Let's Begin

A bit about words and weaving

Thank you for subscribing to my Substack newsletter, Weaving Words with Libby Miles. This is the first, which makes you an inaugural reader. I’m so grateful you have chosen to join me here. Thank you, truly.

Although I’ve been Writing for quite some time — whether officially, unofficially, secretly, publicly, tightly constrained, or with wild abandon — Weaving is new to me. Learning a new tactile craft as I approach my 60th birthday has been humbling, with its terminology both unfamiliar and often overlapping: picks and beats and setts, epis and warps and wefts. At times it sounds more suited to music than to textiles. 

My first efforts were awkward. Unaccustomed to the physical motions, I would stab my shuttle into the “warped” (think vertical) threads, stretching and shifting them out of position, then hoping they would bounce back. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. My back hurt, my arms hurt, my head hurt. These are the moments some Buddhisms refer to as the Beginner’s Mind, when a person capable in many ways starts learning something new. Beginners’ minds may be overwhelmed with the cognitive load of what they don’t know, but at the same time they get to delight in seeing new-to-them patterns and colors that seem old hat to experts. Even with my crooked lines, those yarns played together beautifully, creating shades and surprises as the fabric came into being. 

Something shifted as I practiced at home between Class #1 and Class #2. My mind was still befuddled, but somehow my body knew what it was doing. These arms danced with the “heddle” in a forward and back motion as gracefully as a lifelong weaver; those hands popped the shuttle from right to left and back again with unwarranted confidence and skill. In the week between Class #2 and Class #3, I completed three additional scarves on a smaller loom I had purchased during Covid but couldn’t quite figure out how to use. Having a teacher (especially a teacher as terrific as Cindee at Lofty Lou’s in Placerville, CA) opened the floodgates so fast and wide that I started weaving voraciously.

During those early weeks in mid-winter, my pile of completed items grew quickly — a few table runners, some placemats, various densities of dish towels, and so many scarves — but my thirst to sit and do the work would not be sated. Without thinking, often without even making coffee first, I wove, embracing a rhythm that my body couldn’t possibly know but that my soul seemed to remember.

In my 30+ years as a university professor, I taught hundreds of aspiring authors, most of whom felt uneasy about claiming “Writer” as a title. 

“Do you write?” I would ask.

“Yes,” they would say. 

“Most days?” I would ask.

“Kind of,” they would answer.

“Do you love it?” I would ask.

 “Sometimes,” they would respond. 

“Great! Then you are a Writer.” 

Here’s my confession: I write most days, but I weave every day.

This month marks the one-year anniversary of leaving academia for a rented cottage at the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. No doubt future newsletters will relate and reflect on that whole complicated story. But not today. Today I think about arriving here a year ago in my small-ish car packed with writing journals, knitting needles, and a lot of yarn, but no idea what I would do or if I could survive here without the profession that had absorbed so much of my adulthood. 

My life now has a new rhythm to the days, the weeks, the months. Instead of following a schedule (which I was physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually incapable of doing toward the end of my time at the university), I let the sun direct my sleeping patterns. Instead of checking off to-do lists, I let my intuition guide me — to weave or to knit, to write or to read? One leads fluidly into the other, and then back again, and then over and around and through. 

Letters and fibers: they are the raw material that propel me out of bed each day. This new post-university life has a different texture to it, and I’m learning how to understand how it weaves up. With each row, this new fabric of my life takes shape. Thank you for joining me on this adventure.

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A note on Substack: periodically, you may be asked to upgrade your newsletter subscription to “paid.” PLEASE feel no pressure to do this; it is simply the way the system is set up. Those who choose to upgrade will be entered into a random drawing each month for either a hand-knit or hand-woven item I’ve recently completed. If you sign on as an annual Sustaining Member, you will also be entered into a 4-times yearly random drawing for a custom-made item woven for the season with your input.

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