Knitted Meditation

I started knitting with hot pink - I mean garish flaming pink synthetic (probably highly flammable due to the chemical dying process) “yarn” when I was eight years old. I picked knitting from an after school program catalog of hobby offerings and liked it so well my mom found a woman (my mom was always finding some woman) to help me progress past the basics. You see, my mom is left handed and I right, so sometimes it was a struggle having to turn and reverse a process when learning anything that required the use of my hands.

Confession is good for the soul. I was… a little bit (read: terribly) destructive child. Not that I meant to be. I’d just be fiddling with something, and before you know it, I would take it all the way apart but couldn’t quite seem to get it back together… you know… with all the parts. There was always something left out, a screw or a spring . The missing part(s) would be tucked into my pockets, the reassembled item rehoused and I would carefully back away a safe distance before turning to run to get a book and practice nonchalant innocence and my, “ I haven’t the faintest idea - whatever could you mean - perhaps you should ask one of my miscreant brothers” expression from behind the pages.

What happened to the various parts? “I can use that washer in something else - later.”

My knitting meditation was a welcome reprieve for everyone’s things. One of my favorite things after discovering knitting was to wake up early Sunday morning and watch cartoons, specifically Danger Mouse, cackle at the antics of Brain and Penfold and knock out a few rows of knitting mindlessly before someone would get up to make me breakfast.

So I wasn’t a normal child. You were?

After years of dormancy, I picked up knitting again . Maybe I was feeling destructive again? Maybe my hands needed distraction and my mind a meditative state to vacation to.

Knitting isn’t hard, one needn’t turn out anything more than a scarf or a shawl which is really all I do. I just want to create something and give it to someone and get those destructive “jiggers” out of my hands, mind and heart.

As COVID carries on, anxiety is not just an emotion, I can taste it. I’ve been listening, talking to, having feelings about and working my way through that fear of myself in the present.

Am I doing the work I’m supposed to?

Will I ever understand? Will anyone ever really understand me?

Am I bold enough?

Will I ever feel really really happy again?

Where is my spirit? Where is my lust for life?

Am I enough?

And so I knit. I abandon the questions and go into soft focus for a bit. I hear the clicking of the needles, mentally count my stiches - knit two purl one. It’s a practice of meditation. Another form of being present but not there with all those bottomless questions (and some of the terribly unkind answers I tell myself in response).

I’m not doing the project for completions sake but for the art of soft focused attention. Eventually I do finish. When I do, I usually give my yield to a friend. Everything has my energy in it I think. Before I part ways with my practice, I look at the loose stitches in some places where I was more relaxed and the overly tight stiches in places where I transitioned into a harder unforgiving focus and the places where it was perfect and the places where I dropped a stitch and I give it anyway.

It was my self care that now wraps someone else. They wear, (if I am lucky) a knitted meditation.

*Photos are my knitted gift to Vicky and courtesy of my friend Joan, who has taken up her own knitting projects of late.