Spinning a Yarn

For over a year we’ve been trapped in a touchless world.

And for those of us who are single and live alone, even physical proximity to other humans vanished in this pandemic. Even in communion through video calls we were reduced to technological approximations of ourselves, images and audio. Like paper dolls back lit with blue light, we dwell in posts and pictures, online content, our two dimensional facsimiles of real life.

Even with self-care practices in place, I’ve felt utterly disembodied.

Normally I could paint or write my way back to happiness. Dance with colors or world-create in my imagination. But neither of these escape hatches satisfied in the past year and a half. Writing took place on the same cursed instrument I had been chained to for work, and the last thing I wanted after a day of a screen was to stare into the blank white of a document. Painting proved a little better. At least I could circle the canvas laid out on my kitchen table. But when I finished, the results remained two dimensional.

I needed to make with my hands.

I began weaving. 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 plastic loom kit I found in the sale section of the craft store. At first I began very much like a painter, picking colors and shapes, juxtaposing and imitating wall hangings I liked from posts online. 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 these held one 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, and changed color palettes. I danced with geometric shapes, elongated lines, and with my needle I dashed, and stippled, and crosshatched yarn.

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.

Through the work I could feel myself weaving my way back to normalcy and to joy. As I knotted and then snipped away the excess yarn at the completion of each piece, I would run my hands back over the surface of it. My fingers brushing the topography, hills and valleys, curves and hard places, just like I have in my person.

Life began to imitate Art. I began building a gallery wall of the woven victories 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 little hatchback 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 earth 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 copied landscapes of places I missed visiting, and then I imagined my own. The House of Three Moons came as I imagined making a new home. I dreamed of the day when my apartment would no longer be my workplace, but simply a sanctuary.

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. When I have guests again and they stroll through my hallway, they may simply see the product of manic crafting so many of us delved in during the pandemic. But I know that each of these masterpieces are how I wove my way back to happiness, sinew by sinew, and skein by skein into the woman I am, embodied and whole.