[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

The Spindle

I only picked the spindle up for the same reason I won't leave a yarn shop 
without buying something, however minimal: a sense of generalized loyalty 
to all who make their living from fibre arts. This was a really remarkable 
shop, run by a master weaver named Sue. There were two looms, one small, 
one huge, with remarkable webs on them; there were yarns and hand-knits and 
bags of ready-to-spin silk and a marvellous Native American tall spindle, 
very impressive. I wasn't into spinning -- hadn't done it for 30 years, in 
fact, although I've been thinking about it some. But a simple drop spindle 
is no big commitment in any sense, money included. I'd buy it and put it to 
one side to remind me of my spinning days.

Sue, the seductress, was having none of that. She looped a bit of string 
onto the spindle -- you always have to spin onto something already spun -- 
and took a strip of combed wool (called a sliver) and teased out the 
fibers, giving the spindle a twirl and letting it drop, letting the twist 
climb up the fibres, and then twisting the yarn onto the spindle. She did 
this a couple of times and then handed me the spindle and sliver. "It'll 
come back," she said. It did. I left the shop with the spindle, a bag of 
white wool slivers, a couple of other bits of spinning equipment, and 
(rather schematic) directions to a farm where I could find good-quality fleece.

Spinning, weaving, even knitting -- from a practical point of view, these 
make absolutely no sense, as does potting and Lord only knows how many 
other activities. After all, you can save your valuable time and buy the 
wool/cloth/sweater/pot, probably with fewer imperfections than your own 
product. But that's not why people set finger to fibre or clay.

It's partly the geekiness of the thing -- the delight a person can take in 
all the arcane knowledge of the craft, from the factors governing spindle 
speed to the mystery of sock-heel-turning to the technical art of setting a 
loom to the behaviour of glazes.  Geekiness is a lot more widespread than 
many people think. Just look at cooking junkies. Geekiness is *fun*.

For many of us, it's also a sense of connection. Knitters almost 
automatically befriend other knitters; we have a built-in commonality that 
makes connection easy. When I let the twist creep down the yarn and twirl 
up the yarn on the spindle, I am doing something that other spinners 
(overwhelmingly female) have done for millenia; I am standing spinning in 
solidarity with women in Africa, with Navajo women, with my own 
ancestresses who would have been adept with the wheel.

We do it, too, for the peace it brings us. These are reflective activities, 
activities in which the hands are busy but the mind is free to float. They 
aren't, on the whole, conducive to intellectual striving; they're more 
times to struggle with the knots in one's head or one's soul, or to 
contemplate the realities in which we float, or simply to drift, perhaps in 
God's direction. I find that very useful sometimes.

But also, we do it simply to _create_. Foolishness says that destruction is 
fun, and there's an element of truth to that, for anyone who enjoys popping 
bubble wrap or ripping down bad plaster or destroying another person's 
character. But wisdom says that while creation isn't always fun -- there's 
a lot of patience and frustration involved -- it is profoundly joyous. It 
is making something that wasn't there before: yarn out of fleece, web or 
sweater out of yarn.   It is an act of self-giving and of love.  Potters 
and painters leave not just their signatures and fingerprints on their 
creations, but a bit of their souls. It's a strange thing, but try to keep 
your soul all to yourself and it just shrinks. Give bits of it away and it 
grows.

Creations lets us into God's skin, however imperfectly and transiently. 
Just for a moment, we know what it's like to bring something into being 
even on a small scale. A finished web cut from the loom is a small birth, a 
moment of the same joy that lights up the world when the newborn gasps in 
the cold, foreign air and lets out his first protesting, imperious squawk. 
What then is the joy God finds in the spinning of galaxies and the breeding 
of herons and the leap of a deer into the woods?

There are some who look forward to God's destruction of this sinful, fallen 
world, a world so full of suffering and injustice. It's hard not to look at 
the landscape around us and not want God to come in kicking ass and ripping 
the whole mess apart. But that's our anger speaking, and anger has more 
fruitful directions than destruction; anger can propel us into confronting 
what needs to be confronting: the tendency of human beings to treat other 
humans and Creation abusively. Or we anticipate God's wrath and the joy 
we'll feel as we watch *them* be sent to destruction while *we* are brought 
into glory.

But as someone who knits, if not well, and who has made four rather inept 
bits of pottery, not to mention bread and homebrewed beer and two babies, I 
have to protest. I don't think God would ever be destructive. God might 
have to undo a bit to make a correction, or frog a sock heel, or put a pot 
that dried with a crack in it back into the slip bucket,  but that's not 
destruction: it's recycling. I think God is profoundly attached to 
Creation; as long as we have the slightest response back to that love, 
we're held safe in it. God will always desire our building-up, even if 
sometimes that requires a little breaking-down; but God will never desire 
our destruction. Creators aren't like that.  God will not be happy until 
all Creation reaches its fullest growth and joy and completion. If we 
choose to head in the opposite direction, that's our choice, not God's.

For now, there's a plastic bag with five pounds of new-shorn Leicester wool 
sitting in the front hall, and on the kitchen counter there's a plastic 
bucket holding another plastic bag with enough white wool slivers for a 
knitted hat. Next to the bag of slivers there's a wooden drop spindle with 
maybe 25 yards of not-too-lumpy hand-spun one-ply yarn wound up on the 
spindle's base. Every now and again -- like now -- I go out to the kitchen 
and add another yard, twirling the spindle, letting it drop, pulling out 
the fibres, letting the spin run up the yarn -- not too fast! -- winding 
the yarn back on. This is perhaps a foolish way to spend two university 
degrees, but I don't care. I'm making something. I'm learning something. 
I'm in company with spinners in space and time. I am pointing my soul 
towards my own Creator, the one who spun me out of carbon and hydrogen and 
oxygen and a few other elements. Thanks be to God.



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I'm about to hit some sacred cows, and they moo so badly. -- Phyllis 
Tickle, aka The Divine Miz T.