Tighten the Weave

September brought me into a succession of gatherings that I am still trying to process.

It began at the World Ayahuasca Forum in Girona, continued with Earthrise in Switzerland, and moved into Interstellar, where some of the elders and wisdom keepers who had gathered remained in conversation with people exploring science, consciousness, health, finance, astrology and the cosmos.

What happened across these gatherings was far greater than anything I could capture here. So many organisations, communities and individuals had spent months, sometimes years, creating the relationships and conditions that made these encounters possible. Everyone who arrived brought something of their own: a history, a body of knowledge, a question, a prayer, a curiosity, a particular way of seeing.

What follows is therefore not an account of these gatherings, nor an attempt to distil everything that was shared. These are simply a few moments that stayed with me—perhaps because they touched questions already moving within me. Someone standing beside me may have witnessed the very same moments and carried home an entirely different story.

There is something humbling in that. We never see the whole weave. We see from where we are standing within it.

And from where I was standing, September seemed to keep asking me about remembering.

The thread I almost missed

At the World Ayahuasca Forum, one of the people who stayed with me most was someone I knew almost nothing about.

A man arrived playing a flute. He appeared European, and something about him made me wonder whether he carried a Gaelic or another European ancestral tradition, although I never asked and do not know. Later, I saw him inside the maloca with swan feathers. Among so many traditions and teachings, there was something almost imperceptible about his presence. Then I watched him leave much as he had arrived, playing his flute.

On the final day, our paths crossed. I told him simply, You were seen.

Something about him had touched a question that has been growing in me for some time.

The Forum had brought together Indigenous peoples from many places, some carrying knowledge and traditions that have survived extraordinary historical pressures. There was something deeply important about their voices being heard and their knowledge being held on their own terms.

And yet, watching this European man move almost invisibly through the gathering, I found myself wondering: where are Europe's wisdom keepers?
And would we recognise them if we met them?

I want to be careful with this question. I am not interested in creating equivalences between histories that are not equivalent, nor in searching for a European version of somebody else's knowledge.

The question feels more intimate than that.

My mother comes from French Polynesia. My father is European. For much of my life, it has been easier for me to recognise an ancestral thread on one side of that inheritance than on the other. One feels visible. The other has often felt more difficult to find.

Living in Switzerland, and increasingly listening differently to the mountains, rivers and places around me, I have begun to wonder whether that thread is actually absent. Perhaps it has simply become harder to see.

Europe has lived through long histories of war, religious conflict, persecution, displacement, industrialisation and profound changes in people's relationships with land, ritual and community. Much has disappeared and much has been transformed. But perhaps some things survived quietly—in food, plants, folklore, pilgrimage, songs, seasonal customs, family gestures and relationships with particular places.

When a thread of transmission has been broken, it does not mean everything has been lost. Some things may simply have survived in forms we no longer know how to recognise.

The man with the flute did not give me an answer. He left me with another question: what if encountering people who have kept their ancestral threads more visible is not an invitation to take those threads, but to begin looking for our own?

A few days later, that question changed shape.

What holds your knowing?

After the Forum had ended, I witnessed an exchange in a more intimate setting between an Indigenous Amazonian medical doctor and a group of scientists. What struck me was the openness on both sides. There was genuine curiosity about what might become possible when different ways of knowing were allowed to enter into conversation.

At some point, the doctor turned the direction of inquiry around. I cannot reproduce her exact words, but what I heard was something like:

What are your own knowledge systems? Where are your elders? Where is the community that holds you accountable for what you create?

The question has stayed with me.

Modern science has developed extraordinary capacities by learning to isolate things. We can identify molecules, observe mechanisms, measure effects and investigate parts of reality with remarkable precision. There is enormous value in this way of knowing.

But her question seemed to come from somewhere else. Not simply What do you know?, but What holds your knowing?

Who carries responsibility for what becomes possible through knowledge? Who remembers the relationships surrounding it? Who asks not only whether something can be done, but how it belongs within a larger living system?

I found myself unable to keep her question directed towards science. It came back towards me.

What holds the things I teach? What holds what has been shared with me? Who am I accountable to when knowledge passes through me and then into another context? What changes when something learned through a relationship with a person, a lineage or a place becomes a methodology, a treatment, a framework or a course?

I don't know. Not yet.

But I find the question increasingly difficult to ignore.

Then came the weave

I met a Spanish wisdom keeper with whom I felt an immediate and difficult-to-explain familiarity. She had created a set of cards after travelling to Machu Picchu, portraying weavers from different civilisations. Among them I found Hina, from my Polynesian inheritance.

I knew Hina, but I had never encountered her through this particular lens: as a weaver.

Then a Peruvian Maestra appeared and sat beside us. It was one of those encounters whose timing felt almost too precise to have been planned.

