White World Revisited

September 3, 2012

On  Day Three of thick mountain fog and rain, Cheyenne and I can see only about thirty feet down the driveway. For three days the mountains and valleys, the sun and clouds, the apple trees and the granite rocks down the slope remain blanketed in white. Raindrops splat loudly on the skylight, so I turn up the volume on my computer as I listen to the CD version of The Healing by Jonathan Odell. I read the novel a few weeks back and loved it, even wrote to the author to compliment him on his creation. A friend recommended the audio book version, so I listen to GranGran's stories here in my cozy mountain home surrounded by blank white walls of fog. The novel is even better the second time around!

What strikes me today is how happy I am to be here secluded and alone. You may have read an archive post when I was stuck in the fog and how hard it was for me. This time everything is different. A candle burns on the island as I pray for a friend who tragically lost her adult daughter this weekend. A small plastic car garage, two green and blue balls, The Runaway Bunny and new artwork on the refrigerator remind me of the twins' visit overnight while their parents camped. I hear their laughter and see them run through the room on a mission of making a baby bed or looking at the mountains through a magnifying glass.

The dinner table is covered in weavings, the coffee table hosts fingerless gloves and yarn for premie hats. Beside my favorite chairs, two prayer shawls wait in their respective bags for me to add inches.
Three large baskets of yarn can't contain the skeins and skeins I have available for weavings. Greens and purples spill onto the carpet. I leave them because I am alone. I finished a large piece for a friend yesterday, so today I will begin a new weaving that is already calling to me and continue my work on a larger hanging for over our fireplace.

I am grateful for this time of solitude and creating. I feel like the luckiest person alive to be right where I want to be doing exactly what I want to do all day long.  At night I watch the DNC with all the energy and anticipation packed into Charlotte and am grateful to be here, able to watch from afar yet thankful for the work of so many people who are dedicated to improving our country.

It seems the fog has become my friend, a companion in creativity, a condition that allows me focus and enjoy stillness as I weave and knit my love and prayers into colorful cloth of one kind or another.

A Beginning

While this is a date forever tinged with deep sadness and loss, for me it is also the anniversary of a new beginning. It is the day when, on a Wildacres Residency, I first claimed the writer and poet in me. So on this morning I am grateful to Philip Blumenthal, the Blumenthal Foundation,  and Mike and Kathryn House for the opportunity to find refuge in the Cabin where poems first emerged and where my creative life awakened. For eleven years, Wildacres has nurtured and birthed various creative experiences and gifts in me: writing, painting, pot-throwing, knitting and weaving. I have made great friends and spent quality time with my sisters. I have attended and facilitated workshops. I arrived on the mountain thinking maybe I could write. I left knowing I could. I did not dream of how significant Wildacres would be to me in the years to come. May Wildacres long continue to offer space and support and new beginnings in the years ahead.

out of the fog

This morning the fog lifts slowly to reveal the long mountain ridge a little at a time. For the last hour I have been listening and sitting with Chopra meditations of the last three days. And now, all of a sudden I want to write here, on the blog, not in my journal. It is as if I want to say, " hello, again, i am here!"  You may notice that I have not posted for months, as in four months. In addition to my absence here, I have nothing written in my journal since May, well maybe a short paragraph here and there but nothing like the journal writing I have been so faithful to since January 1997. I just got to the point where I could not write. Nothing was there, that well I was so used to was dry. Perhaps months and months of not being able to walk or drive, months and months of pain in my shins, months and months alone just watching netflix movies or the daily activity outside my glass office doors dried up that well.

Then in May yarn tied me to the creative source, and I have been off and running, following the textures and colors where ever they take me. I weave on small, or now larger, cardboard or foam board. I pick up a thread and all of a sudden I am transformed, taken, led into another world. The flow is mine to follow and enjoy. My heart races and I have to remind myself to just be in the moment because the yarn takes me like a stick on a racing stream. I feel full and rich, grateful and filled with wonder. And I can't get enough of this experience. I wake thinking, "what time do I get to start weaving today? what must i do before i can get to the yarn board?" And then I start moving, washing dishes, walking our dog [yes, I CAN walk a dog now!], doing the laundry. . . all to get to my new work, ahhh, play!, weaving and knitting!

Yet, today as I begin a five day weaving retreat alone in the mountain house, I want to write and so I do, and it feels as though I will again. This post is a way to welcome me back, and you. The white fog has settled again in in the short time I have been writing. And that is fine with me.  Plenty of red, purple and white yarn awaits me in that magical space of co-creation.

Knitting Meditation

 My fingers and thumb shift the yarn over and around to pull a new stitch on to another needle.  The yarn is soft and warm, inviting a new shape to emerge. Since Thanksgiving I have been knitting day and night. I have to make myself sit sometimes without the newest project in my hands and lap. 

I used to knit, back when I was a young girl and teen, making white angora hats that tied under the chin for my friends. At twelve I made my first cardigan sweater, a green that was a favorite color of mine until my father called it army green and said it was the ugliest color ever.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped knitting. Perhaps I had no time for it with studies and activities of high school and college. I made my husband an afghan the first year we met and crocheted a couple of afghans later for our sons.  But years have passed since I knitted anything at all.

