Weaving My Life, Sitting with Death

Elena Zubulake Start Date: Jan 19, 2018 - End Date: May 1, 2018
  • Cultural Exchange
  • Educational/Research Trip
  • Vacation/Personal Trip
  • Scotland, United Kingdom

My Travel Story

by: Elena Zubulake Start Date: Jan 19, 2018 - End Date: May 1, 2018
  • Cultural Exchange
  • Educational/Research Trip
  • Vacation/Personal Trip
I am about to embark on a healing journey from the high mountains of Colorado to the highlands of Scotland, to learn the art of casket weaving from a master weaver. I am seeking some extra financial abundance to flow my way and bolster my travel fund for this amazing and unique opportunity. (every little bit is immensely helpful so thank you!)

As a 13 year old girl, I was contending with my 42 year old mother's death in a corner of the world that didn't understand how to have a conversation with or around death, how to hold grief, nor how make space for the immense disorientation that a child on the cusp of womanhood might feel at having her primary womanbond disappear into the dust.

Needless to say I did not befriend death, developed a general disconnect from my physical form for a while, and only years later when dance and life and love started to thaw me out, did I realize and begin to unwind the impact of this event. This was one of those moments that would continue to shape my life in both challenging and empowering ways to this day.

This year, of all years, I turn 42. I cross over that threshold of living longer than my sweet mama. It comes on the tail of some of the most intense years of my life. 

And as I weave my way through yet another layer of this story, my deepest desire is to become a human who knows how to use her hands well to make beauty, and at the same time sit and have some kind of embodied conversation with death.  To be made through the making into an ever more grounded and connected being.

I want to learn to weave caskets, beautiful vessels grown from the earth and crafted into a simple place to rest. An art almost unknown on these shores where a hard case is the norm. My inclination is to apprentice with a master weaver on the North Shore of Scotland.

I want to hold my old initiator, death, in a softer place in my heart, and what could be a better way than to weave baskets to hold her. And I hope become a stronger vessel in the process to hold my own wild wild life.

Baskets that also are very easy on the earth. Baskets that people can keep in their homes long before they have that deepest conversation with death. Practically perhaps, store blankets in, but seed the idea that life and death are always intertwined in that precious miraculous way.

"All possessions not at the same time beautiful and useful are an affront to human dignity." Wendell Berry

I want to bring this art to my community, just as we are waking up culturally from a long sleepy relationship to death. I want to share the art, as a means to have more conversations with death, as a means of saying we are woven in with death whether we like it or not. This is a very simple journey, but there is great depth woven into the simple.  We forget this too often.

I already have my ticket to the U.K. and at this late hour some funds that I understood myself to have are not available. It feels fitting, as a good journey such as this one, should be held by the community anyway. And so with a humble heart, I ask, "can you be a co-conspirator in making this vision possible?"

What I can offer in return. The wisdom I glean. Writing about my journey. I would love to offer a basket to anyone who feels abundant enough to donate $100. And well, if you want to just pre-buy your casket, let's talk.

Thank you community for loving me again through this next turning of my wheel.

More about me www.sweetearthwisdom.com

(casket in photo by Mary Lauren Fraser)
  • Scotland, United Kingdom

Updates

8

  • More Weaving

    More Weaving
    The bottom of a tall basket, and Sallie, the tiny shepherd as Jaque calls her.

  • Die Peaceful

    Die Peaceful
    We talk, we drink tea, we are silent. The work deepens, the conversation deepens.

    Karen tells me about the women who was dying of cancer, and comes for four days to felt a shroud for herself. She goes home to London, and dies peaceful. Karen’s mom, who has come for a visit, chimes in, “it was good for her, to be here, to be doing something for herself”. I cry a little. I don’t quite know why, but am touched by the image, what would it feel like to be so close to death, and with one’s living hands create the piece that would hold your death. I think of how good this place would be for someone who is dying, to sit in so much simple life, to talk or no, to cry or no. A place where time is not rushing ahead, and presence is in each small movement. To drop away from the complexities and be.

    I feel like I can settle into this for a while.

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