Love in a grass mat

The recent movie Tinā begins with a grieving mother: Mareta Percival cradling the body of her dead daughter after the Christchurch earthquake.  

Tinā means “mother” in Samoan, and this mother’s grief is woven throughout the film. Tinā reminds us that we weave when we grieve.  

Mareta begins weaving an ‘ie tōga – a Samoan fine grass mat – as she sits in a room jumbled with boxes and objects from her past. She sees a recurring vision of her daughter in the front seat of a bus. The vision begins to feature a woven mat on her daughter’s lap. 

One of Mareta’s friends comments that weaving is a good “hobby”, but it is much more than a hobby:

Mareta is weaving with her hands to weave her memories together in the mind, making sense of her grief with what the writer Beth Tilston calls “the literacy of the fingers”. 

In Braiding Sweetgrass the Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer says the tender intimacy of weaving is like “braiding the hair of someone you love”. She describes the sweetgrass of her culture – Wiingaashk – as “waving in strands, long and shining like a woman’s freshly washed hair”. Mareta weaves in memories of her daughter’s long and shining hair as it waves across her shoulders on the bus.  

Samoan fine grass mats are woven by skilled women, prized because of the time and love that goes into in their making. 

Weaving is healing because it is honours the time needed to grieve and the pain of a life come “undone”. The tender intimacy of a maker, bringing strands together. The tender love of a mother, braiding her daughter’s hair. In the Bible King David sings of a God who “knit” him together in his mother’s womb. The tender intimacy of our maker and divine parent. 

This Thinking Out Loud was first published on Facebook.