Enchanting Juno

The total package

I'm having a brain problem right now. 

I remember when I was a kid there was always some complaining going on about whether reading junk was really reading and people trying to Save The Children From Trash.  Me, I loved trash, it improved both my vocabulary and my working knowledge of human sexuality and I am all for both.  And I believe that the more you read the more your sense of nuance improves.  Which is to say, you grow out of junk the way you outgrow Twinkies. 

Tastes like plastic, but EVERY once in a while you just gotta.  Maybe even a lot.  And then one day, revulsion (I'm trying to find my revulsion for fudge iced yellow cake right now).

Which is fine.  I don't approve of calling books bad names because someone somewhere decided they weren't respectable enough.  In the end the quality of the writing shapes you and sends you in new directions.

Which brings me to my brain problem.  I seem to be going in a new direction.  I had a long no reading period after my dad died, and then I was more into - pop non-fiction.  Some of which was great. And satisfying, because it grappled with big modern questions of survival and understanding. 
But fiction grapples with survival and understanding right?

Not the fiction I'd been reading.

So over the last 2 years maybe I've been reading again, but sputtering over it - 12 books at once, not much focus, trouble tracking complex ideas over the structure of the book.  I feel like an old dirty engine, not quite turning over, idling roughly before dying again.  Feeling like I used to be smart.   No - AGILE, I used to be agile. 

Then, last weekend I came to be hanging out with the parents of someone I went to grade school with.

She was the hippy mom when I was a child, who taught yoga and went back to school and worked as a physical therapist and fed the geese where they lived on the lake and worked for the environment all those years ago.  She took me for my very first walk in the woods when I was in the first grade.  It was magical, with rocks and lichen, like nothing I had ever seen or felt.  I told you about her a few months ago actually, which makes it especially weird I should run into her NOW. 

We talked about oh - people we knew in common, and how my hometown is bad and good, and how to change the world in small pieces and later her husband came downstairs and we talked about human potential and The Trial and the doors that are ours to walk through if only we know how and Slavic literature and the Good Soldier Svejk - which is one of the 17 books I am 3 chapters into right now - and she mentioned the Master and Margarita, which coincidentally, I had bought a month or too ago, but hadn't felt up to starting.  

And there is a fantastic story about THAT that I can't really tell you 'cause it's about their stuff but it ends in a oil painting like a Russian fairy tale and it made me glad to be alive.
It made me remember not feeling rusty, made me remember agility, it made me remember this piece of myself I've been looking for, and I feel like I just backfired through my own carburetor and woke up.  

I confessed to a few of my friends Monday this realization, that really, I'm an intellectual.  Over the howls of laughter and my defensive explanations - Bookish Wendy said "dude - it's like you're coming out of the closet - but we all already knew..." which is mortifyingly accurate - came awareness: I have sort of gotten into a place where I suppress this bit of myself - at least partly because it has no non-recreational outlet in my life.  Suppress it so hard that the skills, the habit of complex though is corroded.  I've been neglecting my brain.  Maybe I had to.  10 years ago I was all brain and nothing else and I had to learn to be heart and body too. 

And I did.  

I think its hysterical and inevitable that I discovered yoga NOW.  Of course.  Because now I need balance and integration (as well as the calm to survive this economy and its et ceteras) not merely the brute strength to change.  

Where was I?

Oh, brain problem.

My goopy old, gunk-clogged engine of an intellect is coming alive and I am glad to see it but boy howdy am I worried about the damage that may have been done.  I've been reading more, and struggling with serious, complicated paths through other people's thoughts.  I'm 50 pages into a dozen things, digging my mental fingers into the rock, looking for traction and it hurts like weightlifting after a 6 month break to go a bit deeper than the facile.  

Its all about fear too, isn't it?  What if I can't deliver, what if I'm not so all-fired clever after all, what if I dig and come up short? What if the brain that is the one thing about myself I've never doubted turns out to be a thin shield. 
I am always surprised to rediscover how little maturity and experience really shield you from fear and change.  Stress, yeah,  experience lets you eat stress for breakfast, but self-doubt not so much.

Ah well, I'm only ever happy when I'm evolving. 

The sword in the stone.

So I am starting to think about knitting.  Not in a oh right, I have a lot of yarn I should Do Something with it kind of way, but in a looking at patterns thinking about pretty yarn sort of way that is strongly discouraged under present economic conditions.  With pleasure, not obligation.

I made the strategic error of looking at Old Maiden Aunt's site a few minutes a go and was overcome with an unseemly and base lust for well, everything.  If I am very, very good and kind to small animals and my mother, maybe I can have some someday.

Pardon me, I had to go look again.  And I appear to have bought 1300 yards of lace weight.
How extraordinary: I haven't had a yarn accident in about a year.  Except for that one time, at Colourmart.  (The 10/28NM heavy dk 30/70 cashmere/wool is utterly brilliant and I am only telling you 'cause I have 12 cones in 3 colours or something ridiculous like that.  In fact, I have just the sleeves left in an ACTUAL SWEATER in this yarn.  If the sun ever comes out I will show you.)

If I believed in jinxes I would not mention any of this - for fear of scaring my knitting soul back into the dark corner it's been lurking for so long - but it's nice to think yarnily again - not as an evasion from the rest of my life but just as a part of it.  I've watched so many friends and acquaintances shape lives in fiber - writers and designers and teachers - and thrive, and there came a moment when I realized that wasn't for me - not that it wasn't going to happen but that it wasn't what I want or need.  I adore fiber, but it is not my FUTURE, it's just a part of me.  Just, funny word.
It was painful though, watching them all go and flourish without me, when I felt stagnant and confused about my life.  I had to sort out their paths from my own.  It's good now. 

I think that's perhaps why I'm seeing yarn in the corners again.

A match struck in a dark room

Making Light is often a good read - I haven't the stamina to be a commenter there, but I do enjoy the place, and find out there interesting things about the world and all it's parts.  The other day Abi Sutherland had an Open Comment thread up there about a second century potter and why we know who he is at all. 

Because he left a mark.

It's just so human, shouting into the future on a scrap of pottery discovered against astonishing odds c. 1800 years later. 
I made this, I was here.

We're all doing this - we knit and blog and write and have children and paint and sculpt and cook dinner and plant things and build temples to the glory of our gods in all our little ways - I remember looking at embroidery at the Metropolitan - it was 4 or 5 years ago, an exhibit of ...Byzantine art?  I don't remember that, but I remember these tiny micro mosaics and the gold embroidery, the work of someone's hands, the work of someone's life. 

I worry sometimes that in this digital age, this age of service and finance and disposable goods, we manage to mark our lives with stuff that won't last, that our voices will end with the obsolescence of our technology.
Of course I also think that the act of forgetting is as important as the act of remembering and that much has to be lost for the next generation to rediscover and relearn.  What to sacrifice though? 

Fate decides - that exploded kiln must surely have felt like work lost the the potter then, a wasted effort. 

The idea of leaving no mark is terribly lonely, and I think making things, actual things, is a nice way to spit into the void.  I'm glad I make yarn and sometimes, things from yarn.  I'm glad most of the people I know make things, meaningful, beautiful things.

Hello to you, Lucius Meticius Ferenius, and hello to those you loved.  You existed.