Have you ever found that state where you lose track of time, completely immersed in something? Where time seems to expand endlessly and your world is simple and completely about whatever you’re doing? For me that happens with hands-on making. It happens with tapestry weaving but also drawing, knitting, and other art or craft I might be engaged in.*
I recently read Michelle Obama’s newest book, The Light We Carry. It is a delightful read. Near the beginning of this book, she talks about knitting.
“In all my decades of staying busy, I had always presumed that my head was fully in charge of everything, including telling my hands what to do. It hadn’t really ever occurred to me to let things flow the opposite way. But that’s what knitting did. It reversed the flow. It buckled my churning brain into the back seat and allowed my hands to drive the car for awhile. It detoured me away from my anxiety, just enough to provide some relief. Any time I picked up those needles, I’d feel the rearrangement, my fingers doing the work, my mind trailing behind.”
She goes on to say that knitting allowed her to give herself “over to something that was smaller than my fear…” And that it helped her find clarity and basically reorient herself. I can not imagine the sorts of stress a First Lady encounters every day but I completely understand what knitting is doing for her here.
I am also a knitter. I favor very simple projects in stockinette or garter stitch. I have a whole closet full of shawls and scarves I’ve knitted. They keep piling up and I’m okay with that because the importance is in the making of them. Knitting is a place that calms my brain and allows my hands to take over for awhile, just as Obama indicates.
I think that making anything can do this for us. Using our hands in a repetitive way helps calm down the overthinking some of us are prone to. I find tapestry weaving can also create this state. When choosing projects for tapestry weaving, I make some choices in terms of why I’m weaving whatever image I’m working on.
Some of my tapestries are just for fun. My sketch tapestry diary is an example of this. The entire purpose of this practice is to spend time experiencing something again through weaving about it. I deliberately choose small sizes, simple looms, and easy weaving because I want the work to be about the experience and the weaving to be relaxing and allow my brain to remember whatever the inspiration was for the piece. Of course while I’m weaving, the mind wanders off or eventually shuts off all together and this is a blessed place to be.
Other tapestries are things I intend to contribute to a body of work. The design and execution of these works feels a big edgier because I am invested in making them “good” (whatever that means). I want to show these pieces and perhaps sell them and that puts a thin layer of anxiety over the experience of making them.
For today I’d like to suggest we treat some of our making, whether that is tapestry weaving, knitting, or some other form of art or craft, as Obama does. Let’s let our overthinking brain take a backseat for a little bit and allow our hands to take charge.
I’ll leave you with a quote from another great book I read recently, Unraveling by Peggy Orenstein. She is talking about spinning the fleece from the sheep she sheered on the way to making a garment via knitting.
“After a week of daily spinning, I find myself settling into the flow, at least for a minute or two: that feeling of complete immersion, total absorption in the task at hand. Pinching, pulling, smoothing back—I am suffused with well-being, a sense of peace, not dissimilar to the feeling of being lost in writing. Craft can mean so many things depending on the context. It can be exploitative or liberatory, subsistence or luxury, rote or creative, an act of conformity or rebellion, of belonging or individuality. Making can be a way to resist a disposable culture, to connect to basic processes in a world where we’ve lost such awareness, a world that, too often, reduces us to either workers or consumers. For me, at bottom, it is simply a source of joy.”
A source of joy. Happy weaving!
*This state is often called “flow,” a term coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow.