Enchanting Juno

Center Down

Someone sent this to me just before the holidays.  I'm not sure where a sense of eternety fits into it for the atheist, but basically yes, exactly.

 

“How good it is to center down!”

From Howard Thurman’s “Meditations of the Heart”

How good it is to center down!

To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by!

The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic;

Our spirits resound with clashings, with noisy silences,

While something deep within hungers and thirsts for the still moment and the resting lull.

With full intensity we seek, ere the quiet passes, a fresh sense of order in our living;

A direction, a strong sure purpose that will structure our confusion and bring meaning in our chaos.

We look at ourselves in this waiting moment — the kinds of people we are.

The questions persist: what are we doing with our lives? — what are the motives that order our days?

What is the end of our doings? Where are we trying to go?

Where do we put the emphasis and where are our values focused?

For what end do we make sacrifices? Where is my treasure and what do I love most in life?

What do I hate most in life and to what am I true?

Over and over the questions beat in upon the waiting moment.

As we listen, floating up through all the jangling echoes of our turbulence, there is a sound of another kind –

A deeper not which only the stillness of the heart makes clear.

It moves directly to the core of our being. Our questions are answered,

With the peace of the Eternal in our step.

How good it is to center down!

 

 

Book Tour!

Adrienne Martini has just published her second book, Sweater Quest and was kind enough to ask me to be part of her virtual book tour. 

It seems to me that the book isn't a really a Sweater Quest - your motivations for knitting are something you seem quite at peace with - but it is possibly a quest for understanding – Alice Starmore in particular, your community in general, self-knowledge as well, maybe.  

I hadn't viewed the idea of the "quest" that way, as a "quest for understanding." The title initially came about because the original title I wanted was deemed legally actionable and so we had to come up with something else. And, no, I can't tell you what the first title was, at least not in a public forum. Ask me in person and I'll whisper it to you under penalty of a closet full of Red Heart yarn.

The quest was really about trying to get to the crux of why knitters knit. There are so many other ways to spend time. Very, very few people knit because they don't have access to places that sell clothes. The craft itself is slow - both in terms of mastery and production. So why do we do it? My hope was that the narrative could fill in some of those gaps.  

Why do people golf? Or collect dolls?  Or model trains? Knitting to me makes more innate sense than golf, for example, because it has the maker's spirit in it; I think human beings have an innate need to make things - one that is impoverished in 21st century life. Unless you like to cook. And even then it not really something that leaves you with a thing you can hang on the wall or from your shoulders.  We like to line our dens?  

I think the reason knitting makes more innate sense to you and I than golf or dolls or trains do is that we are knitters. My husband, a golfer, doesn't get the appeal of knitting. He's a collector of experiences, of time spent playing, rather than of tangible things. His job, however, does involve the making of things - so that might be where the analogy breaks down.    I still don't know why people collect dolls. I find them creepy and useless. But to each his or her own.   

I'm not sure the desire to knit springs from needing to make things. How many times have you sat down with the end goal of making a scarf rather than the urge to simply put your hands through the knitting motions just to have done so? And why do we knit rather than sew or crochet? Both of those will get you to a finished product much faster than knitting will.  

I used to collect dolls, ha!  But I know why people find them creepy. There was a creative aspect to it, but it was mostly a grief thing for me - occupying a very precise space between my father's death and the day we invaded Afghanistan.  I think for me FIBER is a collection of experiences (particularly communal ones) but knitting is more end resultish.  If I just want to feel up the wool, I'd spin or knit with handspun, which is far more tactile-y satisfying. I like swatching if I like knitting with the yarn - I'm having a terrible time right now getting through a felted tweed swatch, it's breaking my heart that I hate to knit with it. I love textiles and clothing and always have, but a good part of it for me is ending up with something useful and beautiful.  

Fiber as a collection of experiences works for me. I have a tendency to buy souvenir yarn. I know I'm not alone. :)  

I loved the bit about Om Yoga and Cindy - one of my yoga teachers trained there and there was such resonance in what she said about learning the form and surrendering to it first, before it becomes a part of your practice. That's creativity right there - mastering form so that you can transform it later. Be transformed by it. Did you ever make up your mind if what you were doing was art or craft, or if it really WAS a Starmore once it had been meddled with?  

I still haven't figured if it was art or craft or a Starmore. I lean toward craft, frankly, since I didn't put much of me into it and stayed fairly close to her original specs. I'm not sure it's a Starmore, tho, since I didn't use her yarn. I could easily be talked out of either position, however.  

