violence vs. complacence

This project was started over two years ago and picked up every few months for an added inch or two. Frankly, I had lost interest in it. Who could remember the motives or mood that made me purchase the yarn in the first place. Or maybe I was sick of the Lace Ribbon pattern knitted so many times before. It might have been early summer when I thought that the color and weight would work as a light shawlette. With that thought, I added an additional pattern repeat to the depth.  Like the famous tortoise in the story, I finally finished the race. It's a gorgeous soft scarf/mini shawl in Jade Sapphire's incredible 50/50 silk/cashmere yarn. As I photographed it, I noticed the resemblance to the fossilized shell/rock I wrote about several posts ago. The one that was brought down from the top of a mountain peak a thousand miles from an ocean.

Maybe I was thinking of that when I bought the yarn. Legends of great seas in the southwest when the earth was trembling and cracking and mountain ranges like the Rockies, Jemez, and Sandias were forming.

Eons ago when planetary upheaval  didn't cause the kind of human destruction that the earthquake and tsunami in Japan has.
          Yesterday I was in Santa Fe shopping for cosmetics, browsing handbags and spring styles, only vaguely aware that a natural disaster of some kind had occurred somewhere in the world. On the drive home I spent time wondering how long it would take to learn how to use my spiffy new cell phone. I dreamed about a bag that I liked that was on sale and should have bought and the silk shirt at the Gap - wouldn't that look great with jeans. Those were the flimsy thoughts that occupied me on the long drive home. Once there I turned on the news. Reality kicked in. Of the terrible plight of the Japanese people and how easy it is to get caught up in shallow desires, yearnings, forms of addictions, habits. There were amazing photographs online this morning. One showed two attractive, fashionably dressed young women wearing high heeled boots, carrying stylish handbags, picking their way up a steeply tilted broken sidewalk with a look of fear on their faces, buildings collapsed all around them.
          Not everyone is like me, of course. I know women (and men) who don't give a thought to fashion or material possessions beyond the necessary, who live in earthships, who don't color or style their hair and who have never had a pedicure in their lives. In some cases they have chosen that lifestyle in spite of adequate incomes, in other cases it is forced upon them. It's those of us in the center that sometimes get confused.
          I want to help the Japanese people in some way, but I'm not a Red Cross volunteer, firefighter, or  doctor. Other than a small donation of money or supplies, all I can do is think about adjusting my own life, recalibrating my desires - and maybe knitting wool socks. It looks like the weather is cold there. People bundled up in jackets and blankets. At least I can knit.