Image: A jumble of crocheting in a wavy pattern with a yarn that has many shades of color — purples, greens, blues, pinks and copper.
My favorite yarn manufacturer is called Malabrigo. They are a small family-owned company in Uruguay and Peru, hand-dyeing wool sourced from traditional family farms across the region. The yarn they produce is a pleasure to handle: strong and soft and dyed in a myriad of subtle variegations, ambiguous colors that slide into each other and are hard to define… the tones I like best. I have plenty of tales about difficulty in getting enough of a particular colorway to finish a project – for example, I somehow amassed nine skeins of “Arco Iris,” each one fractionally different from the other, and impossible to blend into the single project I wanted to make. Well, nine clients at Rose Haven, a local shelter for unhoused women and their children, will be getting a “one-skein wonder” crocheted cowl in Arco Iris for Mother’s Day. And I will find something else to use for my larger project.
But I got curious -- why Malabrigo?
It turns out that there is a small village in Uruguay called “Mal Abrigo” - Bad Shelter - a place where winds and other meteorological terrors have left generations of travelers stranded and cursing. It is located at just the right point between cities that people pretty much have to stop there if they’re experiencing any sort of trouble.
The founders of the yarn company decided to re-cast this actual place of discomfort and delay into an imagined community of welcome where, once you got inside out of the elements, you would really appreciate things that are warm and soft and beautiful, and the time and the skill that goes into making them.
“Deepen your perception by deepening your need,” says Rumi. That’s something I need to remind myself more often – that when I’m squatting in the bad shelter of my own heart, cursing the weather and the innkeeper and composing a really magnificently fierce Yelp review for whatever savage deities got me into this mess… I’ve been offered a chance to imagine, more deeply and fully than I ever will in gentler circumstances, what beauty looks like. What warmth looks like. What comfort and kindness look like, and how good they feel to make and to share. My yearning can be the thread that guides me out of the maze of doubt, depression, and dour apathy into a more open space – one that offers the many colors of possibility and the durable pleasures of doing and making and sharing.
We live in a harsh and discouraging time, even for those of us who have nothing to complain about as far as daily comforts are concerned. The problems of our age seem so big, beyond what we as individual creatures can expect to impact. But if in this bad shelter, we can fill our hands with… making something that will warm the body and gladden the eye? That is an outward sign of our interdependence, our love for each other, our power to imagine and create? That’s a start, maybe?
Our longing for better things can lead us. Our making, whatever we’re called to, can lift our hearts. And strengthen us for a very long journey to a better shelter.
Wonderful!!