The World Weaver      

Daniel, walking through a purple-scented garden, passed a well. It beckoned him, so he returned to look more closely. Down he gazed into the water, his gaze drawing him ever deeper. As he leaned toward the depths a stone dislodged, dropping with a splash into the well. Daniel followed, sinking at first, and then abruptly, startlingly, he felt himself propelled into a channel that became increasingly like the tunnel of a mole.

There were twists and turns and networks of passageways in this land-beneath. Sometimes he saw light, sometimes only shadow. Within a final passage that led through something like an arched doorway Daniel became aware of sound. A buzzing murmur increased as he listened, until it clearly seemed to be the sound of voices.

Yes, it must be speech, but Daniel could discern no comprehensible form of language. Short, dark beings, shadowed and unclear, appeared all around the edges of his vision as the light increased. But when he turned his gaze in their direction he saw nothing there.

The force that had been propelling him along began to weaken as he moved forward through strange and unfamiliar realms among the inhabitants of Inner Earth. When he finally emerged he found himself surrounded by a bustling, open-air marketplace. Vendors of every sort were hawking their goods. Some had luscious, fragrant fruits and some had loaves of bread. Others displayed sparkling stones of brilliant colors, set with feathers in elaborate patterns. There were baskets and musical things—bells and pipes and chimes.

Daniel visited the yarn seller, whose brilliant threads included every possible shade and texture. He bought two large armfuls, along with a basket; then crossed to the far side of the market to where he’d noticed crafters working side by side.

Potters shaped clay into bowls while carvers fashioned birds, spoons and whistles out of wood. Glassblowers blew illusions. There were kite makers and thought collectors, but Daniel was attracted to the circle of looms where world weavers were busy weaving worlds into existence. One loom was empty. Daniel set down his basket and took a seat at the vacant loom. Carefully he began to tie on the warp threads that would form the underlayment of a brand new world. 

Meanwhile, back on the surface, in the land from which Daniel had departed, day was breaking. Jennifer of the Valley woke to find a butterfly firmly anchored to her face, perched directly in front of her eyes. She blinked, shook her head and wondered, but as the day unfolded it became clear that the butterfly would not be dislodged.  

She stepped outside. It had been raining for several days on end; the sun had not been seen for several more. Day after day the world had appeared gray and bleak. But today, for Jennifer, the world had changed. Rain still fell, but as it did each raindrop now became a streak of color. It looked to Jennifer like it was raining rainbows.

Most curious of all was that no matter where or how she moved, no rain seemed to touch her. She could still splash in puddles and sink her hands into the wet mossy ground, but she could not leave the sphere of clear, dry air that surrounded her body. She simply could not get rained on.

Looking down the lane, through a wondrous atmosphere of color Jennifer could see her neighbors walking from their houses to the street, huddled under dripping wet umbrellas. She saw her best friend, Alice, running to her mother’s car, hair hanging wet all down her back. But Jennifer was dry. As she walked toward town she realized that she was the only one who was not getting rained on. And no one else seemed to be enjoying—or even noticing—that the rain was coming down in colors.

Inside the park, on a hill that overlooked the town, was a lovely garden. In it grew wisteria and lilacs, violets and pansies. In springtime wild irises bloomed thick beside the stream; in summer all the ground was covered in a carpet of lavender and mint. Jennifer was now headed toward the garden, where she liked to sit beside an old stone well. There was a bench beside the well, snugly tucked beneath a gnarly arch of grapevines. The bench was now empty and entirely dry. She sat down, and no sooner had she done so, than the butterfly was gone from her face. In its place appeared a small old woman sitting right beside her.

Jennifer blinked, as the wiry, gray-haired woman, wrapped tightly in a colorful shawl, told her, “Yes, yes, now is indeed the perfect moment.” Jennifer listened as the woman told of a land where worlds are woven and illusion wrought and where the newest world weaver happened to be a sandy red haired man named Daniel. It seemed that some sort of mishap had affected Daniel’s loom, rendering a leak between this world and that. Daniel must be alerted right away, she said, before any more physical laws began to shift.

Jennifer of the Valley didn’t know just what the woman meant by physical laws, but she did get the sense that shifting physical laws might have something to do with the rainbow rain and the butterfly…perhaps even with the old woman herself.

So down the well Jennifer went, following a sinking stone. She passed quickly through the tunnel, heard voices and saw the shadowed forms of Inner Earth beings. When, like Daniel, she finally came forth into the marvelous marketplace, Jennifer caught her breath in surprise. Never had she beheld such an array of colors, sounds, and smells. Each of her senses felt as if it had just opened for the very first time.

Dazzled, she followed her nose to a mountain of jellybeans and filled her pockets before proceeding to a stone oven, big as a house, where sticky cinnamon buns were just coming out. She sat down to her heavenly feast on a grassy knoll surrounded by juniper trees. Leaning back against a tree, Jennifer closed her eyes and listened contentedly as the music of crystal bells and wind chimes wafted all around her. She began to doze…and dream… In her dreams she wandered in her favorite garden, where an old woman sat on a bench beside a well… The old woman!

Jennifer came wide-awake, aware that she had been sent here on a mission. She reluctantly got up to begin in earnest to look for the world weavers’ circle.

At once a gray bird with turquoise tail feathers flew by, then circled back around her head, so close that it stopped her in her tracks. Thus assured of her attention, the bird flew off in a deliberate arc, slowing to look back at Jennifer, then resuming its direction. She followed and together they crossed a mossy wetland, entered a piney grove and came to a clearing where a circle of weavers sat utterly absorbed at their looms. A low chorus of sound arose from the group, as if they—or perhaps their tapestries—sang, hummed, or chanted the progress of creation.

