Unravelling With Intention

Imagine being in an apartment surrounded by other apartments; above you, below you, and one on every side. Then imagine a series of high occupancy apartment buildings surrounding your apartment building.

Hundreds of stacked, clustered, neighbouring dwellings on every block. A cacophony of sounds registering at every measure of decibel, spilling and spiralling into what very little private space you can carve out for yourself when living in such close proximity to so many people.

A man sneezes loudly into the atmosphere from his balcony and from my living room I hear his resounding “AAAAACHOOOOOOOO!”

Three different men communicate to each other from their three separate apartment buildings all facing one courtyard (which happens to also be where my apartment faces) where my building is caught in the crossfire. Yelling in shrill reverberations as they point to inconsequential trash on the ground or tell one another to come out front for a chat that you would think would be quieter but is in actuality more yelling at an even closer range.

A woman walks her dog at least 4 times a day and that dog, honest to god, nonstop barks NAY yaps it’s way into blood curdling shrieks that bounce off the stucco exterior walls into my bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room windows.

From inside my home kids inside their home at the end of the hall screaming sound like kids screaming in a gymnasium. The hallway has no soundproofing or carpeting so every sound echos into it. Sometimes I wonder how we can all live with such little privacy but I guess that is part of the infliction of poverty. Most of these buildings weren’t built for people that can afford such privileges as soundproofing. These buildings were built with poured concrete, not drywall. You might presume concrete to be an excellent material for blocking the travel of sound and you would be extremely wrong. You can’t hammer a nail in without the feeling of it bouncing on a stud regardless of where on the wall you are hammering in this building and you can’t expect to have peace on your terms in this building either.

This is merely a vignette of the noise of daily life I absorb. If I went into further detail I would surely exhaust your patience for descriptive recounts and my own for writing them.

Last winter I was really at my wits end and there was no escape because if it wasn’t one thing it was another thing and that’s only when it truly wasn’t EVERYTHING. I shut down and left the present moment completely. I felt catatonic. Randomly (or maybe it was divine intervention) I felt an urge to knit. I hadn’t done that in years and in the past I only dabbled here and there with my grandma on visits and when I met older women travelling that wanted to share a craft. I ordered the wool and needles from a local store and proceeded to sit on my couch and knit for hours. I wasn’t making anything. To create was not my intention. When I finished a ball of yarn I would tie on the next ball and continue. I think I had maybe 3 or 4 different types of yarn. When I went through all of them I would unravel the whole weird long rectangle and start again from scratch.

I was meditating with my hands. I was eyeing the stitches with intense focus, I was actively present to the minutiae of moments. I was saving my life…unravelling symbolically instead of emotionally and/or mentally. For two months I kept knitting in this way until I had an idea spark for a pattern I wanted to invent. I had an intention to CREATE something. If you have experienced depression you might understand that to be depressed is to be drained of life force and life force is the root of creation or creation is the impetus for life force. Whatever iteration makes most sense doesn’t matter the point is by intending to create I was intending to live. The hole I had fallen into became less deep as I figured out how to make this pattern. I fervently tried over and over and kept hitting a wall where I would run out of yarn before the shape I wanted could emerge. I would clench my jaw and unravel it with determination to start again and get it figured out.

I have learned that some things that are experienced emotionally and mentally have to be processed physically to come to a resolution. The ways that I was struggling internally were reflected in how I was knitting. Without knowing it consciously, at the time, I was bringing my struggle outwards and channeling it through my hands because I didn’t have the energy to do much else. I eventually did solve the puzzle of inventing the pattern for the shape I wanted to create and I did in-fact resolve the conflict I felt internally and came to find peace through intentionally unravelling.