Reflections and Lace

It’s odd for me to sit down with a wish to write for this blog and find I have little to say. Revision – little EXCITING to say. While I have a wish to be entertaining, I can think of nothing suitable to offer up for snickers, giggles, or guffaws. Nothing is wrong. I am not melancholy or morose. While I still struggle to keep my days and nights straight, I am enjoying my recent endeavors to meet new people and have been getting out regularly. My work progresses, and I’ve even conquered typical household problems like a clogged toilet and an argument between my computer and my scanner.




Confidence has reduced the roller coaster to a slightly hilly path, and sleep increases my ability to handle such bumps as bumps, not catastrophic occurrences. I have re-arranged furniture, purchased some lovely hanging plants, and made wonderful progress on my reading and my summer lace shawl. When traveling, I’m knitting the I-cord strips for the baby kimono from Mason-Dixon Knitting, the lost linen hand towel has been returned, and summer progresses at a reasonable rate.




All in all, it seems that functioning smoothly has become such an anomaly that I’m not sure what to do with it!

Wonder of wonders, I actually helped a friend with her resume, and in the process, managed to make inroads on updating my own without having to resort to hypnotic therapy or large doses of alcohol. It should be ready for fall without the pressure that circumstance usually adds to the task. While I continue to struggle with my own reluctance to ask for rides and assistance, I’m getting better at it. I have wondered if part of my reluctance is a fear that I will not contribute enough to be valuable to the person of whom I’m asking a favor – but I’ve evidence to disprove the concern. People seem quite willing to assist, especially since I tend to rotate my requests, rather than concentrating them on one person.

I have noticed the tentative beginnings of a feeling of interconnectedness – tentative, but not filled with concern or guilt. Odd, that. Blindness and depression can BOTH lead to such isolation, and while I have often spent large chunks of time in contemplative mode, walking the hills near my family’s home in southern Indiana, prowling the state forestry, or drifting on our own acreage in the dark, I am in inherently social creature when functioning normally. Despite the concerns that inhibit my encounters with the world, people fascinate me. They are so very interesting, even if I don’t like them!

Despite my conviction that the human race is far less civilized than we would like to think ourselves, I admire and wonder at what we can be each day. Watching a mind work, tracing interactions and responses, examining ideas of self and society and the webs of connection between those perceptions, hearing stories, watching faces as I tell my own, sharing reactions and events, contributing enthusiasm and quiet observation, all the variations both entertain and mystify me.

How to predict the equivalent of a k2together or a yarn over? How to repair a dropped stitch? If the lace metaphor holds, where do I position myself in the pattern? Am I part of a circular shawl, a triangle? A square? If I refuse the position at the center, instinctively knowing that this is not my place at this time, then how to orient my contributions? What part of the design suits my strengths, my predecessors and my antecedents? A quiet anchor stitch, one of many that make up the strength and beauty of the whole? Part of the edging, that intricate extra that must have the means to survive the risks of its tenuous position? How does my position, role, structure, composition change when those around me are altered by chance or choice, circumstance or fate?



The lace has been forming, the pattern starting to develop; I can finally begin to see the order of it. And I think it’s alpaca rather than acrylic!