The Frazzled Edges of Life

You can’t see it here, but the edges of this warp are just beginning to show signs of rebellion. I’ve finished one Fibonacci Rainbow Clergy Stole (8 feet long,) and am three feet from the end of this second one. And there are yards left on the warp.

The colors are beautiful, the Fibonacci Sequence pattern is great fun, and so far the weaving has been joyfully uneventful. But now I see the beginning threat of some frazzling around the edges.

Life’s like that, isn’t it? Although total disasters are not unheard of they are, blessedly, not the norm. Most of the time what’s going on center stage in our lives stays pretty much under control. It’s what’s going on at the edges, just out of our peripheral vision, where the surprises lurk; where dangers can grow slowly, quietly, insidiously, and we don’t see them coming. The edges begin to frazzle. It may threaten to become a major life problem, or perhaps (it is to be hoped) just a minor irritation. We go on blithely, even joyfully, weaving the pattern of life while out there, out of sight, the edges begin to frazzle.

Now a weaver knows the entire width of the warp is of the same importance. We should be expected to pay attention to all of it. But it’s at the center of the warp that the pattern is appearing in all its beauty, and that is where our attention is focused. We pay little attention to the edges, until they become a problem. When they do, sometimes it can be fixed with minor effort. Sometimes there’s nothing for it but to tie off the ruined warp, and start over.

Life’s like that, isn’t it? We decide what we want to be the center of things, and put all our attention there. It’s what we have relegated to the far edges of life that is likely to cause us a problem sooner or later. Oftentimes its something just as important as the whole warp of our life: a loved one we have been neglecting for one reason or another, a social issue that has been sitting annoyingly in our conscience, a obligation we have been putting off fulfilling. Out there, at the edges, they will sooner of later begin to frazzle, and threaten the integrity of our exciting plans for the center of our desires.

This afternoon, after my violin lesson via Skype from Prague, I’m going to have to get concerned in a very mundane way about those two back threads you see at the edges of my warp. The first threads in the Fibonacci Sequence that spreads across the stole – 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21 . . . They’re both starting to untwist, which means they’re getting longer than the other threads, which means their tension is loosening, and the edges won’t hold. There are several possible causes, most of them (Thank You) easy to fix. But I’ll have to take my eyes off the center for a bit, and pay some attention to the edges.

Have you ever had to do that?

~ Will