Doing Without Making

First I want to say that when I started this blog, I had every good intention of writing regularly. It's not like I have something amazing to say every single day about the very narrow topic I have decided to muse on--fiber art and spirituality. But I thought I would write once a month. I didn't. But I'm going to try to write more, and now I have nothing but time to write because I can't create anything.

Since I began knitting 10 years ago, I don't think I have gone two days without knitting. But this past year, knitting, and weaving, hasn't always been comfortable. I had a shoulder injury--wish I had some great heroic story to go along with that, but I have no idea how I injured it. A trip early in the year last year to an orthopedist showed no cartilage between my collar bone and my ac in my right shoulder. I tried physical therapy. I tried cortisone shots. And ultimately I decided to have it surgically repaired. Meanwhile, I kept knitting, kept weaving and endured the discomfort.

Well, when I had my surgery in mid-December, they found more than just the collar bone/ac issue--I also had a torn rotator cuff. When I came out of the anesthesia and saw my arm in an immobilizing sling, I was horrified. Six weeks (as of tomorrow) later, and I am out of the sling and have started physical therapy. But I still can't knit and I still can't weave. So, space has been created in my life. Created by the absence of something which I love doing. I get a satisfaction from creating fabric that I can't just replace with reading more. But I'm living with that space and I'm happy with some of the things that have come forward to fill it.

Beginning in a few weeks, I'm going to begin facilitating an Ayeka group called "Bringing God into My Daily Life." Each week the group will read texts, ask themselves questions, write and dialogue in pairs about ways to bring God into the mundane parts of our daily life. I love this type of spiritual work, because our days are not filled every day with ecstatic spiritual revelations. What our days are filled with are every day, common events and encounters. Imbuing these moments with an awareness of something greater, just as I look at my weaving and my knitting and my parenting and my yoga, as opportunities to understand something more than what appears to be there, is where I find God. So perhaps I'll use my blog over the next few weeks, and heaven forbid, months, that I can knit or weave, to muse about Ayeka.