Since late fall, knitting is a new meditation and spiritual practice. I have made a dozen pairs of fingerless gloves for friends and family and nearly a dozen pairs for children.  Recently I decide I want to create something bigger, so I check the sizes of needles I have tucked away in my grandmothers’ knitting basket and find a scrap piece of paper that says, “Prayer Shawl. Knit 3 Purl 3 for 57 stitches, then turn and Purl 3, Knit 3 for the next row. Continue for five feet. “ A minister friend giving me the pattern when we were on a Shalem residency in Spiritual Direction. I plan to attempt that pattern and head to Michael’s to buy yarn. 

I find a soft warm yarn in blue green and start on the project as soon as I arrive home. After I complete a few inches, I examine my work to be sure the stitches line up correctly for the pattern. Then I realize what I have done.

In 2003 when my friend, Carlton died, his wife offered me the prayer shawl that had been made for him by a church group. He was the first person with whom I had long spiritual dialogues. I treasure the shawl and use it nearly every day when I am reading, writing or sitting. It wraps me for naps and comforts me when I have lost my way. Nearly every time I sit with it, I examine the stitches to determine if it is crocheted or knitted and how to make it.  I have never figured it out.  Until now.

The prayer shawl that I have just begun making is the same pattern as Carlton’s. I imagine Knit 3 Purl 3 being significant for Episcopalians: The Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One has to pay attention to keep the pattern aligned, especially with a nubby yarn.  I say, “I love you”over and over as I knit the shawl and trust that Spirit will hear my prayers for all those I think of as I add row after row.  It took nine years for me to find the prayer shawl pattern I wanted, and yet, it was there all along. 

Life Anew

Today feels like a birthday, a day of new beginnings and possibility.  For more than two years I have lived with chronic leg pain that, for the last eight months, has kept me in my house mostly alone.  Being housebound was a surprising experience, not one I anticipated for my early sixties. It was hard and trying. Being cut off from friends and normal life experiences increased my sense of isolation and loss.


For most days I sat in a comfortable reading chair with my legs propped on the ottoman. My window on the world was three full length glass doors to the back yard where I watch robins skitter this morning after last night's rain and thunder.  I have seen the trees green, gold and bare. I have watched the days lengthen and shorten, the moon rise, wax and wane, the temperatures rise and fall, the hostas push, unfold, and die back. I have rested because I could not walk. I have listened to silence because the voices I love were not present. I have eaten alone, wondered and prayed, wept and whined, been broken and healed. For minute after hour after day after week I have waited and hoped for healing, for a return to active life.

And yet inside me, deep inside, was a relief, too, a relief for this pass from the daily chaotic scramble of my friends still in the working world. If I felt chosen for this pain, I also felt chosen for the gift of silence even though it was far more than I wanted. Because of my training in spiritual direction, I did not take this experience as purely a physical one. I have known that somehow this time would serve me even though I could not figure out why or how.

Today I feel like myself in more ways than I have for several years. After months of working with healers and sitting in solitude, I believe the healing has happened. I won't be running down the street or driving to DC but I believe I can walk again with out injury and that soon I will be driving myself and going places without someone to help me. I am grateful for those few who have stood with me, tended me body and spirit. I feel a surge of creative energy in my whole body, especially in my heart and hands. I want to bring forth beauty and love, compassion and creation. It is my time now. My time to live anew with more awareness of what matters to me, with less will and ego, with more true essence and less concern of what others might think. How grateful I am. How happy and thankful for this new day.

A Visit to an Art Museum

    The blunt shapes and colors: red, pink, blue, white, the big brown hands, the smoke of the train, the birds, the two women in their bright patterned dresses stir me. They say goodbye and my essence says hello.  I travel on the train, look out the windows to the backyards where families gather to listen to guitars played by men in railroad overalls. I sit on the porch with the family and look into Madeline’s lush gardens.  My hands ache with the work of the day in them and delight in the lift of a baby into my arms.  For several hours I move through the Mint Museum’s exhibition of Romare Beardon’s collages, and they take root in me.

     These images invite me to cut and paste, to paint and draw, to look out my own windows and create the vista with paper and glue.  I lean into the colors and shapes. I back away to see the views through windows in the kitchens of everyday people.  I wish I had come earlier so I could come again.

     We move to the yarns, weavings and textile creations of Sheila Hicks. Her use of yarn makes my hands want to hold thread and clothe. She gets me thinking. How can I create a piece with color and fiber? The large installations are too costly and big to consider. What could I do at home? Embroidery thread! Available in many available colors and inexpensive, the soft threads would be fun to work with. I promise myself that I will get some soon. I make a mental list of the creations I can feel on the tips of my fingers: collages, fiber sculpture, balls wrapped with ribbon and thread, lines of color side by side on white paper. My energy runs fast the whole day at the museum. An electric buzz permeates my skin and muscles, my heart smiles and my head says, “Create something. Soon.” Something is planted in me that I want to grow. The seeds have roots and I realize once again how important creativity is to my life. It makes me feel whole, open, at peace. It cultivates who I really am.