The World Is Coming Apart. Follow Your Golden Threads.

I’ve loved journals and notebooks since I was little. I still remember the first Trapper Keeper that I got from the Tooth Fairy, it was a faux lace gray with kittens at the center of the cover. I was so excited! Most recently, I’ve been obsessed with Louise Carmen journals. For those that aren’t familiar, they are beautiful bespoke leather journals that come with charms of your choosing, and a fabric dust bag. I already have a beautiful bespoke leather Paper Republic journal and can’t truly justify spending the money on yet another luxe leather journal. And still I found myself really wanting the dust bag and the charms from Louise Carmen. So I decided to innovate. I dug through my jewelry box and gave some of my old charms new life — charms from my travels to Acadia, Big Sur, and Londolozi — blinged out the journal I had, and still wanted the bag. Then I thought: if only I knew how to sew. Lollz.

A lifetime ago, in between being a professional chemist and becoming a mother, I was a fiber artist. It’s been over 20 years since I made and sold art quilts. But I have more fabric in storage than is reasonable by any measure. So, I chose a few favorite pieces of fabric and fired up my old machine, and made two bags in an afternoon. Here’s the thing that surprised me, It was like finding myself again. I had forgotten how much I love fabric, what you can do with it, and how time disappears in the most delightful way when making something. As that realization settled in, I realized I wanted to start quilting again. Not to make a living, but to create, to nurture my soul. I’ve set up my dining room as a sewing room—my wall of women behind me, the collected prints and portraits of the many lives a woman lives, a fitting backdrop—and have been playing, dreaming, and relearning how to sew for weeks now.

This might seem like a strange place to begin an essay during dark times. But I think it’s exactly the right one.

There is no argument that these are dark times. The news is full of real horrors: war, atrocities in the Epstein files, and rising sea levels. We don’t have to rely on the media’s ability to spin the stories to the dark side. These stories are dark enough even without the spin.

The question is what we do with that. Eco-Theologian Thomas Berry spent his life arguing that the answer wasn’t despair — it was imagination. Our challenge, he wrote, is to “create a new language, even a new sense of what it is to be human.”

Berry expanded on this in his seminal work, The Dream of the Earth, stating that our task is to “transcend not only national limitations, but even our species’ isolation, to enter into the larger community of living species.” I first encountered Berry’s work when I was young and new to adulting at Bucknell University. Where I was studying Chemistry for “money” and religion for “fun.” I didn’t understand back then that the heart of my religious studies would become the very foundation of the tapestry of my life. I most recently came across this quote while reading Terry Tempest Williams’ latest masterpiece, The Glorians.

In it, Williams shares her grandmother’s belief that what is revealed to us in dreams carries the voice of the Divine — that God speaks through our dreaming and that we have an obligation to try to translate what we are shown. Her grandmother would admonish her to focus on the “golden thread” that shows us the “through line” that weaves the world back together. Where is this golden thread now?

Of course, the mention of golden threads struck a chord within me because I’ve seen and felt those golden threads in my own dreams, where I can dip my fingers into the river and pull them out to weave the very fabric of our existence into being. I’ve seen and felt the power of weaving those threads when we join together with others — the richness and vibrancy of colors that come forward.

Is this the time to really be talking of golden threads and creating a new language? I say yes, this is exactly the time when we need it most.

Are we going to continue handing our agency over to politicians, gurus, and influencers? Hoping that they will step in to save us? Are we going to count on them to create meaningful change? I don’t think that is a path I would recommend. I think we’ve all seen inside that story, and I’m choosing an alternate ending.

What if instead, we began to do as Berry directed us — almost 30 years ago — and started creating that new language, not in the halls of power, but in the intimate places where we actually live?

I think we so often forget that we have choices. Choices in how we “do the business of life.” Whether you are an entrepreneur or not, you have the opportunity to make a litany of choices every single day. That, when strung together, creates the threads that connect us and the new language of living community that Berry calls us to.

The US education system does a really good job of turning most of us into obedient little factory workers who follow the rules and trust that the overlords have our best interests at heart — I mean, they gave us pizza parties, so clearly they loved us. We are trained to hand over our agency. It’s what the system needs from us. So before we beat ourselves up for doing exactly what we were taught to do, let’s just acknowledge that. And more importantly, remember that we can unlearn it.

We can choose to be makers in a world that wants us to stay factory workers and consumers. We can choose connection over doomscrolling, creation over consumption, and presence over performance. Which is how I ended up at my sewing machine on a Tuesday afternoon, three hours disappearing like thirty minutes, pulling golden threads out of batik fabric and remembering who I was before I got so busy being responsible.

What does this have to do with the news, or the war, or the rising seas? Everything. We can pick up the needle, put our hands in the soil, show up at the door of someone who needs us, and create our work to serve those we can help. These are not small things dressed up as big ones. They are the actual mechanism by which the world gets rewoven. This reweaving is how we begin to speak the new language of which Berry dreamed, using the golden threads we pull from our own hands.

Your Golden Threads

This week, make one thing with your hands. It doesn’t have to be significant, finished, or good. Just make something. Then come back and tell me what it was.