Square 65: Progress report

When this idea started to roll, I was fresh with enthusiasm and pumping out four squares per week. I planned to make a full-size blanket, perhaps five by six feet in dimension, and calculated about 14 by 17 squares would be about right: 238 in total. It would take me well into next year.

Then full-time work started lining up and I became busy with other things. I couldn't keep up the knitting pace. At the current rate it would take several years to make that many squares. I balked. I wanted to stop and finish the blanket right away. I was ready to give up.

But new stories kept suggesting themselves. I realized I didn't need to have a definite time frame; I could work until the blanket told me it was ready.

A few days ago when I had completed 63 squares, I laid them all out, nine by seven. It was a great size for a wall-hanging. Once again I contemplated making just a few more squares to round out the stories, finishing, and moving on to a new project.

But whenever I start thinking that way, the squares tell me, "No, we still have more stories to tell." It is like any pilgrimage. It is like life. You can't see where you are going in detail, because you have never been there. You don't know how long it will take, because you can't predict what will happen along the way. But the destination matters less than the journey itself.

I've learned a lot from this trip. I had never used more than two different yarns in one project before. Now I routinely use nine or ten in a single square. Knitting has evolved into a way of painting a landscape, a dream, or a thought.

I have explored the way colours interact, and it's different from coloured pencils or paints, which you can combine to create any colour. The colour of the yarns is immutable, but I am beginning to discover how to use similarities and contrasts to draw out highlights and undertones. A variegated yarn looks very different whether laid alongside a deep red or a muted red.

Perhaps the most obvious change has been the shift from cool, dark colours to neutrals, and warm and bright (inspect the gallery). This is not just superficial. My favourite colour has always been deep blue, followed by green and purple, but I am actually becoming enamoured with orange and its allies. This blanket began as a way to use up yarn in my stash, but has evolved into an excuse to acquire single skeins of anything that catches my eye. This square incorporates several new acquisitions.

I don't regret that, because I know they'll all come to good use over the long haul. Long after finishing this blanket, I'll continue using yarn to tell stories. Hats and scarves will never be the same.

Square 64: Writers' circle

Someone said it's easy to write; you just open a vein and bleed. I did a lot of my writing longhand until the recent purchase of a laptop, and often would imagine the thread of ink across the white page was not really black, but crimson. The best writing comes when I do not hesitate to plumb my deepest, most difficult thoughts and emotions.

I've been writing all my life, but have experienced a mini renaissance lately. After long years of wishing for writing companions with whom I could meet and share encouragement, in 2007 I took responsibility for my own need of community and started a writers' circle. It meets every week at Out On The Shelf. It took a long time to get going but during the past year it has come to life, and the meeting is one of the highlights of my week.

The most important friendship to emerge from this has been with my writing partner, Sarah. For many months the writers' circle included just the two of us. That evolved into a weekly "business meeting" when we talk about our creative processes and challenges, and set goals for the time ahead. No other habit is more potent in propelling my ideas forward.

Recently I have had trouble with fiction writing. The stories won't move easily from the shadowy recesses of my mind onto the page, and once there they don't seem to communicate what I want them to. I tell myself I must cross this mountain to achieve a higher plateau, perhaps a better quality of prose, but without Sarah and the writers' circle I would probably lose courage and lapse into months of not-writing. So this square goes out with gratitude to them; with ink, blood and the richness of colours we strive to pour out of ourselves.

Square 63: My cottage dream

I had a brief retreat at Lake Fletcher this weekend with Danny, Brenna and her friend, Anika, and Dad has his friend, Betty. The fall colour was surprisingly subdued for the end of September (this square captures it pretty well), which means it will probably hit its peak when we're back for Thanksgiving in two weeks.

The cottage is about a three-and-a-half hour drive from home. If I go by way of Toronto and Port Hope to pick up loved ones, it takes roughly seven hours. So we arrived around midnight on Friday and had to leave after lunch on Sunday. It is such a long way, and yet it's worthwhile to spend one blessed day and two nights in the deepest sanctuary I know.

My dream is to live and work there. I could spend the week in creative seclusion, returning on weekends to the city for culture and community. That's backwards from how most cottagers live, but the good thing about creativity is you can drive against the traffic if you wish.

If I had the courage to take hold of the writing life and squeeze a living out of it, I could do this.

The vermilion and sage green rows here are newly-acquired Qina yarns from Mirasol Peru. They're 80 per cent baby alpaca and 20 per cent bamboo, so soft to the touch I want to melt into them. The variegated autumn-coloured yarn from Wellington Fibres is one of my old favourites. These colours, delicious to see and touch, remind of the bliss I would like to achieve. The main colour, apple green is unidentified.

Square 62: Light box

I have decided to buy a light box, but with ambivalence. I hate how medical science calls this condition Seasonal Affective Disorder. It is perfectly natural (not dysfunctional) for people's energy to go through cycles over the course of a year. Many animals in these latitudes hibernate. A few generations ago our own ancestors conserved essential resources by eating differently and sleeping through long nights in a warm cave. Many of the behaviours psychiatry calls mental illness are merely variations, our brains experimenting in order to adapt. Some, like the depression that afflicts some individuals in winter, are reasonable responses to social pressure that runs contrary to nature.

The primary yarn in this square is something from Dye-Version I bought at Kitchener-Waterloo Knitters' Fair earlier this month. These fiery colours evoke an Ontario landscape in autumn. This is one of the most beautiful times of year, but also a perilous one, when my moods and energy respond to the loss of daylight. Some years in October and November I have found my inner landscape eerily out of sync, disconsolate, bogged down, unable to celebrate the vividness around me.

