Rhena Writes

Tag: knitting

  • If a gift falls in a forest and no one is there to receive it, does it make a sound?

    Gifts, the having of, the creation of, the giving of, the receiving of: it’s all been on my mind lately. I often talk a big game about the spirit of how I give. Sometimes I’ll make something handmade — mostly knitted — with the intention of giving it to someone specific. Hand knitted items are work. They take a lot of time and a lot of thought. But this is all a process that I enjoy. Knitting nourishes my soul — the act of then giving the item to someone else is secondary to all of that.

    And what I try to keep at the forefront of my mind is just the idea that once I give the gift away, it’s out of my hands. I give in the spirit of not expecting even a thank you in “return”. The intended recipient has rarely asked for the gift, after all.

    One time, however, my philosophy around giving these times of handmade gifts was tested.

    I made an item for someone. As usual, I sent it off. I did track the package (maybe that was my first mistake so I knew that it got at least as far as this person’s front porch. And then: I heard nothing back about even receiving the gift. Not a text, not a note, nothing….

    So of course, I started to make up all sorts of stories in my head. The person hated my gift. Someone stole it. This person was busy and forgot to contact me. I considered cyber-stalking them to see if I could see the gift in any on-line pictures. I debated asking mutuals if they had seen the gift or to try to subtly mention to the recipient to find out whether they received it. I thought about how I could ask the person directly. If someone stole it from their front porch, surely they would want to know that so that they could… what? I don’t know. Around and around I went in circles in my head.

    There was nothing I could do that didn’t go back on my original spirit of giving a gift. I just had to accept that I may never know what happened after it left my hands. And I had to trust that it will land where it needs to be.

    But what I do know is that it did what it needed to do for me while it was in my hands as I was creating it. And even now, it continues to serve me by teaching me lessons about sharing gifts. Of course, I’m talking about both tangible and intangible gifts. It’s no coincidence that the meaning of “talents” in the biblical parable means monetary wealth as well as gifts both physical and spiritual. I have received certain abilities including the focus required to be able to knit. I show my gratitude for these abilities by using them and then, in turn, sharing them with other people. What happens after that, what the next person does with that is out of my hands, literally.

    Of course, I’m writing also about things like creating a blog and sharing it on-line. The time, focus, vocabulary, etc… that I use to write a blog are gifts given to me. And once I send these words out into the universe, I can’t control what happens to them.

    When I sit down to knit, I focus on the tactile sensations of the needles slipping through my fingers, the softness of the yarn and the squishiness of the fabric that’s emerging from the two. I relish in picking out colors and patterns. I sometimes sit back in wonder that my body and brain are able to coordinate to create something that might be useable or beautiful or both. Nowhere in this sheer joy is there any consideration for how anyone else might respond to my knitting.

    It’s taken me a long time to feel the same way about my writing: that it’s the process of using this gift that I’ve been given, of unraveling words and ideas and images on the page. And then, yes, hitting publish or send or share. And to just sit with the process without thinking about where it might land and how it will be received.

    And, yes, of course, I’m also writing about parenting and sending my kids off into the world, trying to be present to them when they are with me and then trusting that they will land where they need to be even if I don’t know where that might be.

  • Updates from beside the wood stove

    There are worse things, I suppose, than having so many things to do that fill me up and energize me. These past few days, it’s been cold enough that I’ve been making a fire in the wood stove. This has meant that a portion of each day has been spent alternating between reading and listening to a book while knitting next to the fire. It’s exceedingly cozy.

    I’ve been listening to The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna which I think was written specifically to be listened to while knitting next to a wood stove. All of this feels very indulgent. But also very necessary. I received (yet another) medical bill in the mail today and I realized that the hours I spent being cozy and calm was shoring me up to deal with that particular challenge and other challenges yet to come. In spite of all of my health challenges, the professionals often comment on how my blood pressure is ideal. And I think that taking care of myself in these kinds of ways might have something to do with that.

