Tonight an hour slipped by unnoticed as I sat on the couch spinning a yarn. My first skien of handspun was lumpy and bumpy and not the peaceful, meditative experience I had hoped for, but somehow in the space between washing and plying and setting that first skien and starting my second my brain whizzed away at learning the unconscious movement. From the start of this second attempt my yarn has been smoother, more even, more peaceful, more meditative. Somehow now my hands know where to hold and where to release, when to pinch and when to smooth, and even the spindle seems to spin and spin without such frequent encouragement from my hands.
I really like spinning. I like feeling the fibers slip past one another, each eager to join his already twisted fellows. I like the momentum that gathers when I’m spinning, like it’s easier to keep spinning than to stop. I like watching the energy transfer from spindle to yarn as the twist travels up into the fiber on it’s own accord. I like that when my fingers allow some unsmoothed fiber into the twist, there is a very short period of time in which I can tease and pull that twist out before the slub is a permanent part of the yarn. My yarn is like my life, with thin bits and thick bits and every little blob there now and then sliding past and eventually wound up with the rest for all of eternity.
Oddly enough, spinning yarn makes me feel like writing fiction. Words slide out one after the other, the momentum of the yarn itself pulling them out of the unformed mass and into the perfect spiral of life.

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