The thing that struck me when you talk about Alice Starmore is that I have never heard one person say that she has a right to protect her name as it related to her creativity and livelihood. She may have gone too far or been irrational, I don't really have a perspective on those knitting days, it was before my time on the kniternet. But she is a compelling figure - both for her exceptional skill with color and design and for her sheer obstinacy. I think I want to ask you if you think this is because it's such a female community and she was female but playing by other rules?  

As for Alice S. and her need to protect her name - I don't know that many folks argued that she didn't have a right to it in certain circumstances. She (and her name) did get taken advantage of, in my opinion, by at least one business partner who saw what he had and tried to cut her out. But, again, my opinion, the whole protection idea got a little out of control and alienated a lot of knitters who were on her side, which doesn't seem like a great idea when you're running a business. It also all gets tied up in the growth of blogs and eBay. The boundaries were pretty fuzzy during the frontier days and there were land grabs.     Still, I love what she has come to represent in my mind, which is all I have to go on. She stuck to her guns, in a way that a lot of other women would not have. She has designed some amazing sweaters that, yes, exploded what we thought about Fair Isle rather than copying what had come before. And the Hebridean yarn is beyond compare. We should thank her for it alone, if nothing else.  

I find it fascinating that you say you didn't put much of yourself into it - do you mean just in terms of design and color input, or emotionally?
Maybe the fact that your position on whether it meets the criteria to be a starmore isn't fixed means that's not the right question to ask? How do you feel about the FO now that some time has passed?  Do you LIKE it?

I didn't put much of myself into the sweater in terms of design and color. My goal was to follow where ever Alice went. Emotionally, there is a lot of me in the sweater, I think. It was a solace and source of irritation by turns. Mostly, tho, I was simply amused by watching the design unfold.    It's interesting that you should ask about how I feel about the FO now that time has passed. I don't feel compelled to keep it or display it or wear it. And on that last one - I can't wear it as it stands now without losing 40 pounds and shrinking 4 inches, both of which seem unlikely. Or, if I were more sensible about it, doing the math and reknitting it, which is also unlikely because other designers keep coming up with other items that I want to make. I'm am proud of having knitted it and having written about having knitted it but don't need the sweater itself to remind me of the journey.   Does that make sense?  

As we age we become our essential selves. Which is to say, still a book dork after all these years.

God I'm tired.  The last week I have had someone else's trembling, wimpy arms at yoga and I keep falling asleep on the couch.  Partly that's Mom in the house.  It's been nice to see her (no, I mean it) but takes a lot of fuel also, and partly it's because I had a stupid wrist sprain that kept me from doing full arm intensive poses for a couple of months and I think I've lost some conditioning, and partly I have my period, which gives me a couple of nights of insomnia and - I am like, early pregnancy tired and no, this is not my coy way of telling you something.

But I can't bloody stay awake.  Very annoying.

Mom heads home today and after work I am skipping yoga and going for a walk and eating something green for dinner and reading the utterly fascinating book I began last night and then GOING TO BED EARLY. 

OK THAT was yesterday and also, a lie

Instead I went to the chiropractor and tried to take a nap, but was foiled by door knocking and phone ringing, and then I went to J's house for pizza & beer and once again I was barely in bed by midnight. 

The book is rather good and I am trying to convince myself reading is as restorative as sleep, because my house is littered with good books right now.  OK my house is always littered with good books, but in particular I lost all self control last week and will need some new bookshelves as a result.  Which is mostly a joke. (20 books and two seasons of Mad Men.) (Cough.)

I've been on this not-buying-stuff kick for the last 6 month or so.  Not because I think it a particular virtue or anything, I'm hardly a minimalist, but what started out as a budgetary plan has been interesting for someone who's been a life long accumulator.  Perhaps I should not be surprised to find that, for the most part, the things I've been not-accumulating I don't miss, once I got over the habit of shopping all the time. The perfume samples and t-shirts and gadgets and gewgaws are about 80% distraction and static.

Not clothes shopping has actually given me a better understanding of what I really wear and like and find useful, and led me to clear out a lot of things that weren't being used, not shoe shopping has made me more critical of the durability and use of each pair I own - both of these things are going to shape any future purchases in a way I could not have conceptualized last fall.  Ditto all the other things I haven't bought, from mascara to a mezzaluna.  My relationship with things is changing in a way I like and I really love the corners of spreading quiet in my life as I edit my existing stuff down to something a little less crowded, a little more carefully matched to me, and more wisely balanced between need and want.

