Mid life has been an interesting turn of the needles, moments of stark honesty knit one and avoiding them, purl two. A darkening storm of truth in a coffee shop, eyes across a table saying ‘I’m okay’, hands reaching back over words thrown on a telephone line. This hat created to cover my eyes, until mid years when I rolled it back up, saw it for the warmth not the burrowing.
Middle age has been a turn on the wheel of dried clay wondering, inching toward the ways of the way I used to be when I was free of the fear of cracking. It has been a whirling warmed oven reach toward knowing that heat doesn’t mend but it does protect, being fired in the hottest kiln creating tolerance for lower temperatures.
These years have been recreating a life I dreamed of crafting before I began to buy what I wanted. The on sale clothing safer and surer than the wild glittering fabrics that could have been sewn into whatever I wanted, when I wanted it. When my daughter was young, my mother bought her a length of shiny cloth, and for years that became countless outfits, tents, barriers and blankets. It was endlessly entertaining, joyous and fluid in its uses, and throughout it all it remained open and possible.
There is a new possible at this age, a movement unprescribed and unexpected and so sweetly free. I can knit, mold and sew with this starlit cloth that has no edges except the ones I look for. I have always owned it, and no matter now how many times I looked away it sat at the end of my vision, shimmering in moon lit fields.
What I know now is creating doesn’t mean trying, it doesn’t include pushing into corners of belonging or weeding out weaknesses to showcase anything better. It is the soft fall into what we already love. It is the turning toward the darkening hurts and giving them light, air, honor; creating something lovely from what is ours to give, not from what we wished we had received.
Coming out of the blue hour into the ending of the longest night has a bewitching power, there in the shadows she has been waiting for me, that girl, this woman, this life, this moment, turning deliberately, brilliantly toward the longest possible day.
blue solstice 