Week 2

gardening - sprouts
salad days
conversations - changed circumstances open doors to info not revealed a month ago.
slow down - accelerated process
relationships anew - observations from a different perspective
look at something new - adornments where earth meets sea.

Something good

It started with a very bad April Fool's. My reactions included disbelief, dismay, betrayal, and disbelief (did I already mention disbelief?). So what do I do but stay with what's real. Hunker down and get things done. No point in wondering about what happened - I find that others are doing that for me. Maybe it will hit me later.

For now, though, I finished these. The yarn, "Soft Green Seas," has a little history. The socks were started in late March and had a deadline.  They missed the deadline (just a few days late) because when I picked them up in-progress I just started knitting and totally screwed up the heels - I guess I was discombobulated at the time.

I gave them a bath and they dried in a warm afternoon. They are softer than lamb's ears and more rugged than iron.

I make good things.

Neruda's Tribute

Ode to My Socks

Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder’s hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.

Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.

-Pablo Neruda (trans. Robert Bly)