Mending the Circle

A string of rough wool circles my wrist. It was spun not with a spindle but with my fingers, my intentions. 

October. I plunged my hand into the bag of dirty fibers, an afterthought thrown into the corner of a barn after the shearing of ewes and before the birthing of dozens of soft-limbed lambs. The birthing time of Spring felt like a distant ancestor to this season of red and orange and brown. I pulled out a fistful of the tangled hairs that once marked time with lengths of protein, marked movement with bits of leaves and clumps of mud. 

I teased out strands to make the wool bracelet that would remind me of this day in the barn. Remind me how tired I was from chasing turkeys down a hill when they escaped, how my arms ached from shuttling buckets of grain and water to the broiler chickens in a far off pasture ringed with oaks and maples, how my mind kept spinning with all the different kinds of grass and feed and fowl and four-leggeds to know. How farming is hard and dirty and wonderful. How it is the most necessary skill in the world right now. How much has been forgotten, how much is rooted in remembering.

November. A month has gone by and the wool now on my wrist, spun between my fingers into a long line of dirty white, reminds me of these actions and ideas. It is stretched out and dirtier, soaked with rain of the Northwest and flecked with soil from the garden. It has grown thin in parts. 

As I pull off sweater after sweater, it breaks with the friction of fiber on fiber on skin. I am startled at my sudden anxiety as I hold the once-circle-now-line in my palm. I wonder if I will remember laughing hysterically as we chased turkeys down a hill on an autumn afternoon. I wonder if I can trust my brain to remember anything without visual cues. I wonder if it means that the relationship that helped to weave this circle together is somehow damaged, broken, as if this wool is tied with fate.

As December approaches, I slip the ends around one another, a forced embrace, and loop them again to secure a knot. It is not smooth in this place, there is a visible difference, but everywhere else in the thread is varied, too. I see the circle of relationship, with the world, with a person, within a family: it is a tangled thread that is constantly breaking and being retied, thinning in places, bunching in others. 

What happens when there are so many bunches and knots that the bracelet is no longer a bracelet because it is too broken and knotted and thick to fit around a wrist? It becomes a ring. A promise wrapped several times around (other) flesh and bone to become something new. A something that will always fit, a something that can always be connected, tied, mended over and over. 

This is what we do. This is what we are: knotted and tangled and worn thin in places and always able to wrap ourselves around what we love, what loves us, and go on as a something old and new.

We Flutter-bys

I want to be at home with you in this skin of ours, the mutual cocoon that forms between lovers. We are wrapped in silk and grace. I want to nestle the valley between my chin and mouth deep into your collarbone, my lips resting in that gorge between bone and muscle. I want to trace the moles and scars and creases of skin with a fingertip that knows the way. I want the nest of our tangled hair to be the home to fluttering thoughts and chirping dreams.

I want it to all be OK.

But our cocoon has holes we’ve yet to mend. And I can’t see the tiny tears behind your back. You capture me with your eyes and even with needle and thread (words, glances, truth) in hand I am unable to reach, unable to pull the fabric tightly between my hands and plunge the needle through this living breathing warp. You know that when I do that, the scar is still there. The seams will never fully merge, heal, replace cells with new like skin. There will always be a weakness there. 
And in my desperate pulling to mend and forget I will distort, rip, destroy other parts of our otherwise totally perfectly imperfect cocoon. We knew this when we started weaving it under the stars, hands and feet into the dirt, talking over riveted roads. We knew then that the chances of survival for such a being as this WE was slim but that trying anyway was as noble and necessary as birth and death. 

The veil is thinning and I am left with myself. I want to trace stories of us on your sternum, near the heart I love. I want to breathe in your spent breath and pick out the molecules you have used so well, full of memories of your lungs and all the other breaths you have breathed, every moment you have spent filling yourself with joy and grief, ecstatic wonder and deafening pain. 

There is time for this all. 

Allow us to be, to break through silk and grace and emerge as long winged flutter-bys, huge hearts swollen with hope and new beginnings we have woven together.