Walking the Wall

I always find it intriguing when things from two different spheres in my life bang together unexpectedly. Lately I’ve been thinking about trying to learn how to spin yarn with a hand spindle. I have found that I tend to enjoy smaller projects that I can enjoy knitting, move on, and have the item as something that is worn and enjoyed. I have had people be surprised that I knit–it surprises me sometimes, up until a few years ago I would have sworn that I didn’t have it in me to do anything remotely resembling "crafty". But I’ve since found, especially in knitting, that there is something close to meditation found in two (or four) needles and wool–something that makes me take a step back, breathe slower, unwind, and exist at a calmer place for awhile. There is something satisfying in giving someone I love an item that has thousands of small stitches, each and every one made by me because they are special to me. I find it enriching and connective to a long history of women who have done the same thing. Then I watched as people took raw wool and with a simple spindle, really nothing more than a hook, a dowel, and a round piece of wood, and turn out yarn. We have all these machines now that can produce yarn at an incredible speed with perfect consistency, color variation, and texture and at an affordable cost–certainly more aesthetically pleasing than anything I could possible come up with. But it’s sort of like Thoreau leaving the loudness of city life, wanting to reconnect to life on another level–to take a piece of wool with my own hands and a small piece of wood and make yarn that I can knit into a pair of gloves or a hat–that would be satisfying.

While mulling this all over for a few days, I was listening to my current book, The Red Tent, and a beautiful passage about spinning with a hand spindle came on. Dinah has been reprimanded for doing so horribly on her spindling, it’s all a tangled mess and she is frustrated that she just can’t get it right. Her aunt pulls her onto her lap and begins to tell her the story of how women were given the art of spindling:

"I will show you the secret of the spindle, she said, putting a finger to my lips, this is something your grandmother taught me and now it is my turn to show you." …Bilhah whisper the story of Utto into my ear. "Once before women knew how to turn wool into string and string into cloth, people roamed the earth naked. They burned by day and shivered by night and their babies perished. But Utto heard the weeping mothers and took pity on them. Utto was the daughter of Nanna, god of the moon, and of Ninhersog the mother of the plains. Utto asked her father if she might teach the women how to spin and weave so their babies would live. Nanna scoffed and said that women too stupid to remember the order of cutting, washing, and combing of wool; the building of looms, the setting of weft and warp; and their fingers were too thick to master the art of spinning. But because Nanna loved his daughter, he let her go. Utto went first to the east but the women their would not put aside their drums and flutes to listen to the goddess. Utto went to the south but she arrived i nthe middle of a terrible drought when the sun had robbed the women of their memories. We need nothing but rain they said, forgetting the months when their children had died of cold; give us rain or go away. Utto traveled north where the fur clad women were so fierce they tore off a breast to ready themselves for the endless hunt. Those women were too hot headed for the slow art of string and loom. Utto went to the east where the sun rises but found that the men had stolen the women’s tongues and they could not answer for themselves. Since Utto did not know how to speak to men she came to Ur which is the womb of the world where she met the woman called Inhenduana who wished to learn. Utto took Inhenduana on her lap and wrapped her great arms around Inhenduana’s small arms and laid her golden hands around Inhenduana’s grey hands and guided her left hand and guided her right hand. Utto dropped a spindle made of Lapis Lazuli which turned like a great blue ball floating in the golden sky; and spun string made of sunlight. Inhenduana fell asleep in Utto’s lap. As Inhenduana slept she spun without seeing or knowing, without effort or fatigue–she spun until she had enough string to fill the entire storehouse of the great god Nanna. …And their babies, swaddled in blankets, no longer died of the cold but grew up to offer sacrifice to the gods." While Bilha told me the story of Utto, she put her nimble hands around my clumsy ones. I smelled the soft loamy musk that clung to my aunty, listened to her sweet liquid voice, and forgot all about the ache in my heart and when her story was over, she showed me that the string on my spindle was as evenly made and strong as Leah’s own handiwork. I kissed Bilah a hundred kisses and ran to show my mother what I had done.

<<Note: This was transcribed from an audio file of "The Red Tent", all punctuation and spelling mistakes are my own>> 

It is a beautiful story, it is amazing to me that a craft that has been around since one of the oldest civilizations in history is still being done the world over to this day. That is connection, to the land, to women of generation after generation passed, to the present when we need to remember to slow down. While I may never spin yarn made out of sunlight, I think I might just try to spin some out of wool.