Skip to main content

how not to weave

I haven't woven in a very long time, too long, long enough to forget some of the finer points involved as this heap of lovely, tangled linen will attest.  I decided not to get out my ball winder and just wind a skein of yarn directly using the back of a chair.  I know better than to do this but stubbornness united with a desire for immediate action and led headlong into this mess.  As the yarn became more and more tangled I found myself falling apart, my heart cramping, knotting into a ball.  Until finally I gave up and walked away from the disarray I had made and stood a few feet off with a bent head, tears rolling silently down my cheeks, alone, in my silent house, candle flickering in the back ground.  I stared for a time at that wreck of yarn and felt the weight of my own internal tangle. The tears fell.
People keep telling me to be grateful as if gratitude will cure everything and I am.  They beat me with it whenever I raise my head from my internal cramp and voice the ache of loneliness that occasionally grips my quiet hours.  I am grateful. I am grateful for two amazing and healthy boys. I am grateful for a warm and lovely home. I am grateful for a strong and healthy body. I am grateful for the amazing grace that keeps unfolding in this life. I am grateful for a wonderful job that I adore. I am grateful for food to eat, clean water to drink, the beauty of this earth and the gift of life.  I am grateful.  The knot remains, a tangle of good intention, once orderly and full of hope now a confusion of knots and ungainly mishaps.  Is something like that worth untangling?  Is it even possible? Tomorrow I will likely cut it off and throw it in the trash or burn it or set it outside as a nest for orphaned animals.  For now it sits on the floor, a self portrait in tangles, parts overlapping parts, a labyrinth of string.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment.  It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float.  It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within.  It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains.  Eyes closed.  Eyes opened.  A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being.  It takes courage.
4 comments
Read more

tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much.  It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall.  The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep.  But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy.  I am a woman who loves the spring.  I nearly live for it.  When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis.  I gorge.  This year has been hard.  Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally.  The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...
2 comments
Read more

grief

Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the ...
4 comments
Read more