It’s a gloriously temperate Thursday night in Kansas City. There’s a group of a dozen or two people laughing in the living room below me.
What am I doing? I’m pumping my fists in the air to some music, joyful that I am learning to knit socks.
I knit, but I don’t have a knitter-brain. It’s just something to occupy my hands, sometimes, a way to create what I want to own. The fact that stitches work together to create something shapely out of yarn is pretty miraculous in my world—hence the celebratory actions! There were a bunch of things on a pattern, that I executed (thanks to a little help from a British lady on YouTube), and now I have part of a slipper.
The thing the knitting bloggers tell you is to follow your pattern and trust that it will work, especially when dealing with sock patterns. “One step at a time.”
On the wall above my desk I have a yellow piece of paper with a freehanded map of France on it, and little names of farms I might like to visit penciled in. Below that I have some Post-Its with the names of the people who run these farms. These are reminders to me of where I am going, who I am going to, soon. Still, they are abstract and hold only a breath of a form, like a connect-the-dots design.
Tonight I looked this map while I was in the middle of being amazed by my sock pattern’s success. They are alike, in a way.
I’ve not felt like the greatest adventurer or risk-taker, in my life. While I have experienced some wonderful escapades, the great travels and things of that nature have seldom been my idea. They have made me very, very afraid. The thought of experimentation has found me crippled with fear. Failure. Lack. Being alone. Not being enough.
What if there was no reason to fear? What if there was assurance that things will be taken care of, that there will be enough?
These questions outline the back-and-forth movement of my thoughts and emotions as I prepare to go. Deep fear and insecurity mingle with simple lack of knowing how to proceed.
There’s a moment of choice: I look at another possibility. I am loved. I am capable. I will never be left. My dreams are good. I make a decision to follow through with my plans: buy a ticket, make a transatlantic phone call, write an email. Furthermore, I share with joy and anticipation. I laugh and rejoice.
Stitch by stitch, things are taking shape. A season is becoming visible to me, now. From where I sit in my Kansas City home at the Bolers’ house at the beginning of February, I look forward. I see months of discovery, experimentation, joy, perseverance, and so much love. There will be laughter, hikes, bee stings, breathtaking landscapes, smelly clothes, criticism, tears, so very many wildflowers, and knowledge of how to make them useful. Many of the people who populate these reveries have faces already and bring smiles to my face. Others have names. Others are a dream in my heart of welcome, instruction, and if we’re lucky, a little romance.
The moment when shape begins to exist is a good, exciting time. I am grateful for it.
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A lovely perspective of a dream taking shape and the steps in between the idea and the reality. Sometimes it seems like there are only dreams and reality, but it's not like that at all. It's an idea that starts to fill out, little by little, and then you can finally start to see it and believe in it. And then you have the faith and courage to keep going. I love this, Maggie. This is good for me to hear/read. I might even write my own thoughts on it, linking back here to my source, of course. :)
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