Why am I buying a light box? Why do I submit to manipulating my own environment in an attempt to conform to societal standards I disapprove of? Why do I take a pill to treat a sickness that isn't sick?

The only answer I have is that when I am out of pace with the world, I suffer. No matter how misguided the system is, I have to live in it. And as long as I'm depressed, I won't have any power to change the system. We have to make some sacrifices, waver on our principles occasionally.

So I plan to purchase this thing. Maybe it's like sending my brain for a little vacation on a tropical beach, every morning of the winter. That, too, is something my caveman ancestors could not have done, but I have to admit I like the idea.

The four other other coloured yarns represent states of mind that pertain to this problem: grey for depression, gold for light, violet for creativity, and pale peach for peace.

Square 61: Kettle Creek bag

For years I have carried a small red canvas backpack my mother gave me, made by Kettle Creek Clothing Company. The name is embroidered on it in golden-brown thread. It is rugged and has already been repaired once by a friend, but is finally wearing out. Kettle Creek closed years ago, and cloth bags like this one are becoming hard to find. It is irreplaceable.

For years after I came out, I used to head into Toronto once or twice a month to visit the gay village, meet men I had encountered online, go dancing at the bars and spend time with friends I had made there. I dated quite a few. I traveled light, and this bag would carry everything I needed for a weekend.

Those were exciting times but also lonely, I suppose. I had lost my social network and was starting over from nothing. I couldn't go back to where I had been, but had to figure out who I really was and what kind of people I belonged with. I was doing what every adolescent needs to do, twenty years late. Few relationships I made in those days have endured until now. I came out in 1996, and it was five years before I started to figure out where I fit in. It turned out to be Guelph after all, not Toronto, but the big city offered a quick fix. That sounds cheap, but you need something when you're on your own. Toronto kept me busy and allowed me to experiment, and that was valuable. I had few constant companions, but the red bag was one of them.

Later I used it more often for carrying my writing things to the E-bar above The Bookshelf, where I liked to hang out and work. Since I moved seven weeks ago and could walk to pick up groceries, the bag has proven useful but suddenly started to show its age.

In one patch on the bottom the threads are wearing bare. I am afraid to carry anything heavy in it. Soon it will become useless.

I used to keep old, broken, lovely things that had sentimental value attached, but I am trying to overcome that habit. In striving for a simpler life, you can't afford to hold onto clutter. One day soon I must let go of this bag, but I need to retain the stories that hang from the fabric. They are part of who I am.

Square 60: Hymn to the sun

In reading Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams I have been struck again by the thought of how it would be to live months of the year without sunlight. Already in September I am intensely aware of the darkness when I wake at 6 a.m., the sharpening angle of afternoon rays, their poignant golden hues, and the swift return to darkness at dinner time. I tremble. October and November are a perilous time, when my mood might slip into a six-month rut. I have a stock of vitamin D pills in the fridge and am contemplating renting or buying a light box this year. But above all I try to face this challenging season with creativity and hope. It is a deep-earth time, when we bury our seeds of inspiration deep under fold of quiet reflection. After winter dormancy, I wonder what exotic flowers will erupt from my mind when the balance of sunlight returns to the northern hemisphere.

Sun, I knit your light into the texture of this yarn. While you wander, I hold you here with me, always part of my story.

The outer row (and several others) of rich ocre yarn is some Manos del Uruguay Silk Blend Danny gave me, leftover from a hat project. Along with the other darker colours I used here, it suggests the warm, hospitable retreat I would like to establish in my new apartment this winter.

Square 59: Asters and goldenrod

There are few sights as resplendent as a September meadow full of asters and goldenrod. I dream of making a tapestry to portray this beauty.

A few years ago Danny and I dyed some yarn using goldenrod flowers. Natural dyes often smell foul, but that dye pot made the whole cottage smell like warm honey, and the fragrance clung to the yarn for a long time. I used that yarn for the three rows of light gold in this square.

Wild asters come in many colours. I took all the yarn for this square on an outing where I planned to knit it, but up arrival discovered I had forgotten to pack any white, one of the most common colours and an essential part of the meadow fabric. But several of the Noro yarns I had brought showed white threads of silk, so I used these, doing my best to set their highlights off against saturated solid rows.

Pale pinks are also common. One of my favourite species is Aster lateriflorus or calico aster, so named because the central discs of the flowers vary from yellow to pink, purple or brown on the same plant.

But perhaps the largest and most distinctive is the vivid purple New England aster, Symphyotrichum novae-angliae. This colour is not as easy to derive from natural sources, but I'll have to find it for my tapestry.

I haven't gone on a walk to see asters and goldenrod yet this year. When I thought of doing this square, it reminded me that last year I walked every day from April to December to create a daily photo journal of nature. This year my nature walks have been far fewer, and this story blanket is partly to blame. I haven't had time.

There is not time in life to do everything we want. I have a hard time accepting this truth. When I think about time I tend to feel impoverished. Instead I ought to focus on the richness of opportunities and savour each day as a gift.

Last year I went on a lot of walks, saw some things I had never seen before, took thousands of photographs and created a remarkable photo journal. It was good. I try to take pleasure in the memory, understand that it is still part of my life, even though it's in the past.

It's no good to regret what I haven't done in 2009. Instead of walking and taking photographs every day, I have worked long and hard on this story blanket. It commemorates many things I have seen and love, like asters and goldenrod. It is good, too.

When I am finished I will move onto another adventure, and it will be good, and maybe someday I will lose this habitual regret.