Existence

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Soft living tapestries heal the soul and add dimension to a space that is healing and rejuvenating.

I had been going through a little bit of a difficult time in my life––joyful, but in other ways sorrowful. I was thinking about how complicated life can be, and how far from natural living we are in the modern world. Our home and work environments are so often, hard places, and not places where we enjoy handmade materials. They don’t often inspire slow living, minimal living. It’s a long story, but my husband reminded me of something from my childhood. I was ten years old when the Soviet Union let go of my homeland, Latvia. Life was not easy under the soviet times, and we didn’t have much. I didn’t have any toys, but I did have this one little butterfly toy that I used to play with in the backyard. I started to cry, because I thought about how happy I was in the simplicity of my playing as a child with that one modest, unsophisticated hand-made toy. The modern world is all about ‘trying to be’, and ‘striving to become’¬, and in some ways, and to some degree it must be so, as life is tough, and we must survive and carve out our livelihoods––but only in our fight to survive, but not in our heart-of-hearts. The is a secret place, where we can go. When I was a child, playing with my butterfly, I simply ‘existed’ in the beauty of those moments. This piece, ‘Existence’ came from this place of appreciation and reflection. It was also created through a time of tears of joy and appreciation for the gentle things of life. This piece has now found a home, in a dear friends new house. It was as though my butterflies were wanting to fly away to a home where they could comfort another, who needed to experience ‘existence’ in this life, and to be wrapped in the comfort and softness of my handmade wool tapestry. That this forgotten art of tapestry could be used in this way, brings the greatest joy to me.