Once I asked my neighbor, the composer David Liptak, why listening to classical music can be so meditative. David offered: “when your mind is focused on following the pattern in music, other preoccupations tend to drop away.”

As I expand my skills in knitting (which I’ve mused on in earlier posts such as this oneand that one), I’m finding that the kind of attention required by knitting a complicated pattern can be meditative in a similar way. When your mind is focused on following the pattern, other preoccupations tend to drop away.

I experienced this when making my first piece of stranded knitting: a wool hat for my great-nephew’s first birthday. The pattern was called “Elephants on Parade.” On an off-white background, grey-blue elephants circled the hat, big ones below, and smaller ones as the hat decreased in diameter toward the top of the head. Between the rows of elephants were cheery red-checkered rows.

The designer’s pattern posed two new challenges for me. The elephants were graphed onto a pattern chart, showing which color to use for which stitch as you moved across the row. I’d never followed a pattern chart before; all my previous knitting projects had verbal instructions. But once I got the hang of following the tiny colored squares, keeping my post-it above the row I was on, I gained confidence and comfort in this visual way of following a pattern.

The second new challenge was the stranded knitting, which involved carrying two different color yarns across the row, the unused color carried as a loose strand behind the color in use.

So, for instance, while knitting two grey-blue stitches for the elephant’s back leg, I let the off-white yarn hang loose in the back, then picked it up to create the space between the elephant’s legs, leaving the grey-blue yarn loose; then for the front leg’s two grey-blue stitches, did the reverse. (I’ve since learned how to hold one strand in each hand, as in Fair Isle knitting.)

Once I figured out how to keep these two colors of yarn from getting tangled, I relaxed into the focused concentration that following this pattern required. I did have to focus; no day-dreaming here!

But as I saw the little elephants take shape in my hands, I felt the joy of creative accomplishment. It seemed almost miraculous: how these little creatures could come to a kind of life from two strands of yarn.

I remembered (not while knitting, since during the process my mind had to stay fixed on the creative present, but when I’d rest between rows to gaze with fulfillment at the work) how the figure of Wisdom speaks about creativity in the Bible’s book of Proverbs.

She, Wisdom, was created by God, she says, “at the beginning of his work,” so that she was present to witness his creation of our universe. “When he established the heaven, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep…when he assigned to the sea its limit…when he marked out the foundations of the earth.” As God molded these forms of heaven, seas, and earth, Wisdom watched in joy and even, she suggests, participated in the creative work: “then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race” (NRSV 8:22-31).

Sharing in the creativity of the designer of “Elephants on Parade” seemed to me at least a bit like Wisdom’s sharing in God’s creative work: a designer creates the original pattern; but “beside” the designer, “like a master worker,” is the one who delights in helping bring the pattern into being.

Wisdom’s rejoicing as she shared in the divine creativity was, as I imagine it, a meditative joy. Being “there” as God “established” heaven, earth, and humankind would be a witnessing in wonder. This would be a meditative experience beyond that of listening to music, that is (picking up my friend David Liptak’s terms) beyond focusing the mind on following the pattern. Because Wisdom—and a knitter following the designer’s knitting pattern—is “following” the pattern in a medium that helps bring the pattern into being.

The musical analogy here would be to the performer’s art: the musician follows the composer’s pattern and in doing so with attentive creative energy brings the composer’s design to life anew with each performance.

And so with following a complex pattern in knitting: it is meditative, but an active, creative meditation. And if you have followed my musings this far, dear reader, then I expect you might be a knitter too. If you are, and if you’d like to muse with me further about the spirituality of knitting—for a book I’ve recently gotten a contract for—email me at pegrosenthal@yahoo.com or give me your e-address in the comment box below.