Everything is Holy Now.

Before I typed my first word here, this post took on an entirely different focus.  My intent was to address my lack of "passion" and "focus", which I take as a positive, not a negative.  If you've been reading me a while, you know I paint, I work in wool, I whale watch, I teach, I volunteer, I photograph, I write... and really there is no ONE thing I place all my focus on, no one great passion in my life.

In the past, I've said my passion is exploring; my passion is having new experiences.  I think that paints me as being a bit more adventurous than I am.  I don't have a passion for trying a lot of new experiences.  I don't have any interest in skydiving, rock climbing, or eating snails, for instance. 

I also don't have a lot of interest in becoming an expert in any one thing. I've written about this a little before, when I've talked about Trekkies vs Trekkers, and about NOT getting a degree in Marine Biology.  The thing is, I want to explore what I want to explore in the way I want to explore it.

Recently I thought it would be fun to be part of a spinning group online (spinning fiber, not sitting on a stationary bike going nowhere fast with a lot of people).  It is not fun.  My interest in spinning isn't about making certain ply yarns or plying colors together and I'm not ever EVER going to dye wool with Kool-Aid.  My interest is in the production of the wool to dye with historic/ natural colors... to deal with creating color and combining color under the restrictions of what was available in the past, and the social and cultural relationships to the fiber and color.   Oh, and I don't really need to be an expert in all that either, since the topic is too broad and crosses too many boundaries to be a degree... I mean, is it history? Sociology? Art?  

For me spinning is also at times a meditative act.  There is something about the wool passing through your fingers, binding together that is almost Zen.  For me, a lot of that is spoiled when the wool has been chemically died, although the yarn produced is certainly very beautiful, it isn't at all the point to spinning for me.   It's not that I don't use the yarn I spin, but that I want it to be all part of the process.  When I weave, I like to work with wool I've both spun and dyed.  I do draw the line at processing the fleece, because washing and carding large quantities of wool is not something I'm equipped to do, but I do card small quantities of washed wool to spin.

This thing I have about spinning is pretty much the same experience I have with other things in my life.  I enjoy the whale watching trips and education I do.  There's a lot I want to know about life in the ocean, but except for the whales, I really want to know about life in the intertidal, and don't have much interest in anything with a backbone.  I admit to a recent curiosity about birds, but I want to watch birds in a casual kind of way, and birders are a very passionate, focused group.

For a long time I thought my problem was that I didn't have a passion for anything, because I could find something interesting in so many things, and have zero interest at this point in my life on finding a "focus" or "over-riding passion".   I think the difference for me is that now there are so many things to find joy in, that focusing on one thing feels limited.

Today, when I started to write, it occurred to me that to say that everything has the potential of joy, that there is some spark of passion in everything, and that you don't need to ignite into flame focusing on one thing, but to find that spark in everything was pretty much the same thing as saying everything is holy.  

And that, of course, brought me back to this song.

For me, it seems better to be walking through a world of interest and wonder than to be bound to one narrow aspect, although I know that's not for everyone, and that it's just a difference in worldview.