Weaving Loom Quotes

The Weaver” “My life is but a weaving Between my God and me. I cannot choose the colors He weaveth steadily. Oft’ times He weaveth sorrow; And I in foolish pride Forget He sees the upper And I the underside. Not ’til the loom is silent And the shuttles cease to fly Will God unroll the canvas And reveal the reason why. The dark threads are as needful In the weaver’s skillful hand As the threads of gold and silver In the pattern He has planned He knows, He loves, He cares; Nothing this truth can dim. He gives the very best to those Who leave the choice to Him.

You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over.

Wait Wait, for now. Distrust everything, if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven't they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become lovely again. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old. Wait. Don't go too early. You're tired. But everyone's tired. But no one is tired enough. Only wait a while and listen. Music of hair, Music of pain, music of looms weaving all our loves again. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, most of all to hear, the flute of your whole existence, rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

If life is a loom, the pattern you weave is not so easily unraveled.

Swiftly the brain becomes an enchanted loom, where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern-always a meaningful pattern-though never an abiding one.

The surface of the Earth itself is an immense loom upon which the sun weaves the fabric of existence.

The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

She was nothing but the words of a story, one tale weaving imperceptibly into the next. She was the loom that wove the tapestry. She was the tapestry that joined all things.

The Weaver My life is but a weaving between my Lord and me; I cannot choose the colors He worketh steadily. Oft times He weaveth sorrow And I, in foolish pride, Forget He sees the upper, And I the underside. Not til the loom is silent And the shuttles cease to fly, Shall God unroll the canvas And explain the reason why. The dark threads are as needful In the Weaver's skillful hand, As the threads of gold and silver In the pattern He has planned.

And still the Weaver plies his loom, whose warp and woof is wretched Man Weaving th' unpattern'd dark design, so dark we doubt it owns a plan

In a city the multiplicity of threads forced a whirling confusion on the loom but here the simple pattern and the slow weaving made purpose more discernible.

The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? ... And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.

Of wisdom there are as many patterns as a loom can weave. Yours is the wisdom of good and kindly heart. Scarce it is and its worth all the greater.

The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.

Our lives were a complex tapestry, and our woven strands were only meant to intersect at a small number of points in the time-conceived whole. An embroidered starburst, a missed warp, a complicated notion on the loom of time. We were always together, but meant to live our majorities apart, two golden threads wandering through a haunted textile life.

The brain is... an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one.

Medieval technology could raise marvels of architecture 200 feet in the air, it could conceive the mechanics of a loom capable of weaving patterned cloth, and of a gearshaft capable of harnessing the insubstantial air to turn a heavy millstone, but it failed to conceive the fore-and-aft rig and swinging boom capable of adapting sails to the direction of the wind. By such accident of the human mind, war, trade, and history are shaped.

My life is but a weaving, between my God and me, I do not choose the colors, He worketh steadily, Oftimes He weaveth sorrow, and I in foolish pride, Forget He sees the upper, and I the under side. Not till the loom is silent, and shuttles cease to fly, Will God unroll the canvas and explain the reason why. The dark threads are as needful in the skillful Weaver’s hand, As the threads of gold and silver in the pattern He has planned. (Anonymous)

In life like a flood, in deeds like a storm I surge to and fro, Up and down I flow! Birth and the grave An eternal wave, Turning, returning, A life ever burning; At Time's whirring loom I work and play God's living garment I weave and display.

Read it if you like or don't read it if you like. Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with string only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and then sun shines on it and after a while they don't even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter. And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something-a scrap of paper-something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone can't be is because it never can become was because it can't ever die or perish...

Yet surely that story she had imagined was a real thing? If you created a story with your mind surely it was just as much there as a piece of needlework that you created with your fingers? You could not see it with your bodily eyes, that was all....the invisible world must be saturated with the stories that men tell both in their minds and by their lives. They must be everywhere, these stories, twisting together, penetrating existence like air breathed into the lungs, and how terrible, how awful, thought Henrietta, if the air breathed should be foul. How dare men live, how dare they think or imagine, when every action and every thought is a tiny thread to ar or enrich that tremendous tapestried story that man weaves on the loom that God has set up, a loom that stretches from heaven above to hell below, and from side to side of the universe...