Except for books.  I'm getting greedier for them as I get less greedy for other things.  It's really weird, but doesn't feel like a bad idea, except that I better finish breaking up with my TV and get on it because I mostly can't see my coffee table anymore (there's a little spot hollowed out for my water bottle).  I guess my essential book dork has been released from under the materialist burden?  Or something.  Because books are not material goods, they are OXYGEN. Ideas. Juice for the future. Not stuff.

First up:  Mountains of the Mind, which I discovered via the supremely talented Kate @ Needled.  Imagination, perception, science and how they give shape to our relationship with the physical world, good stuff.  

Interlude.

I am starting to understand the ways in which basic rules for civilized life serve a purpose, no matter how stuffy or pointless they might seem.

I have spent the day in my bathrobe after a bad night's sleep - a muscle spasm in my shoulder that has been my unhappy companion for 6 weeks or more, causing odd pains to run down my right arm and inevitably waking me after four hours.
I arose cranky at 10 after several disjointed sleep segments, read and made lunch and read Pride and Prejudice until my lids drooped and napped - ironically the couch upon which I slept one night to cause the initial spasm is also the only I can prop myself for comfortable sleep at times - until awakened by a very upsetting dream in which a person whose place in my life I currently doubt did something to rather confirm those doubts.  Thanks ever so, unconscious mind.

Now I am sweaty, cross, mildly depressed, premenstrual, feeling like all my ideas come only from opposition rather than creation, and suffering from that vague feeling of not being entirely upon the earth that sometimes accompanies a day when you do not dress or move around enough. 

If I were the kind of person who never lay down in her clothes or always did the dishes and never let the housekeeping get away....well, I supposed I might take to secret drinking instead, and would not be me anyway, so the speculation is useless.  
But the thing that strikes me in the between the lines reading of Lizzie Bennet's life on this trip through is how much ritualized boredom there is, particularly for the women.    Of course, we have ritualized boredom too, it's just noisier.

Nothing profound to say, really, just trying to get back in the habit of blogging and of not being so guarded.  Maybe, like in the folktales, I hope that naming my mood will destroy its power.  A shower might help as well.

imaginary friends

I am passing my Friday night with the The Annotated Pride and Prejudice.  Cause that is the kind of wild woman I am.  Mixed grains and broccoli with a side of classic literature.

I don't recommend it for your first reading, the footnotes are totally spoilers, but for a lit geek like me who read Pride and Prejudice (unannotated version) for the first time at 11 and eleventy times since then, it is brilliant.  I'm good with words and well able to submerge myself in the sense of other times, but still. Knowing that a piano was a status symbol as much as it was a form of pleasure or entertainment, adds a tiny bit to several key scenes (Lady Catherine, I am looking at you).

I know that Emma * and Persuasion ** are 'better" books in the opinion of many but Lizzie Bennet is my girl.  Quick, clever, at peace with herself, wise and foolish, witty, warm, hasty and yet evolutionary over all, she and Harriet Vane*** are the women in literature whom I love the most.  And watching Lizzie navigate her world and assess the people in it always makes me think again about my own shallow extravagances and quick judgments and odd convictions.  I find it - settling and thought provoking at the same time.  Which is one of the reasons it is a great book.

True story:  Years ago I was working as an educational consultant and this wonderful girl was a client, also called Lizzie.  She was fantastic - quick and self aware, with a clever small face and dark hair that swung straight to her shoulders.  She was articulate and creative and independent  and interested in communication and literature and one day we were talking about favorite books and I said mine was Pride & Prejudice and she made this face, squinched with distaste and perhaps a bit of regret at having to downgrade me from "cool for an adult" to "adult".

You do not care for Jane Austen?

And she said - wellllllll, I haven't read her, but........

Old fashioned, about marriage, girly, dusty, stiff,  mannered, etc, etc, etc.  A bit how I feel about Richardson really (reading Pamela was one of the more painful experiences of my degree).  (Followed immediately by Daniel Deronda , which, I admit, I only read part of) (Sorry, Professor Roy).

And I grinned and said, I PROMISE it's not like that.  I am willing to go so far as to bet you'd like it a fair bit.

