in the best way. The kind where you know you are only catching part of what is being offered.

I loved seeing how much could shift with pre-dips and post-dips in different solutions. One mushroom could become many colours. One pot could open in several directions.

It made me excited to return home and look more closely at the mushrooms growing near the land here in BC.

Another kind of remembering. Colour from the world around us, waiting to be noticed.

By the final night, something had opened.

The drums I carried south finally came out around the fire. After days of listening, learning, making, and singing together, the rhythm felt like a release.

People danced around the fire. There was laughter. There was wildness. There was tiredness too, but the good kind. Bodies remembering. Feet on the earth. Smoke in the air. Voices. Hands. Drums carrying us forward.

So much of the week had been about thread. Wool into yarn. Yarn into cloth. Song into memory. Stranger into family. Around the fire, it all seemed to move at once.

Not polished, not perfect, but fully alive.

Another way of singing over bones.

I came home with a deeper devotion to the slow tools. The slowest tools. The drop spindle. The peg loom. Plant and mushroom dyes bubbling in pots. Songs learned by ear. Handmade offerings passed from one person to another.

I came home remembering that these skills are not just hobbies. Even to call it all craft feels somehow less than. They are ways of being in relationship. With land. With animals. With ancestors. With ourselves. With each other.

That may be what I am carrying most.

That sense of remembrance. Not as something abstract. Not just a thought. Something we do. Something we lean into together. Something that brings us closer to our grandmothers, our lineages, our inner wisdom, and our own deep knowing.

With our hands. With our voices. With our willingness to gather. With the threads we choose to carry forward.

All of us are threads. Full of story. Full of memory. Still becoming.

My ‘We Are the Weavers’ portal, woven during the gathering as a reminder… to remember.

Maybe that is what it means to sing over bones.

To look back.

To honour.

To sit with what has been forgotten.

To sing life back into the fragments.

To let the old ways move through our hands, our voices, our bodies, and our stories.

To remember. 🖤