The gold had asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer, deafened and blinded more and more to all things except the monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web; but Eppie called him away from his weaving, and made him think all its pauses a holiday, reawakening his senses with her fresh life, even to the old winter-flies that came crawling forth in the early spring sunshine, and warming him into joy because she had joy.

People who need regulation often leave therapy sessions feeling calmer, stronger, safer, more able to handle the world. Often they don't know why. Nothing obviously helpful happened - telling a stranger about your pain sounds nothing like a certain recipe for relief. And the feeling inevitably dwindles, sometimes within minutes, taking the warmth and security with it. But the longer a patient depends, the more his stability swells, expanding infinitesimally with ever session as length is added to a woven cloth with each pass of the shuttle, each contraction of the loom. And after he weaves enough of it, the day comes when the patient will unfurl his independence like a pair of spread wings. Free at last, he catches a wind and rides into other lands. (172)

I remember Aeneas’ words as I remember the poet’s words. I remember every word because they are the fabric of my life, the warp I am woven on. All my life since Aeneas’ death might seem a weaving torn out of the loom unfinished, a shapeless tangle of threads making nothing, but it is not so; for my mind returns as the shuttle returns always to the starting place, finding the pattern, going on with it. I was a spinner, not a weaver, but I have learned to weave.

So to hell with dignity. Dignity has got nothing on Rita Hayworth singing “Put the Blame on Mame” in Gilda, and absolutely nothing on Mae West in anything. It seems far more exciting to be a Siren beckoning with her song or Calypso captivating on her island than to be Penelope, the archetype of female fidelity, weaving and unweaving at her loom, sending her suitors away, waiting for the errant Odysseus to return, waiting while he luxuriates in lotusland, waiting while, as one correspondent to The New York Times Book Review put it, he “commits adultery with various gorgeous, high-class women,” waiting for her husband like Lucy waits for Desi at the end of the day, or Alice waits for Ralph at the end of the night. Bad girls don’t wait around—one doesn’t get to go everywhere by sitting by the phone.

I do not know if God is a mathematician, but mathematics is the loom upon which God weaves the fabric of the universe....The fact that reality can be described or approximated by simple mathematical expressions suggests to me that nature has mathematics at its core.

Orito pictures the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.

And he was gesturing up through the trees above to show them how it was woven across the sky or how the sky was woven into the trees, he wasn‘t sure which. But there it was, he smiled, and the weaving went on, green and blue, if you watched and saw the forest shift its humming loom.

Their gazes met. His eyes swept her in a velvet caress, uncertainty stamped on his features. The night loomed between them, as dark and impenetrable as his eyes. Rowena had to look away. She forced herself to remember how he had used his body and her need as weapons to weave a punishing net of pleasure.

Spirit: In floods of being, in action's storm, Up and down I wave, To and fro I flee, Birth and the grave, An infinite sea, A changeful weaving, An ardent living; The ringing loom of Time is my care, And I weave God's living garment there

We were stumbling sluts married to mud. When the war was over, nobody bothered to tell us. Our tragedy was permanent. No records were kept of us anywhere. We shuffled through ruined villages aimlessly. Anyone who had a menial, pointless job to do had only to wave us down and we would do it...On and on Helga spun her yarn, weaving a biography on the crazy loom of modern history.

I feel that weaving is a precise metaphor for the way in which life is made,” she said. “By which I mean individually constructed. Any strand can be woven in at the dictation of the imagination. I think of the philosophy of history as a loom of that sort. It is, isn’t it?

I think writing is a process that starts long before the writers are actually writers and probably goes on long afterward. It’s rather like the way the Arabs weave rugs. They don’t stop. They just cut them off at a certain spot on the loom. There is no particular beginning or end.

On this fifth-century BC Athenian pot, Penelope is shown seated by her loom (weaving was always the mark of a good Greek housewife). Telemachus stands in front of her.

a good man will welcome “every experience the looms of fate may weave for him.”3

The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

the good man’s only singularity lies in his approving welcome to every experience the looms of fate may weave for him,

Germany, your shroud's on our loom; and in it we weave the threefold doom...We weave; we weave.

Then we must say farewell," answered the weaver-woman. "But mind you," she added, in her usual sharp tone, "if life is a loom, the pattern you weave is not so easily unraveled.

