Day 15… Creativity to soothe the savage…?

Number two son: “I’m just… I dunno… I’m not happy… but I’m not unhappy…”

I got it.

Restless soul syndrome.

He was looking for an outlet.

I was sitting on the sofa knitting (a rather alarmingly frequent sight at the moment, much to the dismay of the hoover, casting me doleful glances from the corner of the room) and it occurred to me.

“Do you want to try knitting?”

I had tried to teach him a couple of years ago, but he was still a bit young, impatient and frustrated. Now, though, he’s 10, and I remember my lovely grandma teaching me at just his age. She took me to the wool shop in her town, helped me pick out a fluffy blue yarn and a pattern, and I started knitting a jumper. She extracted a faithful promise from me that I would finish it. Thirty years later with not a stitch knitted in three decades, I found a plastic bag with the needles, balls of wool and half a jumper in it. I’m sure grandma would forgive me, especially since I turned that half a jumper into a pixie hat with integrated scarf for a *very* grateful 8-year old. It wasn’t wasted…

“I’ve got a new routine,” he said to me before he went to bed tonight. “I get home from school, walk the dog, and get knitting.” He’s making himself a scarf, and he’s already on the 7th row!

Focus, concentration, creativity, channeling the energy into something positive…

In the meantime, I heard this today:

“Only to the extent that a person exposes themselves again and again to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found within them. In this daring lies dignity and the spirit of true awakening.”
~ Karlfried von Durckheim

Aka the long, dark night of the soul?

Food for the next meditation, methinks.