About power
I have this memory: I’m 20 or 21 and I’m entering Skyloom Fibers, a fabulous but now defunct yarn shop. I climbed a steep but short flight of wooden stairs glazed with snow and ice. As I remember it, I was alone, though I couldn’t have been—I didn’t own a car. Inside it was sweet roll warm and the lights grazed the colorful hanging skeins; they looked like strings of glass beads.
As it is with some memories, my visual recollection is uncertain. Was it really a cold day? Did Skyloom have stairs? Who was I with? I don’t remember really. But I do remember how I felt. As I poked through cubbyholes and pressed yarn to my face, I felt powerful.
Youthful arrogance and all, I fancied myself an expert knitter at the time (though 20 years later it would come as a revelation that there was more than one way to decrease). Then as now, I didn’t choose or reject patterns by their rankings of “advanced” or “beginner,” but because of their beauty or needle requirements (size 2’s, no thank you). If a pattern was challenging, I always believed I could figure it out, or at the very least, run home to Mom.
To possess a skill like knitting—a skill not everyone has—is a kind of power. To read a stitch or color chart, to understand pattern instructions, to create a garment with loops and wool is magic. In the Tarot deck, the Magician is the card of creativity, skill and confidence, in other words, power. To watch a tangle of sticks and yarn become the heel of a sock or to see a cable pattern emerge is a wonder and it fills me with pleasure.
I am a big fan of acquiring arcane skills. Though there are days when I wish my interests would light on car repair or microeconomics, I’m proud of the strange abilities I’ve amassed. These quirky talents define me as much as the color of my hair or the way I hold a pencil. When I meet a Russian immigrant at a party, I can carry on a halting conversation. I can whip up a batch of soap for holiday gifts and I can follow a musical score, belting out a mean alto should the need arise.
Is this about grandiosity or a need for superiority? I think it’s self-efficacy, that golden buoyancy that comes with competence.
It is so easy to become complacent or obsessed with the day-to-day necessities of a modern life, so easy to put off learning to tango, studying ikebana or mastering two-handed Fair Isle—so easy to allow life to slip by without tucking something new and powerful into your world.
This past summer I took Galina Khmeleva’s Warm Shawl class at the Estes Park Wool Market. The tiny needles and the endless counting and yarn overs required by the Orenburg tradition made my head and hands ache. Let’s just say, I was not the star pupil. But I was the only one who could speak to the teacher in her native tongue.
9:33:12 AM 
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