There’s a phrase in the Irish language that I have come to love. In fact, it’s a concept that I’ve always loved and lived, but couldn’t fully describe until recently: fite fuaite.
(Fite fuaite, I say? Pronounce it something like “fi-CHA foo-i-CHA.” Better yet, listen to my guest Kate Chadbourne say and describe the phrase in episode one of KnotWork Storytelling, Conspiring With Brigit.)
As author and Irish language broadcaster Manchán Magan describes it, in a piece about weaving wool and weaving words, fite fuaite means firmly interwoven, inextricably mixed up.
As human beings, we are inherently creative creatures who are here to weave ideas and visions together. As creatives who share our work with others, we are part of a great weaving that perpetually draws the world together. The point of this life is to create and connect, to weave new energies with the eternal cycles of nature.
Oh the boldness of such a statement in times like these, but it’s still something I believe. Regardless of the great unraveling that we see–environmentally, socially, and psychologically–there IS hope that art and love and conscious recreation can sew us together.
Woven together. Again. For the first time.
The Why of the Weaving. The Why of Stories, Mythology, and Folklore.
This week, we released episode 10 of KnotWork Storytelling.
Two months into sharing these stories and guests, weaving these themes on the public stage, and watching my creation wrap its way around a small sliver of the world, I am freshly aware of why I am investing myself in stories from centuries past. And why I will keep inviting guests and listeners to continue on this journey with me.
Whenever we turn our gaze to folklore and mythology, I think it’s essential to ask “are we just looking backwards to avoid the pain of the present and future?”
If this KnotWork Storytelling project becomes focused on stories “merely” for the sake of escapism or romanticism, I’ll be tearing the vital roots from the mythology.
If I stick too closely to the original texts in order to stay true to my academic roots, the life force will drain out of these tales.
If I twist these tales to suit modern (and American) sensibilities, I will have wandered into cultural appropriation and the perpetuation of colonialism.
The goal is to balance all these elements – the original material, the personal passions, the spiritual resonance, the cultural tides, and more. The goal is to weave all these together and stay in integrity.
It’s no easy feat in this age, when misinformation and misattribution are rife and attention spans are limited. It’s doubly hard as an American born person who can only rely on memory, images, and others’ stories and poems to stay connected to the land that sourced these tales.
And still, I hope to manage the trifecta: entertain, inform, and (the element that excites me most) inspire.
How the Stories from the Past Inspire Us Today and Tomorrow
“Inspire” is probably the toughest element of that entertain/educate/inspire formula that I learned in my content marketing days. It is too easy to make “inspiration” into something too flimsy, too lofty, or too ill-defined.
Ultimately, however, I think inspiration is the most compelling, necessary work a creative person can do.
I turn to the Irish language again, this time to Old Irish, and the word imbas, inspiration. (Modern Irish’s word for “inspiration” is inspioráid, which, as Manchán Magan describes in his book, is functional rather than poetical, and works on the page rather than everyday life.)
There’s another Irish phrase I want to offer you: imbas forosnai, It speaks of “inspiration that illuminates.”
I think we need to be inspired to face the great challenge and source of heartache that is woven through our modern lives: a sense of alienation from self, spirit, land, the ancestors, and cultural memory. I think that (re)discovering stories from centuries ago can give us access to those missing pieces and can illuminate the way forward.
So many of the troubles of today can be traced back to a sense of disconnection. To continue this weaving metaphor and the concept of fite fuaite, we might say that our individual and collective suffering can be traced back to tears in the fabric of self and society.
We all suffer when we cannot see that we’re inextricably woven with one another, with the ancestors and indigenous people who came before us, and with the ecosystem of the planet.
Weaving Us Back Together, Story by Story and Stitch by Stitch
The latest episode of the KnotWork Storytelling Podcast is called The Girl Who Defied Expectations.
This story, written by me, Marisa Goudy, is inspired by a piece simply named “A Story,” found in the Irish Schools’ Folklore Collection from the 1930s. It was collected by a student named Annie McLaughlin, as told by her father John Joe McLaughlin for St. Mary’s National School in Buncrana in County Donegal.
The original tale, found at Duchas.ie, offers a retelling of a traditional story of three women who have been disfigured by endless work, carding, spinning, and weaving wool. It’s the story of a “useless girl who lived happily ever after.”
In this version, I imagine the scene in which the father, John Joe, tells the story to his daughter Annie. (There really was a woollen mill in Donegal in the 1930s where they wove carpets for Buckingham Palace!) In this retelling, details have been added to the original fairytale, which is an adaptation of a Brothers Grimm story.
My guest for this episode is Nicole Burgess, a coach, psychotherapist, and podcaster who also happens to be a phenomenal weaver and fiber artist. In our conversation that follows the story, we talk about the weight of expectations, the pressure to be “useful,” and the enduring power of handcrafting.