100 Days of Spinning – Day 70

Today’s big insight: the elephant now knows how to spin.

What’s that, you say? What elephant? Conjures up quite a mental image, doesn’t it?

Granted, I am taking some liberties with the published science. But loosely speaking, we can consider that our conscious awareness is like a child riding on the elephant of the unconscious mind. This elephant is very smart, and very capable. It learns how to do things, and then you don’t have to really think about them any more. Driving a car is an excellent example. Everyone (who can drive) has had the experience of arriving at his or her destination with no real memory of actually doing the driving. When that happens, the elephant was driving. It’s actually better at coordinating all the little things have to come together in order to drive successfully – remember when you were first learning, and you had to think about steering and accelerating and braking (and maybe the clutch) and changing gears and watching the traffic all around you and that stoplight up ahead…whew! So this ability to take all that below conscious awareness is very valuable. And now, my elephant knows at least the basics of spinning. That makes me very happy. It was one of my goals in this daily practice.

So I had this lovely awareness while I finished the first bobbin of the next 3-ply and got a very good start on the second one. I really enjoy the meditative state that I slip into now when I spin, because I can put my thoughts on hold and just watch the wool slip through my fingers. At least for the most part. It still gets away from me now and then, and I have to stop and fix it. And there’s the joining that has to be done as I use up each little chunk of roving. But for the most part, it’s pretty sweet.

Until tomorrow.