Henry David Thoreau
״Many people weave all of their lives
without knowing that it is not cloth
that they are after.״
The Wool Woman
The Story Begins
The Wool Woman is a story still becoming - part memoir, part myth. For me, the loom is not yet strung with thread, not yet carrying a cloth into being. And yet, in her presence, I see how my own life is woven together.
Briagha Wabano stands in my home as both reminder and invitation: that even what is empty holds potential, that the unwoven can still speak. One day I will learn to draw the threads across her frame, but for now she is a symbol - of fire tended, of stories gathered, of a journey unfolding.
The Wool Woman is not only about weaving wool; it is about weaving a life. A life of bread and art, of music and clay, of myth and memory - each strand crossing the other, bound together by the hands that keep making.
The Book in Progress
The Wool Woman is also becoming a book - a fictional memoir woven from memory, imagination, and myth. It is a story of tending the fire, of what it means to keep creating even when the world flickers dark.
It is not a straight telling of my life, but a mythic rendering of it - part truth, part dream, part flame. Within its pages live the threads of bread rising, wool waiting, clay grounding and music flowing. The Wool Woman walks among them all, carrying her fire, keeping it alive.
This book is, at heart, about survival and making. About how the smallest act of creation can hold back the silence. It is about the ways women have always kept the hearth burning, even when the world turned cold.
"Unspun wool stands for the cosmic gas from which stars and galaxies are formed."
-Jessica Hemmings
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The Journey Continues
The Wool Woman's path is still being woven. Some days it is firelight and ink; other days it is quiet, a single thread waiting for its turn. What began with wool in my hands has grown into something larger - a life of bread, art, music, and making, all carried forward by the same flame.
This page will grow as the journey grows. Here you will find glimpses of the book as it takes shape, reflections gathered along the way, perhaps even the first weaving when Briagha Wabano finally hums with thread.
I invite you to return as the Wool Woman's story unfolds - slowly, like bread rising, like a tapestry woven one patient strand at a time.
The Wool Woman's Reflections
"Small pieces I share as the book unfolds, glimpses of her life in the making."
Counting Petals
The Wool Woman knows that the world is always rushing, but she moves differently. Time slows in her hands, enough that she can count the petals on a single daisy. Enough that she can notice the weight of wool waiting to be spun, or the steady rise of bread in the oven.
She has learned that beauty does not need to be invented - it only needs to be tended, like a flame, like a thread pulled patiently across the loom. Petals, wool, fire, bread - each is enough, if only one lingers long enough to see them.
And in the stillness, she is not unseen. Her quiet is mirrored back to her, reflected as something more than she thought herself to be: not perfect, not polished, but alive.
This is the fire she tends, the daisy she counts, the thread she weaves: a reminder that even in the smallest worlds, the Wool Woman is never truly alone.
The Wool Woman's Farm
There is no land. Not yet. But I have fleece. I have the combs. I have the sourdough starter bubbling beside me and the jars of dye like tiny alters of color on the windowsill. I have my children, and the space between their laughter. I have a hearth, even if the flame is something only I tend. So I am farming. This is Thistle and Stone Farm - named for what survives.
The thistle blooms where no one asked it to. Spiny, soft, and bright with stubborn light, it grows anyway. And the stone...the stone remembers. It holds heat. It bears weight. It says, you are not broken just because you are heavy with memory.
I gave my farm this name because I needed a place to name what is still alive. Even without acreage. Even without barn or pasture. I am farming for nourishment. For soul. For beauty. For the lives I tend here, even when mine feels shaken. I am farming for wool, yes, and for bread - but also for warmth, for story, for women who are still finding their fire.
You don't need 10 acres to begin. You need willingness. You need tenderness. You need to call something yours, even when the world had told you to wait. You need to remember that making a life is a kind of planting too.
So I farm.
And I will keep farming until the sheep arrive. Until the fence line rises. Until the garden grows wild again. Until then, I offer what I have: wool, bread, art, music and the voice of woman who remembers that even without land, she is still the Wool Woman - and this is still her farm.
The Fire That Remains
A woman's fire is not only a blaze. It is the ember that holds on in the dark, the red glow that does not ask to be seen. It burns in her even when her hands are weary, even when her voice has been quieted. This fire is not for show, not a performance or for others. It is the core of her being, the secret heat she carries through winters no one else remembers.
There has always been such a fire in women. Long before names, before books, before the walls that told them to hush. It burned in caves where mothers pressed children close. It burned in kitchens where bread was kneaded in silence. It burned in shawls and earthen pots, carried across miles of exile, hidden under cloaks, guarded by hands that knew what it meant to lose everything but not the flame.
Some call it courage, others call it defiance, but it is older than either name. It belongs to the women before her who would not let the light die, and it belongs to the women yet to come, who will kindle their own flames from its glow.
You can see it in the way she rises after being told to sit still. You can hear it in the words she never spoke aloud, but which carried her forward all the same. It lives in the beauty she insists upon even when no on is watching, in the tenderness she offers even when it is not returned.
This fire is not the kind that roars for a moment and burns out. It is steady, enduring, sometimes only a spark - but always enough. Enough to keep her alive, enough to remind her she is not lost, enough to guide her back to herself.
This is the fire that remains.