Unmaking

It is easy to think of knitting as a craft of making, of generating a new thing where there was nothing before, creating soft order and careful structure out of the chaos of a skein. These days I am finding myself drawn increasingly back toward the source of all that making. I have been picking up my drop spindle for the first time in years to feel the tender strength of light and airy wool twisting into tight yarn. I idly browse the internet for dyeing kits in my spare time and contemplate the risk they may pose to my stove and my cookware. How long will it be before I am keeping sheep, the ultimate source of wool, in the parking lot behind my apartment?

The process of creation taking place in the craft of knitting is far from effortless. When you hold a fresh skein in your hands and prepare to wind it into a ball, anything is possible. But as soon as you cut the ties and slip the long skein around the back of a chair as a makeshift swift, beginning to wind and wind, you start to see the imperfections. Maybe the skein hasn’t been tied properly, so tangles assert themselves. Maybe the dyeing is inconsistent. Maybe your hand-wound ball is shaped more like a lumpy potato than a round grapefruit. And then you start knitting. Mistakes creep into your stitching. You lose patience with your progress. You start adapting the pattern on the fly.

And sometimes… well, sometimes you make it nearly all the way through a project, feeling so proud of yourself, and then you discover that it is all wrong.

Three years ago I bought six hundred yards of beautiful goldenrod-colored wool. I planned to make a fall jacket with it. I treasured the potential in this beautiful yarn and admired the way it looked in the sun. Then I knitted the back panel and one of the side panels of the jacket, plowing eagerly ahead. I was almost ready to begin the second panel when I discovered two things: first, my estimation of the correct size was off, and second, I had completely misinterpreted the pattern for the side panel. All that work: useless.

I stuffed the jacket pieces in a bag and buried them under the rest of my yarn stash. There they sat, surfacing occasionally as I moved to a new apartment, dug through yarn to find needles, and transferred my stash to a shelf. I felt guilty every time I saw them: guilty for failing my beautiful yarn, ashamed that I had given up, embarrassed that I had made such large errors in the first place.

There’s nothing quite like the frustration and shame you feel when your beautiful (and expensive) yarn turns out to have become the most useless thing you could have made – and after hours of hand-aching work, no less. You will be reminded of your own mistakes. The failed garment will haunt you like a ghost in the back of your closet. Three days ago I decided I had had enough of this. I recently accepted that my body simply isn’t the same after a few years of graduate school and various health issues as it was three years ago. This made it easier to pull out the sweater again, to face facts.

But I did not take it out to finish it. I took it out to unravel it. After all, I had only purchased enough yarn to make a size small.

 

As embarrassing it is to screw up a garment, it is an implicit violation of knitting ethics to discard it. Rather than waste hundreds of yards of perfectly good yarn that did nothing wrong, most knitters will opt to rip out their poorly crafted work. Many knitters call this “frogging,” from “rip it, rip it,” an analogue to “ribbit.” Three days ago I started frogging that ill-fated fall jacket, and then I started making a scarf patterned with stitched stars from the fresh remnants.

There are many lessons in yarn, but this is one of the most difficult: that sometimes the penultimate stage of creation is the unmaking of your own labor. The process of unmaking proceeds with a bittersweet kind of love, and with more than a little wonder and grief at how easily and quickly the stitches unravel.

But unmaking lays the groundwork for the beautiful work to come. When the whole arc of the creative process can be seen in full, meaningful creation is impossible without unmaking. It is humbling to recognize that the time has come to unmake one’s own work, but it is a joy to use the resultant yarn – crimped though it may be from languishing in a flawed garment – in a new form. Unmaking reclaims the liberty and potential of a brand-new skein.

I have more confidence in this star-patterned scarf than I ever had in the fall jacket, which now exists only in a few plump balls of yarn. It grows inch after inch from my needles, flourishing thanks to every stitch unmade.

Last first things

The tag on my teabag is preaching to me. The season of last first things has begun.

This is my last first day of school, excluding my Lutheran seminary residency, for the foreseeable future. I have no idea where I will be living or working at this time next year. I managed to postpone my departure from Yale by three more years when I graduated the first time by choosing to study at Yale Divinity School. This time, however, there will be no second chances, no saving things to do next fall, no wandering in the woods of East Rock in a year, no hoping I'll achieve more or study harder or perform better next time around. It is time to assemble my New Haven and Yale bucket list and get to work, time to read every obscure book I'll never be able to locate outside the library of a major research university, time to allot my time to the things that matter most, time to commit fully.

"Love what is ahead by loving what has come before," says my tea tag. I step into this year while remembering six other New Haven autumns, the long bright fall lasting well into November; six other years of watching afternoon sunlight move across my desk as I read and write; six other years of music and of friends who have come and gone (and some who have stayed). When I returned to New Haven after a week away recently, it felt like coming home -- solidly coming home, not the tenuous homecoming of returning to a temporary living arrangement -- for the first time. Six years will do that to you, it seems.

