The Saunterer

Rosie Taylor on the rewards of weaving

    A living weaver, a member of the Navajo Nation, Rosie Taylor tells of the rewards of weaving:

When I start weaving, I think about what kind of design I want to put into my weaving ahead of time. But when I start to sit down and start weaving, it totally changes the design. It just wants to do by itself – the weaving itself – it wants to create its own. It's like the mind of the rug itself.
    I think [weaving is] a way to bring [children] back to having their patience. When you teach them any type of culture that's done by hand or storytelling – whatever it is – teaching them is the most important thing. Having the patience. That is how I have been teaching my girls, teaching them to be patient at all times. No matter how hard the weaving is, they have to be patient. With the rug and also with themselves.
    And, at the same time, when they're weaving, their spirit is rejuvenated, and they sit there, and they think about life in the long term. They think about that. That's how I was when I was younger. Sometimes I would get so frustrated with just little things, and I would just sit there and weave, and the weaving itself – the rug – it just calms everything in me.

    For more on Rosie Taylor and other living Navajo weavers, see the book Weaving Is Life.

John Muir placed wild animals above paper laws

    John Muir naturalists are those with John Muir’s beliefs, as extracted from his collected writings and applied to today. I have spoken for them in The Life of the Creative Spirit (p.155):

John Muir naturalists place wild animals above paper laws, exempting animals from the boundaries of governments and the property rights of landowners. Wherever an animal walks or swims, it is a treasure belonging to people far and wide. If cranes come onto a farmer’s field and eat grain, that is a cost of doing business, no less than if a mud slide came. The farmer or forebears bought the land with risks of this sort compensated in the price. The repercussions of a bullet striking a crane reach beyond the farmer’s concerns to spiritually sensitive people, a harm outweighing any dollars the crane might subtract from the farmer’s ledger.
    In the same vein, what say should farmers, ranchers, and shopkeepers rightly have on the fate of wilderness areas next door to them? None more than those a continent away who care that wildernesses remain unspoiled. By no means does a treasure diminish by the distance from it.

    For a brief biography of John Muir, click here.

On Virginia Woolf’s not wanting children

    To Virginia Woolf, conceiving books was her one anchor:

And yet oddly enough I scarcely want children of my own now. This insatiable desire to write something before I die, this ravaging sense of the shortness and feverishness of life, make me cling, like a man on a rock, to my one anchor. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 172.)
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    For a brief biography of Virginia Woolf, click here.