Tinkerers built America. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, all were tinkerers in their childhood. Everything from the airplane to the computer started in somebody's garage. Go back even further: the Industrial Revolution was a revolution of tinkerers. The great scientific thinkers of eighteenth-century England couldn't have been less interested in cotton spinning and weaving. Why would you be? It was left to a bloke on the shop floor who happened to glance at a one-thread wheel that had toppled over and noticed that both the wheel and the spindle were still turning. So James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, and there followed other artful gins and mules and frames and looms, and Britain and the world were transformed. By tinkerers rather than thinkerers. "Technological change came from tinkerers," wrote Professor J.R. McNeill of Georgetown, "people with little or no scientific education but with plenty of hands-on experience." John Ratzenberger likes to paraphrase a Stanford University study: "Engineers who are great in physics and calculus but can't think in new ways about old objects are doomed to think in old ways about new objects." That's the lesson of the spinning jenny: an old object fell over and someone looked at it in a new way.

Children of yesterday, heirs of tomorrow, What are you weaving? labor and sorrow? Look to your loom again, faster and faster Fly the great shuttles prepared by the Master. There’s life in the loom! Room for it, room! There’s life in the loom! Room for it, room! Children of yesterday, heirs of tomorrow, Lighten the labor and sweeten the sorrow; Now while the shuttles fly faster and faster, Up and be doing the work with the Master. He stands at the loom! Room for Him, room! He stands at the loom! Room for Him, room! Children of yesterday, heirs of tomorrow, Look at your fabric of labor and sorrow; Seamy and dark with despair and disaster, Turn it and lo, the design of the Master. The Lord’s at the loom! Room for Him, room! The Lord’s at the loom! Room for Him, room!

I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.

Upon This Age, That Never Speaks Its Mind Upon this age, that never speaks its mind, This furtive age, this age endowed with power To wake the moon with footsteps, fit an oar Into the rowlocks of the wind, and find What swims before his prow, what swirls behind— Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, Rains from the sky a meteoric shower Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined. Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill Is daily spun; but there exists no loom To weave it into fabric; undefiled Proceeds pure Science, and has her say; but still Upon this world from the collective womb Is spewed all day the red triumphant child.

The heat of a million suns shimmered from the ground and bounced off the triple canopy that loomed above and created undulating waves, that blurred a man’s vision. Knap, looking like a ghost weaved his way forward through the rays of heat.

The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. " 76

But fate is a funny thing. It weaves its threads through the loom with steady hands. At first, the result is seemingly a distorted mess, but if one can wait long enough, the full picture comes into focus, the threads tightly intertwined, strong and true.

the world was fluid—that existence itself was fluid—and that the waking world was nothing more than a script that could be written if they could find the right brush, a pattern they could weave in completely different colors if they just knew how to work the loom.

Evolution is an enchanted loom of shuttling DNA codes, whose evanescent patterns, as they dance their partners through geological deep time, weave a massive database of ancestral wisdom, a digitally coded description of ancestral worlds and what it took to survive in them.

A Roman matron should always do her own weaving,” Marcella had often heard her sister say. “It’s a sign of industry and virtue in women. Even the goddesses in the heavens sit at their looms.” “Even the goddesses of heaven need a way to look busy while they scheme,” Marcella agreed.

Marion does not talk much. But when she does talk she swears a lot more. There is a joy she takes in swearing which I suspect she inherited from her aunt Grace. She likes the word 'motherfucker' in particular (not that this particular one was around in her aunt's day). Everything is a motherfucker. For instance, the TV is a motherfucker. (There is 'never anything on the motherfucker'.) Her shoes are motherfuckers. The American president is a motherfucker. Weaving yarn through a loom is a motherfucker. Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy is a motherfucker.

So, year after year, Silas Marner had lived in this solitude, his guineas rising in the iron pot, and his life narrowing and hardening itself more and more into a mere pulsation of desire and satisfaction that had no relation to any other being. His life had reduced itself to the functions of weaving and hoarding, without any contemplation of an end towards which the functions tended. The same sort of process has perhaps been undergone by wiser men, when they have been cut off from faith and love—only, instead of a loom and a heap of guineas, they have had some erudite research, some ingenious project, or some well-knit theory. Strangely Marner's face and figure shrank and bent themselves into a constant mechanical relation to the objects of his life, so that he produced the same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube, which has no meaning standing apart.