In her hands was a weave she had made herself. Its pattern was extraordinarily complex, almost more like a map of a living system than a geometrical design. She began to sing as her fingers travelled through the threads, tracing their lines. I had the strange sense that the song and the pattern were not separate things.

I could not read what she was reading. I did not understand what she was showing me. But I remember wondering: where was the knowledge?

Was it in the pattern? Her hands? The song? The making of the weave? What had been transmitted to her? Or was it somehow held in the relationship between all of these things?

The Indigenous doctor's question returned to me: What holds your knowing?

I do not know what the Maestra's weave meant, nor what knowledge it carried, and I would not want to interpret something I do not understand. But I could recognise that I was encountering knowledge differently from the way I had been educated to recognise it.

Much of modern Western understanding begins by separating. A plant becomes its compounds. A body becomes its organs and systems. A song can become frequencies. An organisation becomes departments, roles and metrics. This capacity to differentiate has given us extraordinary knowledge.

Yet watching her hands, I wondered about another capacity: knowing while keeping the relationships between things intact.

Perhaps there are forms of intelligence that become difficult to perceive once we separate the pieces.

Then she looked at me and said something I understood, in that moment, as:

You have to tighten the weave. Hay que cerrar.

I have carried those words ever since.

Weaving is already familiar language in systems change. We speak of network weavers, ecosystem weaving, weaving communities, weaving capital and projects. I use the word myself.

But perhaps I had been using it too lightly.

A weave does not exist because many threads have been gathered in one place. It exists because relationships have been formed between them. Tension matters. Distance matters. Each thread affects the integrity of the whole.

Perhaps tightening the weave does not mean adding more threads.

Perhaps it means tending what passes between them.

Carrying the community

The question followed me from Girona to Switzerland.

At Earthrise in Interlaken, I watched Mama Panchita, an elder of the Mapuche community, share a bag she had woven herself. At first I saw a beautiful woven object. Then she began explaining its patterns.

As I understood her explanation, the motifs represented the different communities of her nation. Each had its place. Woven into the bag was their relationship to one another, their unity and their protection.

She carried them with her.

Until then, I had been thinking about weaving partly as a metaphor. Watching Mama Panchita, I wondered whether calling it a metaphor was already too small.

Perhaps the weave was not simply representing relationship. Perhaps weaving was one of the ways relationship could be remembered and carried.

What also struck me was that unity did not require sameness. The different communities remained distinct within a larger pattern. They did not have to disappear into one another in order to belong together.

That image has stayed with me because it holds a question that reaches far beyond weaving: how do we belong to something larger without losing what makes us distinct?

How do different forms of knowledge meet without one needing to absorb the other? How do we create coherence without demanding uniformity?

How do we weave without erasing the threads?

Did you learn how to weave?

One final conversation in Interlaken brought everything back to a surprisingly simple question.

I was speaking with the wife of one of the Earth Elders about weaving and some of what I had witnessed during those weeks. She shared something with me about the Mapuche understanding of the afterlife. I want to hold this carefully: I am sharing it as it was told to me in that conversation, rather than claiming to speak for Mapuche cosmology more broadly.

As I understood her, when we leave this life, one of the first questions we are asked is:

Did you learn how to weave?

I remember becoming very still.

After everything I had witnessed, the question reached somewhere much deeper than the language of networks, ecosystems or systems change.

I thought of Mama Panchita carrying her communities in the patterns of her bag. The Peruvian Maestra singing as her fingers travelled through the threads. The Indigenous doctor asking what holds our knowledge. The almost invisible European man walking through the gathering with his flute.

Perhaps these stories have nothing to do with one another. Perhaps I am the one weaving them together.

In fact, I almost certainly am.

That is the nature of the mirror. Someone standing beside me may have returned home carrying entirely different threads. These were simply the ones that found me.

But they have left me wondering whether, in systems change, we sometimes pay more attention to the threads than to the weave. We ask what needs to change, what needs to scale, who needs to connect, where resources need to move and which structures need to be redesigned. These are necessary questions.

Perhaps there is another question underneath them.

Are we learning how to weave?

Not simply how to bring more people into the room, but how to tend what exists between us. Not simply how to acquire knowledge, but how to understand what holds it. Not simply how to create new systems, but how to form relationships capable of carrying what we hope to build.

And for those of us whose ancestral threads have become difficult to see, perhaps learning to weave also begins with learning to look again—not by borrowing somebody else's threads, but by becoming curious about what remains of our own.

I don't know where that inquiry leads.

For now, I am carrying the question I was given in Interlaken.

Did you learn how to weave?

PS: Thank you to @melaniepyne for the cover picture for this article, and all the beautiful pictures she took during the Earthrise Collective gathering in Interlaken and the beautiful presence she brings into this world.