Trust in the Beauty

 

I faltered last autumn.  I grew up, went to school, and have worked most of my life in rural America (in the east and west) around the hate, intolerance, and ignorance that was catered to (encouraged in fact) by our new president.  So while I wasn't surprised by the results, I couldn't make myself believe them either.  Every day before and after the election, I'd see something online that made my blood boil or made my heart sick.  I had to step back for my own sanity.  And so, for the most part, I went offline.  And in that time, I lost my voice.  Whenever I thought about this space, I just couldn't see the point.  With all that is going on in this county, in this world, it just didn't seem right to post about knitting a pair of mittens.  Or bringing in the new year with black-eyed peas and a visit to my elk girls.  And yet, when I did venture online, it was to seek out those images of fiber.  Images of nature. Images of a home-cooked meal.  Images of life.  I needed to be reminded of that beauty even if I was incapable of sharing it myself. 

Denise wrote about hope a few weeks back.  When I finally visited her site and commented...a comment that mirrors some of the above sentiment...she returned with a story about a simple, yet beautiful moment in her day that she was holding on to.  And then she said this: The world needs your post about knitting mittens because it needs to remember what beautiful looks like.  I needed someone to say this to me.

And so I chose today, inauguration day, to find my voice and to share some of the beauty in my world. 

I didn't find comfort in knitting last fall...which is actually a normal post-season cycle for me.  But when I came home in late December, despite having Xmas gifts on the needles that still needed to be finished, I kept coming back to this mitten pattern that I had seen.  I'm not normally a fan of yellow but the slanted garter ridges, the happy yellow and light grey combination set against the white and grey back-drop we've been living in for 2 months almost...I knew I needed to cast on.  And knitting these mittens was pure joy.  Given the way they are knit, the fit is not the greatest (the mitten body is knit flat and seamed and the thumb is knit separately, and flat which makes for a strange fit)...  And on one anxiety-ridden day, I just had to finish them and thus the seaming could have been neater...   But I love them anyway.  Every time I look at them, I feel happy.  The first morning they were dry from blocking, I wore them when I went out on my morning walk.  The air was bitter (it was -5 F) but the sun was just starting to break out and I felt myself coming out of the mental fog.  I suddenly had this feeling of immense gratitude.  I noticed the world, the beauty, around me again for the first time in what felt like weeks.  A few moments later, I glanced down and saw a splash of color against the white.  A beautiful flicker feather.  It felt almost serendipitous to me...

Every year for the past few, I've been choosing a word that would guide me through the year and sharing it here.  I find this to be an invaluable practice.  Each year I look back to those words that I've chosen in the past and find that while there is always more work that can be done, I can see progress.  I had a few words competing for attention this year but in the end, I settled on TRUST.  And while this can mean a whole mess of things, it's intended to mean 'trust in myself'.  Like many, I don't have very high self-esteem and I see how that, hand in hand with fear, holds me back day in and day out.  When I fractured my arm, I lost some trust in my body.  And by November, long after I was told it would be healed and yet it still wasn't, when I attempted to do a push-up and literally fell flat on my face because I had lost so much strength in my upper body...well, what little trust I had left went completely out the door.  Shortly after that I went on captures at the start of one of the worst winters I've experienced since moving west.  Day in and day out for 3 weeks I was trudging up and down hills in 1 to 3 feet of snow carrying a pack on my back.  The kind of snow where even 20 feet feels like a lifetime.  Each day I gained condition such that by the end of that period of time...on the third capture...I outpaced every single person on the crew on a very long, very steep uphill climb.  And it was as I was doing that, feeling the burn in my legs and lungs, that the word trust came to me.  Despite much neglect at times, my body has never let me down.  My legs have always carried me wherever I've asked them to.  Every time I retreat to creativity, whether in the form of knitting needles, pencil and paper, a drimmel on a gourd, a bag of fiber and my wheel, a camera...despite all the fear and anxiety that I'm not 'good enough', my body instinctively settles into the rhythm that it knows.  When I feel overwhelmed or 'in over my head' with a work task, once I trust in myself that I do know what I'm doing, my brain settles into the rhythm that it knows.  And so this year, I need to remember these things and work on trusting myself.

Not many read this space, but for those that do, I hope that you will not just read and move on.  Instead, I hope that you will share in the comments a bit of beauty from your own world. 

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Now playing:  One Tin Soldier by The Original Caste
I've always loved this song but had not listened to it in years.  This fall, I was reminded of it and searched it out on itunes.  If you have never heard this song or really listened to the words, I encourage you to do it today.  


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