When life gets tangled,
as it does from problems looming large, and often from the little snarled up problems which seem like too much, I think of Carol King‘s song My Life Has been a Tapestry…
Then I think of the Tapestry Metaphor for all of us spiritual beings living in a physical world. Bet you’ve heard this before?
The idea is that our life is a glorious tapestry, but we don’t know that.
We toil along viewing snarls, loose threads and a jarring cacophony of color. It’s all too much.
Only occasionally do we come to the crucial awareness – we are all on the underside of an exquisite tapestry. God sees the upper side and we — the “ugly” underneath.
Once we have the first Tapestry glimpse, we do see the glorious upper weave from time to time. Yet, if you are like me, you dwell most of the time among the knots, the snarls, the mismatched tangled threads underneath. Yet all the time, above is as pattern of nature as lovely as the sacred spiral inside a seashell.
It seems sometimes, that we must go to tiny places like sea shells and lichen or vast places like oceans, mountains and valleys to glimpse the Tapestry.
Here’s a family experience below, noticing the Tapestry. In this case, my mother and I are in the John Muir woods for my 5oth birthday. My sister is taking the picture.
My mother survived World War II in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation, my sister and I survived a childhood with many moves and upheavals. We often see glimpses of the tapestry now. My father survived World War II, barely, in Japanese Concentration Camps in the Dutch East Indies. I have often been in woods and other spots with him, seeing him breathe in freedom.
How do you remember to breathe in freedom?
tell me about it…
“My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision of the ever changing view
A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold”
