The EarthLoom™

What are Earth Looms?

Earth Looms develop partnerships among families, neighbors, community members, schools and public agencies by weaving our strengths and diversities together. They function as restorative tools to promote harmony, healing and well-being by offering an objective hands-on model of engagement with a structure that creates connection, positive creative expression and meaningful service.

What lives in our heart creates the threads of our thoughts which in time weaves the fabric of our life. As we combine all human desires on Earth today, we can see and touch our collective weaving. We may think we are separate beings, but in reality we are woven together with the air we breathe.

Earth Looms teach us how this is true in a most fundamental way that all ages, cultures, communities and individuals can experience. The Loom itself stands to represent our body. The strong, stable vertical threads on the Loom, our inner values and beliefs, the horizontal weaving we do are our actions. Over and under, in time, we weave these two together as long as we live.

What are the materials we use to weave our life? Are we fearful, angry, lonely, depressed, wanting more?

Earth Looms teach us with our own hands and personal experience how to transform our fears, the result of our beliefs, into harmony and our actions into love.

Weaving on the Earth Loom empowers us to feel, touch and see our choices, not only as an individual but as a group. This most important creative work helps us to explore what is meaningful to us as we experience the results of social ecology, environmental fragility, political conflict and our inability to find peace among nations.

Peace starts with what is in our heart. How can we touch what we value and create with our hands the life we want.

The Great EarthLoom

The Great EarthLoom is a large (9ft or 3m) loom of logs or timbers installed outdoors in a garden, park, playground or woods. Based on the seven-stick loom designed by Weaving a Life, and conceived by Susan Barrett Merrill as a community activity, the first EarthLoom was built at the Common Ground Fair in Union, Maine.

Your EarthLoom may be built by your organization, corporation, school, family, camp, day care, hospital, prison, government agency, nursing home, or in your garden or back yard. EarthLooms and their weavings are a gift of friendship and an inspiration for action.

Local Materials, Local Hearts

EarthLooms may be made with indigenous materials by the hands of those who will weave on them. Weaving together is so powerful-- it is a literal act of weaving together the community. In this simple and ancient art, we connect with others whose fingers have touched the same threads to create the same fabric with the same purpose. It is a deep-rooted bond in the heart that can change the way we define our neighborhood.

The EarthLoom Project is raising funds to help those who wish to build EarthLooms in any locale, and to find related ways to weave the fabric of community. One of our ways to do this is through sales of our delightful DVD, Building and Weaving on the EarthLoom

Contact us to find out how you can be involved.