Knitting and Swearing

These are things that may be heard coming from my mouth when I'm knitting:

"Did I just knit or purl?"
"Oh crap! I did it again."
"What is blocking?"
"Does everybody take this long or just me?"
"In five minutes, I will not be able to recall what you just taught me."
"Wait... did I just?... damn it!"
"Is it supposed to look like that?"
"Shiiiiiiit."

I think it's safe (and charitable) to say that knitting doesn't come easily to me.

Most things that require visualizing the end product do not come easily to me.

Enter LIFE.

I'm damn good at making goals and working towards them-- for those I have an outline, a sketch, a calendar, and full-page blueprints. But when it comes to the big picture, I mostly follow my nose and see what happens.

Not having the propensity to see the end product could be why one friend used the word "sparse" to describe my decorating aesthetic, and why I failed to see how taking the cush writing job for that magazine in the Bay would have been a good thing for my career after college (career? ohhh, that). 

This long view blindness became painfully obvious recently when the whitewater rafting company I worked for interviewed me for their newsletter (http://arta.org/e-wave/e-wave-1). They asked if my life was going the way I'd always planned. My life... a plan? Errr, um, cough, hmmm... sure?

Enter YARN.

Prior to this hat-making adventure, I'd only made scarves--which requires no counting, no plan, just zone out and move your hands. I can make a bitchin' no-frills scarf because I am damn good doing stuff that requires little thought.

But when I started this project, my mom gave me a pattern to follow. A piece of paper that told me what to do and how many times to do it so my finished product would look like the picture on the website.

Take this strand of yarn and make it into something that stays together.

Maybe even something useful.

Maybe something... beautiful?

So I learned how to keep the yarn on the circular needles, how to envision them as two separate needles when really they are one. I learned a new knitting stitch. I counted stitches (swearing under my breath as I did so). I listened to others who knew more. I followed the instructions and tried to envision the end product.

Experienced knitters will probably need to avert their eyes.

This pattern happened to be missing instructions for a row in the decreasing phase of the hat. As we do in life, I cobbled together my own idea of what to do and--with some spit, swear words, and knot tying here and there (shhh!)-- I was able to finish the hat. There were other hiccups as well: how did those stitches get out of line with the others? Why is there a bit of a hole in the brim? Eccentricities showed up in the hat without me even knowing when or why they were happening.

Which is pretty much how life likes to work it.

We gather up the holes in the pattern and stitch a life around them. The holes make the threads count; the threads keep the holes together.

Imperfections make life interesting

Perhaps in my youth I had a grand vision of what my life would look like at age 40. But I dropped some stitches along the way, purled when I thought I was knitting, sometimes pulled the yarn too tight, sometimes left it too loose. Sometimes I forgot the whole damn thing out in the sun and didn't come back to it for years.  But damn, is that hat ever beautiful now. In its holey, sun-bleached, no-pattern kind of way.

It's quite wearable and it keeps my head warm.

The Return of the Gunk

"The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege."
                                                                                                                   ---Marilynn Robinson

Just when I felt I shed a heavy coat of gunk in this year-long endeavor to de-gunk, I chose to pick up the mantle of shit again and place it squarely on my shoulders.

Because the truth is, as much as I don't want to admit it, the gunk cannot stick unless I let it, so it really is me choosing the gunk as much as it is the world dumping it.

If there is one thing I am not good at it's letting the gunk roll away from me like water flowing off an oily road. I am more like the summer soil in a warm storm, ready to incorporate into my being all that happens to come my way.

What part of me listens to the criticisms? Which part of me believes they are right? Who is that person in me that is willing to believe the hurtful  things others say?

Someone told me I just need to not care. To shut it out, create a facade of joviality.
So I worked on doing that, and I kept waiting for it to be easy, for it to be second-nature to just shut-off my heart, like shutting off the ignition before you get out of the car.

But it never came easily. And I finally realized that for me, I don't want it to get easy.

I am going to keep sitting in my vulnerability. I am going to keep pulling back the bones shielding my heart. And when I am knocked onto the floor, I am going to keep getting up.

And up.

And up.

The world is full of feelings. Not all of them are pleasant. But they are all worth it. You can only decipher the highest high when you have the measuring stick of the lowest low. And far be it from me to judge which is which.