Adolescence

Finishing up a knitting piece (!) and listening to the Everly Brothers sing "All I have to do is dream." Thinking, wondering if mine was the first generation to have its own music in adolescence.
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Well, that took two hours, longer than I thought, and turned out worse than I expected. I dread meeting up with the experienced knitters I know, who will see at a glance that I lost a stitch near the beginning, and then one near the end, too. They are the hard parts, a little different than the knitting endlessly along the middle. I could always hide if I saw a knitter.

Furthermore, it goes with nothing in my wardrobe. Nearest, with my new old blue flannel plaid shirt. It's about on that level of undress, anyway. Kind of scruffy looking. Just plain knitting. I thought that would be easy. Well, I almost got it right, look at it that way.

And I realized as I worked on the thing - a scarf, your first project - that it is one of my high school colors. We were maroon and gold, two colors I hate for their own selves, and for the memory of high school, too. I grew to hate the color. What was I thinking when I bought it? My eye was drawn to the yarn, Bamboucle it was called. It just captured me. I didn't think how bad I look in yellow or what I was going to wear it with. It was about some dream, a dream of thread made from bamboo and linen. I love bamboo, the plant, and didn't realize how a four-ply yarn would split on me, how the slight nubbiness would add to my difficulty knowing what I was doing, without giving it any nubbiness at all. I bought bamboo needles, too, and they are very nice. I kept on enjoying them, anyway.

Thus I have wasted my Monday morning to end up a little grouchier than when I woke up. I am supposed to be saying Yes to everything. Yes, this is a damnable yarn. Yes, it's a gloomy day. Yes, at least I am done with it. I am done with it. I don't have to wear it. I certainly don't have to go buy clothes to go with it. As an artist I have lots of things that didn't turn out. Hey, here they sit in my file drawers, in my drawing portfolio. That's something it's hard to take, the unease when the finished project is not what you wanted it to be. Not great. Or maybe it is, if you just look at what it is, not what you wanted it to be. There, I knew I'd arrive at Zen eventually.

The Zen of Not Knitting

This winter I established to my own satisfaction that knitting is not meditation - and it is not Zen. Having begun four projects and finished one, and put the gently used yarns in the Cupboard of Discarded Arts, I think knitting is much more like the unexamined life.

You begin wandering in the candy store, imagining a lovely unique creation. Here is a sweet yarn - puppy love! You invest in the materials (which cost twice as much as you expected) and go home to begin with a light heart. Tongue between teeth, you cast on, proud to make this beginning.

And it soon becomes clear that the yarn doesn't handle like you thought it would. You persist.

After an hour or two you notice you made a mistake way back, who knows how, when you were trying so hard to do it right. Trying to fix it makes it much worse.

Eventually you get it going smoothly. But you can see now that the whole thing is going to take many more hours work than you thought, and frankly, not be as pretty as you thought. And now that you've got the stitches down pretty well, your mind is free to tumble all around unhealthful thoughts because, face it, knitting is the same old thing, not that interesting to watch. Chopping carrots is much more interesting - at least you could cut yourself. That's why people like to watch TV or talk while they knit. It's boring. Anyway, you already have a scarf. Several, in fact.

Here is a moment of realization. You can now take the road much taken and just keep slogging along doggedly because, darn it, you said you would. You had a goal. You don't want to be a quitter. Or you can sigh and put the project aside, in that corner of your mind stacked with small guilts - all the things you really meant to do. (Don't you hope you don't find yourself on your deathbed whispering, I only wish I'd got the laundry caught up?)

Is there a middle way through this muddle? The way I see is too simple by far, and as Lao Tsu said,

The Way is simple but the crooked path is more popular.

Let the project be in the past, let it flow away. Go do something more rewarding.

If that doesn't want to work, you can try thinking of the knitting as an experiment, like a first marriage. In an experiment, there is no success or failure, at least in theory. You try something and see what happens. Think of it as not being attached to the outcome. That's Zen.

Buddha Knitting

[Buddha Knitting, from FunkyQuail on Etsy]
I was sitting here in the light from the west window, knitting along and thinking about the ways knitting (and many other relaxing activities) are not equivalent to zazen, the specific Zen method of meditation . . . when I realized I had just knit several stitches on the new row when I should have purled. Ah, I thought. Attention. Karma. That's how Buddhism is; it sticks out a foot and trips you up now and then.

