A couple of meditations, for a Sunday afternoon:

I read on several blogs about people traveling to various fiber conferences, sheep and wool meetings, and even arranging vacations to visit as many fellow knitters as possible. In a way, it makes me a bit sad - my teaching and research schedules are usually such that I'm lucky to get away for a couple weeks at Christmas and a couple more in the summer, and those are to visit family. I admit a certain amount of jealousy of those who are retired, self-employed, stay-at-home-parents, or what have you, that allows them such time off.

Then again, I'm not sure how much I would go to conferences, etc., if I had the time and the freedom. I've always been kind of a lone wolf on things, always sort of a loner.

I'm a Lone Wolf Knitter. (I think of the retired pastor at my church, who grew up in a tiny town in Kansas, and was a Lone Wolf Scout - that is, a Boy Scout in an area that had too few scouts to form a pack. ) I think there are perhaps a lot of us Lone Wolf Knitters out there, people who can't or don't or won't travel, people who live far from a stiching group or guild, or people whose schedules prevent them from joining one.

And you know, for me, the Internet and magazines are all the more precious because they are my link to the big exciting knitting world - a world I wouldn't know of the existence of without them.

I'd love to live somewhere where a knitting guild was an option - but then again, I don't know if I could do yet another evening activity, even one that meets monthly. Right now, I've got CWF once a month, book club once a month, AAUW once a month, and the youth activities at church weekly. There are weeks where a whole evening at home is rare and precious.

And the Internet, with all the knitblogs and the lists and the free-pattern and tips websites out there, is a great thing - think of it as being like a guild meeting that goes on, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with more people than you could ever get in one place at one time. True, communication is a bit slower, and we don't get to pass around and feel the lovely yarns in everyone's projects, or try them on, or have someone sit down next to us and show us how to do some technique that's stymied us, but a lot of the interaction is still there.

And for all the things people say about the Internet and its problems, I have to think that there's also a lot of good that comes from it - good for people who live in isolated places or isolating circumstances to be able to connect with others. (And I won't even get into the fact that on the Internet, your gender or color or sexual orientation or age or disability status or ethnic origin or religion or anything that might divide us in real life doesn't matter. Or at least, doesn't matter as much.)

And the second thing: rarely, in my reading, does something catch me in the heart and make me gasp and make tears come to my eyes. But something did yesterday, and it was in a book about knitting.

In KnitLit 2, Molly Wolf has an essay where she talks about knitting (and unknitting) a sock for her sister, and she says this:

"I wonder sometimes if, after death, God frogs us - holds us firm, undoes the

years of pain and wrong and suffering, reknits us together in eternity's womb,

so that we emerge in glory, just as we should have been if this life weren't

so broken and bloody imperfect."

Oh. Oh, yes. I hadn't thought about it that way at all, but now I love that image so much. The idea that at the end of it all, it will be put right for us, that we will be reknit.

(I will say that later on she talks about maybe instead of being wholly remade, we will be transformed instead, so that our imperfections are merely similar to the handmade quality of a handknit item. I have to say though that I'm more powerfully moved by the image of God going back and taking out the mistakes that we and the world put in our beings).

My family saw a couple of large losses over the summer - a well-loved member of the church my parents belong to, a man who "walked the walk" so clearly that he was someone I held up as an example. And then, the man who was my father's best friend, and who was the father of one of my best friends when I was a child. Both of these deaths were quite sudden - the one of my father's best friend totally unexpected. And already since I've been back, I've had several friends lose parents or aunts or uncles. And that line, the picture of God as a loving craftsman, taking out the imperfections in the souls of the departed, is deeply comforting to me.

I don't know. Over the past several years, one of my morning prayers has been "please God, no bad surprises today." I realize that's a selfish prayer and that there's nothing constant in this world but change, but it seems over the past couple years I've observed and experienced so many big and traumatic changes that I feel that tiny bit of occasional selfishness can be forgiven.

I guess what I'm saying is, let the people close to you know how much they matter, you never know what may happen, even overnight. Because not telling someone you love them, when you have the chance, means you risk dropping a stitch in your own being, and causing a ladder to form that time will not knit back up.