Red Thread Spin the Wheel
an essay about Crete, weaving women, & the heart
1.
It’s my first night, and already Crete has shaken me.
I’ve come back to participate in a weaving workshop in the region of Rethymno, put on by my lyra teacher’s family. The workshop is to be entirely in Greek—and my spoken Greek is only vaguely passable despite a year of study and more than a year of immersive living. Luckily I can understand a lot more than I can articulate, but before the week even begins, I know it’s going to be a challenge.
When I left Crete last December, I had been very ready to leave. I had finally been able to see that the life I had longed so fervently to create on the island just wasn’t working anymore, and another was calling me. As if to help me along, not one but two honeybees had been blown against the left side of my chest, over my heart, and had stung me there in the month leading up to my departure. I’ve never in my life been stung by a windblown honeybee, or heard of this happening to anyone, let alone twice, and in the same area of the body. So I’d left, letting go of what I wanted Crete to be for me, not knowing in what manner I would want to return, if at all.
But now, drawn by a force much older than me, a force that has to do with looms and threads and women and a dream I’ve held for much of my life to learn to weave, I’m back. It’s my first night, and I’m sitting barefoot on a wooden chair in my lyra teacher’s house while two friends dig the splinters out of my left foot. The thorns are deep, and it really does end up taking two of them to get them out. There’s a bottle of iodine, a lighter for the needle and tweezers, and someone has poured me a fresh raki for the pain. I’m very glad in this moment for the years of barefoot walking that have made my soles so tough. One friend— an ex-chef— is digging with surgical precision, and the needle is large. The other is wielding a frighteningly sharp pair of tweezers.