English Ivy is one of the most invasive, noxious weeds where I live in the US Pacific Northwest. Brought over by colonisers sometime in the early 1700s, it was used as ground cover but quickly showed itself as a bully and smothered every indigenous understory plant in its path.
Greedy for light, soil, and water; spread by birds who snack on its berries; when left to multiply, English Ivy quickly becomes a monoculture that leaves no room for native plants.
Talk about a great metaphor for the colonisation of this land!
English Ivy is in my neighbour’s yard and creeping through the fences into my vegetable garden, and I’m not ignorant of the irony of it wanting to invade the patch of land now owned by me, an English woman. It’s like the land is spitting it back at me.
I imagine the story I’ve written below becoming a future myth—The Old Woman And The Ivy—or something like that.
It was a Sunday afternoon and I found myself tugging at long, long threads of ivy that were even longer than I imagined since they were hidden like snakes in the grass, and I snipped their tails and pulled away arm-fulls of ropey vines laden with bright green, waxy leaves.
And knowing that I needed to heal the land and my own ancestral, colonisers’ wound, I carefully picked off the leaves, stripped away the bark, and slit down the vine, using my thumbs to divide it into two strands.
I took nine of the threads and a tenth to use as a weaving thread and started to weave a delicate, bell-shaped basket, and as I wove I remembered how ivy was—and still is—a symbol of eternal life in my homeland; how ancient Britons believed the bind protected them from negativity and brought healing and good fortune.
And while weaving, I thought about the interconnectedness of all life on this earth and how in these times when the veil has been lifted and violence, corruption, and power show themselves as the evil they are, we need weavers and stitchers and knitters and knotters and lacemakers to come together in community and show us how to pick up the threads and start again.
And when it was finished, I hung the woven bell in a tree and watched it gently rock in the breeze. And at dusk, birds danced around the weaving and an American Robin briefly rocked on it before flying back to its nest.
And so, if this were a folklore tale, the old woman (I) knew that this was how she would spend the rest of her days because the ivy would never fully disappear and her garden would be filled with woven sculptures hanging from every branch of the trees and in years to come storytellers would sit in circle and recount the tale of the old woman and the ivy.
It is never too late to mend. Nothing is so bad that good may not be put into it and make it better and save it from utter loss.
W.E.B. Du Bois
Do you feel the calling to be a weaver, a stitcher, a knotter? How can we pick up our individual threads and weave them together in communal mending?
As artists and creatives, we have the superpower of imagination.
How can we use our imagination as the glue to seal our threads so they never come unravelled?
What story can you tell that might become a future folklore myth? A healing or mending tale?
May we respond to the call of our times with our creative superpowers, compassion, resilience and boundless imagination.
Until next time.
JC x
A healing tale for sure. Loved this post!!!!
This was such a great read to start my day! Do you weave ivy often, or is this new for you? The metaphors are so potent here. I've had a fixation for a while on the processes of spinning and weaving for some time now. I am afraid those arts are becoming lost to us. Thank you for your beautiful words :)