If Hope Was A Tapestry

The re-emergence of Likely Tales, and a tale to get us started.

I refuse to believe that we aren’t going to create a better world on the other side of this.

There is still a chance that we don’t have to repeat the lessons of the past fully.

We could step up to the line and refuse to cross it. We can resist the hardening of our compassion.

There’s a chance that this could be enough to shake us from our complacency, and we might realize that working together is the better way. And how we treat the most vulnerable is how we treat all of us.

We’ll realize this was never about sides of an aisle but instead, the desire of the few to have power over the many, when it was always the many who hold the power. Everything that denies this is a distraction.

We have been distracted from the power of stories and how they change everything in our lives, one repetition at a time. Let this be a rallying cry to remember and awaken to that power.

Wondering how you got here, why you’re seeing this? You likely subscribed via referral, and haven’t heard from me since. Hi! I’m Kate - and this publication is devoted to sharing Likely Tales. What are those?

Tales of the most unlikely nature, pondering personal power, universal magic, and alchemy through the stories we tell ourselves.

We’re warming back up to each other we a series of super-short stories from history and lore, with accompanying poems. Food for the soul that we all need badly right now. I’m aiming for one a day for the month of April.

May the spark hope in you - as they do for me. Invite a friend, if you feel called.

This isn’t the first time in history that we’ve been here.

It’s time to bring Likely Tale back to (an new) life.

Welcome to a mini-series to kick us off.

A helpful to take a trip through folklore and history - through our human stories that show … we can handle this. There is hope.

Welcome to a set of 20 tales on two themes. One, with stories of resistance and collective hope. Another set is on overcoming class divides through community and hope.

Each of these stories, in its unique way, underscores a profound theme: the power of ordinary people working together. Whether through art or education, quiet deception or noisy protest, these individuals and communities refused to submit to fear. Instead, they reached across differences—joining hands in solidarity—and turned small acts into historic change. Their victories were often hard-won or symbolic, but they ripple across time as beacons of hope. In a world often darkened by oppression, these tales remind us that collective courage and creativity can ignite light in the darkness, and that the bonds of community can become an unbreakable lifeline in the struggle for freedom.

Their acts, small and large, still create ripple effects. Every resistance begins within. It starts with refusing to surrender your inner power. Refuse to let hatred take over. Refusing to abandon hope.

We must recognize that we are in a moment of choosing compassion or anger. It is those with compassion, and those who seek to harm. It is those who exploit their neighbour, and those who would help them.

Unsung Stories of Resistance and Collective Hope

A Chilean arpillera tapestry (“Arrests and Raids,” 1976) depicts a brightly colored village scene disrupted by armed men, illustrating how women sewed defiance into art under Pinochet’s dictatorship.

If Hope was a Tapestry

In 1970s Chile, as families were shattered by the Pinochet regime’s “disappearances,” groups of women quietly turned sewing into an act of rebellion. Many were mothers of the missing who gathered in church basements to stitch arpilleras—patchwork tapestries appliquéd with scenes of daily life under military rule. Using scraps of cloth (often from their loved ones’ clothes), they embroidered stories of protest and hope: depicting military raids, empty chairs at dinner tables, and community solidarity.

The women sold these tapestries abroad via secret church networks, funneling the proceeds back to support victims’ families. When the regime outlawed the arpilleras as “subversive,” the arpilleristas smuggled their works out in diplomatic pouches, spreading the truth of Chile’s brutality to the world.

Through humble fabric and thread, these courageous artisans preserved memory, sustained one another, and proved that art can be resistance in the face of fear.

Like this story-starter? Read more from this post by Hyperallergic

I wonder, in 2025, what we might have at our disposal that we don’t realize? What forms of communication and story-telling we have forgotten. What acts, like the granny’s quilting gathering - we may have forgotten and need right now?

Know of some? Share below with a comment 🙏

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Human experience is a tapestry. A collection of stitches and thoughts, of textures and colours, coming together to share a story. The Arpilleras remind us there is more at our disposal to tell these stories than we think. The power of these little resistances is something, thought we may have forgotten, remains accessible to us all. Art, story, words, sewing - they are political. They are unifying. Unification is the medicine we need.

-Kate

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If Hope Were a Tapestry

by Kate (your soul, threaded through)

I refuse the ending they’ve written for us—
the one where we forget.

Where we harden.
Where the rich keep winning.

There’s still a crack in the world wide enough
to let the light of remembering in.

We could choose not to repeat it all.Could pause at the edge,and say—not again.
Not this time.

There’s still a softness in us,a thread that hasn’t snapped,and it winds through stories,through stitches,through hands that oncesowed rebellion into fabric.

Let this be our call to thread the needle again.
To sew hope into the seams of now.
To remember that we are not powerless—
only distracted.

That this was never about left or right,
but about up and down.
Power held like a fist
or offered like an outstretched hand.

We are not alone.

We are not finished.

And we can, together,

mend the torn fabric of the world.