So I will do what I can to love what is ahead by loving and honoring what came before. I know I will hardly be still at all this semester, but when I pause to catch my breath, I will remember the six years that have shaped me. May this bittersweet season of last first things be a blessing.

Grit to Gift

Grit to gift

Strange how grit

should turn to gift,

and yet,

it is so.

Some resurrections

are slow:

not easily won

but worked

from difficult stone.

Can it be I come to love

the taste of bitterness? -- 

the sharp, sweet smell

of the real,

against which

piety fails.

--Katherine Charnley

I have just finished eleven weeks of work as a chaplain in a trauma hospital, and it was not enough.

It is strange to say this about a job that required me to work upwards of sixty hours per week, stranger still when that job required me to work for twenty-four hours straight once each week. It borders on insanity to say this about a job that demanded the emotional equivalent of marathon endurance as I moved from a death to a trauma to an emergency baptism to a new cancer diagnosis, all within a few hours. To miss this job when it came hand-in-hand with the heavy emotional work of self-reflection -- forcing me to face the parts of myself I'd sooner ignore -- is truly madness. But there it is: eleven weeks of chaplaincy in a level I trauma hospital were not enough for me.

I took a second unit of clinical pastoral education (CPE) this summer in order to test myself, to see if I might (or might not) really be called to chaplaincy as a part of my pastoral vocation. During the eleven short weeks of the intensive CPE internship, the hospital threw nearly every possible crisis my way, as I knew it would. It is impossible to describe everything I saw and did: some of it is too tender to repeat to those unprepared to hear it, and every call was filled with the intimacy and delicacy of sacred space. In brief, I was called to serve as part of the trauma team on call, where I saw the bloody and grief-filled aftermath of accidents and crimes; to support families as they chose to remove life support from their loved ones; to help the ill and dying say goodbye to those they loved; to baptize and name critically ill babies; to walk the long journey of stem cell transplants with leukemia patients; to bear witness to the stories of those with sickle cell anemia; to embrace many people as they wept; to offer blessing after blessing after blessing in a hospital where the balance of life and death seems deeply unfair much more often than it seems just.

Yet amid all of this, I consider myself abundantly blessed.

Katherine Charnley's poem "Grit to gift" helped to orient me for the past weeks. The blessing of hospital chaplaincy is not easily won at all. I can remember a particularly difficult afternoon on call when I returned to the office feeling like the hospital was so rough and unfair that it was the emotional equivalent of sandpaper, removing the top layer of my skin. Yet to offer care in such a place as a hospital is to be deeply in touch with the real, to encounter God's baffling presence at the heart of grief and suffering. For now, I find that I encounter God and the Holy with more immediacy and power as a hospital chaplain than I do anywhere else. The hospital is my sanctuary, "the sharp, sweet smell/of the real/against which/piety fails," even when the only odors in the air are blood and antiseptic and grief.

As the difficulty of the grit continues to transform into gift, I am able to say that I would repeat these eleven weeks of chaplaincy in a trauma hospital in a heartbeat -- and mean it with my whole self.

She Restores My Soul

Today is called "Good Shepherd Sunday" in some churches; according to the lectionary, the twenty-third psalm is among the readings for the day.

We sing this gorgeous setting by Bobby McFerrin at Wednesday sung morning prayer at Yale Divinity School, calling upon God our Mother as our good shepherd. I love affirming God as a female presence -- it can feel like a relief amid the flurry of masculine depictions of the Holy One; soul-restoring, even.

Glory be to our Mother and Daughter and to the Holy of Holies...

Parable

Written as one reflection among many upon hospice and palliative care chaplaincy.

Leaving work, I stop to take a photo of roses in the evening sun.

It is mid-October, yet the hospital gardens are still blooming, and I am amazed.

I bend closer, frame the shot, focus, shoot: only once.

On the bus ride home, I can’t stop looking at the photo of the roses,

perfection in a single lucky shot.

Their petals, full of light, are a microcosm of the hospital,

each organic fold a room I entered today.

The brightest is V---’s, the sun streaming in, and he is beaming up at me,

glad to be recovering from chemo in full-bodied light.

The sun slants across the other side of the bloom and I am with A---’s wife,

now nearing the end of the second week of her vigil

and napping at his bedside as the sun touches the blinds.

Shade lends a blue tinge to the lowest petals and I am holding C---’s hand gently,

my other arm around his daughter in the ICU, full of cool daylight;

this man who taught me how to glow with gratitude now dying

as we pray together, grappling with our farewells.

Oh, roses, roses, when the sun touches you, you are lit from within,

even in this fragile season.

Does this radiant work not do the same to me?

Is there awe in my face, and an inner glow,

light reflected and absorbed?