Ithaca, three thousand years ago in the imagination. A queen sits at her loom. Her husband, Odysseus, left for the Trojan War years ago and has not come home. Suitors fill the palace, eating her food, drinking her wine, insisting she must choose one of them as her new husband.
Penelope agrees, on one condition: she will choose when she has finished weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes. By day, she weaves. By night, in secret, she unravels what she has woven. For three years, the shroud is never finished, until a servant betrays her.
The longest wait in literature
In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus is away for twenty years in all: ten at war, ten trying to come home. Penelope waits the whole time, without news, never sure whether he is alive. She becomes, in Western culture, the great symbol of faithful, patient waiting.
But she is not passive. She is clever, strategic, quietly resistant. Her weaving and unweaving is a way of keeping time on her own terms.
What Penelope teaches about waiting
- Waiting can be active. Penelope fills the waiting with work, with ingenuity, with a ritual of her own. - Some things are worth not rushing. She refuses to force an ending before its time. - The thread holds. Her loom is a kind of letter to someone far away: every row says "I am still here".
A house that waits
Anyone who has waited for someone at sea, at war or abroad knows something of Penelope. I grew up with a father who was a sailor, away for long stretches, and a mother raising three children mostly alone. Letters were our loom: a thread across the distance.
Your own loom
What are you waiting for right now? A reply, a change, a person, a season? Instead of counting days, give the waiting a ritual: a page written each week, a walk, a stitch, a letter. Let the waiting become something you make, not just something you endure.
Letters for the waiting
The Letter & Magazine subscription sends you a letter and a postcard every month, with a meditation and a story about art, plus a seasonal issue of "(meditating) On Art". A thread across the distance, arriving at your door.
Remember to take as much time as you need, and meet me at the next one.
Love, Evi