Pattern Recognition: Following the Thread
One of the prompts and inquiries I love to invite into our microdosing programs and community is to have people reflect on their childhood fascinations… those quirks, passions and pastimes that seem to come from out of the blue. These threads often make us unique and differentiated from our families of origin, and seem to connect us to an older, deeper, wiser place within the human soul.
When I was a little girl, I got very into “beading.” Now, a lot of kids go through ‘beading phases''… but mine went to a whole next level. 😂 I don’t know how many thousands of hours I spent beading, but suffice to say if you came across me during those years some form of beaded jewelry would have been bestowed upon you.
I innately loved working with my hands, making intricate patterns and designs and colours that would especially reflect the spirit of the adorned and connect us when we were apart. To this day, I love that jewelry can connect us across time and space and generations and - in a culture of fleeting fashion, swiped connections & disposable-everything - that it possesses a timeless quality, ancestral roots, lasting meaning, and permanence.
For all of the countless distinct and unique bracelets, necklaces, and anklets I made, they always shared one thing in common: At the start of the pattern - and again at the end - a single orange bead was placed. Invariably the recipients of my gifts would ask something logical and along the lines of “So, what’s with the orange bead?” And I remember as a small child thinking that this was both a completely reasonable thing to ask - and simultaneously - that it was the silliest, most obvious question ever. “This is just the way it’s done,” I would think, but never say. I never did have a good or sufficient answer, and so it remained an open question. Beginning and ending with a single orange bead was as natural to me as eating and drinking, sleeping or breathing, never something I needed to think about or decide. My hands just knew what to do.
Fastforward forty years later and it’s a cold, wet December day in Portland, Oregon. I’d met my sister there to see one of our favorite musicians and she’d flown back to California that morning, leaving me solo to explore the city before flying home that night. I heaved one of immense black hotel umbrellas from the lobby and set off to wander the rain-slicked streets with no particular destination in mind. A few miles in - my paper coffee cup empty and bones shivering - I was contemplating calling an Uber when I looked up - whoa! - to see a shock of royal purple and gold gleaming against the grey background of the neighborhood. A towering mural of an Egyptian Pharoah rose up stories into the air and stopped me in my tracks. Curious, I rounded the building and stepped inside what turned out to be a museum — The Egyptian exhibit was here for just a few more days, perfect!
I looked around, my umbrella dripping at my side, and one hallway in particular called me. In the distance was a warmly lit room that grew more radiant as I got closer… ultimately opening into a series of beautifully lit glass cases holding display after display of the most exquisite, intricate jewelry — gorgeous broad beaded necklaces, thick brightly-woven arm bands, lush links of turquoise and gold, and delicate wrist bracelets… all so distinctly unique, beautifully ornate, and all with a single orange bead at the beginning and end.
And just like that, there it was, forty years later: The answer.
There is a secret code that lives buried within each of us, a code that lies dormant inside the fabric of our lives until we encounter the experience, the person, the practice that summons it back to life. It is a quiet force that sleeps in our every cell - a knowingness in our bones - that, given the right alchemical connection, just the right turn of the key, at just the right time - Awakens.
When we are young children - before the ordinary, mundane, conditioned modern world overtakes and dulls our instinct & intuition, our shine and magic - we are still close to the mystery inherent in life, close to the threads that stretch and tether time together across the millennia. Looking to your childhood, catching that wild thread, and following it will lead you to that place where your soul resides and the deepest healing can happen. That knowing place between lives where your blueprint lies and the genius that animates your soul can be found, and felt, and lived through.
We all live and breathe within a pattern - a wise, breathing matrix and beautiful latticework of life - that stretches across time and space. Even in this modern moment, where so much feels surreal, artificial, and incoherent, there is a deep, true congruence living within us. The work of a lifetime is locating our thread, learning to weave it as it weaves us in return, and creating something of beauty, meaning and last within the tapestry of existence.
