III. Utinam Fortior (I wish I had been braver)
The third scarf in the Dark Hedges collection comes from a place just before the horizon - a garden at the edge of the world, past the city, past the beach, past the frontier of land and sea.
This piece is about being brave enough to risk everything, knowing that risk, learning to comprehend that cost, and to still choose to sink like sand into one messy sea, even though the moment to do so has come and has long since passed.
In this piece I retrace the steps that inspired my previous scarf, 'The Walk', asking questions to which I had no answers.
In a storm of conflicting feelings, memories, desires and hopes, some eroded and faded, some cleaved deep in my heart, however hard I tried to forget them, everything is torn loose, pounded and purified in an indescribable storm.
When I wove ‘The Walk' it spoke not only of a place explored, but a place shared.
Every part, when seen or touched, told the story, from the smoothened purple-brown rocks to the scratchy shimmering chartreuse-coloured lichen that bespeckled them, to the infinite horizonless soft blue sea, to the eyes of the person I walked with - their lips, their hair, their pale ivory freckles... But this new piece no longer tells that story. Those details have been eroded away.
Now it speaks a confession, an acknowledgement and acceptance of the entangled messy threads of our lives, and after the most ferocious weathering, the remnant truth knows what it is called, 'Utinam Fortior' - I wish I had been braver. The surface of the sea is stronger here, even more beautiful now that its dominance and unyielding strength are acknowledged and surrendered to.
The parts of the story that can't be weathered away remain. It tells the story of what's left, of 'drowning in enough'. It doesn't deny what's now gone, in many ways it mourns it, but it unmistakingly acknowledges that 'I wish I had been braver', I wish... I wish and feel and have learnt things that I cannot yet find the words for, but that somehow I can weave.