My yellow cab snakes its way down a narrow twisting street. Tiny storefronts overflow onto the sidewalks where vendors hawk cheap imported goods. An old woman in a wheelchair rolls down the middle of the street, seemingly oblivious to the cars and buses that pass within inches of her. Delivery vans sometimes entirely block what is little more than an alley. The meter ticks away dollars and cents.

My Egyptian driver asks me again what address I’m looking for. I apologize and dig through my bag to find the scrap of paper with the scribbled location on it.

“It is no problem for you, nice lady.” He tells me patiently, in heavily accented English. “Sorry, there is much construction here these days. It is slow.”

If I close my eyes I can easily imagine I’m in Cairo. But I’m not.

I am at Ground Zero in New York City.

Suddenly, my destination comes into view, an oasis of green amid the concrete chaos of lower Manhattan. For 240 years St. Paul’s Chapel, the oldest continuously-used public building in New York, has witnessed the glory and agony of our nation. Following his inauguration in 1789, George Washington led a procession to St. Paul’s where he asked God’s blessing on our young country. King William IV of England, Lord Cornwallis, and President Grover Cleveland are among the notables who have worshipped within the chapel’s walls.  In 2001, it became a staging area for those responding to the terrorist attacks. For almost a year, hundreds of volunteers worked 24/7 to serve meals, make beds, counsel and pray with firefighters, construction workers, police, and others. Today it is a shrine commemorating the rescuers and the rescued, the volunteers and the victims of those dark days.  

I am here to see The Thread Project.

The brain child of Terry Helwig, The Thread Project: One World, One Cloth was born out of the despair she felt the night of September 11, 2001. “As I lay in bed, too numbed to sleep from the day’s events, I kept thinking our world is hanging by a thread. I wondered if that precarious thread was enough to hold us. Could a thread of hope or compassion matter in the larger scheme of life?” she wrote in her online journal. “I began to wonder what would happen if I sought out another thread of hope and yet another. What if these modest threads found one another, joined together, and were woven into a new tapestry?” Terry’s question was both metaphoric and literal. “Metaphorically, I imagined weaving a social fabric that celebrates diversity, encourages tolerance and promotes compassionate community. Literally, I imagined weaving the most diverse cloth ever woven from thousands upon thousands of threads collected from individuals world-wide.”

She began collecting threads and tying them together. “Never mind that I didn’t know how to weave, at least not threads,” she said. “Ideas don’t always come to the qualified, sometimes they come to the willing.”

Soon Terry met Judith Krone, of Tucker. Judith holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Textiles and teaches weaving at the Callanwolde Fine Arts Center in Atlanta.

“My friend of 30 y ears, Trisha Sinnott, asked if she would meet with a friend of hers who had an idea and needed a weaver.” said Judith. “So Trisha brought this nice woman [Terry Helwig] to my house for tea, and she started telling me about her vision for a world cloth. I thought it was just unbelievable. I told her it could take 50,000 threads to do what she was talking about.”

Yet Judith enthusiastically agreed to be the weaving consultant for the project.

Many have asked how Terry collected enough threads and found enough weavers to make her vision a reality.

“Don’t ever doubt the power of one plus one.” she said. “Believe that one voice matters; that one idea counts; that a single act can impact the world.”

“I realized that, usually, after a chain of five or six intermediaries (someone who knew someone) we would find what we were looking for. And so news and word of the project spread around the globe.”

By August of 2002, there were enough threads to start. A few months later, Judith, Terry and a handful of close friends gathered and began the first panel, christened Hope Materializing. In her online journal, Terry wrote, “Careful consideration has been given to the scheduled start date of December 21, 2002, the shortest day of the year. It seems appropriate to begin weaving a cloth of hope during the time of year when each day begins to linger a minute longer than the day before. As the World Cloth lengthens with the days, capturing more light within its fibers, it symbolically illuminates the process of weaving diversity into unity.”

 Judith Krone

“Thread Ambassadors,” Terry’s friends, continued to spread the word, and threads continued to come in. Terry started a website (www.threadproject.com). The numbers of people who wanted to add their threads to others grew. One of Judith’s students from Hungary took the news of the project back home with her. She and her friends soon began work on another panel. “It has been little circles of friends making a big circle,” said Judith.

Over the years letters and packages became a familiar site in Terry’s mailbox, arriving with notes such as these:  The enclosed threads are from a flag marker in Antarctica; it was flown and shredded in the Southern wind.  —Nancy.  These threads are from the Iron Middle School in Zibo China.—Patti   This is a piece of the towel that my best friend, my guinea pig, laid on as he died.—Erika   This is from the blanket of my shy little daughter Sarah who grew up to live in NYC; she survived Tower 2 on 9/11.

In just five years, Terry’s dream became a reality.  Tens of thousands of donated threads were woven together into 49 cloths, grouped into seven tapestries. The seven cloths represent the seven continents, and their names echo Terry’s vision of one world, one cloth: Hope Materializing, Threaded Harmony, Ariadne’s Prayer, Weaving Reconciliation, Dawn Looming, Lienzo Luminoso (Cloth of Light) and Sophia’s Mantle. They are adorned with clay buttons, hand-made by Tucker clay  artist Susan Ryles. (See related story.)

The cloths were woven with threads donated by individuals of all faiths and ideologies from over 70 countries and every continent. And with every thread came a story. “The most meaningful to me,” said Judith, “were the threads from clothing of the victims of 9/11, donated by their family members.” In the spring of 2006, the same little group of women gathered at Judith’s mountain home to weave those cherished threads into the final cloth.

That is the cloth that holds my little thread, too.

And that is what I’ve come to St. Paul’s Chapel to see. In commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks, all 49 panels of the Thread Project are being displayed together in the chapel of St. Paul’s. They hang from the walls and balconies, over pews gouged and scarred by relief workers who slept there, still in their gear, in the days and months following the collapse of the Twin Towers. “Like a security blanket.” Judith said. “Maybe it will provide some comfort to those who come there to mourn lost loved ones. Maybe it will mend some hearts.”

The Thread Project is on display through November 30, 2006 at St. Paul’s Chapel in New York. It is also scheduled for display at City Gallery in Charleston, SC, September 15-October 28, 2007.