Wait, for now. Distrust everything if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become interesting. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again; their memories are what give them the need for other hands. The desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old. Wait. Don’t go too early. You’re tired. But everyone’s tired. But no one is tired enough. Only wait a little and listen: music of hair, music of pain, music of looms weaving our loves again. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, most of all to hear your whole existence, rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

CROWS CALLING AT NIGHT Yellow clouds beside the walls; crows roosting near. Flying back, they caw, caw; calling in the boughs. In the loom she weaves brocade, the Qin river girl. Made of emerald yarn like mist, the window hides her words. She stops the shuttle, sorrowful, and thinks of the distant man. She stays alone in the lonely room, her tears just like the rain.

I remember every word because they are the fabric of my life, the warp I am woven on. All my life since Aeneas’ death might seem a weaving torn out of the loom unfinished, a shapeless tangle of threads making nothing, but it is not so; for my mind returns as the shuttle returns always to the starting place, finding the pattern, going on with it. I was a spinner, not a weaver, but I have learned to weave.

The brain is a highly connected and interconnected organ, but the activation of those connections are constantly shifting. The great neurobiologist Sir Charles Sherrington, in his Gifford lectures titled Man on His Nature, described the brain as "an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.

He believed that he must learn to accept the cold mechanics of Creation, because it made no sense to rail at a mindless machine. After all, a clock could not be held responsible for the too-swift passage of time. A loom could not be blamed for weaving the cloth that later was sewn into an executioner’s hood. He hoped that if he came to terms with the mechanistic indifference of the universe, with the meaningless nature of life and death, he would find peace. Such

Loom was about a society of Weavers whose elders (named after the Greek Fates Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) create a secret loom that controls the world, or, according to the script of the game, that weaves “subtle patterns of influence into the very fabric of reality.” When a young boy discovers the loom’s power, he’s forced into exile, and everything spirals into chaos until the world decides that a secret fate machine might not be such a great idea, after all.

The gold had kept his thoughts in an ever-repeated circle, leading to nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object compacted of changes and hopes that forced his thoughts onward, and carried them far away from their old eager pacing towards the same blank limit - carried them away to the new things that would come with the coming years, when Eppie would have learned to understand how her father Silas cared for her; and made him look for images of that time in the ties and charities that bound together the families of his neighbours. The gold had asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer, deafened and blinded more and more to all things except the monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web; but Eppie called him away from his weaving, and made him think all its pauses a holiday, reawakening his senses with her fresh life, even tot the old winter-flies that came crawling forth in the early spring sunshine, and warming him into joy because she had joy.

Winter war was the ruin of the pattern. Near the beginning of a new weave, if she felt a flaw through her hands—the hitch in the flow, a tension on the loom as she threaded the shuttle through the warp—she could stop and unpick one row: a moment, a blink, and it was mended. But if she ignored it, if she pretended it was nothing, she would begin to feel each pass of the shuttle, each beat of the weft turn more wrong, until she slowed, closed her eyes, and stopped. Then she must tally the time it would take to undo the weave, and weigh that against the rest of the work to be done.

The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villanies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.

I’m sorry, Jack. But as you’ll soon learn, I am not a good man.” “You don’t have to be a ‘good’ man,” Jack said. “You simply need to be an honest one.” His father looked at him again. His eyes were a bloodshot blue, like the summer sky at sunset, and filled with remorse. “Very well,” Niall said. “Then let me speak honestly to you. I’ve stolen. I’ve lied. I’ve killed. I’m a coward. I left your mother to raise you and your sister alone. I let her go. I let you go. I let Frae go. I am unworthy of what you hope for me, because I never fought for your mother and you and your sister when I should have.” “Then fight for us now!” Jack replied sharply. He pounded his chest with his fist, felt the best move through him. “Let our names be the sword in your hand. Let us be your shield and your armor. Fight for us tonight. Because over the clan line, I’m the shadows of the Aithwood, my mother still waits for you, weaving your story on her loom. My sister longs for you as I once did, wondering where you are and hoping you will one day knock on the door and proudly claim her. And I would love nothing more than to bore you with mainland stories day after day and sing to you until your guilt she’d like old skin and you choose the life you want, not the one you think you deserve.

The reality is that Ada’s contribution was both profound and inspirational. More than Babbage or any other person of her era, she was able to glimpse a future in which machines would become partners of the human imagination, together weaving tapestries as beautiful as those from Jacquard’s loom. Her appreciation for poetical science led her to celebrate a proposed calculating machine that was dismissed by the scientific establishment of her day, and she perceived how the processing power of such a device could be used on any form of information. Thus did Ada, Countess of Lovelace, help sow the seeds for a digital age that would blossom a hundred years later.

Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!- pause!- one word!- whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!- stay thy hand!- but one single word with thee! Nay- the shuttle flies- the figures float from forth the loom; the fresher-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.

Wait" Wait, for now. Distrust everything, if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become lovely again. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, their memories are what give them the need for other hands. And the desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old. Wait. Don’t go too early. You’re tired. But everyone’s tired. But no one is tired enough. Only wait a while and listen. Music of hair, Music of pain, music of looms weaving all our loves again. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, most of all to hear, the flute of your whole existence, rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

C. P. Snow was right about the need to respect both of “the two cultures,” science and the humanities. But even more important today is understanding how they intersect. Those who helped lead the technology revolution were people in the tradition of Ada, who could combine science and the humanities. From her father came a poetic streak and from her mother a mathematical one, and it instilled in her a love for what she called “poetical science.” Her father defended the Luddites who smashed mechanical looms, but Ada loved how punch cards instructed those looms to weave beautiful patterns, and she envisioned how this wondrous combination of art and technology could be manifest in computers. (...) This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both.

No matter how many times I walk this same path, I never get bored of it. The central Realms—home to most of the residents and buildings—are set up like a grid, with walking paths crisscrossing each other at even intervals. On either side of the paths trees loom high and streams weave their way between them. When I was younger, before I started delivering the pies, I could usually be found in one of the distant fields with Kal or Bren, watching the clouds change color. The sky here is without color, but the clouds more than make up for it. I learned in school that on the planets, clouds and trees and water are solid objects, providing some sort of purpose in nature. In The Realms, they are more like suggestions of such things, until someone wants to use them. A lake becomes a lake when someone wants to go fishing. A flower becomes a flower when someone wants to water it, or admire it, or put it in a vase. Even then it’s not a “real” flower, like the type that grows in the soil of many of the terrestrial planets. But that doesn’t make it any less beautiful.

Well, let me weave together various sorts of tales, using the Milesian mode as a loom, if you will. Witty and dulcet tones are going to stroke your too-kind ears—as long as you don’t turn a spurning nose up at an Egyptian papyrus scrawled over with a sharp pen from the Nile. I’ll make you wonder at human forms and fortunes transfigured, torn apart but then mended back into their original state. Now to my preface. ‘Who’s writing there?’ you ask. In a few words: my ancient stock is from Attic Hymettus and the Ephyrean Isthmus and Spartan Taenarus. All that fertile sod has been immortalized by books more fertile still. There, as my boyhood began, I served my first tour of literary duty in the Athenian tongue. Then as a foreigner in the Latian city I invaded the speech native to the Quirites’ curriculum, settled on it, and worked it for all it was worth – and it was harrowing, as I had no teacher walking ahead and pointing out what to do. So here I am, pleading in advance to be let off if I commit some offense, as I’m still a greenhorn: to me, the speech of the Roman forum is outlandish. But this very change of language suits the genre-jumping training I have undertaken. The story we are starting has a Greek original, you see. Give heed, reader: there is delight to be had.

It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!—pause!—one word!—whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single word with thee! Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the loom; the fresher-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.

Winterfest is as much a celebration of the darkest part of the year as a festival of the returning light. For the first three days of Winterfest, we pay homage to the darkness. The tales told and puppet shows presented are those that tell of resting times and happy endings. The foods are salt fish and smoked flesh, harvested roots and fruit from last summer. Then, on the midday of the festival, there is a hunt. New blood is shed to celebrate the breaking point of the year, and new meat is brought fresh to the table, to be eaten with grain harvested from the year before. The next three days are days that look toward the coming summer. The looms are threaded with gayer thread, and the weavers take over an end of the Great Hall to vie among themselves for the brightest patterns and lightest weave. The tales told are ones that tell of beginnings of things, and of how things came to be.

Winter arrived with the month of June, which is the December of the northern zones, and the great business was the making of warm and solid clothing. The musmons in the corral had been stripped of their wool, and this precious textile material was now to be transformed into stuff. Of course Cyrus Harding, having at his disposal neither carders, combers, polishers, stretchers, twisters, mule-jenny, nor self-acting machine to spin the wool, nor loom to weave it, was obliged to proceed in a simpler way, so as to do without spinning and weaving. And indeed he proposed to make use of the property which the filaments of wool possess when subjected to a powerful pressure of mixing together, and of manufacturing by this simple process the material called felt. This felt could then be obtained by a simple operation which, if it diminished the flexibility of the stuff, increased its power of retaining heat in proportion.

