Report From the Couch

Mere physical sitting is not enough. You have to sit carefully and attentively. Let your body and breathing sit. Let your mind and emotions sit. Let your blood circulation sit. Let everything sit. Then your sitting becomes indestructible, immovable. – Maezumi Roshi

It's just after a week since I broke my foot. It's better, but I've got a way to go before it's all healed. In the meantime, I sit.

I sit and sit and sit.

It's uncomfortable sitting around all day: you get sore hips, sore back, sore butt... It's a relief to stand up. Since my foot is a lot less swollen, I'm a bit braver about moving around without pain, but I refuse to put any significant weight on it until I know for sure it's healed enough for it. In the meantime, I've become an expert at navigating myself around the house on crutches. I'm grateful that all that time in the gym means that my upper body strength is really helping me support myself on them (thank goodness for dips). I get up the carpeted stairs on my hands and knees, and I come back down on my bum, sort of crab-walking my way down.

I've learned that pockets, straps, and loops are the way forward. I can make it from the kitchen to the couch with an apple and a wrapped sandwich in my pocket, and a cup of coffee in a sealed travel mug in my bag. And I can carry two skeins of yarn in each hand if I loop them onto my middle finger as I move around. And well, that's an important skill, yes?

My greatest idea was to use my old crochet bathroom mat on the tiled floor in the bathroom. It's very helpful at night if I need to use the bathroom. I don't trust myself to use my crutches when I'm that sleepy. I climb down off the bed, crawl along the carpet to the bathroom, then I kneel on the mat and pull myself along to get around.

Necessity is the mother of all invention, as they say.

One thing that happens when you're not very mobile is that you start to keep a lot of bits and pieces near you to save you the hassle of having to get up and bring them over to you. The things that have accumulated on the coffee table in front of me include:

• my work laptop
• cell phone (plugged into the work laptop to charge)
• travel-size hand cream
• lavender oil (for nap time)
• glass of water
• a hair elastic
• set of crochet hooks
• my darning pouch, complete with darning needles and scissors
• a tape measure

Also strewn around me on the couch: a bamboo shawl, a sweater, and a pair of sweat pants, which I wear interchangeably with a pair of shorts, depending on the weather.

I also seem to be collecting skeins of yarn around me. I looked beside me yesterday and saw this:

Never hurts to be prepared, I guess.

I am working from home (and man, do I ever get a lot done when there's no one popping up in my door every fifteen minutes), but having no commute time and being unable to get out for walks or anything, I've got LOTS of spare time on my hands. I spent some time daydreaming about this skein of 100% silk laceweight yarn from Handmaiden. I think I've got a plan for it now:

And while I was sitting here, I looked up at my shelf and saw another skein that my friend, YarnKettle, sent me a while back. It's a Merino wool sock yarn from Cotton Ridge Farms. I never noticed how similar the colourway was. They could be sisters... or cousins, at the very least:

Great minds think alike, hey YarnKettle? Or maybe fools seldom differ...

I've been craving a lot of sweets these days, which is dangerous because I'm getting so little exercise. Yesterday, I decided to get up and make some Toasted Coconut Butter for the first time. I took some unsweetened coconut flakes and dry roasted them in a pan. It's trickier than is sounds: as soon as you notice it starts to turn brown you have to keep stirring and folding it, otherwise it'll burn. Even taking it off the heat to take this photo was taking a bit of a chance:

After that, it's a matter of putting it into a blender and pulsing it until it turns into a smooth liquid, which doesn't take long at all. About 200 grams made enough to almost fill a small Mason jar. After it cools, it sets into a spread, but I put it into the fridge where it hardened, and then I scraped some out to put on some yogurt later on. It's so good that it's probably better for me to keep it in the fridge. It means I have to work harder to get it out, otherwise I'd be eating this stuff by the spoonful:

And of course, the knitting. In the evenings, I knit and I knit and I knit. I finished the back of my cotton top already:

I decided to wet block it to make it easier to sew it up later. It turned out pretty huge, but it being cotton, I know that it'll spring back a bit after I take it off the boards. I'm happy with the length: I won't be forever tugging it down when I finally do get to wear it. I'm glad that I decided not to try to knit it all in one piece. This fabric will really need the stability of the shoulder and side seams once it's all finished:

And yes, I have a great deal of time to think. I think about all of the fun springtime things going on all around me: about the market I wanted to go to this weekend, the sunshine on the marina, the trail I like to run on Sunday mornings, my friends going out and about, and me, just sitting here. It's lonely and depressing. I know it's another reminder to slow down, but darn it all, I'm finished with reminders now - I've been sick, I've been burned out, and now I'm broken. I got it. Loud and clear.

All I can do, I suppose, is to try to practice some quiet meditation: to be fully here in the midst of all my frustration and loneliness, to face it and look at it and try to make sense of it. I've read about this kind of sitting a lot. I guess it's time for me to practice it.

On to week two.