Weaving a Carrier Bag

For the last few years, I've been weaving a basket. No grass blades or pine needles went into its making. I never pulled string and fiber through my fingers.What went into making my carrier bag? Breath and flesh. Sitting among the ever-curious pollinators in my mother's garden. Paying attention. Making space. Re-learning. 

Making space for what mattered to me and putting boundaries on what didn't. Learning to create joy amidst immense sorrows. Paying attention to the seasons and the rhythms of life all around me. Quieting the critic and learning a more caring comforting inner voice. Paying attention to my body, to the bodies entangled with mine through breath and wing, rain and fur. Making space for a garden to grow in my soul. Clearing out the dried growth from last year. Prepping the soil. Learning what grows there best. Paying attention to the rhythms of tears and laughter. Feeding and nurturing the soil and fencing out anything that poisons it. Learning to play again and fill my days with wonder. Re-learning how to re-feel awe after so many years of cynicism and doubt and depression. Space, attention, and practice - those are the things I wove a carrier basket from. I'm still weaving it. Perhaps I always will be.

But a basket is made to be filled. Lain too long on its own, and it will fill with rainwater or weeds or creepy crawlies. So we must tend to it and fill it with wonder. Sticks and flowers. Nuts and leaves. A pretty quartz found in the riverbed. A piece of blue ribbon tied on a tree branch long ago. Most of all, a carrier bag should be filled with seeds. Seeds of new growth, in myself and in the world. Seeds to nourish and seeds to sow.

The seeds are the pieces of radical hope I collect. A story that transforms my concept of what narrative can be or enchants me with its poetry. An idea that shifts the way I see the world so completely that the earthquake of its arrival may not stop reverberating in my mind for many years. Songs, fairy tales, a poem or two (or two hundred). Imaginings that tell me: I am not alone, others feel what I feel, and that there are indeed ways we can all get through all of this (waves hands wildly), together.

But not just the ephemeral, not just the imaginary can go into the basket. Though what a force that can be, a strong radical hope cannot be built upon just that. But experiences and people, stories embodied in the flesh and senses. My own movements among the more-than-human entanglements around me. Re-learning to weft and weave my body back into the entanglement I am. People finding remarkable ways to re-weave their communities into the neglected entanglements around them. Collectives pushing what it means to be an embodied soul, re-imagining how to express our existence as a woven entanglement of beings.

This carrier bag is filled with the radical hope - sometimes tangible, sometimes ephemeral - I need to get me to the wondrous future I imagine.

The road to our imagined futures is long, perhaps never-ending. You'll need sustenance along the way and herbs to heal your body and soul. And we're not going to make it there alone. Take some of my hope and I'll take some of yours, and maybe we can find our way there together.

This space is one of the fibers in my carrier bag, a place to collect pieces of hope and share them with you. What would you put in yours?

You are reading Entangled Worlds, a newsletter from Nichole Amber Moss filled with poems and poetic prose that radically imagines the more-than-human worlds beyond the Anthropocene. You can find me on Instagram and Bluesky.