Her gait was such that the fall of her sari acquired the rhythmic grace of the loom on which it was weaved.

I’m sorry, Jack. But as you’ll soon learn, I am not a good man.” “You don’t have to be a ‘good’ man,” Jack said. “You simply need to be an honest one.” His father looked at him again. His eyes were a bloodshot blue, like the summer sky at sunset, and filled with remorse. “Very well,” Niall said. “Then let me speak honestly to you. I’ve stolen. I’ve lied. I’ve killed. I’m a coward. I left your mother to raise you and your sister alone. I let her go. I let you go. I let Frae go. I am unworthy of what you hope for me, because I never fought for your mother and you and your sister when I should have.” “Then fight for us now!” Jack replied sharply. He pounded his chest with his fist, felt the best move through him. “Let our names be the sword in your hand. Let us be your shield and your armor. Fight for us tonight. Because over the clan line, I’m the shadows of the Aithwood, my mother still waits for you, weaving your story on her loom. My sister longs for you as I once did, wondering where you are and hoping you will one day knock on the door and proudly claim her. And I would love nothing more than to bore you with mainland stories day after day and sing to you until your guilt she’d like old skin and you choose the life you want, not the one you think you deserve.

Felipe guided me into the nearby building and upstairs to the weaving room, where there were seven head-high wooden looms, some of the weavers sitting, thrusting the shuttles at right angles through the tight threads, pulling the beams down, working the treadles, and in all that effort—the rattle of skeletal frames and the stamping of treadles—lengthening the cloth by one thread. (Recalling that, it seems a fit image for what I am doing now, fussing with my fingers and hesitating, then tightening the line and starting again, minutes passing, this memory of weaving enlarged by one sentence.)

The real functional "machinery" of the brain, for Edelman, consists of millions of neuronal groups, organized into larger units or "maps". These maps, continually conversing in everchanging, unimaginably complex, but always meaningful patterns, may change in minutes or seconds. One is reminded of C. S. Sherrington's poetic evocation of the brain as "an enchanted loom", where "millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns".

Plato spoke of the Sisters of Fate on the last 3 pages of his book, “The Republic” when he said:    “Then the Sisters of Fate take all of our choices and weave them on their loom into the fabric of destiny. Hear the word of Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity. Mortal souls, behold a new cycle of life and mortality. Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny. Virtue is free, and as a man honors’ or dishonors her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser — God is justified”     [Quote from Plato’s Republic written 360BCE In the Public Domain]

time is not a prison but an opportunity. It is the loom on which you weave your life, the classroom in which you learn your lessons, the playground in which you discover and express your possibility. The point is not to be free from time but to be in time, freely.

I spent some time with my grandmother. During the winter the sheep are corralled close to home, and my grandmother works almost non-stop at her loom. She makes these amazing rugs and blankets. She says her ability to weave is a gift from Spider Woman.” He looked at me, a faint smile lurking around his firm lips. “Spider Woman is of no relation to Super Sam or Bionic Josie.” He quirked his eyebrows at me

Orito pictures the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory, and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.

The norns are goddesses of fate, of love and hate; they are weaving on the loom of destiny. All the lives of people and gods, past and present, are woven on their loom. Your thread of life was long ago spun and placed in their great image.

By your Owl Ever-Watchful By your Broom that sweeps the Land of souls By your Geese who bark in the Sky By the Deer who are your herd in the wood By your Caudle that boils the dark remains of former worlds, By your loom that weaves dreams and nightmares, By your Black Dog that menaces the wicked, By your Wheel, Key and Thrice Locked Door, Let the cup overflow with your shadow and your ardor- Let me drink and be whole by your mighty leave; Let me greet the stars and touch the earth Made Red by your beneficence.

two maids move Penelope’s loom into place, so that the suitors may watch her work upon it in her shadowed corner. She is weaving a funeral shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes. When it is finished, then she will marry a man – so she says.

