Mittens

I knit a baby blanket for my older grand daughter before she was born.

I imagined her wrapped and comforted and secure within it as I knit. It was my contribution to her coming into the world, this blanket.

knitting creates an inner rhythm, not a sound from the outside like in music, but an inner sense of presence and movement, at the same time. Knitting anchors me within past, present and future. When I flow with knitting, it allows me to experience one true moment of time. The now.

Mystics have long used knitting and weaving as symbols of the creation of the universe. Not only because they create something, but because the flow of the process is akin to meditation, to being present to the one moment of true existence, the one moment that is real. The now.

Like heart beat and breath.

Knit 1, Purl 2. Knit 2, Purl 1.

Once and again, like ocean tides, in and out.

A meditative rhythm of beauty.

She is 7 now, my grand daughter. And that blanket hangs over the back of a rocking chair in her room. That creation connects the time before with the now. She sometimes still snuggles with it.

I missed a whole year of her life during COVID 19 isolation.

A year in which she went from interest in magic and faeries, and angels, and dress up, and stone polishing, to an interest in reality.

"Did you know Gaga that whales don't ever sleep?"

"Did you know Gaga that a thousand million is a trillion?"

I missed a whole year of angels and faeries and dreams and prayers and pretend.

She missed a whole year of playing with her friends, contact with me, loving school and learning, going to the park, loving her teacher. Of confidence. Of security.

She went from being an outgoing happy child to an anxious perfectionist.

We lost touch. Zoom became boring. We moved into our individual fears and our aloneness.

And now we emerge to connect as not exactly the same people.

What do we still love together? She, now school-aged child and me, this Gaga (grandma)? Can we find our way back to each other from this year of deep change?

CATS. We still love cats. And kittens.

We love the way they move. Lick their paws. Glide gracefully. Meow softly. We love kittens and cats.

She is at my house again. We are brushing my cat, Mittens.

As we are brushing my white and red male cat 'Mittens', that my gran has made into a female white cat princess, because..."she IS female and a princess", Mittens by name because of 'their', his/her white paw tips, great globs of under fur and over hair come out in chunks. It is very enjoyable to brush. Mittens loves it and meows and moves their body gracefully to get more and more touch.

"It's a shame to waste this fur Gaga", my gran says. It is so beautiful". I agree with her

"Wait!", I say, thinking. "Maybe we can make yarn out of mitten's fur. "

"Do you think so?", she says excitedly.

"Let me check."

So I check, the way we check almost everything these days, using google. And yes. You can make yarn out of fur!

We are both excited. It is not wasting. It is free. It's beautiful. It's creative. It's just plain purrfect.

So, we joyfully get a spindle and practice making yarn out of mitten's fur. It will take a very long time, my gran's small hands and mine, together carefully, gently, spreading, pulling, twisting to get enough for a small ball of yarn. But we can see it in ours mind's eyes. When we are done, a long time from now, this fur yarn will be used to knit a stuffie or doll sweater.

As we make cat yarn, our tension melts. The tension of this year of isolation and change and fear. We are absorbed in our creating. The rest of the world disappears for a time. We are we. Mittens, she and I, and fur yarn, present only to presence and each other.

My grand daughter is a bit younger than I was when I first learned to knit and she is knitting with kitty fur yarn, but knitting still connects us. It connects past, present and future also. It calms us as we are absorbed by the process. It brings us a joy of connection to each other and an awareness of each moment's perfection and beauty.

Perhaps someday spinning and knitting will carry into a further away future, with greats, and great great gran kids and many many many more kittens.

"Gaga, I want to be an environmental artist when I grow up."

"What is that?"

"It's like what we are doing. Creating beauty with things we already have, so there is no waste, We are not throwing so many things away and making trash."

"Ahhhh", I breath to myself. Peace.

Maybe creativity and reality CAN twist together in beautiful ways.

Maybe knitting and spinning yarn can calm the dread and loss from a pandemic year.

Maybe the ancient arts of spinning and knitting can take on a newness as environmental art.

Maybe the threads of yarn that create knitted patterns, can create patterns of connection; of new ways and old ways, of past and future, that knit and purl lifetimes together.

Maybe we are reconnecting after the oh too long isolation of the COVID19 year.

Maybe we stayed connected underneath it all. As love, love connects us. Love stayed, was always there, and emerged whole out of this year.

Our creation weaves love into our day and our lives, just as I wove love into my gran's baby sweater, almost 8 years ago.