I once had an art teacher, Dorothy Ives, who restored Persian rugs for the Art Institute of Chicago. But she did not always use the old threads and the old dyes as the purists would want her to do. Instead, she kept her faith in the integrity of the design itself, and would find any means possible to honor it, rather than simply trying to replicate the antique materials used when the weaver first made her vision into a palpable piece of “cloth.”
We should remember the creative tension that brought Dorothy to that vision: she had noticed that the original weavers sometimes repaired their own works with novel materials of sources of color different from what had been initially available to them. We should puzzle over that riddle whenever we go about reweaving the tattered cloth of Creation.
Brother Coyote, OEF