THE CITY Our story begins in a city, with buildings and streets and bridges and parks. Humans were strolling, automobiles were driving, airships were flying, robots were hard at work. Weaving through the city streets was a delivery truck. The truck knew where to go, and how to get there, all by itself. It pulled up to a construction site and automatically unloaded some crates. A few more turns and it unloaded more crates down at the docks. The truck zigged and zagged across the city, delivering crates as it went, and then it merged onto a highway. Cars and buses and trucks were cruising along the highway together. But as the delivery truck continued, the traffic became lighter, the buildings became smaller, and the landscape became greener. With nothing but open road ahead, the truck accelerated to its top speed. The landscape outside was now just a green blur, occasionally broken by a flicker of gray as a town flew past. On and on the delivery truck went, racing over long bridges, shooting through mountain tunnels, gliding down straight stretches of highway, until it started to slow. It drifted from the fast lane to the exit lane, and then it rolled down a ramp and into farm country. Clouds of dust billowed up behind the truck as it drove past fields and fences. In the hazy distance, enormous barns loomed above the plains. The air was thick with the smells of soil and livestock. Robot crews methodically worked the crops and fed the animals and operated the massive farm machines. A hill gradually climbed into view. The hill was crowned with

Time was when a peasant family could consider the corn it sowed and reaped, or the woollen garments woven in the cottage, as the products of its own soil. But even then this way of looking at things was not quite correct. There were the roads and the bridges made in common, the swamps drained by common toil, the communal pastures enclosed by hedges which were kept in repair by each and all. If the looms for weaving or the dyes for colouring fabrics were improved by somebody, all profited; and even in those days a peasant family could not live alone, but was dependent in a thousand ways on the village or the commune. But nowadays, in the present state of industry, when everything is interdependent, when each branch of production is knit up with all the rest, the attempt to claim an individualist origin for the products of industry is absolutely untenable.

It's the stars that are imprisoned in their own power, and they cannot really help us. They merely design the nets, and on cosmic looms they weave the warp thread that we must complete with our own weft.

I’m sorry, Jack. But as you’ll soon learn, I am not a good man.” “You don’t have to be a ‘good’ man,” Jack said. “You simply need to be an honest one.” His father looked at him again. His eyes were a bloodshot blue, like the summer sky at sunset, and filled with remorse. “Very well,” Niall said. “Then let me speak honestly to you. I’ve stolen. I’ve lied. I’ve killed. I’m a coward. I left your mother to raise you and your sister alone. I let her go. I let you go. I let Frae go. I am unworthy of what you hope for me, because I never fought for your mother and you and your sister when I should have.” “Then fight for us now!” Jack replied sharply. He pounded his chest with his fist, felt the best move through him. “Let our names be the sword in your hand. Let us be your shield and your armor. Fight for us tonight. Because over the clan line, I’m the shadows of the Aithwood, my mother still waits for you, weaving your story on her loom. My sister longs for you as I once did, wondering where you are and hoping you will one day knock on the door and proudly claim her. And I would love nothing more than to bore you with mainland stories day after day and sing to you until your guilt she’d like old skin and you choose the life you want, not the one you think you deserve.

Did you steal from her? Did she weave a thread of your life into her loom?” The Weaver of the Wood. My heart thundered. No breathing could steady it. Cassian’s hand tightened around mine.

The act of invention was no easy job, but securing the materials and setting up production was just as difficult.

beard who had worked in mills most of his life and operated a company, Family Heir Loom Weavers, in a small town near York called Red Lion. Kline agreed to meet with Yang and said he could offer him work. “How much will you pay?” Yang wondered. “Seven dollars an hour,” Kline replied. As they were talking, Yang knelt down and picked up a length of thread from the floor. He toyed with it for a moment, then skillfully tied a weaver’s knot. “Okay,” Kline said. “Eight dollars an hour.” In the coming years, Kline and his family essentially adopted Yang, allowing him to live rent-free in a room in an old cigar factory that they had converted into a weaving mill. Yang worked sixty hours a week at nine

looms, bringing an extraordinary degree of dexterity and skill to his weaving and increasing the output of the mill by 50 percent over his first three years. He made garments for Civil War reenactors and upholstery fabric and period drapery for historic residences; the mill produced materials that would be used in the restored houses of nine former presidents. When the movie Cold Mountain needed hundreds of authentic-looking costumes and uniforms from the American Civil War era, it was Yang You Yi who produced the fabric. Yang called David Kline “Dad-Boss,” and Kline credited him with turning the business around. Kline decided that when he retired, he would sell Yang half the company.

