My Dearest Madeline,
I smiled at your wish to apprentice with the Moon Lake Woman. As it happens, I know her well. I tended to her husband at the end of his life23 and spent a great deal of time with the two of them.
It is always best to wait for a teacher to recognize something in you, rather than asking, unbidden, for an apprenticeship. My advice is to go to her with the intent of purchasing one of her weavings, and while you are there, find a good question to ask her.
For the Moon Lake Woman, a good question is food for her soul,24 but it must be a very good question for it to stir her interest in you. I can’t tell you what to ask, but I can tell you some things about her and her work that will help.
The first time I met the Moon Lake Woman, it was in her work studio. When I arrived, she was at her loom with her back to the door; I couldn’t see her face, and she did not acknowledge my entrance, though she knew that I was there.
Like you, I was enchanted by the rhythms of her loom. I heard music: jingles when she treadled the frames, forming all her patterns; a swish when she tossed her shuttle, threading in a row; and slaps when she beat the weft, tight against her weaving. “Jingle-swish-slap-jingle-slap! Jingle-swish-slap-jingle-slap!” It was almost as if a weaving machine was doing this, except every so often, the rhythm would change almost imperceptibly. If you weren’t closely listening, you’d not hear these little changes.
Later, I asked her about these, and she told me that in those changes, small intricacies found their way into her patterns.
She said, “A loom can be just a weaving machine. If I only work with mechanical skill, the result will be skillfully made cloth, no better than if it were made by a machine. But a loom allows for other things. With it, I can bring a mood, a wish, or a prayer into my weaving.”
And I asked her if she could tell me more about this, as it was a subject that interested me greatly. And she was silent for a moment, and then she said, “It is easy to bring a mood into a weaving. I can do this by choosing patterns, textures, and colors that seem to fit the mood. Then I just need to align my heart with the spirit of this mood, and as I weave, somehow, it finds its way into the cloth.
“A wish is a bit harder, as the patterns, textures, and colors for any particular wish are not as obvious as they are for a mood. And if I am to hold a wish as I weave, I must be better aligned, as the spirit of a wish lives partly in my heart and partly in my head.
“A prayer is the hardest of all to bring into a weaving, and often when I am asked to make something with a prayer in it, the person is really only after a wish. Few understand what prayer really is: It is an open channel to heaven! To bring prayer into a weaving, I must be reverently aligned. And in this state, I choose the pattern, the textures, and the colors. And in this state, I sit at my loom, and with no words, I listen. And in this state, I weave. And somehow, the prayer finds its way into the cloth.”
She invited me to stay in her studio while she went to tend to her husband. He was, by then, bedridden, and I had just seen him before I came to meet with her. At her suggestion, I sat at her loom while she was away; the room was quiet, and a bit of the morning sun shone through a window facing out to Moon Lake.
As the quiet of the room enveloped me, I sensed the profundity of this quiet. It was clear that this room held no residue of disharmony, no traces of contentiousness, argument, drama, or pointless talk. But prayer, yes. And just as she had described bringing prayers into her weavings, the walls and even the loom itself seemed to hold a sacredness.
I had felt something similar years before, when I visited a monastery. There, prayers had so entered the stones of the structure that it made it easy to connect with heaven. The prayers had brought finer synchronizations deep into every grain of every stone, and in the way that a magnet aligns a piece of iron, I became aligned with those centuries of prayer.
When the Moon Lake Woman returned, I asked her about this feeling in her space; could she tell me anything about it? She paused for a moment, and then said, “I have only ever used this room for my work. It has never had another purpose, so when I began, it was very much a clean slate. When I first started weaving, I was young and inexperienced, and I was lucky to find work making towels for dishes. But that was how I learned the mechanics of my craft.
“At that time, I began to notice a mood within this room when I came in in the morning: It was a feeling of serious industry. That was my feeling whenever I worked, and gradually the spirit of this mood made a home in this space. So even when I would just walk in, my studio brought me into the mood to weave!
“Later on, once I was known as a skilled weaver, I began to get requests for pieces to carry certain moods. I did wall hangings for children’s bedrooms, happy pieces and things like that. And the more of those that I did, the more this room began to resonate with the feelings of those pieces.
“Later still, as my reputation grew, I began to get requests for wishes. And it brought me back to when Simon carved my charm.25 Many times, he told me, ‘A charm is but a wish, confined.’26 And the spirits of common wishes—for health, for happiness, for success—began to inhabit my walls. I was calling upon them often, and so they made themselves at home.
“But these days, most of my requests are for weavings filled with prayer, and this now suits me. Some who ask for prayers really just want a wish, and I send them to another weaver. With my husband’s life so near its end, wishing will not change a thing for me. But I have taken great solace in prayer, working in a prayerful state, living as reverently as I am able, and trying to bring as much sacredness into every moment and into each of my weavings as I am capable of doing.”
And I asked her if she could show me a finished weaving that had a prayer in it, and she produced a shawl meant to be worn while praying. She placed it over my shoulders, and all at once, I sensed a silence, an alignment, and after a moment, that feeling so familiar to me of a spirit of healing entering my heart.
And I asked the Moon Lake Woman one more thing: Did she have any sense of how this prayer of hers got into her weaving? Did she work her weft in an intricate way at those moments when the music of her loom varied in its rhythms? And she told me she knew none of those things. To her, it was not a thing to know. It was a way of being.
All that was knowable, she explained, was to be reverent without end.
So, you see, my dearest niece, the Moon Lake Woman is more than a weaver of cloth! And with your interest being what it is, I can’t imagine a more perfect pairing than the two of you. When you see her, please give her my fondest regards.
And write once you’ve gone to her, and tell me how it went!
Your loving uncle,
James