Episode 123: Can Spinning Heal the World? A Post-Retreat Reverie

In this episode, Sasha indulges in a little post-retreat reflection on how spinning enables human connection.

You can find the script for this episode HERE.

You can comment on and discuss this episode here in The Flock, Sheepspot’s free online community for inquisitive spinners.

Here's the link to the Podcast search page and playlists. 

 

 

Episode Transcript

(01:21):
I hosted my retreat last weekend. It was pretty magical.
Spinners arrived at Showback, the stunning seaside farm where I hold the retreat, on Thursday.
And we had a lovely dinner together. And then we spent Friday and Saturday learning,
spinning, eating, very important part of this retreat, and hot tubbing.

(01:45):
And we ended with a big breakfast together at my local general store slash restaurant on Sunday.
As you might know, I am extremely introverted, and this was a lot of peopling for me.
So I have alternated between napping and just being completely out of it for the past week.

(02:08):
Like, I don't remember which day it is kind of out of it.
I've never had that experience before, but all last week, I thought that it was the day before.
Um, so it started around Wednesday.
I was completely convinced that Wednesday was Tuesday and it just continued all week. It was weird.

(02:28):
Um, and because I have been so out of it, I've been really, really stumped on
what to tell you this week. I think I'm just tired.
Um, so I asked the text chain that has emerged from the retreat,
what I should talk about on this podcast.
And one of them, hi Susan, responded with this.

(02:51):
Talk about how in exhausting times, parentheses, pre-election season,
news about war, climate change, homelessness, close parentheses,
spinners have a near magical power of connecting peacefully with our inner selves and with others,
of finding instant commonality and focusing on the joy we find in working with

(03:17):
our hands and all of the color and texture of fiber as the background's negative hum recedes.
So with gratitude to Susan for
sending me that message, that's what I'm going to talk about this week.
Hello there, dear Sheepspotter. Welcome to episode 123 of the Sheepspot Podcast.

(03:42):
I'm Sasha, and it's my job to help you create more yarns you love.
And it is the best job in the world, helping you create more yarns you love.
I'm so lucky to have it. We will We'll get back to the actionable spinning tips next time, I promise.

(04:03):
But for now, I want to offer a little reflection on what, for me,
is one of the best parts of spinning, the way it allows us to connect with others.
If you've been listening for a while, you know this is something I spend quite
a bit of time thinking about because a lot of my work is creating community for spinners,

(04:23):
whether whether that's in the temporary community of the retreat or the less
temporary one of the guild,
my membership for intermediate and advanced spinners.
Indeed, I recently did a whole podcast series on the benefits of being part
of a spinning community.
And in that series, I talked about how community benefits spinners.

(04:46):
And today I want to flip that and do some thinking aloud about how spinning can help community.
So spinning has connected me to homeschooling homesteaders, physicians and physicists,
C-suite executives and stay-at-home moms, scientists and social workers,

(05:10):
economists and ergonomists, liberal pastors and conservative Latter-day Saints.
Yet, yes, demographically speaking,
Most spinners are still middle to upper middle class white women,
and that's a problem, and it's one that we all need to address.

(05:33):
How do we make the fiberverse more genuinely inclusive?
But even if we are mostly still middle-to-upper-middle-class white women,
we are all over the political spectrum.
And in these hyper-polarized times, I think that there's still something to celebrate in that.

(05:58):
We have got to figure out how to talk to each other across political differences.
And why not start with talking about wheels and wool?
Part of the reason we're so polarized is that a lot of the institutions that
have traditionally provided common ground for diverse groups of people,

(06:19):
things like labor unions, churches,
service organizations, and even major media institutions like network television,
these institutions are less and less central to most people's everyday lives.
Instead of getting together in meat space and trying to accomplish things in
the world together, we're all living in our own algorithmically curated news feeds.

(06:45):
In the age of social media, we really no longer share a common culture.
Spinning can be something that diverse folks share in common.
Here's how Diane, who's another participant in the retreat, put it to me after the retreat.

(07:06):
She said, the entire retreat was something special, but perhaps the thing that
resonated the most for me was not a technical skill that I learned,
of which there were many, but something else, something incredibly meaningful.
It was the experience of being part of a diverse group of people from different
places, different backgrounds, and different viewpoints, drawn together by our

(07:31):
shared love of hand spinning.
And then discovering through that not just connection, but something more, friendship.
And for us and our world, experiences like that aren't just good,
they're incredibly important and incredibly valuable.
I couldn't agree more, Diane. I think Susan gets at something really important

(07:58):
in the quote that I started with.
She says, spinners have a nearly magical power of connecting peacefully with
our inner selves and with others.
And it's the connecting peacefully with our inner selves part that I want to underscore here.

(08:19):
I have a hunch that the relaxing and grounding qualities of spinning are part
of what makes connection possible across cross-difference.
Talking with someone you don't know well is much easier when you start from
a calm place with a well-regulated nervous system, as opposed, say,

(08:39):
to encountering someone on social media, which, let's face it,
is just a technology to produce outrage.
Where we're usually anything but calm. By connecting first to ourselves,
spinning allows us to bring our best, most grounded, and centered selves to the conversation.

(08:59):
And that's a very good place to start connecting with other people.
I've always felt that there was something utopian, or at least potentially utopian, in the fiberverse.
And it wasn't until I read Suzanne's and Diane's texts that I connected the

(09:21):
dots between Spinning's ability to soothe,
excuse me, and how enabling that is for making real connections with others.
Can Spinning heal the world? Perhaps not.
But today, at least, I think it's as good a place to start as any.

(09:44):
I would love to hear about whether spinning has allowed you to connect with
people you would probably never have encountered otherwise.
As always, there's a dedicated discussion thread in the flock where you can
comment on this episode and discuss it with me and other listeners.
Come tell me your stories of connecting through spinning.

(10:07):
There's a link to the thread in the show notes for this episode,
which you will find right inside your podcast app.
So just open up the description for this episode, click the link,
and you'll be taken right to the thread.
If you haven't joined The Flock, Sheepspot's free online community for inquisitive

(10:28):
hand spinners, you absolutely should.
You'll get access to all of the freebies I've have created for the podcast,
as well as several self-guided spinning challenges, our weekly spinning check-ins
every Friday, and lots more.
You can join us at theflock.sheepspot.com.

(10:50):
Darling Sheepspotter, that is it for me this week. Thank you so much for listening.
I'll be back next week with the first of a series of episodes on fiber preparation
tools. We'll be talking about the ways to prep fiber for worsted spinning,
and you don't want to miss it.

(11:10):
Until then, go spin something.
I promise you'll feel better.