The dark is as needful as the gold - Grant Colfax Tullar

I read a poem from Grant Colfax Tullar and I started thinking of how the divine is a weaver.  Let me share some ideas and then I'll shares poems I read around the weaving topic. 

When I think of the Holy at work, I see a loom. Threads cross threads—some bright as festival silk, some dark as monsoon—while we stand beneath the frame, staring at knots and loose ends, unable to read the pattern from the underside. Yet the upper side is held by an unseen Hand, where even the shadowed strands belong to the design. 

A century ago the American hymn writer Grant Colfax Tullar (later popularized by Corrie ten Boom) put it plainly: the dark is as needful as the gold. Emily Dickinson, peering closer, watched a spider spin “continents of light” in an hour—only to have a broom erase the borders. Our work is that fragile; the Weaver’s is not.

Kabir—fifteenth-century poet-saint and literal weaver of Kashi—made this craft a way of seeing. The body is a cloth, finely woven; breath is the shuttle; day and night are warp and weft; the Guru is the beam that keeps the threads true. What we choose to dye the fibers with—ego’s quick colors or the slow, fast dye of the Name—decides whether the fabric runs in the first rain. The knots we tighten become our tangles; the knots we surrender become texture. 

To live by Kabir’s loom is to keep the shuttle moving through grief and gladness alike, trusting that nothing is wasted. One day the loom will fall silent and the cloth will be lifted. May it return to the Giver bright, simple, and whole.