Organic Socks Gone Wrong

I'm one month deep into the Organic Experiment, and have been woefully underreporting my adventures. Apologies. Yet, I'm having many rich moments of bliss, and... well, many shrunken things. While I feel I should be sharing the baseline toxic load data I've collected, I'd like to start with a story about organic socks gone wrong and lessons learned.

That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence. It is the ordinary state of affairs. Everything is in process. Everything—every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate—is always changing, moment to moment. -- Pema Chodron

I shed a lot of clothing as I prepared for my year of wearing organic, which continues to delight me endlessly. Found a like-minded soul - Bindu Wiles - who captured the bliss of limited choice in her "Shed Project." Bindu, a white chick from Brooklyn who happens to be a Buddhist had the brilliant idea to pair down her belongings to 100 items only, over 8 weeks last fall, and rather than just wax poetic about her solitary journey, she invited the broader community to join her. Read about her experience right here.

Why does it make me so happy to have shed so many clothes? Do the old, toxic clothes weigh down my soul like negative coping patterns and excess weight? Why am I thrilled to have only 6 pairs of undies, 3 bras, 4 pairs of pants and 6 shirts? Why does the vacuous space in my dresser and closet feel like I'm making room for more important ways of being radically and outrageously present in the world?

It's not all bliss and rapture: my first day of organic on New Year's Day began with a load of wash which included my 5 pair of organic socks. You probably know where this is headed. My darling husband agreed to put the laundry in the dryer, and sheepishly emerged from the laundry room asking about caterpillars.

"Caterpillars?!" I repeated, stunned but slowly realizing that I had blithely washed my precious hand-knit organic socks, made from the kind sheep at local Petaluma sheep farm, Windrush, in hot water.

"I opened the washer and there were these weird 2 inch furry caterpillars staring up at me," reports my sweet husband, David Gottfried, "and they looked curiously like the socks you so happily knit a month ago. Now one finger doesn't fit inside. Sorry, Babe!"

Caterpillars. We all had a good laugh and a reminder about impermance. The Organic Experiment is in process and I'm down a few socks, an expected part of the flow of daily, ordinary life. Weren't those socks just on loan to me?   

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating …and you finish off as an orgasm. -  George Carlin

Sacred Socks & Pablo Neruda

Maybe you didn't quite get just how obsessed I am with knitting. Here's an example: I could not properly express the joy I feel with my new socks, knitted from delicious "soft girl" yarn from local Petaluma sheep, until I came across Pablo Neruda's Ode to Socks, excerpted way below in English and Spanish. Thank you, Mom, for sending me the link to Pablo's poem.

Welcome to my new socks for my 2011 Organic Challenge!

wear organic | schmear organic | eat organic

for more info, click here

Are these socks crazy good? Have I lost my mind? The yarn is from local Petaluma sheep owned by the wise and wonderful Mimi Luebbermann of Windrush Farms. 

Pablo understands....

ODE TO MY SOCKS

(Translated by Robert Bly)

Mara Mori brought me

a pair of socks

which she knitted herself

with her sheepherder's hands,

two socks as soft as rabbits.

I slipped my feet into them

as though into two cases

knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin.

Violent socks,

my feet were two fish made of wool,

two long sharks

sea blue, shot through

by one golden thread,

two immense blackbirds,

two cannons,

my feet were honored in this way

by these heavenly socks.

They were so handsome for the first time

my feet seemed to me unacceptable

like two decrepit firemen,

firemen unworthy of that woven fire,

of those glowing socks.

 

Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp tempation

to save them somewhere as schoolboys

keep fireflies,

as learned men collect

sacred texts,

I resisted the mad impulse to put them

in a golden cage and each day give them

birdseed and pieces of pink melon.

Like explorers in the jungle

who hand over the very rare green deer

to the spit and eat it with remorse,

I stretched out my feet and pulled on

the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

 

The moral of my ode is this:

beauty is twice beauty,

and what is good is doubly good

when it is a matter of two socks

made of wool in winter.

Now, in Espanol....

ODA A LOS CALCETINES

por Pablo Neruda

Me trajo Mara Mori
un par de calcetines
que tejió con sus manos de pastora,
dos calcetines suaves como liebres.
En ellos metí los pies
como en dos estuches
tejidos con hebras del
crepúsculo y pellejos de ovejas.

Violentos calcetines,
mis pies fueron dos pescados de lana,
dos largos tiburones
de azul ultramarino
atravesados por una trenza de oro,
dos gigantescos mirlos,
dos cañones:
mis pies fueron honrados de este modo
por estos celestiales calcetines.

Eran tan hermosos que por primera vez
mis pies parecieron inaceptables,
como dos decrépitos bomberos,
bomberos indignos de aquel fuego bordado,
de aquellos luminosos calcetines.

Sin embargo, resistí la tentación
aguda de guardarlos como los colegiales preservan sus luciérnagas,
como los eruditos coleccionan
documentos sagrados,
resistí el impulso furioso de ponerlos
en una jaula de oro y darles cada
dia alpiste y pulpa de melón rosado.

Como descubridores que en la selva
entregan el rarísimo venado verde
al asador y se lo comen con remordimiento,
estiré los pies y me enfundé
los bellos calcetines y luego los zapatos.

Y es esta la moral de mi Oda:
Dos veces es belleza la belleza,
y lo que es bueno es doblemente bueno,
cuando se trata de dos calcetines
de lana en el invierno.

Nuevas odas elementales, 1956 

With deepest thanks to Rebecca Burgess for inspiring this work with her friendship and her brilliant project, Fibershed!