This life you are is free-form. Life is not lined up like candles on a mantle or like marchers in a parade. There is a different sort of progression in life. It certainly looks free-form. Life certainly doesn’t look like a pointillism painting to you. To you, the carpet of your life may seem to be a random pattern woven without a pattern, woven without foresight, woven without anything in mind. Your life certainly may seen to you to have been woven more than one stitch at a time. It may seem to you that it has been woven over and under haphazardly with stitches dropped. Many stitches dropped the way you drop off a hitchhiker at a corner never to be seen again. Certainly there are stitches that, if they continue, you don’t see where.
Certainly you weave your own carpet of life. Of course, it does seem that, as you sleep, elves must have been weaving your carpet, and even sometimes in the day when you are awake. Somehow more of the carpet has been woven when you were not looking. And there is no end to this carpet. It is never finished. There is no time when fringe is added, and you can bite the thread and say, “Now it is done.” There simply is no end to the carpet you weave. You simply weave the stitches in and out. You don’t even know the next stitch you will take.
I will tell you something. All carpets are woven the same, and all carpets are new. Every finite pattern is unique. And yet rug-making is rug-making, and you are a weaver of your life. Sometimes you even lean over, and do a little weaving on another’s rug.
You teach others to weave. You sit down with beginners and help them start their rugs. Many learn simply by observing you and the wool you weave. And yet there was never a time when anyone was not weaving. You always pick up where you left off. You can’t continue somewhere else.
You may decide to start a new rug. You may find new yarn. You may decide to weave a circular rug. You may decide to weave a rug with different colors, and yet invisible threads connect your new carpet with the old. You are not a beginner. You are an established carpet-weaver. You have been weaving for a long time. This is what you do.
And you weave by hand. You may think you have an automated loom, and yet you are a weaver who weaves with his own two hands.
Weaving is actually quite simple. It is like walking through life, one step at a time. Planned or unplanned, you are a weaver of life. It is no small thing that you are a weaver. No matter how many weavers there are, there is no other weaver just like you, and yet every weaver weaves, and some seem more adept, and others seem less adept, and yet everyone weaves, and the process is the same. Each stitch you weave has never been quite woven before the way you weave now. Each stitch is its own, and it is new no matter how many times you think you have woven it. Stitches may at first glance look the same, and yet, no two stitches are alike. Every weaver has the same yarn, and yet the same yarn twists and turns, and the sun brightens the yarn, or the sun fades the yarn this way and that.
And yet, this being said, there is only one master carpet being woven, and everyone is a master at weaving this one carpet that belongs to all, no matter what corner anyone thinks he is working on right now.