Pachamama

Before a field is planted or a wall is raised in the highlands, something is given back to the earth first: a few coca leaves, a splash of drink poured on the ground. Pachamama is not a metaphor there; she is the ground you stand on. Our version is simpler and smaller. We make what we can sell, we sell out, and we do not make more than the cloth allows.

The earth mother

Pacha is Quechua for earth, and also for time and for world; mama is mother. Pachamama is the living ground, the one who gives the harvest and can take it back. She is not worshipped from a distance. She is fed, thanked and asked, in the field, in the kitchen, at the roadside shrine on the pass. In August, the month the earth is said to be hungry after winter, whole communities make offerings before the new planting.

Offerings

The offering is called a despacho or a pago, a payment. Coca leaves, sweets, grains, a little wine or chicha, sometimes wool from a llama, wrapped in paper and burned or buried. The point is not the size of the gift. It is that nothing is taken without something being returned first. That is the same logic as ayni, turned toward the land instead of a neighbour.

Small batches

We are not going to claim a ceremony we do not perform. What we do is run the business by the same rule: do not take more than you give back. Our drops are small because the cloth is bought in the quantities the weavers can make, not commissioned by the mile. Colourways sell out and do not always return. We would rather have a cap missing than a warehouse full of cloth nobody wears. Shipping is tracked so no parcel is lost on the way.

The land the cloth comes from

Every weave family is named for something in that landscape: the rainbow, the night, the lake, the sun, the earth, the moon. The green family is called Pacha for this reason. See all six on the weaves, and the rest of what we hold to on what we stand on.