No epiphanies this week. Just a hat. I decided to try making one with lace, rather than straight ribbed stitches, and like how it’s coming out so far.
Boria and Kolya both keep sleeping on my Uglii Chair Afghan, which is annoying. Kolya wants to chew the ends of my knitting needles.
I think I’ll make him into a hat.
Coyote poses in front of my mobile craft dalek, three drawers and a surface for dreams.
It’s strange. As I look back on 2015, I wrote less fiction than I usually do, despite putting out several books and writing a short story for a podcast. I’ve also knit a lot less than I’m used to, though I’ve finished more than I think I have when I take time to talley.
The nature of 3-D creation, things like making soap, knitting, and sewing, to name a few, is that they all operate in the real world, the three-dimensional space in which we physically live. To an anorexic, this physical space thing is puzzling. By and large, we live in our minds, and coming down out of the mind into realspace can be scary and unfamiliar.
Oddly enough, my three-dimensional experimentation this last month and a half has been at the gym, rather than my crafts. In going to the gym everyday except holidays, I’ve learned a number of things. I already knew that “showing up on the page” is the way to accumulate words, it never occurred to me to apply it to the gym and getting fit. Now that I’ve made the connection, it seems obvious – I mean, if “showing up at the barre” works for dancers, or “showing up at easel” for painters, why wouldn’t it work for fitness? I’ve been working to apply the same regularity that I have with morning pages to my gym-going. It’s been working, if a lot less spectacularly than I thought it would have to be.
I suppose that’s the lesson, in many ways: reality is a lot less spectacular than the echo chambers of social media and drama would have us believe. The echo chamber wants us to be up in arms, heartbeats pounding, as we worry about the next crisis in some other place over which we have no control and no actual connection. We need to remember that we are physical bodies, not just mental, and that as such we have our own realities. The echo chamber is not reality. On a good day, it’s a reflection of reality; most of the time, it’s simply a tool of drama llamas.
So, while my thoughtful Thursday is less about crafts and writing, it’s still about three-dimensional space and writing. They relate to each other more profoundly than we realize.