    These are not the socks I’ve actually been knitting these past few days; this is a pair that I finished before it was fire season. My daughter selected the colors and pattern from my stash.

    I’m grateful for all of the work that my past self put into making sure that I could weather these challenges. Many years ago, I learned to knit. And in the past few years, I’ve accumulated enough skeins of yarn, patterns, and skills that I can pick up a project pretty quickly. It gives me something for my brain and hands to do. Idle hands being what they are… And, of course, there’s always the satisfaction of finishing an item and then giving it to someone, sending it off into the world where it will do its thing. With each item I make, it’s a practice in letting go and in trusting that it will end up doing what it needs to do, being where it needs to be without any sort of effort from me. Once that final strand is woven in (ok, and I block it), it’s out of my hands. I’m done. It’s an exercise in letting go of control. Of course this translate into other areas of my life: parenting specifically. But also even with writing. I put the words on the page and hit publish or otherwise send it off. What happens beyond that is up to the universe. I have to be ok with that or else I’d never do any of it. But I am. And so I do.

  • Becoming unraveled with this question: leader or follower?

    Daily writing prompt
    Are you a leader or a follower?
    View all responses

    A few months ago, my husband bought a two-player cooperative video game called “Unravel Two.” Soon after, my son asked me to play it with him. I’m not a huge video game player. I’ll play the occasional round or two of Mario Cart and I think I might have an animal crossing account that hasn’t been opened in years. I sometimes like to watch the kids play something, but if it’s something they’re really excited about, I’d rather hear about it from their perspective.

    So sitting down to play with him was a novel experience for me. And for him.

    It’s a charming game centered around two small yarn creatures who are attached to each other with a string. They have to work in tandem to swing from place to place, build bridges, jump and climb through various scenes. It’s a bit like parkour. When we sat down to play, the duo was in a park and had somehow gotten so tangled up in what looked like a bike rack that we had no choice but to start the scene over. As a knitter, the whole thing was very relatable. As a non-gamer, it was, well, not.

    My son tried to teach me what buttons to push when and I managed to muddle through some sections. Thankfully, my character could also jump on his back sometimes and we could piggy back our way through bits and pieces. But that didn’t work for everything. Sometimes, he just took my controller and pushed the buttons to move my avatar. But there were times where both the little red one and the little blue one had to be moving simultaneously. Sometimes one had to lead and the other had to follow. Connected, as they were, with this yarn umbilicus, both had a role to play.

    My son was immensely patient with me. Probably far more patient than I sometimes am when I’m trying to get him to do something in person. This is in an of itself a lesson to me about leadership and much more.

    So what’s the answer to the question?

    I’m a leader following myself.

    *************************

    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. 

  • Knitting and Cancer

    “You can sit and knit while receiving your infusion.” The physician’s assistant who conducted my chemotherapy orientation (yes, just like for freshman newly arrived on campus but with fewer ice breakers) made the whole process seem almost pleasant. And I was, in fact, a knitter, the type of knitter abbreviates “works in progress” to WIPs and, at the time, had no less than three WIPs in various, extremely cute project bags and one yarn stash large enough to require a big bin. But it had been months, maybe even a whole year or so since I had knitted. I had let that particular hobby drift to the wayside. I didn’t really think that cancer treatment would be the time that I was going to pick it up again.

    I love knitting. There’s a certain satisfaction of language fluency in reading and successfully following a pattern. And there’s the return to a WIP again and again, the gradual progress.  I love, of course, to finish a piece and then to give it to someone knowing that I already squeezed maximum enjoyment in the making. Any further happiness on the part of the recipient is mere extravagance. There’s also a human connection: not just between me and the person I’m giving it to, but between me and the shepherds, the spinners, and the dyers too. Perhaps most of all there’s the connection to the pattern maker, who spent countless hours converting the image in their head into yarn and then paper words for me to read and then reverse the process. I don’t personally know any pattern makers. But I know pattern makers. Know what I mean?  What a remarkable thing: to be able to spend weeks inside someone else’s head without every having met them. In science fiction, there’s often some sort of machine (in Star Trek it’s a transporter) that dematerializes an object and then rematerializes them somewhere else. Sometimes knitting is like that. 