And that, I thought, was the end of that, because the chance that a high school student, even an unusual one, will listen to one such as I beyond the sphere of my usefulness, is fairly small. 

Until one day she came by the office in a complete state.  Oh MY god, I'm reading that book and I love it.  I love HER.  She's one of US. 

Which - although I now see her as a younger woman rather than a peer - is pretty much it.  Lizzie is my girl.  Home with her is about a million times better, more useful and improving as well as flat out more fun, that 90% of anything I can think of right now (I had a very bad date last week, no doubt my percentages will change as the horror fades).

Getting back to it.......

* Not a huge fan

** Anne Elliot, of Persuasion, is a heroine who has grown on me as I have gotten older and slightly more battered about the edges.  Less witty, more human.  Excellent.

***Harriet Vane is a character in Dorothy Sayer's Peter Whimsy books.  Which you should read IMMEDIATELY. 

When I am an old woman I shall.....be myself.

So I was knitting with friends this weekend - I know, shocking!  I made actual progress on an ancient project and someday when I am home during daylight I shall show you - and at some point I remembered I had two new books of poetry in my bag.

As one does.

I forget what brought it up, the conversation was wide ranging, but I pulled them out and passed around the poems that made me find the books in the first place.  

I've been interested in poetry recently, there's something about the small vivid moments of perception, of memory or retroactive understanding, of beauty in the dark and sadness in the light that is really drawing me right now, and in the way of the universe I keep finding gorgeous ones that remind me of this.  Or possibly I see what was always there now that I'm awake to it. 

As one does. 

If one is lucky and paying attention.

So Tuesday night I had an interesting conversation with my therapist (about food mostly, and mothers and daughters and body identity and all the lines between them), and later a bowl of broth with rye bread and goat cheese and a ginger muffin or two, and then I was restless.   TV was stupid, internet was dull, the eleventy books I am reading did not appeal and knitting was too far away (about 4 WHOLE feet).

So I took a bath.  And I took my poetry with me.  I was sitting in the bubbles and I saw my hands against the cream of the page.  And I thought, when did I become the kind of woman who reads poetry, who makes herself cry reading poetry aloud even, in the bath, with a leaf green manicure? 

(The Colonel, Carolyn Forche)

I had paragraphs more here about becoming who you actually are, but it was pompous and annoyed me.  Some other time.....
I will say the library in my bathroom is starting to amuse me: I was having all kinds of trouble settling down to anything this past fall, and the jet wash of this is a thin film of partially read books on every surface of my house, including the radiator by the tub.  (Also, no matter how I try I cannot get into Eldest.  Same problem with Eragon.  I never learn.)

(I was actually reading Anna Frater but was too lazy to go fetch the book out of the bathroom.  Plus the Colonel is a mind bending poem.  And the photo pleased me.)

Pump handles.

So I read this perfectly amazing book the other day, The Ghost Map, which is at basis a completely gripping tale of the detective work that went into understanding the waterborne nature of cholera for the first time, as well as an urban/medical drama about the combination of circumstances leading the London's 1854 epidemic.   
Which then turns into a love letter to cities and a discussion - one I found really provocative - about the nature & role of the urban in the future of the planet, the similarity of all this internet nonsense to the mapping that was crucial to proving the disease theory and the potential of human beings to get some things right.

  Click for more info about map and epidemic.

Thanks to Making Light for the recommendation. 

As I tend to be a bit gloomy about the future of humanity I found it completely compelling, pretty plausible and really something to think about.

Which I have been doing. 

And then Friday my email box went ding! with a notice from Edge - for which there is a link in my sidebar as well.  Edge's stated purpose is to "arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves."
I find it deeply comforting that somewhere in this world, someone is asking abstract & concrete rather than profit-minded questions about anything (outside of pure academia, because while I have no beef with academics and in fact many of these people are academics, it's a world that can be as insular as business or politics, and I really believe that the intersection of knowledge, rather than the isolation of knowledge, is better for us as individuals, as well as a species, and as a planet).

Which is actually how the cholera epidemic came to be tamed.  A doctor with an interdisciplinary approach and a varied experience, from an atypical background, asking non-dogmatic questions, encountering a clergyman with intimate knowledge of a neighborhood, a load of anger and an open mind, both of them with the determination to put some serious shoe leather into figuring out how 700 people died in a week.

You could never plan for that.  Never.  Passion, questions, serendipity & hard, slogging work.

