Your Personal Myth

And how it can guide you to Love and Wholeness.

By Manuel Bujados (Spanish; 1889 - 1954)

If you are old enough or come from the parts of the world that still hold to folk traditions, you may have witnessed the image of a woman sitting on a porch or on the ground as she tends to her sheep, holding a spindle in her hands and spinning the thread. It is an image that makes one recall the Fates — spinning, measuring and cutting the thread of life.

Maybe you saw her knit and weave carpets, shapes and colours appearing from her movements. I remember when I made my own little carpet — the loom was a piece of carton against which the vertical threads were spread and then the horizontal thread could be weaved in. I was around 9-10 and I remember picking a bright red colour with a black burdock motif (believed to protect from evil eye) in the middle. This protective burdock motif was often referred to as “the spider”, connecting the symbol to the Story of the Cave in which a spider’s web protected prophet Muhammad from the oppressors.

These rhythmic movements are in general, soothing for the women who do them. There are songs made and composed while weaving and the sound of the spindle or the loom is used as a rhythm for the song. From the small, seemingly separate threads, you start seeing an image or a story. The fact that the carpet is weaved by connecting vertical and horizontal threads points to the most fundamental of metaphysical ideas — and yet instead of being thought of or conceptualised, this cosmic reality is experienced between one’s own hands.

Stories and songs that carry the truths of life and existence inside of them have always been a part of the collective feminine inheritance. And this is also what the collective feminine gives and leaves as her dowry to the entire humanity. She creates a space, crafts a reality in which the high and abstract concepts are reflected to us as something familiar and immediate. This same idea can apply to our lives — when we read about myths, archetypes or stories, when we read sacred texts, these may appear as abstract and distant tales about deities or prophets. However, when we open ourselves towards life and begin our path, we will come to see that all the stories told in both the folk tales and the sacred texts, are lived and experienced in our own reality.

There is an uninterrupted thread within each woman that reaches back to the “First Dawn of Humanity” — while the male lines rise and fall, vulnerable to time and fate, the female lines remain and are woven into every being. While men often avoid the mother’s line and seek identity, and even refuge from her within the father’s (this is not to suggest that rejecting a half of ourselves is good for men or women), women cannot avoid their matrilineal inheritance. Woman’s body/subconscious ‘remembers’ the secret keys, even if she is not actualising it in any way. Stories, initiations and symbols hidden in them are these keys.

Today’s article shall help you try to find your story, and give techniques on how to find the pattern on the seemingly separate threads of your carpet.