Skein’s ball and the finished scarf.
The burgundy skein was wrapped in transparent mystery, visible to those who could see. Fortunately that was not me. New to crochet and yarn skeins, I laid the elliptical loops on the floor and drew yarn from the top. All was well for a while; all was about to annoyingly improve.
Over the next few days I haplessly moved the bundle around the room as I worked from different chairs. The skein’s complaints slowly increased. When I drew yarn from the bundle the slightly jostled top loops began to lasso future loops. I ignored portentous signals and jiggled and tugged to free arm-lengths of yarn. With each jiggle I deepened inevitable future entanglement.
The skein raised its voice to offer counsel, the perennial wise counsel of our “inanimate” teachers. Their message is usually inaudible above the din of my pride and certainty, inaudible above my immersive inner narratives. Fortunately my meditative stitching quieted my mind and the skein’s call rose above my mental chatter.
My Inner Expert said that my unwitting self-ensnarement dance was a mistake, evidence of my flawed self or of nature’s mischievous unfairness. The skein had another message. It reminded me of beginners delight in mystery, reminded me to relinquish my shame and regret toward my lack of omniscience. It whispered an irksome message that: “Adventures through bewilderment lead beyond stagnating ignorance”. I reluctantly acquiesced and engaged the lifeless spaghetti pile.
My friend saw me swimming in the morass. She shared her memory of her grandmother rolling skeins into balls to manage their flow. She gently joined me with her unspoken intuition. I felt grateful for her presence, her gift reinforced my confidence that this snarl was worthy of our attention. She began slowly drawing from her end to fashion a ball, I began maneuvering the skein to free the flow from tightening tangles, and the skein began to whisper its secrets.
Poles of uncertainty pulled my focus with inner tension. I simultaneously nurtured the possibility that we would find our way, and conjectured our fate as a series of excised knots and yarn balls. I dreaded that making a single continuous ball would require deciphering our hopeless spaghetti code. My emotions cinched when tangles cinched. I pried open my emotions together with the bolus. My doubt was born from my desire for certainty, from my resistance to swimming in mystery’s waters. I repeatedly suspended my doubt, attached it to buoyant attention and floated back to mystery’s surface.
My wife adjusted her steady and gentle-dynamic tension to maintain our conversation with the yarn. Her responsive tension infused structure and continuity into the mass of lifeless flaccidity; it breathed animating energy into our conversation with Skein. Skein spoke to our questions: “What do you needed now?”, “Does this create space?” Skein spoke through the medium of our life giving tension and we struggled to hear the messages.
Skein’s language was vaguely familiar and my responses became slightly more skilled. I noticed that the yarn sometimes flowed more freely from one side, and then more freely from the other. I rotated Skein and teased apart proximate loops to keep the yarn flowing. We understood that the original loops were free of knots, and we recognized that they could be easily introduced. This brought hope and caution as we took care to pass the ball between loops instead of through them.
The ball slowly grew. I continued wondering when Skein would bind in an emotional pucker, when we would succumb to impatience and Skein would reject our excessive force. Twenty minutes in, I was relieved that half of Skein had been balled. I thought: “Perhaps only two balls.” Then there was a shift. The language of flow became delightfully familiar, and remained delightfully unpredictable. Maybe the difference between resilience and stagnation is in conversing from familiarity rather than predictability?
Ten minutes later, Skein completely passed into one big yarn ball attached to a partly finished winter scarf. Ironically, our three way discussion ended too abruptly. I mourned the loss of Skein. Our conversation far exceeded the tedious logic I had dreaded. We’d animated Skein with life serving in-tensions and learned from Skein’s wisdom.
P.S.
I still hear Skein’s posthumous voice. Maybe Skein’s afterlife is in the influence of echoing messages. I recently heard Skein whisper: “Healthy resolution of tension is in a balance of life serving tensions, rather than flaccidity.”
Skein once warned me that: “Static tension is a myth. All tension creates movement, however slowly it may come.”
Skein weighed in on Story Resolution: “Story resolution is story evolution when expectations tangle in conflict with experiences. Story resolution is a practice of story maturation and perpetuation, rather than seeking story’s end in ‘happily ever after’.”
Do you hear Skein’s voice? What does Skein say to you?