A Body of Yarn

Teaching is an embodied profession.

I bound in front of the white board to add a new idea from a student during a class brainstorm session. You can find me coughing through axe body spray or mango hand lotion as I lean over to ask a leading question of a collaborating small group. I circle students at desks in the back of the room, one hand holding the short story in front of my face, the other gesturing as my posture and vocal intonations shift back and forth between Bilbo and Gollum exchanging riddles in the dark.

After students have gone, only then will you find me seated at my desk or my computer. For over ten years I have taught high school English, Drama, and Journalism. So long that I forget what professional development session it was where I first heard my teaching style described. Though expertise in my field I do have, I am more coach than professor. I am not "a sage on the stage." No, I am "a guide on the side." I'm the teacher who draws near and is silent until you give an answer, you decide what you think, you discover what you believe. Occasionally I'll hand you a tool to help you express yourself, but you speak in your own voice in our classroom, because you are also embodied. And I rejoice in that moment of transformation I witness in real-time: when your voice, your shoulders, your micro-expressions all change as you arrive at that place of understanding the world and yourself. You know that you know things, that you are intelligent, at times even wise, and it is good.

And then, the great reduction came.

Suddenly we were bodies, faces, voices, no longer. March 2020 and I became a flat image on a screen, still instructing but riveted in place within the frame of my laptop camera. And because our school district did not require students to even unblock their cameras or respond verbally during class sessions, they were reduced to mere avatars. I logged in to our class meetings to behold circles filled with school pictures, each with a name beneath them. I read aloud to and asked questions of a yearbook page. And for four months we were disembodied media.

I only got to hear their voices if students answered questions in the chat, or actually turned in assignments. A large number of them didn't do either, and I didn't blame them. We were all in Plato's cave now, staring at shadows on our desks, on our walls, and in our palms of the world we used to know. I missed my students terribly. I missed myself. All of us flattened into pixels and light.

Normally when I am grieving, I paint or write to release the pain, to dwell in my sadness safely. A non-representational painter, I find myself in colors, brush strokes, and shapes. But painting would not satisfy. Circling a canvas on my kitchen table still felt distanced. And the work I produced only lived in two dimensions, just like the screens I was trapped in.

Writing was even worse, no words I could compile using the same damned instrument I was bound to in my classes, could adequately express the poverty of what my teaching had become. And from what I read on social media my isolation stood as no solo experience. We were a nation estranged from normalcy, from others, and from ourselves. But even to say so in words was not enough. Words signified the problem but could not embody it. Acknowledging loss in paragraph or post couldn't restore me as I'd hoped it might.

Summer came, and I visited friends in Dallas. We found an art instillation in the city that we could visit masked: Intangible A Fiber Fairy Tale- an immersive art experience featuring some of the top yarn and textile artists in the nation. In a nation where proximity and physical touch had vanished, we were invited to stand next to the art and touch it. To climb in some exhibits, pose as mermaids in others, and to draw near and witness the thousands upon thousands of multicolored strands woven, crocheted, knitted, tied and shaped by the hands of the artists. Here was color, but also texture, depth, dimension. Softness and curves and indents.

Artists ourselves, my friends and I went home, picked up some yarn at a craftstore and began making. We tried different techniques, we pulled tight and left loopingly loose, we braided and cut, and the cats delighted in chasing our experiments as we tossed them across the apartment.

I returned home, summer ended, and the school year came again. Still distance learning. A return to disembodied memes. I couldn't take the class outside on a sunny afternoon to read in the shade, inhaling the remnants of the marine layer and the scent of fresh cut grass. I couldn't see their faces turn to each other as new answers were shared. But we soldiered on as we must. And I prayed and tried to paint, and felt stilted as ever.

That's when I began to weave in earnest.

What had been a hobby before became a necessity. I had already knitted and crocheted, but now I drew the colors with a needle within the small square of a Martha Stewart kit I found in the sale section of Micheal's. At first I began very much like a painter, picking colors and shapes, juxtaposing and imitating wall hangings I liked from Pinterest. What I produced felt very controlled, and inorganic, and I didn't like it, but I kept going. The space I worked within reminded me of the screens I stared at daily, the emptiness before me and within me, but with one distinct difference: touch.

My hands began to know things that my eyes could not. Thickness and thinness of skeins, the slight catch of wool in contrast to the fluid slip of polyester. Cotton's natural bulb, and the sneaky elasticity that would warp if I pulled too tight. I looked at Moroccan, Mexican, and Indigenous weaving techniques, changed color palettes. I danced with geometric shapes, elongated lines, and with my needle I dashed, and stippled, and crosshatched yarn.

My fingers touched the topography of each new piece and understood. Life began to imitate Art. I began building a gallery wall of the weavings in my hallway. An early work of coastal hillsides had been a substitute for going to the beach. But now gazing at it in inspiration, I felt the energy return to jump in my honda fit and actually drive to the beach on weekends. Working in the round with embroidery hoops I got at a thrift store, the small sunbursts reminded me to go outside and walk in the sun. I hiked hills by my house, and feeling the give of the earth beneath my feet made me dream of the layers of time I stood upon. Each their own season and color all pounded into layers of diatomaceous earth, not only in chalky white, but in reds, blues, and purples. More followed from my mind's eye. A lonely white mountain gazing on the northern lights, a lime green sunset or sunrise over a vacant beach.

I remembered the line from the Emily Dickinson poem I loved in high school, where time itself is described as twine rolled into balls and placed in drawers. To unroll a ball of yarn, to unravel a skein and guide it along a new journey was to take time itself into my hands. Whatever emerged in the making entered dimensional space, occupying but also exceeding two dimensions, because I could touch what I had woven.

Yarn is a continuous often piled strand composed of either natural or man-made fibers or filaments and used in weaving and knitting to form cloth.

A yarn is also a story.

And where words had failed me, the consummate storyteller, fibers stepped in to build back the narrative of living. I copied landscapes, but then I imagined my own. The House of Three Moons came as I imagined making a new home for myself, I place where I could dwell again that was no longer my workplace. A sanctuary that rebuilt me brick by brick, sinew by sinew, and skein by skein into the woman I am, embodied and whole.

The Lime Green Sunrise started as a sunset, but evolved as I returned to my classroom and taught a small fraction of masked students each day. Last Friday, I stood on a green field and watched our graduating class take to the stage. Seniors who only had their final high school victories over screens, sat mere feet from one another in their graduation robes. The bright colored stoles of their regalia included folded neon flowers and serapes embroidered with "Class of 2021" all carefully made by hand.

A day that began overcast, pale and cool, transformed again as the sun came out. And I watched that moment when a student pulled their mask aside and turned to face the photographer. Each paused to stand in the sunlight, some smiling and each holding their diploma at their chest, real people once more. That's when I knew it what I had made lately was not a sunset, but a sunrise. With their lovely faces before me, I could see at last the thread that I had been stranding through my making all along: this day. The day we would leave our caves and shadows behind, and step out again to greet each other in sun.