Colleen Leonardi

The Knitting Sutra by Susan Gordon Lydon

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Not one single soul has told me in my two years of knitting, making dances and practicing yoga about the book The Knitting Sutra: Craft as a Spiritual Practice by Susan Gordon Lydon. Not one.

I don't know why I am surprised by this. I suppose if I'd run into myself two years ago, knowing what I know now, I would have mentioned it to me. (Isn't that true of a lot of things, though?) For the way it aligns ideas about craft with ideas about meditation and the search for a spiritual practice are very much in line with the journey I've been on over the last few years. 

The book was originally published in 1997. At that time in my life I was primarily concerned with the mini-drama of high school, and more involved in dancing than anything else. The minute I read the first page of The Knitting Sutra a few days ago, as I sat in my sunny kitchen enjoying a home cooked lunch, I was transfixed. I wanted to spend the rest of the afternoon reading her words, her sentences resonated with me and my journey as a woman and an artist so much. 

Now that I've finished the book, I see how her tale reflects back to me some version of my female self I know to be true. The way Lydon talks about the significance of weaving and knitting reminds me of why I have come to this craft later on in my life - it's an integration practice, a deepening down into the well of ones spirit.  

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Lydon traces the traditions of knitting back through the ages, telling of how the women of the British Isles knitted a sweater a week to make enough money to feed their families, how the mothers would knit the body of a sweater and the daughters the arms, and how she feels a kinship with this way of life. 

She writes, "Women experience so many pressures to give up being who they truly are in order to take care of everyone around them," and goes on to talk about how she has had to learn how to protect her time and create solitude for herself, a quiet space where "prayer, meditation, and inspiration flourish.... And I have found knitting to be an aid in all those things."

And she speaks of the need to follow the thread of your calling to establish your own traditions, in art, spirituality and life. She details a time in her life when she went through rigorous spiritual studies and journeyed to distant spots scattered about the American West to find salvation, truths, some kind of healing. It was when someone told her she hadn't yet found what she was looking for because she hadn't yet found her tradition that she realized she had to create her own way towards enlightenment and healing (not simply prescribe to someone else's), just as she might sit and knit a sweater. 

I love this book because, as a reader, I felt I was on the journey with Lydon as she discovered these truths about knitting, craft, the spiritual life and being a woman. I'm reading Knitting Heaven and Earth: Healing the Heart With Craft now by Lydon, and while I like it it is not the same as The Knitting Sutra. I feel as though she is looking back on her life and how knitting saved her in Knitting Heaven and Earth, published in 2005.

It's in The Knitting Sutra where she is unraveling the threads of her life right along with you, both forward and back. I could feel the mystery of all these things in conversation with each other as I read, finding their ways in and through me, leaving me with a stronger sense of awe and continued purpose. What purpose? As Lydon writes, "The purpose of craft is not so much to make beautiful things as to become beautiful inside while you are making those things." 

Indeed. 

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The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock

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In the snowy throes of winter this holiday season, I read a book. The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock. Amidst all of the other books I'd planned to read during the break, I found this one at the library and cast my pile of newly-purchased titles aside for its thick, elegant structure and its subtitle: An Artist Begins Her Life's Work at 72. 

Really? I thought as I carried it home. How? 

Molly Peacock is a poet. And in The Paper Garden she weaves together the story of 18th-century English artist Mary Delany with her own story of becoming an artist. These two stories, as they ride side-by-side for 300+ pages, seem to inspire other snippets of other stories about other women throughout history (including the author's mother) and their battles with marriage, becoming themselves and, perhaps, yes, cultivating some creative leaning during their lifetime. 

Mrs. Delany's story is remarkable, but I won't go into great details about it here. What I so loved about this book is its attention to the dailiness of making, both a life and a body of work. Most of Mrs. Delany's life was spent in what Peacock sometimes calls "artistic dormancy." It was with the noticing of a fall of a petal onto black paper that she started her life's work at 72. Mrs. Delany created a new art form, then: mixed-media collage. She designed over 900 cut-paper collages of flowers and plants. The rose on the cover of the book is one of her most famous creations. 

This story and the questioning Peacock provides about being a woman, making art, noticing life, collecting objects, inspired me in more ways than one. I further embraced my collection of shells (which Mrs. Delany kept as well) after reading the book. And I've made three collages this holiday, each one colorful and meaningful in its own way. 

