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