Maitri's Other Blogs...

Wabi Sabi Fiber Art ~ Healing The Heart With The Hands...

"Healing is a journey deep within oneself -- a search
for soul, the essence of the self. It seeks to balance
the inner and outer worlds, to connect and to
integrate. Healing is the reuniting of the body,
mind and spirit."

~ Diane Mariechild, Motherwit ~

The thing is that somehow or another we have moved up so far in our physical bodies we live in our minds. I think this is the cause of many problems today, inconceivable ongoing depression, a lack of connection with our physical bodies causing eating disorders and obesity, a general listlessness followed by periods of thinking so hard for so long on so many things that we are as if a head floating around without a body. I believe this is a central cause in today's Great Disconnect, and we'd better heal it soon.

I know about this first hand. First, I was abused as a child for a very long time. The outcome is that I have been floating about for most of my 53 years like a head whose body was bumping about on the ground behind me, I, totally disconnected from the fact that it physically existed. Whether I gained weight or got hurt didn't seem to phase me because I was living in my head. But we can't just live in our heads. Now after 3 decades of talk therapy I am on the right medications (which took five years to figure out with my doctor, as far as which meds in which dosages) and I don't care what anyone says, they work and I'm living proof. Now the next step, once I started to re-enter my physical body, was to learn how to keep me there.





I am primarily a writer. That didn't help one whit as far as creating the body/mind balance because it just means I live in my brain 24 hours a day to the point that I can get little else done and don't sleep well at night. Then came fiber art.

I have knitted since I was young, but I was an adult when I began to weave, handspin yarn, and do myriad other fiber genres and I learned something startling. When I stop the world around me and just pick up my fiber art I become wholly absorbed in the work of my hands, my physical body, in what I am creating. I am inside myself and outside of my head. The beauty about being an intuitive artist is that you aren't following patterns (too much slipping back in your head mode) you are following your hands propelled by your heart, your feelings, your intuition. And nothing has been as freeing as crochet for me. I am now working on several pieces. The one you see here and at the top of the page looks to be the first in a line of crocheted jewely I would like to sell, I am also working on the piece you've been seeing all along but as it is getting bigger and moving more slowly now I will stick it in, here and there, as there are significant, noticeable changes. And I am working on a piece of Freeform for our year long FreeForm exchange on my Women's Artistic Soul list where we exchange pieces with new partners each month, and will have a years worth of finished pieces to make something of, with a little list show early next year. Lots of fun and opens your channel to your creativity exponentially.

So once again, I am crocheting for my life. I am adding in beads as I go. I am planning to add in other things. I am beginning to be more mindful about shape with the jewelry pieces so that they are the correct size for the pieces, but even then, there are infinite possibilities for the work.

And so you can begin to see that once you pick up a new craft, it will start floating you downstream through a beautiful landscape of infinite possibilities, and as my hands work, I am in my body, and as I am focused on my body and my hands, my grey matter relaxes a bit, and I am all the more at peace as I feel the myriad pieces of myself finding their way back together, being woven into one great tapestry, my body, my mind, my heart, my soul, my hand, all of a piece. And once you feel this you start to feel many deep shifts as your body and the world around you and your relationships begin to change. You don't effect one thing without affecting them all. Be very gentle with yourself as the ripples of change through your body and life start happening inside of you. It is not only worth whatever comes your way, it is the only way to live and survive.

Find your way to an artform that calls to you. Do it everyday. You'll never be sorry that you did and you will undergo a transformation that will change your life for the better.

Blessings and love to each and every one of you. Now I'm back to my crochet....

Maitri

When A Piece Starts To Get Unruly, The Fun Has Just Begun...

"I know of the way of all things by what is within me."

~ Lao Tzu ~

I think it looks like a rainbow colored taco shell.... of
course, folded in half it looks like an oyster shell...

Now the fun begins. I started at the center with my first crochet stitches ever. With each color change I have tried new stitches or little patterns making each of the rows a little different from one another. I asked the wonderful women on my fiber list, Women's Artistic Soul, for suggestions. And then I sat there a few nights ago, having gone all the way around with the light blue, a very soft thin wool that tends to break easily, and the second go round I had an idea, and I am delighted with it. What is happening is that it is starting to pull the ends in. It will take many more colors to achieve this goal, but I think what it's going to be is a purse, a big round one, with spoolknitted drawstring cord, and spoolknitted or crocheted handles. At least I think that's what it's going to be. One never knows, certainly not the intuitive artist!

And the above quote by Lao Tzu is so apt with a process like this, and it works in two (or more) different ways. If you trust what is within you, you don't worry if you can accomplish your goal, you just do it. And then when you see that you can indeed do it, you gain more confidence in yourself so that the ability to do more things, to manage Life itself, becomes less frightening, and seems more doable. One feeds the other and makes us far more capable of handling the things that come our way.

When I was leaving my marriage in 1999, a woman who had walked that road before me and made it through very difficult times said something to me I have never forgotten, and it is one of the most important things anyone has ever said to me. She said, "When someone asks me if I can do something, I always say "Yes!" and then I go home and figure out how to do it. She is an artist and her freelance work took her down many different avenues. She had enough faith in herself to know that she could jump in one way or another and get the job done, and further, she had no choice, she had to to survive. And survive she has.

I think this is one of the reasons that I have been drawn deeper and deeper into the fiber arts over the years. When you knit, weave, spin, crochet, whatever artform you are working in, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. You can see the thing start to come together, you can see it come to completion, and you look at it and you think "I did this!" And it reinforces within us the knowledge that we can be more than we thought we could, that we can gain a new skill, that we can make a thing of beauty, and this knowledge carries us down the stream of life giving us more confidence along the way. It stands us in good stead, this knowledge that we can create, we can achieve our dreams, and once we know that is inside us, we can tackle anything, we can take on the world.

I know this to be true because I have been going through a very hard time for many months. As the worst of it hit this summer I started this piece of crochet, and there have been times that I have clung to it for dear life, crocheting madly round and round, with no destination, I simply had to crochet. And it has steadied me and is helping me through the hard times. What a gift. A simple crochet hook and a bag of balls of colorful yarn and there you go. What could be easier? Oh, there are multitudes of stitches still to learn and many more kinds of things I will eventually make, but for now, none of it matters. I am crocheting my world together with each stitch, I am following what is within me to create something outside of me, and in doing so am strengthing my inner core so that as the hard times ahead come I will have a tool to see me through. I don't go anywhere without my crochet bag and sometimes, if I get nervous or afraid, a few simple stitches are all I need to help me come back to my breath, relax, and work all of my jangling frayed edges into the "piece" that is myself.

So today I work with the blue, finishing the round I am working on that is starting to draw the edges in and bring the piece together. I am always thinking one color and a certain stitch pattern ahead, and I work the current row in such a way that the next color/row will dovetail in just as I want it to. I think no further than that. The rest will be revealed to me along the way. I just say "Yes! I can do it!" and then figure out how...

Blessings and love to one and all, and trust what is within you, it will lead you where you need to go...

Maitri