Spinning Your Own Story

Maybe you like to take a spin on your bike; or occasionally you've had to put your own spin on a total blooper; or you like to spin a yarn over a laid-back dinner? You know, however you spin, what you are actually doing is taking something of your own stuff (your energy, imagination, history) and reeling it out in the world. 

Which is exactly what Mahatma Gandhi had in mind when began a massive revolution by imploring every man, woman and child in India to daily spin home grown cotton into thread. He knew it was an act of independence.  When you create your own story from the ground up, when you spin it out of your own history; when you become self-sufficient wearing your own hand-spun cloth, then you are not beholden to anyone's else's story about you. In his case, the rule of the British. In your case, the rule of anything that has colonized or limited your imagination.  

Self-rule starts here, with the unruly mass of what you've been given in this life (like a mass of cotton plucked from the field.)  Spinning that stuff into a fine thread takes a lot of time, but then, taking the time to really know yourself, to know your own story and values, to define yourself on your own terms, takes time too.

Megha Agarwal works with women in India harvesting cotton from their local fields, spinning it by hand the way that Gandhi did, on a spinning wheel, and weaving by hand to make khadi - handspun cloth.  Absolutely redolent with their own history of non-violent resistance.  Khadi is not just a cloth, she says.  It is a movement.

I love khadi more than any kind of cloth,  It is simplicity itself.  Real, authentic, pure. Beautiful.

And I love the women of India who are finding for themselves the self-sufficiency to which Gandhi devoted his life.  I am honored to offer it, gorgeously beaded and embroidered, an Ibu Original.  To wear it makes me stand taller.  

This is perhaps our highest calling. To spin our own lives out of the ground of our being.  To define our own selves.  And to that thread be true.

Susan Hull Walker