Hardly any teaching is more fundamental to Buddhism than the idea of karma, or cause and effect. While it is sometimes the job of psychotherapy to examine the weighty karma of our past, Zen teachers tend to wish you'd drop it; our job in spiritual work is different. Our job in our lives is to build good future karma, for ourselves and the world we are firmly knit into. Whether or not we think about it, we do build our futures with every action. Nowhere is this more obvious than in knitting. Drop one stitch, and down the line you're going to know it.

I am new at this, and have already had the experience of ruining everything by trying to go back and repair a mistake; my teacher can do it, but I don't understand the stitches deeply enough. I tore out the last project twice, and then decided to buy a more forgiving yarn, a smooth, multicolored blend, and not to tear anything out, but to forge bravely ahead. The intended recipient will not be critical, but astonished that I could knit at all.

But to carry even this modest intention forward requires attention, a quality emphasized in Zen. Mine lapsed only a few seconds (Too conceptual, my teacher used to say) but that was enough. It's like walking blithely along and slipping on a patch of ice. Pow. Your knee will never be the same.

Knitting might not be zazen, but it makes good work practice, which is called samu in the Zen tradition. We (are supposed to) do our work with the same wholeheartedness we (are supposed to) bring to meditation. So it's more of learning to focus, to be all the way with whatever you're dong.

Knitting will surely cultivate attentiveness in me, though I am told you eventually get to where you can knit and watch TV. I doubt that I will. Not Boston Legal.

The Unfortunate Ongoing Disaster of Knitting

Isn't this pathetic? And you have no idea what I went through to take the picture and download it, for this is a day when machines are rising up against us in this house, to say nothing of what I went through to knit this uhh, this beginning of a square.

It is about the church having a project of knitting squares for afghans for the poor, a curious project actually. It certainly costs more to make one of these afghans, just in dollars spent on yarn, than to go to Kohl's and buy fleecy blankets - the Christmas stuff is probably 75% off by now, and they pay you to take the Halloween stuff. (So what's a little zombie on a fleecy throw if it keeps you warm?) But we are doing this, nevertheless. It is a way of giving our energy somehow, our caring. I went to Pat's knitting class with that thought, and also for the purely ego-centered reason that some decades ago I tried and failed to learn how to knit. I hoped that decades of spiritual work would have transformed my ability.

It didn't go that badly in class. Pat just quietly went around and fixed our problems. I learned how to turn at the end of a row, I thought. I brought home the whole business and couldn't wait to get at it the next day. And you see what that led to.

There ought to be a pony in here somewhere, as the old joke goes. And there is at least a metaphor. I looked at this knitting - the varicolored pastel yarn, named Lullabye, had so much potential - and I thought, this looks like my life up till now. Except you could unwind this, maybe, and do it right. And you can't unwind your life.

We are all sitting in the middle of a sort of landfill that is our past, I suppose, except the occasional Buddha. Rummage around a little and it contains things that smell bad: someone sworn to hate you, someone else you just can't stand; all those darn books you should do something with; the shoes that are actually a little small; the heavy purse you paid too much for; the smell you can't get out of the car ever since the summer day you forgot the turkey breast in the trunk. I'm not giving anything away about my life, I'm sure. Doesn't everyone have unanswered e-mails relentlessly brushing their ankles and yowling?

The problem is not actually the mistakes I made. The problem is that what I chose to knit, not understanding the implications, was a square for the afghan project. Right away that meant standards. In knitting, the standard is simple: perfection. Miss a single stitch - or whatever I did - and it creates this whole karmic mess.

Obviously, I am not up to the afghan challenge. I am going to go back to the class next Tuesday and tell Pat I just want to knit a scarf for myself. If it's my scarf, I will just forge ahead, accepting my mistakes. I won't mind it being a little gollywhompers. That's the term my father-in-law would use to describe my unfinished square; he's from Georgia. A practical man, he would hasten to say, "It'll keep your neck warm, won't it?" Engineers think in terms of function.

Functionwise, I don't need a scarf. I have six or eight knitted scarves, most of them bought at the last church auction, where they were donated by people who must knit up a storm. I don't need another scarf. This is not about function at all, but about the pleasure I did experience, yes I did, of actually doing a stitch, and then another, smoothly, liquidly. It is just like riding a bicycle once you get the hang of it. You should expect to skin your knees.