    A few weeks after my orientation, I was sitting in my oncologist’s office with my husband for a pre-treament check-in with my doctor and his trusty medical transcriber. My eyes were closed and I was rubbing my fingers across my forehead. All I could think was complete darkness. Just blank. It was probably only seconds but it felt like minutes of just… nothing. Somewhere at the back of my brain, I felt there was a word or maybe a question that I was trying to retrieve. I felt the doctor and my husband waiting. The medical transcribers fingers poised on his keyboard. Finally, the doctor’s voice cut through. 

    “Are you having trouble recalling words?” he asked. 

    “Ya’ think?!?!” I wanted to reply back, but while the snark was there, the language to convey it was gone. 

    “Yeah,” I said. “I think I had a question, but now I can’t think of it.”

    The doctor reassured me that this is normal and that words would come back. What could I do but believe him?

    As it had been explained to me, chemotherapy targets rapidly dividing cells. Ideally, this means that it wipes out cancerous cells. Realistically, hair follicles, the digestive tract, skin and immune cells can all be collateral damage. In my own way of thinking about it, while on chemotherapy, my brain also wasn’t able to form new neurons. This is how I explained the language loss to myself. Or maybe it was the stress of the whole situation. Or that my known information was being overwritten by new cancer patient vocabulary: HER negative, dexamethasone, neuropathy, taxane, and a dozen other that I realize now I never actually learned. Somewhere along the way, I decided to leave it to the doctors and nurses. My own language became much more rudimentary: sleep, pain, eat, poop. At times, I was an infant once again. I could feel people around me internally cheering when they could illicit a smile or laugh from me, just like they do with babies. 

    I never did bring any knitting projects with me to chemotherapy treatments. Knitting is a relaxing pastime but it is also an act of resistance. It is all the things that modern, western society and capitalism looks down upon: feminine, slow, collective, inherited knowledge, sustainable, creative and nourishing. In our culture, it takes time, energy, and focus to maintain those types of activities. So does cancer treatment. The second months of my chemo involved Benedryl, which would usually make me sleepy, and ice packs on my hands to help prevent nerve damage to my extremities. I couldn’t have knit even if I’d had the energy to open up my WIPs and figure out where I’d left off. Besides, in the midst of all of this, it was impossible to prioritize knitting. All those years of learning and doing and making, I shoved it all to the back corner of my brain. Would I ever return to it? It didn’t matter. 

    But no, there’s more to it than this. I just admitted that my language abilities are greatly diminished. And yet here I am, writing and asking you to trust me that this is all going somewhere in spite of my reduced capacities in the very medium in which we are currently communicating. Am I an unreliable narrator then? Are we all? Here. Let’s go back. I trusted the doctors to know the words necessary to eradicate the cancer. Now, I need to trust myself that I have the words to tell this story. It’s not an easy thing, trust. 

    Spoiler alert: I’m knitting again. This fall, I made a charming green hat for my charming nephew. (I’d drawn his name in our family gift giving.) It’s been a pleasant little surprise each time I’ve picked up my knitting these days. It’s so easy! I remember all of it, each of the little steps from balling the yarn to casting on, checking gauge to reading a pattern. And where I’ve forgotten, there’s someone on-line or a book with the necessary information. How did this happen that I can still do all of this? I was recently doing an Old Norwegian cast on and it felt so natural that I wondered whether my ancestors from there weren’t gently working through my bones. 

    The question that I had in the doctor’s office popped into my head one day. I’d wanted to ask if he thought I needed to start on the antibiotics he was prescribing right away or just have them on hand in case of infection. It turns out that he’d already explained that and my husband was there, paying attention where I could not; his brain forming neural connections while my own cells were otherwise occupied. 

    And here we are, at the end of this post, ready to bind off, having sustained each other’s attention against all the odds and distractions. And still here.