Aristotle tells us that the ability to see metaphor is the hallmark of genius. You're a genius, right? So stay with me here as I try to work out this metaphor between beading and proton therapy...
We'll start with my love of beads. I'm sure it isn't a reflection of any innate talent, but more just a draw toward bright, shiny objects. But I am enthusiastic about beading, and they know me by name at my local bead shop. They should, given the unseemly amount of my net income deposited there each month. Some of my expenditures have been on nice, big beads made out of jasper, moon stone, tiger eye, and so on, beads you can pick up with your fingers and thread on a wire without incident or a whole lot of skill.
But, since I'm now getting into off-loom weaving, most of my purchases these days are in the seed bead section. For you bead virgins, seed beads are the kind that come packed by the hundreds in little tubes, and, individually, are too small to be seen by the naked eye. Well, not really, but they are too small to be dealt with by my naked eye, thus the magic lamp that makes all things possible, beadwise.
Getting started on a beadweaving project requires pulling lots and lots of whisper thin, tangly thread through these infinitesimal beads. As you might imagine, as I am guiding 15 or 20 feet of thread through the first few tiny beads at the start of a project, there is a lot of snarling going on, by both the thread and by me. More time is spent at first on untangling knots and jabbing myself with the needle than on actually getting any beads together.
There are moments when I feel like chucking the beads right through the window, along with the magic lamp and the whole kit and caboodle of bead gear. But I usually just stick with it, and once I get enough on rows of beads put together, the piece starts to take shape, and the whole zen of beading thing begins to kick in: pick up a bead and stitch and pick up a bead and stitch....
It actually becomes calming and eventually you end up with something that is finished and put together well enough.
I've been thinking a lot about this as we've been working to bring together all the necessary, but initially shapeless, elements of P.'s treatment plan--wrangling our way through all the diagnostic steps, connecting with Dr. God's crew long distance, the waiting, waiting, waiting for the insurance approval--all of the things I've been whingeing about throughout this blog.
At this point, I like to think that we have made it past the initial snarly stages, and that things are coming together. Maybe we even have a routine that is helping us reach the stage when treatment can finally begin. At least I hope so.
1 comment:
Yup! Great metaphor, and to keep running with it...perhaps on occasion we will have to tie on thread. That, too, will be onerous, but the end result is oh-so-worth-it. And maybe along the way we will even discover a sort of zen when tying on the thread!
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