So, is it madness or patience? I tend to think, only based on what others say about it - that you have to perceive time on a different scale to work with yarn, weaving, crocheting, knitting, oh especially spinning then doing one of the above. I didn't spin this - but I am crocheting it because I have thought about what it might be like when it is done. It is forever time wise away from being done, so much infinite perhaps that it might not be completed, in fact, the probability (as so many knitters know with unfinished objects) is that it will not be done. But yet, we begin, and often, we persist. Is it madness or patience?
Same with gardening. Perhaps, with my learning languages without having any useful place to use them. But I take a 'sense of cadence'? could it be a 'zen'? from making something -for myself*- that takes a long time, and from checking on plants every day and eeking them along - from learning more again and again on ten different languages round and round and round the spiral. It is like making hash marks on the stone wall except sometimes, you get to hold the object, or behold the plant, or understand the sentences in a foreign book or movie - and say 'hey, if I hadn't started this - I wouldn't be here now, using/admiring my persistance.'
So yes, a bit of both. I still recall the (seriously different than me) lady who said I must be so bored to sit and knit an item - don't you have anything else you want to do. Not that will become this, through me, and I will use literally for years etc...
I put on my little blue bolero thing the other day - one of those things made like this, out of fine blue yarn in a net foundation, with gold thread crocheted along the edges - and it has kept well over the past what.. nine? years, holding together, and being a pretty piece of clothing. And there are a lot of things like that. And if I hadn't started them, they wouldn't be something I have to use now. And yet, we can't guarantee that we will finish things - we can't bank on the persistence part - so much could happen, and yet.. we start. And that depends deeply on who we are, what we value, how we reflect. All of it.
//We shopped early early and it was already hot when we got back. I did some watering in the garden and planted more seeds. We planned to go out to a farmer's market today and get some produce. It has started to rain a bit now, but we'll see what happens with it. Mark has some alphabet and language stuff he wants me to look at - I made him a Czech list of 8,000 words, but he wanted 3 million, so he found some spell checker that has every form of every word in it. I still like my 8,000 word list - it has a lot of useful words I didn't know all of, and could use for myself at the very least. I did French and Spanish today, and a lot of Czech vocab, and need to finish out my Russian lesson. Then I work the next two days.
*and yet, I have found that often, for others, I do not persist like this -- art projects, or specifically requested things that I did not want to make (because when I want to make it anyway, or made it and then give it away, it was the journey that was the reason for it, not the end point).. and the difference is in because perhaps we never know how they will value it, and then when we do not have it later - that time is gone, but when we do have it, and use it, the time is still captured ... planting the orchard of trees that you may never see fruit from for years, means something different on another person's property when the chance to see them even if you live that long reduces nearly to nil by giving it away? Sometimes though, we still persist on those - and that is why knitted and handmade gifts made with intention are special.//philosophy
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