Not all of the men went into the restaurant business, and not all of them left York, Pennsylvania. Yang You Yi, the detainee who first folded a paper pineapple in prison, had run a weaving company in China, using old looms to manufacture mosquito nets. Through Joan Maruskin and Sterling Showers, he was introduced to a local man named David Kline, a gentle weaver with an Amish-style

Now, it is possible that the ground-loom existed farther north also: to the northeast, in the steppes (where, however, large cloths to this day are by preference made by felting), and to the northwest, where it might conceivably have co-existed with the warp- weighted loom, the two looms having been specialized for different purposes. Yet the warp-weighted loom is so different in its concept that it is hard to believe that it was not independently invented, by people who originally knew nothing of the two-beam ground-loom, although they almost certainly already knew the principle of weaving under tension, as with a backstrap loom, for example (see Chapter 11

He read the 23rd Psalm, then a poem.” The poem, by Grant Colfax Tullar, was one of Carole’s favorites: My life is but a weaving Between my Lord and me; I cannot choose the colors He worketh steadily. Oft times He weaveth sorrow And I, in foolish pride, Forget He sees the upper, And I the under side. Not til the loom is silent And the shuttles cease to fly, Shall God unroll the canvas

What is left after a death? Everything else. The sun a man saw rise goes down though he does not see it set. A woman sits down to the weaving another woman left in the loom.

He kept returning to the factories to watch the rattling grey-black efficiency of the wooden and iron machines out of which came long webs of pure white wool, fragile silks the colors of jewels and flowers, patterned velvets, splendid and delicate products of the looms and racks, the stinking vats of dye and sizing, the crazy dancing spindles, the endless trays of leaves and worms. The big new Ferman Wool factory had two steam-driven looms, the first in the country; he had read Sangiusto’s descriptions of such machines in the northern English cities, and went to see them in some intellectual excitement, but was drawn back to them again and again simply to watch them work: the swift endless back-and-forth, the deft, effaced men that served them. He could stand watching them for an hour, all the time with a slightly sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. They were the same motions, it was the same product, as Kounney working at his loom in his rooms in Mallenastrada; it was weaving, there had been weaving done since the dawn of human time, why did the powered looms so fascinate and frighten him? He wrote an article describing them, their structure, their product, and their probable effect on the economy if more came into use.

At its simplest, weaving involves two sets of threads: weft threads and warp threads. The warp threads are held tightly by a device called a loom. The process of weaving involves passing a weft thread over and under successive warp threads. This is the basic procedure to weave most kinds of cloth. In tapestry weaving, the warps are spaced widely enough that the weft slides down over them and completely hides the warp. Because the warp is hidden and the image we see is created by the weft alone, the weaving is called weft-faced.

saw a large fire burning on a hearth. In its rosy glow, three strange creatures were weaving at a big loom. Jack caught his breath. Their appearance was shocking.

The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it.76 If you tried to listen to all the sounds of the universe at once it would be deafening. All the various meanings would cancel each other out. You would hear the chaos of white noise instead of the single, hidden truth of a rational universe. This is exactly parallel to what would happen if you tried to see all the colors in the world at once. It would look like something that has a meaning, you would be driven to find out what that ultimate meaning was, but you would be driven mad in the search. Because when it is universal it is deafening, it is a chaos; and although this chaos is itself the ultimate nature of the universe, you can only fathom it from one perspective at a time. That is why, on Melville’s account, Ahab’s fanaticism is ultimately mad. The multiple meanings of the universe simply don’t add up[…]” Excerpt From: Hubert Dreyfus. “All Things Shining.

We weave the majority of our problems on the loom of our decisions.

Life is not so simple as a loom. What you weave, you cannot unravel with a tug.

For the fashioning of a proper doom is in the manner of weaving. Through the long warp of character, ambition, greed, habit, intolerance, yearning, faith, love and hatreds of the humans, the loom bed from which they cannot escape, we interlace the strands of chance, threads borrowed momentarily from the lives of others, the stranger, the friend, the innocent, the guilty, the young, the old, a chance phrase overheard, a corner turned just an instant too soon, a word spoken in anger, later regretted, a letter delayed, an article forgotten or left behind, some trifling matter overlooked, the ill-temper of another.