What I Love

I love things that make sense of the messy world. Straight lines, clean edges, a box tied up tight with string. I love how a perfectly symmetrical sphere rests its cool weight in the warm palm of my hand. I love evenly tesselated pictures, geometric patterns that repeat their perfect predictability off the page and into unknown space. I love long complicated mathematical proofs that fill up pages of grid paper and emerge with an equation of pure simplicity.

I love rows and columns, lined up in order and never exceeding their borders. I love the tiny kernels of golden corn on the cob, arranged in perfection vertically and horizontally, each tiny cube pregnant with flavor. Anything arranged in boxes and borders with reasoning and logic is a relief to me.

That may be why I love knitting. I love the neat, even stitches created by two dull knitting needles as they click against each other in a predictable rhythm. It's expected and yet always a surprise when a new row emerges with color and structure in perfect accordance with what I had in mind. It is motion with purpose, motion that has an effect on the world. And it never needs be repeated -- it's not like doing the dishes, or changing the baby's diaper, or paying a bill, or watching tv, or listening to the radio. What's created has been created, and there is no arguing with reality resting in your hands.

Considering

Lately I've been completely tuned out, turned off. I'm like an electronic device that nobody has bothered to charge for weeks. Or just hasn't bothered actually powering up. The first sign of this was the overall lack of knitting. As is often the case, I was the last to notice. Other people noticed. My students commented first: Johanna, what happened to those socks you were knitting? Johanna, have you finished the xxxx project yet? Johanna, why don't you ever KNIT anymore? My co-teacher noticed. And of course, my faithful blog readers noticed the lack of progress in my knitting goals. Didn't you?...... (cue the crickets)....

There were other signs too, of course. It's not just the knitting. But it's an interesting question to pose to the universe: why is it that we stop doing things we love sometimes? Readers will go for a period of months without reading anything. Writers (and this is true of me in particular as a writer) will go a year without writing much worthwhile, and then suddenly come back to it with a vengeance. And knitting, while it is pure medicine for my soul, has suffered the same odd fate in my life too. Where does our joy in things go when it goes missing?

So last Thursday I decided to take action. I was at Webs and just decided to buy the yarn for a very cool blanket that my friend was knitting. It was almost completely funded by gift certificates from my birthday, so it was guiltfree. It's a neat blanket. You make a striped hexagon out of a few parallelograms, then sew the hexes together for a neat optical illusion effect. It's called the Illusion Cube Blanket. I've linked to the pattern, and will post pictures soon. I have finished 5 hexagons, and it's really fun. I hope it's enough to rekindle some joy in yarn and the work of the hands.