WHAT IS SOUL WOVEN?
SOUL WOVEN BEGAN IN ME LONG BEFORE I HAD A NAME FOR IT.
It began when I was a child trying to stay connected to myself in a world that didn’t always feel safe, and where I often felt invisible to the people around me.
From the time I was very young, I made things. I drew and painted. I made clothing for my dolls and little houses for them to live in. I decorated every inch of my room because I needed to surround myself with something that felt like me.
I didn’t think of any of it as art or healing. I only knew that making helped me feel more real, more present, more connected to something in myself I couldn’t explain.
As I grew older, the forms changed, but the need didn’t. I wrote poetry. I journaled. I sewed. I stacked rocks. I made jewelry. I painted and wrote endlessly.
I was always reaching for a language that could express who I was, and that language was never limited to words.
MAKING BECAME A WAY OF LIVING
I kept making.
Through different homes, different versions of myself, illness, relationships, loss, and all the ordinary upheavals of a life, there was almost always something taking shape beneath my hands.
Sometimes I painted. Sometimes I wrote. I worked with cloth, beads, paper, found objects, whatever drew me. I climbed onto tables and worked on the floor. I followed an image without knowing where it was going. I made things simply because something in me needed to make them.
There were years when I was deeply immersed in it and years when life pulled me somewhere else. But I always returned.
For a long time, I thought I was moving from one kind of work to another.
I didn’t know yet that I was following the same thread.
THEY WERE NEVER SEPARATE
For years, I thought of these things as separate parts of my life.
Painting was painting. Writing was writing. Cloth was something I worked with because I loved the feel of it in my hands. I made jewelry, stacked stones, created spaces, wrote in journals. Each seemed to belong to its own place.
But they kept speaking to one another.
An image that appeared in a painting would surface later in my writing. A piece of cloth carried the same feeling I had been trying to put into words. Symbols returned without my consciously choosing them. Things I made years apart seemed to know each other.
Slowly, I began to recognize that I wasn’t moving between different forms of expression.
I was speaking the same language in all of them.
MY LIFE ENTERED THE WORK
The things I made were never separate from what I was living.
There were years when my life changed faster than I knew how to understand it. My body changed. Relationships changed. I lost people and animals I loved.
There were endings I chose and others I never would have chosen.
More than once, I found myself inside a life I barely recognized.
I didn’t always have words for what was happening.
But somehow, it found its way into what I made.
A color. An image. A piece of cloth. Something written in the middle of the night.
What I couldn’t yet explain often appeared first through my hands.
Over time, I stopped thinking of creativity as something separate from the life I was living.
It became one of the ways I stayed connected to myself while I lived it.
MY BODY CHANGED THE LANGUAGE
There were times when my body changed what was possible.
I couldn’t always paint. I couldn’t always write. But I could touch cloth. I could work with my hands. I could make something small.
What I reached for changed with what my body could hold.
The language was still there. It simply took another form.
THE SEPARATE THREADS BECAME A WEAVE
For a long time, I gave each part of my life its own name.
There was the painting. The writing. The cloth. There was illness and healing, ceremony and Spirit, the body and everything it was teaching me.
But my life wasn’t happening in separate pieces.
The same images moved between my paintings and my writing. The same questions followed me into ceremony.
What my body was living changed what came through my hands. One part of my life kept finding its way into another until I could no longer tell where one ended and the next began.
They were all part of the same weave.
SOUL WOVEN
Eventually, I needed a name for what all of this had become.
Not for any one thing I made.
I needed a name for the place they all came from.
SOUL WOVEN
It is the weave of my life and my work—the body, memory, creativity, Spirit, loss, beauty, and everything I have lived that continues to find its way into what I make.
It isn’t something I step into when I’m creating and leave when I’m finished.
It is the way I live.
SOUL WOVEN
AND YOUR LIFE HAS ITS OWN THREAD
Soul Woven grew from my life, but I share it because sometimes encountering another person's story, image, or creation helps us recognize something in our own.
A painting. A passage in a book. The feel of cloth against your skin. A story that sounds nothing like yours and somehow brings you closer to something you know.
You may be in a place where the life you’ve been living no longer quite fits. You may be beginning again, or finding your way through something you never expected. Or you may simply know there are parts of yourself asking for more room in the life you’re living.
You don’t have to know what any of it means yet.
Sometimes you begin by noticing what draws you.
CONTINUE THE THREAD
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