Knit. Purl, Knit. Purl. Life.

*originally posted on WarmHeadsWarmHearts blog.

An interesting thing happened as I was frantically twisting and looping my way towards the completion of the first of my twelve sets of hats and scarves ... it became more.

Warm Heads. Warm Hearts. began out of my desire to meet an essential need of the homeless who live on the streets during the winter ~ warmth, and to do so in a personal way by knitting hats and scarves for them with love. As way leads on to way (in the words of the venerable Robert Frost), knitting has become a metaphor for my life.

As I sit with these pieces in my evenings and on weekends, at the doctor's office, and in the middle of the mall waiting for my daughter to finish a movie with friends - the life lessons just keep coming.

So here's what the loom whispered to me last month:

1. Persistence pays off, always. One knot at a time, a scarf and hat take shape out of strands of individual yarn. My life has become richer and more full over this past year as a result of fantastic people who have woven their lives in with mine, one story, one experience, one laugh at a time until out of nothing deep friendships have evolved.

2. There CAN be perfection as a result of imperfect process. My knitting is not perfect by any means - I won't do a test swatch to ensure my gauge is correct, instead, I just plow forward and make adjustments along the way, believing it will work. Is this how I operate in my life too? To a large extent the answer is yes, I trust my intuition implicitly and often make decisions that appear to others to be haphazard, but much like my knitting - it works.

3. You have to unravel your stuff from time to time, you just do! My yarn gets tangled and I keep knitting until I absolutely have to just stop and look for the loose ends to unravel the unruly mass of beautiful yarn I've created. I find that I try to do one more thing, make one more call, send one more Tweet before I look around and see that I've got an unruly mass that I have to unravel, usually somewhere close by - the laundry, opening mail, having the conversation with a friend that I've been putting off.

I can see the parallels between knitting and my life and delight in them. My life experiences will be inextricably tied, with love, into every knit and every purl of these hats and scarves.

I wouldn't have it any other way.