We may weave with love and hope - with a vision for the world -
we may try to weave a gift.
But who can know how our work will be received?
The strands we work combine in unpredicted ways
as they meet the tapestry around them.
Joy or sorrow?
Beauty or pain?
No matter our choice
others will decide.
And as the tapestry grows,
so the pattern changes,
and our strands take on new shapes,
new meanings
that we cannot know, or claim.
How will our patterns look in a hundred years? A thousand?
And who will be the judge?
We may choose the colour, the strength, the texture.
We may weave tightly or loosely
and even hope to choose our lines of intersection.
But we cannot choose the impact of our work,
nor see the finished picture.
We cannot choose even to have no impact.
That choice was made
before we ever came to be.
The design is,
and our work becomes part of a tapestry we will never fully see.
To exit is to leave a hole that cannot be repaired
and to fray the edges of a larger life.
Therefore weave with joy.
If the only pattern we can choose is our own journey into being,
then weave with hope; weave with abandon.
We do not get to choose the pattern that we weave.
But we get to weave.
Weave the pattern.
Ruth Davmor
