From the Farthest Shore

Ursula K. LeGuin's third novel in the classic Earthsea trilogy holds these pearls, which I gather to me now.
"It is time to be done with power. To drop the old toys and go on. It is time that I went home. I crave to walk on the mountain, the mountains of Gont, in the forests, in the autumn when the leaves are bright. There is no kingdom like the forests. It is time I went there, went in silence, went alone. And maybe there I would learn at last what no act or art or power can teach me, what I have never learned."

"A kind of weariness of dread, of waiting for the worst, grew in Arren all day long. Impatience and a dull anger rose in him. He said, after hours of silence, "This land is as dead as the land of death itself!"
"Do not say that," the mage said sharply. He strode on a while and then went on, in a changed voice, "Look at this land; look about you. This is your kingdom, the kingdom of life. This is your immortality. Look at the hills, the mortal hills. They do not endure forever. The hills with the living grass on them, and the streams of water running... In all the world, in all the worlds, in all the immensity of time, there is no other like each of those streams, rising cold out of the earth where no eye sees it, running through the sunlight and the darkness to the sea. Deep are the springs of being, deeper than life, than death..."
He stopped, but in his eyes as he looked at Arren and at the sunlit hills there was a great, wordless, grieving love. And Arren saw that, and seeing it saw him, saw him for the first time whole, as he was.
"I cannot say what I mean," Ged said unhappily.
But Arren thought of that first hour in the Fountain Court, of the man who had knelt by the running water of the fountain; and joy, as clear as that remembered water, welled up in him. He looked at his companion and said, "I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?"
"Aye, lad," said Ged, gently and with pain.
They went on together in silence. But Arren saw the world now with his companion's eyes and saw the living splendor that was revealed about them in the silent, desolate land, as if by a power of enchantment surpassing any other, in every blade of the wind-bowed grass, every shadow, every stone. So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again."

November's gift

The earth in late November is transmuted, or simply muted, by the cold--no longer snapping sharply with the sudden shock of early autumn, but penetrating deep into the bones of the ground and settling there in a long persistent throbbing.
Grass bleaches, showing the raw earthen colors beneath, ochre, gray, and brown beds laid bare on the hillside, and trees assume their purple silhouettes, skeletal finery slender and tall against the mountains' shadow.
November is life turning over in bed and dreaming of the bones of the earth.
Not black-and-white, not technicolor, this dream is filled with sepia tones, faded textures, and nostalgia for the liveliness of summer. Clay and slate predominate in a once-vibrant landscape, violet and charcoal populate shadows that pooled in summer with deepest green.
"Purple mountains majesty and amber waves of grain" were not the mountains and fields of late November. These mountains are far from cartoon, the purple a silent and waiting color, the wisdom of the bare trees written on the hills, grief at the season's end tempered with the maturity of a landscape that endures the test of winter, scrupulously saving to emerge again in spring. The stubble and straw remaining reveals the plow's furrowed tracks, script of a different story, what people have made of the land, their conversation with or their conversion of the earth, schooling it to articulate careful rows of corn, silky tops waving, or whispering seas of alfalfa mingled with the hushing of grasses. November winds have no reeds of grass to caress. Nobember winds go hungry and gnaw bitterly at the land. November's grace is tarnished silver, precious metal weathered by the ravages of time. This time of change and lengthening shadows does not yield up its secrets easily, and all yield to the relentless turning of the wheel.

weather report

The rain that pattered through this November day was the kind of rain I always write about, the rain I add to a scene if it needs the grace and inward turning of reflection, that extra whooshing of a passing vehicle or the eloquence of dripping clothing as it dries, slung over a chairback. Spattering my windowpane, beating a gentle tattoo on the roof above my low ceiling, whispering to me as I lie in bed, this rain makes a space in my life around the sheltering roof. In rain the aromas of the earth come rising up to blend in endless conversation around each inhaled breath, and I stand sniffing like a dog, tracking down the experience of the weather. Expressive, gentle, everywhere at once, this rain is a miracle filling five-gallon plastic buckets left in the driveway.

As if I had lost

Tonight the words are addressed to my sadness, coming from everywhere and enveloping me fully in my memories. In autumn, I remember other autumns, other years past, as if they were coils of wire touching each other at the rim, separated by whole years but located in the same space, other wraps of the scarf around my neck. (I wear layered garments of memory, each one brightly insulative against the tugging, scattering winds.) So I've found that in sadness, I remember past sadnesses standing out sharp and clear, tingling along the length of my arm like bangles sliding neatly together. Or it may be that my memories of grief stand out strong as the most vibrant experiences of my life, when a hurricane rocked through my body, more strongly still when I felt the tidal pull of strange waves. I know that I love doing this, that it keeps me alive, and that without this rocking motion another feeling I love would end, which is why I am sitting with tears streaming down my face, as if I had lost a child. Not merely finished a book, where I was witness to another's grief, and the laying down of burdens, fictional and twenty years in the past. Not merely held someone else's child in my arms, astonishment melting me under the light of the infant's gaze. I had not just heard it as a story, seen it in the face of a friend, listened while the parentheses closed. Are these the echoes of some future grief ricocheting off a rupture in the fabric of my life? I honor this feeling and any who can call it forth with as much grace and tenderness as Barbara Kingsolver in her book Animal Dreams.

