Knitting As A Manifestation Of Love, And Lower Mathematics

 

I know that I have touched on this in a past post, but I have gathered some more thoughts on the matter today. 

When I sit silently knitting, while some program that I don’t need to look at much is nattering on, several things are going on in my mind. I am in a state of meditation usually. It is like a pool of quiet to me. I can be there and also monitor what is being said in my presence. It helps me to pay attention to the spoken word. It obviates tension.

Knitting represents an unfolding in the physical. It is simple math. I progress through a pattern which exists completed in my mind. I am in the moving present then. I don’t use other’s patterns. I have, but that is a whole different deal.

It represents inquiry on my part when I was very young, willingness to take instruction, practice, and patience. It represents a desire to use my human ability to bring forth from the inside to the outside. A birth in a way.

For me knitting is sensory too. There is a tactile satisfaction in the fine smooth needles and certainly in the various fibers, colors and spun styles of the yarn itself. It is often quite succulent.

In a closely related subject, spinning yarn is its own story. Spinning yarn creates order out of chaos! If you start with raw wool, it is a long process involving washing and drying the wool, carding, which is like combing in a way, to make it ready to spin. Order increases as the process continues. In home spinning, little sausages of combed wool called rolags are brought to the wheel or the drop spindle and a bit of the wool is drawn out and attached to a length of leader yarn already on the spinning wheel. Then the process of drawing out and twisting the yarn begins. You can see that this is a process of refinement. 

When it comes to the knitting, then, the process continues. I have a little joke. I call the knitted object re-organized sheep. These days I mostly use purchased yarn. 

It sounds rather physical, doesn’t it? But the physical is just the outer working of thought and my intentions. 

By the time I get to designing, or simply using a well-known practical pattern, which exists only in my mind, I am beginning to think about the person who will receive the finished work. I try to create a pleasing thing. By the way, if you dropped all of the things that I have knitted or sewn for loved ones on me I am pretty sure it would squash me! lol! Of course it would.

I will tell you that during the long hours that person rests in my heart and in my good intentions towards them.

It means that for that period of time as I completed stitch after stitch, I was in my homely way manifesting my love for that person, persistently, quietly and with determination.

This is just my example. I believe that it is mirrored by everything a person does for another’s welfare or comfort. Even just making dinner.

AND, just in case anybody is curious about this arcane art...