Yarn Meditation

“So I’m forced to suspend time. To work outside of time. To forget that time exists. On a subconscious level I have to believe that I have all the time in the world, or I wouldn’t be able to begin. And something happens when I entertain that fallacy. Time, which is fractal, stretches out, and I begin to experience eternity. There is something about that spacious expansion into endless time that promotes the growth of large-scale thinking, that enables one to rise above the petty stresses of everyday life. Viewed from a certain perspective, time is the only real luxury we have.”

Dear Susan Gordon Lydon. How I shall miss her. This quote from her The Knitting Sutra’s introduction perfectly expresses what I feel when I knit lace, puts poetry to the claim I’ve made that knitting lace is my meditation.

When you can finally sit down, quietly, with perhaps only Mozart on the CD player and a cup of Earl Gray tea nearby, a not-so-patient Siamese watching the strand of yarn emerging from the ball, when you can finally focus on the lace, time does indeed “stretch out” or in my mind, time shifts. It’s as though I’ve entered another dimension, where time slows to the barest crawl. Time becomes the K2tog’s, the yo’s, the ssk’s, the sl1k1psso’s. As the lace emerges from my fingers, frenetic motion within and without disappears. Calm descends. In such a space, complex problems can be seen clearly, decisions reached unemotionally. Large-scale thinking is indeed promoted. The deep breathing of peace begins.

Blessed be.