I dream of knitting.

For what it's worth, I don't knit, but I think I should take it up.

I am sitting in some sort of living room knitting with two friends, one on my right side and one on my left. We're sitting in a vaguely circular pattern. At some point we are at my grandmothers' house. (She doesn't knit either.)

We are each making a pair of gloves. Mine is ivory colored. Left-side friend's pair is green, and right-side friend's is black. RSF is struggling with his pair, as his right hand/wrist is broken.



We put the projects away before they are complete. (We are going to move on to something else but I don't remember what.) The tips of the fingers in mine need to be finished. I wrap the needles around and through ends of the fingers, as they currently exist, and put them back into a bag. Inside the bag is a lot of yarn, that I had known I had but hadn't realized I could actually use to make things. The yarn I am using to make the gloves I had borrowed from LSF, and I feel a little silly about this once I realize I have so much of my own.

Based on some cursory research knitting can be about creativity, or the process of converting raw materials into a usable something.

Having difficulty with knitting indicates avoidance of an issue. Hands can be about competency, holding on or letting go, and broken bones are about obstacles or inability to deal with whatever the particular bone might be. It is possible this is intended to be about RSF, but much more likely that it's about me, that both of them are about me.

One on each side, the friend to the right indicates active processes, assertiveness, dominance. But this part of me is represented by someone whose right hand is broken. Who can't successfully accomplish the task. RSF is trying to knit his black yarn into gloves, but is prevented from doing so due to feelings of or literal incompetency, and avoidance of those feelings.

If both of these folks are here as aspects of me, then LSF represents the passive, receptive, intuitive parts of me, which are much better and knitting. They are competent, they are using green. The borrowed yarn indicates that I am relying to heavily on this passive acceptance, quite possibly to make up for my wounded active side.

Most of the standard implications for yarn seem useless to me - I think it's perhaps directly representative of the raw materials/energy going into the creative process. The loudest message to me here is that I have resources I am not using, resources that I don't even remember exist, and that before I ask people for help I need to remember to check the bag for unused supplies.

But what about the gloves? We were all very pointedly making gloves, not hats or blankets or baby sweaters. Googling "glove symolism" points me towards the Freemasons and The Catcher in the Rye. I don't find either of these especially useful.

What I do find useful is the concept of gloves being absolutely, always intentional. Gloves are a preparation. They protect our hands from cold or heat or water or chemicals, sometimes they protect other things from us. But they are always an intentional step toward an end, a preparation for a certain task. I can only assume that we are preparing to insulate ourselves from something, I just don't know what.

My gloves' missing fingertips points to a lack of commitment on my part. Fingerless gloves are a rather useless half-assed attempt at having two things at once - warmth and dexterity. You never quite get much of either that way.

There are a lot of unanswered questions here, but: Stop being so passive. Check the bag for resources I forgot I had. Figure out what you actually want, no bullshit compromises.