so many arts

My plan to grow pairs out of languishing single socks before starting new ones is working! This pair (there is another sock) emerged in only two nights of knitting and at least one good movie. Have you seen It's Complicated with Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin?  It's hilarious.  Directed by Nancy Meyers who also did Something's Gotta Give. If you loved that one as I did (Keanu Reeves fantasies not withstanding) you will notice some similarities. Overall this new movie is really fun. Anyway, to get back to sock basics, I used a soft cotton/wool blend from Opal (in colors that I couldn't help but photograph against Ron's eight foot long abstract painting that takes up an entire wall in our dining area). I added an inch of mock cable around the ankle (which you can barely see) to keep it interesting. Because I didn't write any notes to myself when I put the unfinished pair away months ago, I subsequently spent a day searching for the cable pattern I used. It's one I've used often for whole socks, but somehow my brain just wasn't making the connection and I almost tossed the whole project into a drawer again. Glad I didn't though. I love this blithesome pair of socks (isn't that a great word). 

I love Jeff Greenwald's book shopping for buddhas. It's about his journey in the late 1980s obsessively searching for the perfect Buddha statue. What makes a statue perfect? The criteria seems to have originated from the words of an Indian poet who lived fourteen centuries ago and said, "the figure of a Buddha blazes with immutable signs and marks" and proceeded to list 32 major and 80 minor traits that positively identify one. Greenwald reduced them to eighteen "protrusions and coruscations".
         I have a small Buddha statue on my desk upstairs. I bought it in Sedona, Arizona a few years ago at one of the new age crystal shops (after I'd gone to the one yarn shop in town and bought sock yarn - but that's another story). I liked its face. It was made of a lightweight clay, was small, and didn't cost a fortune. It's been on the desk since then and I am often aware of its serene presence nearby. Occasionally I burn some incense or a votive candle and there is a string of sandalwood beads (from an authentic Tibetan monk) wrapped around his body. It turns out that this little Buddha figure has every single one of the traits that Greenwald researched and deemed important - right down to the bump on his cranium and the wheels on his feet. Who knew? I have no idea who carved and molded this little statue, or where, nor did I find another one on a recent trip to Sedona so as to be able to ask about it. So, with a Zen-like attitude I will simply accept it. But I am feeling a tad smug at having scored easily what others needed years to find.

To just see is to release the tight grip we unwittingly place on everything we think.
                                                Steve Hagan