(Which is why I still think a broad education is a great idea.  My dad would be so happy to hear me say that.   Though I mean ACTUALLY broad, as in liberal arts people like me ought to not be allowed to escape from scientific education quite so completely, and vice versa.  I knew some science types in school with a very limited understanding of life outside the lab, as well as a number of literary types *cough* who thought science was BOring.  Bunch of idiots.  Suck it up on both sides, with a little mutual respect.)

I tell you, the best moments in my education were when something I learned in class A and something I read in the paper, and something I saw on a beach somewhere and something else I read in high school all snapped together like magnets the size of tectonic plates, with a terrible, awesome crash of world-expanding neuroplasticity. 

(God, doesn't it seem like everything you hear or see on TV or in the paper is about making the world smaller?    And not in a good, reducing-distances-between-people kind of way, in a narrow, grasping, selfish, hysterical and profit-minded way?)

Where was I?

Oh right.  The Edge.  I love Edge.  It always leaves me going - Hey, I never thought of that.  Because I am definitely not one of the world's great thinkers.  And that's OK, because they have something to teach me, I like to learn, and I don't have to be one of the world's great thinkers to be part of changing the world.  I'm a point on the map.   This post is a point on the map.  And each person who reads it and reads more about it and clicks through and talks about what they think and passes it on, is another.

Today's email was about a speech called "Gin, Television and the Cognitive Surplus" and discussions relating.  The index is here and while it will take a while, I highly recommend it. (The site is poorly organized for the internet.  Imagine it's an actual paper thing and keep scrolling.)

The basic idea is that gin in the industrial revolution functioned as a society-wide numbing agent while human beings got used to an urban society, a numbing agent that was combated and discarded when people could begin to conceptualize the new world and use its resources more effectively, and that TV has performed this role for the 20th century, and now...

Did you know that for the first time since its invention TV watching is declining?  Replaced with interactive media that are non-passive, connections between people and places and information through social networks and the Internet that are now ADDING something to humanity's experience.  There's a video, and I can't figure out how to embed it.  But I really, really, really beg you to go and watch it, or read the transcript (scroll way down, though the introductory articles you will go past are good too).  Or both.  BEG.

The intersection between the book, the Edge and my present brain state feels electrifying in some way - can you tell?

Because I've been thinking about how sitting on my ass watching the Olympics has felt like losing ground on life, and how as bloggers we are connected to this larger world, and Ravelry and Facebook and online dating how much I have learned from the internet and all the mad fools out there talking about books, and cast on techniques and art and home design and dressmaking and raising families and building personalities and politics and feminism and science and gaming and the human experience - using this medium to make creativity and growth and learning parts of their lives, and how great it is, though great is a weak word.    Transformative.  Because no fooling, my life has been transformed by this stuff and I bet yours has too.

And how the excess energy released by not sitting on my ass gives me so much more to give to things I care about.  A few months ago I was talking about perfume with an acquaintance.  And she said - I don't know how you have time.  And I thought, Time?  You are 10 years younger than me, and work 40 hours a week and are married and own a townhouse with your husband, no kids yet.   I have never heard you mention a hobby, a bike ride, a trip, a museum, a book you've read, anything that you have passion for, a home improvement project, a great meal you've cooked or eaten.  Nothing.   How do you NOT have time?

And I'm not slamming her - she's a very nice person and I enjoy chatting with her when I run into her.  She finds me exoticly amusing because I am always talking about something new.  A date, a knitting project, a book I'm reading, something I cooked, a new gadget, shoes, something. 

How do you find the time?

Well, for one thing, some days I don't turn on the TV.  (And I am not patting myself on the back about this, I just told you I spent two weeks watching Olympians and I can't wait for Life to start up again.  The idea is LESS.  To not sink into inactivity, to make, to share, to generate.)

Clay Shirky, speaking on Edge, is calling it cognitive surplus and he thinks it can change the world like the rise and decline of gin drinking transformed the world (I dunno anything about either of the books I link here other than I would like to read them and this way I can find them again).

And I love it.  It feels like a true possibility, it feels like a way to look at what we have and are and see the possibility for positive change in a useful and productive way, to take the chaos and change and use it, rather than being swamped by gloom over our inevitable destruction.  Which is the same way I felt after finishing The Ghost Map.  A friend said to me the other day that the world was incredibly large but so accessible.   And you know, it is.   If you care to look.