Loom Stories Around the Hearth-Fire

Vesperisms S3 E4: A talk from the Loom Conference, North Carolina, July 2022

Close your eyes. I’m going to tell you a story. Let everything around you in the room fall away. The desk supporting your computer falls away. Your earbuds disappear. The screen dissolves into the floor and you hear my voice in the room coming from my actual person, not a speaker in a device or hanging from the ceiling. We are, instead, together in a circle, sitting on low benches, listening, shuffling, breathing, clearing throats. Through your eyelids you see the glow, not the cold blue of the phone screen or light bulbs, but the warm light of a hearth-fire.

In the shadows cast by the fire, children move about softly at their parents’ feet. A baby suckles, a toddler babbles. An elderly woman softly shushes a squirmy grandchild and points to the storyteller, and the child focuses in on the voice as the story begins.

“Deep in the forest, there was a small hut…”

The adults listening, you know the story. You’ve always known it. There wasn’t a time you can remember hearing it for the first time, because it was probably whispered into you at the breast—in fact, you heard its rhythms in the womb, and you repeated in make-believe games with your friends, and it was woven into your school lessons, and you wrote it in your journal because it made its way into your night-dreams.

You and I have held this story in our bodies, as part of the fiber that makes up the yarn that is woven into the tapestry of our cultures, that weaves seamlessly into adjacent cultures to our left and right, to the north and south, that sails across oceans and picks up the thread on distant shores until the whole earth is covered in this richly colored story, and we come to understand that similar hearth-fires have sat at the center of story-gatherings since the first human breathed in the stardust, and passed it to the next person, and on and on until you and I are breathing in the same stardust and passing it to each other even today.

Around the hearth-fires, the storytellers have taught a thousand generations how to pick up the threads, sit together at the loom and weave themselves into the tapestry. The storyteller recites a long stanza, and the people join in on the refrain. And so the babies learn the rhythms as they learn their mothers’ heartbeats, as they learn the whish of the fiber, of the warp and woof, stanza, refrain, stanza, refrain, for hours in the firelight.

Nothing is new under the sun, you see. There are no new stories. There are no new songs or paintings or dances.