Tangles

It's almost inevitable that a center-pull ball of yarn is eventually going to vomit up a big tangle. There you are, knitting along smoothly, when there's more tension than there ought to be in the yarn. Begrudgingly, you interrupt your flow, pick up the ball, give it a good tug, and it yaks up a multicolored hairball that looks like an impenetrable knot.

This happened this morning to my citrusy kidsilk just as I was listening to a recording of a meditation class I attended about a year ago. If you've ever heard yourself talking from within the time-machine of an event you'd almost forgotten about, you may have learned the meaning of cringeworthy. When I recognized my voice on the recording, I tightened up into a self-protective knot. "Don't say something stupid. Don't say something stupid."

It wasn't so bad, actually; I was talking about an anxiety meltdown from the year before. I mentioned how hard it was at the time to simply sit down to meditate at all. I was so filled with anxiety that the thought of sitting in The Big Stillness with all that fear for company was too much to bear. As I listened to myself describe this, I remembered spending several months watching a lot of TV and eating a lot of hoagies and completely neglecting my meditation practice. It seemed like a good plan for self-protection at the time.

So while I'm listening to this little monologue from my past, the kidsilk horks up a tangle of mohair and silk that looks like it's going to have to be cut out before it ever submits to being untangled. And the whole experience — of remembering that time of intense anxiety and staring at the yarn tangle in the present — seemed of a piece. The sensations of the old anxiety and the yarn knot in front of me kind of merged.

I started working on the tangle. The best way to do that is to relax your mind and your fingers, believe in the best possible outcome, and keep it all loose. Don't pull tight, don't panic, and keep going. Do that, and you're probably not going to have to cut this yarn; it's probably not beyond salvaging.

And I remembered that it turned out the same was true back when I was so anxious that I thought I couldn't even sit still to look at my fears. The prospect of meditating seemed like closing my eyes to find a tangled monster of worthlessness lurking just behind my eyelids. Who wants to face that? But when I started that class and actually did find the courage to sit — to stay loose, refuse to panic and just keep going into it — staring at that monster made it dissolve rather than rise up and attack me. The image of it reminds me of the soothing Biblical passage about a promise to turn the darkness into light and make the rough places smooth.

Since that time, I've had more faith that whatever I'm feeling, no matter how unbearable and powerful it seems, it will eventually cave to the simple power of being still and not turning away from it. My practice these days is far from perfect — that faith might not always translate into action. But my knowing is different now. I know from experience that consciousness and awareness are the careful hands that we turn to the task of untangling the impossible, of making rough places smooth.

Doing It Wrong

A good thing about a plain-Jane stockinette piece that's all loose and floppy is that mistakes don't matter quite so much. If I don't end up with the same number of stitches at the end of a row as I had at the end of the previous, well, it won't be all that visible. Realistically, it won't be visible at all. I made a mistake this morning I still don't know how I made, and I resisted the temptation to tink back, find the exact nature of it and Fix. It. ... and it got me to thinking about doing things wrong. Which goes back to that "allowing" of my first post. I have a habit of not allowing stuff in my life, and not allowing myself to do a lot of stuff, which generally means not allowing mistakes. Because to do is to do things wrong part of the time, particularly when you're learning, and then you're doing things wrong almost all the time. And oh, the grenades I lob at myself when I do things wrong.

There's been lots of opportunity for grenade lobbing since I started taking swimming lessons. Swimming requires coordination of moving body parts like knitting does, just on a much larger scale. Reach out, pull through, reach out again, breathe, and keep it all going by kicking just about as hard as you can. For someone like me who hasn't felt at home in her own body since learning to walk, this feels like reining in an epileptic octopus. The reality of learning to swim, like learning to knit, is harder than it looks, harder than thinking about it, than thinking about how nice it would be to swim or to knit.

In the meditation class I listened to today, Scott was talking about how lovingkindness meditation can change our whole experience of ourselves and our lives, and a student asked, "So how does that work?" Scott politely declined to answer that question, saying that it literally isn't worth talking about. He said he can't explain "how," we have to do "how." It reminded me of one of my first knitting classes, when the teacher showed me a new technique and I simply couldn't imagine how it would work. She said, "I can't explain it; you just have to do it and you'll see."

The only way to swim or to knit or to live a loving life is to do it. And to do it, I have to at least start to embrace doing things wrong. I think I can start to find that embrace through mindfulness practice, by just observing my response to doing things wrong and enveloping both the mistake and my response to it (even if it's ugly self-recrimination for some of life's more serious mistakes) in lovingkindness.

Sensory and Other Pleasures

Clearlight Meditation

Pique, Interrupted

I traveled Thursday, and spent Friday morning ensconced in my hotel room. I make this trip to visit Troy regularly and enjoy my rituals, like the long Friday morning I get to spend alone after Thursday's travel. For this grouchy, out-of-shape introvert, travel can feel like the Bataan death march. (Up at 3:30 a.m. Connection through O'Hare. Airport food. Rental cars. Overly friendly hospitality professionals... You get the picture.) So "Friday in Michigan" is it's own entity, like Lake Michigan itself, and a visit to it is as treasured as a visit to a favorite landmark.

As I sat on the bed knitting, I was mentally listing all the ways I hate this hotel. Then I wrote out the list in my journal entry, which includes (but is not limited to) the room being about 100 degrees when I arrived, due to a heater that had been running full tilt since the last inhabitant (or disgruntled housekeeper) left; chairs that no human under 7 feet tall could sit comfortably in; random and freestyle shower temperature modulation; and the depressed town it is in. And it all looked kind of petty as I wrote it out. One thing visiting a man who has been in prison too long will do for you is give you some perspective on discomfort.

I hate self-awareness sometimes. I would rather have my pique and eat it too, with a side of curly fries. I wonder why misery feels so good, so preferable. Maybe because so much of it is manufactured; it isn't even close to actual misery, which most certainly doesn't feel good, isn't territory we want to inhabit. Still, what is it about manufactured misery that is so appealing?

Part of it might be the persistence of story. To live indeed is to suffer, and our narratives are often full of it, justifiably so. It's not easy to inhabit this soft skin, to live with a consciousness ruled by sometimes harsh formative conditions, hormones and brain chemicals that can literally make us insane, and emotion-ruled thought processes. So, in a way, when we compose that story, which a mindfulness practice asks us to shed if even for a moment, much of that composition has its root in suffering — suffering I suffered, suffering I overcame, suffering that keeps me down.

The tagline of one of my persistent stories is "Nothing Is Easy," which is part of an overarching thing I have about (not) getting my needs met. After a long day's travel, a 100-degree hotel room and an alarming shower get narrated as part of a larger drama I'm habituated to. It's tough to shut that earworm of a story down. I don't know any other way to put it in its place than to sit with it for a bit, stare it down. On good days, the story blinks first. 

Sensory and Other Pleasures

Grand Haven, MI

Material World

Tonight I listened to the second session of the meditation class I'm taking online while knitting my kidsilk throw. Scott suggested imagining the breath as a horse and the attention as the rider. It was easy to imagine the act of knitting as the horse — the gallop of the knit stitch, the lope of the purl. I knit more fluidly than usual, and focused on the tactile pleasures of the barely-there whisper of the mohair and the strong silk it's spun into. I kept my focus even as I paused to pull more yarn off the skein, feeling the cobwebby tickle of the mohair on my bare leg, as it lay there waiting to be tangled up in my fingers before being caught up in the needles. I heard the gentle nickel-click of the Addi circulars more clearly than ever before.

I don't intend for knitting meditation to be the only form of meditation in my life. Centuries of meditators have it right that sitting with nothing — no movement, no runaway thought-train — coming between our consciousness and the fact of our existence is the best way to face that often puzzling existence with courage. But as a sort of adjunct practice, knitting meditation is a chance to combine a feeling of trance and deep focus with a sensory experience that is pleasing and multilayered.

In looking up other examples of knitting meditation before I started this blog, I found a lovely video on YouTube about a woman who makes a daily practice of getting up and knitting a "seeds of intention" scarf: "I take out my needles and my yarn and I knit good intentions and affirmations into every stitch. I feel peace around me and within me... I call this project my seeds of intention scarf. It's a kind of tactile prayer I get involved in."

Not long after finding this video, I read a Daily Dharma from Tricycle Magazine that echoed this in a nice coincidence of language: "...we meditate on our good intentions, however weak or strong they may be, and water the seeds of these intentions."

Mindfulness practice urges nonattachment — to things, concepts and beliefs — but we live in a material world, and lovingkindness toward that material world is part of a mindful and grateful approach to having life in this moment. Knitting is a great way to focus on the beauty and life-givingness of the materials around us. It's not easy being human — we're soft and vulnerable in a world with many hazards and we've had to be ingenious in using materials to literally keep us alive. I love knitting as an expression of this. It's low-tech, but knitted garments keep us warm; in their beauty they please us and others and remind us of the loving intentions of the knitter, stitch by stitch, breath by breath.

Sensory and Other Pleasures

Tricycle Magazine

Knitting Meditation

Addi Needles

One Breath, One Stitch

I want to start a practice of knitting as a form of meditation.

Tonight I played with this idea while knitting and listening to Hoagy Sings Carmichael, a dear old favorite. I didn't do any knitting meditation tonight, but after working on my silk and mohair throw for the length of the Hoagy album, I laid down to meditate with a class I'm taking online, taught by Scott McBride of Clearlight Meditation. During the guided meditation, Scott talked about cultivating "an openness, a gentleness and an allowing." I was especially taken by the phrase "an allowing." There's not enough of that in my life; I've spent much of my life closed off to experience from outside, living in my head. I want, before I leave this world, whenever that will be, to allow things to pass through me a little more often.

And that little triad of needful things — openness, gentleness and allowing — put me in mind of the stitches I'd watched take shape as I knit tonight. I'm knitting a wide-open stockinette stitch throw in Rowan Kidsilk Haze on size 10 needles. I got two skeins of this wondrous yarn at Yarnings ("Yearnings for Yarn") when I couldn't resist the colors and pictured them draped simply over my white sofa. The colors are the same luscious, citrusy colors I'd chosen for my place when I designed my new home from scratch last year, and they were put together for Rowan by Kaffe Fassett to boot. 

Anyway, my mind helplessly went to those loose stitches when Scott started talking, almost hypnotically, about "an openness, a gentleness, and an allowing." I tend to think in threes anyway, and knit and purl stitches each split nicely into threes — the needle pushing through, the wraparound of the yarn, and the needle pulling back through. When I'm in flow, I have a kind of 1-2-3 waltz going through my head as I knit anyway, and "an openness, a gentleness and an allowing" put me in mind of those noble kidsilk stitches, as each one opens without resistance to the needle, the soft haze of the mohair parting gently and allowing a new stitch to be born from it. Knitting can indeed be a very feminine activity. 

Sensory and Other Pleasures 

Hoagy Sings Carmichael

Clearlight Meditation

Yarnings

Rowan Kidsilk Haze

Kaffe Fassett