Slow down. Hold still.
It’s not as if it’s a matter of will.
Someone’s circling. Someone’s moving
a little lower than the angels…

And it’s got nothing to do with me.
The wind blows through the trees,
but if I look for it, it won’t come.
I tense up. My mind goes numb.
There’s nothing harder than learning how to receive.

Calm down. Be still.
We’ve got plenty of time to kill.
No hand writing on the wall:
just the voice that’s in us all.
And you’re whispering to me,
time to get up off my hands and knees,
’cause if I beg for it, it won’t come.
I find nothing but table crumbs.
My hands are empty. God I’ve been naive.

All I need is everything.
Inside, outside, feel new skin.
All I need is everything.
Feel the slip and the grip of grace again.

So from now till kingdom come,
taste the words on the tip of my tongue.
‘Cause we can’t run truth out of town,
only force it underground.
The roots grow deeper
in ways we can’t conceive.

All I need is all I need.

(lyrics, Over the Rhine, “All I Need is Everything”.)

I can feel the seasons changing.  All of a sudden, I want to sleep at night (rather than during the day when it’s so hot your face melts off and puddles on your shirt fronts), and make soup and stockpile things for the long winter ahead.

Most of all, though, I can feel it in the way I’m being drawn to huge projects.  Much huger than normal.

These aren’t the complicated sock patterns or the sewing of curtains, both of which I’m really attracted to in the hotter months, but the Big Fat Heavy Projects — sweaters and blankets and intricate shawls.  Somewhere inside my head, there’s a switch that gets flipped around this time of year, and my sock knitting lays at the sidelines and I start eyeing the worsted weight wools with a new appreciation.  Last year, it was the Simple Knitted Bodice, and this year, it’s the Cherie Amor from Knitty.

I know.  I feel so trendy.  But I had the yarn already, and I couldn’t keep myself from casting on.  I’m through most of the ribbing right now, in fact.

There are such huge changes on the horizon for me.  For everything, really.  I’m scaling back on the work I’m doing personally — finding good staff that I know will handle things in a way that *I* would, if I had the attention to deal with it all — and branching out oversight of a couple new things in the same vein.  I know.  That’s cryptic.  Two of them are super-sekrit, and coming very soon, though.  So I can’t say much until they’re finalized or I’ll jinx it all and it’ll all come tumbling down around my ears.

Stuff does that.  See how it is?

Everything in my life right now has this kind of golden glow around it.  It’s all good, mind you, but the cynical side of me keeps wondering when things are going to crash.   It’s that Getting Hit By A Bus Syndrome(tm) again.  I’m sure it came from somewhere and is a deeply-held psychosis, but I haven’t figured out from whence it came yet.  Soon.  I’ll do some self-examination soon.

Like, maybe, while I’m knitting this sweater.  Or the halloween mystery shawl.  Or the hexagon blanket from the last entry.  Big projects are conducive to Much Thinking.  And winter *is* the time for introspection.

Pictures of the sweater-in-progress coming soon.  We’ve had two days of rain, so I’ve been sound editing rather than taking pictures.  But I’m enjoying myself muchly, and the golden glow just lingers.

I think I’m officially reaching the point of burnout.

It could just be a bit of sleep-deprivation, since lately I keep staying up until five or six in the morning (this morning it was ten. Ten. A. M. Ridiculous.) , and getting less and less done as a result. But really, I think all the activity that’s been going on since June has started catching up with me, and my brain just isn’t able to keep up with it all anymore.

Everyone always says that you need to take time for you when you’re living a creative life. I agree with that. I do. My problem has been that my passion has been my business — the most wonderful of situations, trust me, I’m grateful — but it means that when I’m not working, I’m still doing the same things, so my brain doesn’t really know when it’s not working. Does that make sense?

I’m not starting to hate fiber or anything (oh, heavens no…and I have the eBay receipts to prove it.), but I am finding that I’m not finishing any of my personal projects. Or my work projects, for that matter. And I’m increasingly distracted and confused, which is highly irregular and definitely uncomfortable for me. I derive a lot of my personal satisfaction from what I get done, and when that’s a big, fat, zero on the list of to-dones, it makes for a restless, wanderlusty Me.

Last night, I looked at the growing pile of end-of-batch mini-skeins from all the lime & violet dyeworking, and the japanese craft book that moonstitches is using for her hexagon blanket  (it’s ISBN#13 978-4415103655, for those who want to use the google-fu…), and thought that maybe I’d just step away from all the writing and the spinning madly and attempts to design stuff for super-sekrit projects, and do a few squares, just to see if I could unwind a bit. I threw in a movie and picked bits of yarn by random, and ended up with seven hexagons. A good start on a longer-term project that I want to do as we dye more yarn.

I love it so far. It’s just mindless enough and random enough that I can do it without thinking — which is just what the doctor ordered, I think. Not a lot of counting, or worrying about misplaced yarnovers, or dealing with a Whole Lot Of Pattern — just an around and around double-crochet and getting to see what those yarns I keep making will end up looking like when they’re all worked up.

At some point in the very near future, I still think I need a break. A big one, in fact. One where there’s food in the house and yarn on the needles and all the wholesale stuff is already taken care of so I can kick back a bit and just relax and let the brain unwind.

It’s a good start, though.