Tuesday 19 June 2007

My version of Philosophy...

Over the last few days, and weeks, I've been thinking about why I feel so strongly connected to string things. I dearly wish I could see a instant replay of when I first begged to be shown how to embroider. That is how it began for me, after all.

But its more than that. Have you ever seen programs on TV showing how men in Africa make nets, and fix them in the ways it has been done for centuries? Watching their hands with their shuttle going back and forth, weaving up and down as they make or repair nets is like sitting in front of a master needle worker from ancient times. It pull something deep inside me and says come discover this too.

Inside my head I can see the forms of work, nalbinding, knitting, crocheting, tatting, macrame, merging, and morphing through time to what I see and know. Is it weird to say that? I can see it, maybe feel it is more correct, I can feel the tie to to ancient things. When my hands are doing something, I am that tie, I am that needle, I am that thread as it wends it way inside, out, around, and through. I feel it, it resonates. That is how it has always been with me and string things.

Its not just knitting, it so much more. Its every colour of my multitude of flosses, every inch of linen, its every needle of the hundreds in the needle box, its every skein of yarn and every skein of cotton thread. When I have a piece of string and a needle in my hand, I breathe deeper, I feel better somehow. Not so rushed, as if time has slowed. I am in a warp bubble where only the project goes fast but time itself goes restfully and peacefully along.

With a piece of string and a needle I am, I exist, I live.

I get all philosophical like this once in a while, and then the Mr. insists on showing me his Father's Day gift.

I am, I exist, I live, and I laugh a lot. Life is good when you work with needles.

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