The scene awed Jennifer. She felt flooded, as if a rushing river had swept through her heart. She dropped to her knees and would have fallen once again into stupor but the bird roused her with a loud caw. And again she remembered her task.

Clearly, she thought, the gangly, sandy redhead must be Daniel. His tapestry was only recently begun. He had started sensibly, with solid blues and grays, weaving water, adding waves and eventually sand. Just as she was admiring a splendid dawn over water Jennifer noticed what appeared to be a mottling of tiny holes. She looked closer, then bent to examine the scene from underneath.

And there she found the problem. A moth had laid its eggs right in the middle of Daniel’s warp threads. The newly hatching larvae were beginning to nibble their way through his unfolding world. Jennifer knew she must rouse Daniel, but he was deeply absorbed, entranced as all the weavers seemed to be. In fact, she could only maintain her own alertness with vigilant effort.

Jennifer thought to awaken Daniel by shaking his shoulders, but the nearer she approached the more powerfully she felt pulled into the river of his trance. So she began to dance around and to sing loudly, in a rhythm very much at odds with the weavers’ drone. “The moths are eating sunrise, wake up, wake up! There’s a leak between the worlds, wake up, wake up!”

Daniel weaved on, apparently unaffected, but across the circle an old man yawned and stretched. He arose from his loom to walk over to where Jennifer jumped and waved, singing her “wake up” song. In a glance the world weaver took in Jennifer, the moth-eaten tapestry and the unresponsive Daniel. He began to laugh a rich deep rumble that sounded like the ever-so-distant approach of thunder.

Jennifer stopped singing to observe the man. He was brown and gray, ruddy and robust. His eyes were like none she had ever seen. So clear! She thought of crystal bowls as she met his glance.

“No worry,” said the man, his voice tumbling like water over boulders. “This kind of thing happens with the new weavers. They haven’t yet learned how to hold their focus in both worlds at once. It’s all about attention, you know.”

As he spoke Jennifer watched a shifting scene of riverbed, flat stones and sandstone cliffs playing somewhere at the bottom of his remarkable eyes.

“Daniel has mastered concentration, but for him it’s still a this-or-that sort of thing. Either he’s focused entirely on his inner world or he’s in this outer world and loses the inner image altogether.” The man laughed again and Jennifer watched a pair of herons swoop across the depths of his eyes. “It comes with practice,” said the man as he fixed his eyes on hers. She could almost hear a high-pitched hum, like when she ran a wet finger around the edge of a glass. She began to realize that the weaver, though no longer sitting at his loom, was nonetheless continuing to weave his tapestry, all the while he was conversing with her.

“That’s right,” he said, as if she’d spoken her thought. He nodded his head toward his loom, where Jennifer could see unfolding, a mirror image of the scene she’d been observing in his eyes. “All about attention,” he repeated. “Some of us can work with five or six worlds at once, but every one of us starts out in this-or-that mind, just like your friend Daniel here.” With that he reached out and gave a snap to Daniel’s warp threads and Daniel came abruptly awake, though just a bit disoriented. He glanced up at Jennifer and the smiling old world weaver, then down at his moth-eaten tapestry.

“Oops!” he said, laughing a little with the old man. Gently and politely, Daniel asked the hungry young moths to move to some nearby trees. He then introduced himself to Jennifer. Learning how and why she’d come, Daniel expressed concern about the world-above. He had never intended to harm anyone in any world as he learned his new trade.

“Nonsense,” said the older weaver. “No harm, never any harm, it’s all one bigger tapestry.” The other two looked questioningly at him. 

“Look at it this way,” he said, and turned to Jennifer. “Where would you rather be right now, here or at some other here?”

“Here,” she answered.

“Of course you would,” said the old weaver. “If you would rather have been in some other here, then that’s where you would be. Your rather and Daniel’s weaving lesson matched up in perfect harmony and so the three of our warps and wefts were woven together into this meeting.”

“But how?” asked Jennifer. “Who did the weaving?”

“We all did,” said the old one. “Everyone weaves worlds all the time, on looms of wishes and desires and focused attention. There are infinite worlds to create and to explore, but all worlds are woven together as one, by the total creative collaboration of all that is. Most people are too caught up in this-or-that to be able to see their part in the pattern. They can only see this world or that world. With practice we become skilled at opening our attention to encompass many worlds at once.”

“I want to see the collective tapestry that shows all worlds as one,” said Jennifer.

“So do I,” replied the weaver. And around the circle, all the weavers’ heads nodded in agreement, as one.

Despite her longing to see it all, Jennifer perceived that she was still of this-or-that mind. She knew that she would have to return to the surface, much as she wished that she could never leave. But already, she discovered she was losing touch with the world that she had previously known. “If I stay much longer,” she thought, “I’ll forget that Alice and my home on the surface ever existed,” for she could feel herself beginning to get pulled into the same narrow-focused trance that had held Daniel, and had thus brought her to this world.

The clear-eyed world weaver summoned her over to his loom. “Come,” he told her, “I’ll weave you home.”

Jennifer observed his tapestry and saw the purple garden with its stone well and bench beside it. She noticed the rain had stopped, the air seemed fresh and a gentle breeze now stirred the grape leaves. “But how can I keep from losing this world and you?” she asked the weaver.

“Practice remembering the one big pattern that contains all worlds,” he said. “Remember that you are part of something very grand.” With that, he fixed her gaze with his and she was drawn into the depths of those eyes, where a butterfly alit gently on a stalk of lavender within a lovely garden.

c LuviaJane Swanson   2001