Knitting up the ravell’d sleave

Embroidery by Ann Widness, 3 1/4" x 2 3/4"

Often, in the evening, Don and I sit down to a glass of wine and, since you don’t want to drink a glass without food, a few crackers, cheese, nuts and raw vegetables. For me this is a glass of chilled Sauvignon Blanc from one of California’s central coast vineyards. For Don, a red, such as the tasty ones from Bogle Vineyards. We have Canadian wheat crackers and some of our favorite cheeses: Tillamook cheddar, a manchego sheep cheese from Spain, St. Andre’s great triple crème from Normandy, or a Mt. Tam from Cowgirl Creamery in northern California. If Don is working, I may sit down by myself to the same. 

We talk about the day, what we have been doing and thinking about. What puzzles us, what comes up again and again, what we would like to do. We are processing, noticing, holding things up to the light. We toast those near and far whom we are grateful for, are worried about or those we hold in memory. In the summer, the door is open to the street, protected only by a screen, and we listen to the neighborhood kids with their water guns, balls and bicycles playing outside. In the winter, we draw the blinds, turn on the lights and enjoy the coziness.

It isn’t just about the wine, the food or the stories though. It is a matter of knitting up the chaos of the worlds, inner and outer, real and metaphorical, the potent past and the neglected now. We are opening our inner attention to the world. I can almost see the stitches our words make.

For Shakespeare it was sleep that knit up the “ravell’d sleave of care,” or not, in Macbeth's case. And sleep is a worthy rest for tired bodies. But for many of us, an evening conversation with a loved one with whom you can be as honest as courtesy permits helps us to sew or knit up our inner and outer lives. Peace comes when inner and outer are in sync. Anxiety results when they are not.

Attention to the real is the bedrock of authentic inner lives. Another person’s take on our thoughts is often just what we need to bring them back into line with truth. It is so easy to get off into the weeds these days, which then leads into a swamp from which it may be difficult to retreat! I’m not sure why this is particularly true today, except that there are so many ideas out there and so few overarching unities.

For instance, when Don and I got together I had been living alone for almost ten years. I worked, of course, but also traveled and had adventures. When I joined a family, however, Don and his son, it was a little hard to remember that me and my own experience and perceptions were not all there was. Don was miserable about not seeing enough of his son and poor Jesse, only five, was having to go back and forth between two cultures. It didn’t take me long to realize that the life I allowed to happen around me, the big life of everyone, was my own; that life was not the small knot of my own perceptions. This is what families teach you. “All for one, and one for all,” in the words of The Three Musketeers, as we became.

Recently too, having grown up in a relentlessly productive culture, I have allowed myself to wonder what the point of life is, if you are not as “productive” as you once were. And surely, some people encourage us to think this way! But again, it was Don who pointed out that this is the wrong question. “Anyone asking that, doesn’t know much about life!” he said, prompting me to remember that life has its own way of judging value. We will be much happier if we try to understand ourselves as part of precise nature and its underlying order, rather than viewing ourselves in terms of a rapacious and puerile civil society.

In a way it is a response to the Buddhist question, “Who is doing the thinking here? Who is this self you are so proud of?” It is really the fist you can’t pull out of the cookie jar until you unclamp it. Let things go, let them flow. And see yourself and the world around you as a whole. As Robert Thurman says in his book, Infinite Life [published 2005], “The target of Buddhist practice and the constant theme of this book is the primal misconception that you are the center of the universe, that your ‘self’ is a fixed, constant, and bounded entity. When you meditate on enlightened insights into the true nature of reality and the boundlessness of the self, you develop new habits of thinking.”

And, of course, when it comes down to it, there is nothing more productive than working to transform our small, selfish and mean-spirited selves into large ones, capable of joy and through which love can flow.

There are many ways to do this. Iain Mcgilchrist believes that our civilization has been made with our powerful left brains, allowing our right brains to atrophy to the detriment of our understanding. He advocates attention, listening, allowing things to come into being in the space which we open. “This kind of attention is a generative act,” he says. “It changes the world, changes what is there to find and it changes us. It’s a kind of magic. Attention bestows something on what you are attending to. It brings it to life.”

Knitting up inner and outer worlds keeps us sane. Meditation, open attention, but also thoughtful, wide-ranging conversation to go with a glass of wine of an evening are all helpful. I raise a glass to you, dear Reader.