So Winter Begins

This is a time for remembering, as the first snow falls to the ground, as the winter wraps me in close in deep folds of cloth. A time for turning inward into the heart, beyond the rattle of beech leaves still clinging palely gold, rasping on their branches, the last sensory organs of a dried up season, the last glory and color of a changing perspective. A time for the stores of memory to unwind, a time to examine each garment for holes that would let in the cold, a time to shore up the foundations and the structures that support each of our beings through the long night. This is a time to sit by the fire and tell the story so that we remember who we are, and where we are going. In the dark one's identity is in question, in ways it would never be under the plain illumination, the clear brightness of day. A time of endurance and strength has come, a time of waiting while plans we have dreamed lie asleep still, waiting for us to wake up into them as to a new spring. A time that tests our preparation and our dedication, that seeks out the weak places in us and cracks us open in all our flaws, right there on the icy hillside. In this time, all our acorns must be in, and the long long arms we stretch beyond our valleys to distant lands be pulled back. We are small in winter, small and close, and we keep the heat in but the cold outside of us, and we know when to keep moving, and sometimes we stay still. And in the space where there are no cricket voices, that breath space of cold, ice cavity of a silence instead of a chest, where billowing steam on the breeze replaces the effervescence of a butterfly's lazy trace, there we hear our blood pound through hot vessels, there we hear the clear ringing of the mountain voices, a raven's startle.
I sit and I remember. I remember how the mountains never felt lonely, on those gray blank days when they were wrapped in snowy blankets. Quiet but purposeful, the mountains bowed to receive their caps. It was beauty on a scale only my heart could conceive of, large in the child's chest that housed it. I would tromp along willingly in the wake of its tug, my boots flopping in time with my flouncing scarf and windmilling arms, mittens securely attached. I didn't know why the resonant chords of the mountains, the fact of their presence, laid bare against the snow, should leave such a welling sadness within me, so solemn for an eight-year-old experiencing the weight of the world. The enormity of the love I felt consumed me without outlet, I could not relate it on a human level, nor understand it. I was simply covered, like an avalanche. I found myself running, running, struggling through snowdrifts, wading when it became deeper and entered my boots, urgently heading somewhere, collapsing in the blank hysteria of an empty field, white as a page, my footsteps laid out behind me. Those footsteps proved the pinnacle of my grief, that I would move a tiny mouse pinned to the land, so removed from the rolling vastness of the mountains I longed for, encompassed but never encompassing. I sought the memory I now hold, memory of flight. Memory of my true sight of the world, my falcon's eyes, with which I envisioned all laid out before me, beat wings with which I gave thanks for all laid out beneath me. A hopeless, sweet child I struggled in utter confusion, barraged by the senses I once knew how to make sense of, fledgling in freefall, not yet knowing to spread my wings. The mountains received my keening and echoed back my cries to the crisp, falling snow.

knit one

I have been working on this piece of knitting for quite a while. It will be a spiral pattern shawl, and it is a gift. I love how the spirals fit together so nicely, and I end up thinking about honeycomb and the center of daisies and soap bubbles and everything that has either the spiral pattern or hexagonally-packed radially symmetrical designs. The practice of knitting says a lot about who I am, and what I do. I get very quiet and still, I work with a focused intent, and I keep a pattern in my mind that represents the whole I am creating. In this state, I will happily untangle snarled yarn, all the time thinking about the mittens I'm going to make. I usually hum wordless tunes, or talk to the person I'm knitting for, or think something nice about them. I watch each stitch carefully as I make it, even if I'm sitting in front of a TV, or in a seminar (I made several seminar scarves. I swear it kept me awake and listening all through senior year). I explore the idea that all the stitches are interconnected, and that a piece of string can become anything with the right guidance, and that patience and craftiness are warmly rewarding. And, slipping into metaphor, if each stitch were a species in an ecosystem, then a slipped stitch, a species going extinct, would create a widening hole in what is meant to be a whole garment, as the species most closely relying on that link in the foodweb are effected and the links begin to crumble. I examine the pattern laid in front of me, counting carefully, and if I see a slipped stitch, my breathing stops for an instant, as I stay perfectly still to keep the run from getting any bigger. I pick up the stitch and work it into the pattern, if there is enough room, and only then do I breathe easy again. Sometimes I undo entire rows, unraveling the mistake and returning to an unbroken pattern. This is what ecological restorationists do for a living, isn't it? Unravel anthropogenic "mistakes" and return to an unbroken pattern, except that there is no knitter, the stitches (species) weave themselves. Which reminds me of a Chinese medicinal text called The Web That Has No Weaver.
At any rate, the study of patterns is necessity to me. If I weren't memorizing carpet squares, I wouldn't have been able to sit through middle school, which moved at a snail's pace, nor even sit in my own room talking on the phone. Out in nature the patterns are so obvious, they have names, aspen, maple, birch, basswood, and I know them the way I recognize voices or handshakes. If you ask me how I know, I will need to think a minute to put it into words, because the patterns do not have words. They have entire stories. But indoors, I compulsively study fabric motifs, wall hangings, and paintings, looking for the same regularity of character or design, looking for something predictable, something that grows and becomes and creates more of itself, as patterns can, and as life can. And so I knit, taking on projects of increasing complexity and scale. Each one I try is a little bit harder than the last, so I keep pushing the envelope. I hang onto the predictability of a pattern in the face of uncertainty. Stories hold patterns that I search for, and they provide an experience of a pattern unfolding and reaching completion. Stories model life. I follow the thread along someone else's pattern, and feel safe and assured, and more confident about my own leavings and tracings, my scribbles, the bits of knotted string that are preparing me for the patchworking of my own life.
This is how knitting is important.