At my local yarn shop, we were sitting on the couches talking about what knitting means in our lives. As the conversation revved up, with everyone tossing out comments about how knitting can be at once meditative, creative, solitary, and communal, one knitter threw in, “It’s like we all have a yarn to share.”

As we all laughed at the pun, someone else added wryly: “Yarns are stories knitters tell each other around the fire.”

I steal this anecdote from my book just published by Paraclete Press: Knit One, Purl a Prayer: A Spirituality of Knitting. (Thanks to Good Letters friend Maureen for her review.)

Much of the book is about the joy of creativity—especially creating with one’s hands—and about the communal dimension of this sort of creativity.

All creativity has a solitary and a communal dimension. A poet writes a poem in solitude; it becomes communal as soon as it reaches a reader. A sculptor chisels or molds in solitude; the work becomes communal when it is exhibited or put online.

But some crafts are communal in their creating. I think of murals painted by a whole city neighborhood. Or the improvisation of a jazz group. Or, most classically, quilting.

What’s intriguing about knitting, I’ve found, is that, while it can be done alone, many knitters also belong to groups that intentionally knit together. There’s a social dimension that’s facilitated by creating with one’s hands in the company of others who are doing the same.

The countless knitting blogs and websites speculate about why this is. And about why knitting is in such a popularity boom right now, especially among young professionals.

Part of the reason, I’m sure, is a reaction to the increasing non-tactility of our culture. Everyone is connected on Facebook, but it’s an eerie sort of connection, really. You can’t touch your “friends” this way. And the same with all our email and everything else we do online: it’s immensely convenient, but there’s an inherent distancing in its “virtuality.”

Greg Wolfe said something helpful along these lines in his September 2011 interview in The Writer’s Chronicle. He was speaking about the “production values” of Image: the decision from the start to create a journal which is luscious to hold in the hands and to feast the eyes on. Image is meant to be “an incarnational product,” he said.

I believe that we can’t live fully human lives without incarnational products and without creating incarnationally in some medium ourselves. God the Creator created us in the image of the Divine Creator—so we are meant to be creative beings. We are meant to take the stuff of earth and shape it into forms that in some mysterious way carry meaning and add to the beauty of the earth.

The medium we choose (or that chooses us) doesn’t matter. What matters—profoundly—is that we create.

This is why my caught a recent Ad Council ad in a magazine somewhere. The ad’s central bold letters proclaim “NO WONDER PEOPLE THINK MARTHA GRAHAM IS A SNACK CRACKER.” And in smaller caps above and below: “There’s not enough art in our schools…. Art. Ask For More.”

Cleverly, this ad expresses what I feel passionate about: when public schools have to cut budgets, the arts are the first to go. And whenever this happens I cringe, as if a knife has slashed off an essential part of our collective well-being. Raising kids without the arts is smothering their souls.

And knitting? It is one of the most democratic of creative media. A couple sticks and a ball of fiber are all you need.

A psychiatrist who is also a knitter told me that knitting is important because it yields a concrete product. “In our world, we don’t make things,” she said. So we don’t have a sense of fulfillment, and this absence of fulfillment can cause stress. We have too many activities with no end result—like being at the computer all day. Whereas knitting is gratifying: you finish with something tactile and useful.”

And if you knit with others, you are sharing your yarns along the way.

Making real friends, not virtual ones.