Sometimes I think I stumble into artistic dormancy. And this book reminded me that that's part of being an artist. 

Passages like... 

"Daily-ness, like sewing, puts one stitch after the other. At first you don't see how on earth you will cover a whole piece of linen with manipulated thread. And then you start making each long stitch count, each short stitch, each French knot as good as you can make it, as perfect, pouring all your energy into the measure of the thread, like a measure of music, and watching the work grow under your very hands, and going to bed, and getting up the next morning. Having one day, and then the next." (pg. 59)

"Having a collection, taking it out, looking at it, reordering it, and putting it away is creative in itself. it doesn't yield a product, like the results of an art, but it stops time, as making art does." (pg. 101)

"There is a marvelously obsessive nature to craft that allows a person to dive down through the ocean of everyday life to a seafloor of meditative making... To ornament one's existence, even with six paint-by-numbers paintings, is a key to understanding one's personal wealth - and acknowledging that wealth in others, too." (pg. 288) 

...sunk down in me like little oars rowing me back into the body of water that is my soul. 

And then the book ended with this passage by Virginia Woolf from her diary , Tuesday, November 23, 1926: 

"I am now and then haunted by some semi-mystic very profound life of a woman, which shall be all told on one occasion; and time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall somehow blossom out of the past. One incident - say the fall of a flower - might contain it." 

Woolf's words took my inhalation in that moment when I read it, and have left that in-breath caught somewhere between time and page, still. I'm not sure I'll ever get that one inhalation back, and that's fine by me. 

Because the passage alone is so telling of something I have felt, too, but been unable to tell. But also because Peacock's book does unwind both back through time and forward to tell the story of one woman's profound life. Taking the time to read it and share in her adventures is like one long, musical moment of watching the most beautiful flower in the garden fall. 

A Woman's Journal

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2012 was the year of women for me. I studied with some amazing female writers, photographers and artists. I forged friendships with five amazing women here in Columbus who are healers, teachers and artists in their own way. I cultivated my ongoing friendship with my Mom, now that she lives here with us in the city. 

I've been lucky. 

It doesn't change the fact, however, that my grandmother is no longer with me. She passed away years ago. She was a writer, cook, teacher, a palm reader and psychic, a mother, daughter, sister, aunt, and she had a wit that was out of this world. 

I miss her. 

I keep the journal she kept before she passed away on the bookshelf with my own journals. She only wrote one entry in it.

The journal itself is handsome, titled "A Woman's Notebook." It's home to some of the most truthful, thoughtful quotes by women I've ever stumbled upon. It's still in print. You can order a newer edition of it here. 

I may not have my grandmother living here with me, but she is guiding me. I have this journal of hers. She was drawn to the quotes in this little notebook for some reason. I turn to each blank page and read a quote, following what bread crumbs of wisdom she left behind.

And I have her words, in letters, postcards and the one journal entry.

Her wish for me was that someday I would become a writer. I feel I'm living out that wish, still.

My grandmother was like any woman who keeps a journal - always looking with words for the things that could never be found among the blank pages of a notebook, always writing to find the things in this world that do not live among language - the real stories.

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 "And this I have learned grown-ups do not know the language of shadows."

~Opal Whiteley, b. 1900, American diarist

 

"Freedom means choosing your burden."

~Hephzibah Menuhim, b. 1920, American musician 

 

"The happy people are failures because they are on such good terms with themselves that they don't give a damn."

~Agatha Christie, b. 1891, English writer

 

"One is not born a woman, one becomes one."

~Simone De Beauvoir, b. 1908, French writer

 

"I look forward to growing old and wise and audacious."

~Glenda Jackson, b. 1937, English actress

 

"For years I have endeavored to calm an impetuous tide - laboring to make my feelings take an orderly course - it was striving against the stream."

~Mary Wollstonecraft, b. 1759, English feminist and writer

 

"Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make the last part of your life bearable."

~Francine Du Plessix Gray, b. 1930, French writer

 

"A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness."

~Elsa Schiaparelli, b. 1907, Italian fashion designer

 

"I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly."

~Anne Morrow Lindbergh, b. 1906, American writer and aviator

 

"We see human thought and feeling best and clearest by seeing it through something solid that our hands have made."

~Eudora Welty, b. 1909, Americam writer 

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