Creating From the Detail of What Is

I recently took a knitting class called Yarn Alchemy from a truly inspiring designer name Joji Locatelli. Joji is a lovely Natural Number 3 (although she doesn’t know this yet!), a knitting designer from Buenos Aires, Argentina.  An ironic twist is she began the meeting saying “welcome to Yarn Alchemy – I called it that because the course just needed a fancy title”  She downplayed the true meaning of the course title, perhaps because the words to describe what she did, the power and impact, where it came from and what it means have never been expressed before, at least for her. What I learned from this 3 hour journey with Joji was, unexpectedly, profoundly life changing and surprisingly related to Body of 9.

Joji’s lessons:

1. Know your Stash – know what you have, how much, the attributes, and where it is. Break it down in an organized fashion and record it. This is the first gift Natural Number 3 gives us – what do we have in our inventory with which to create.
2. Understand your materials at the finest level and the impact that each attribute will have on your process. She showed us skeins of yarn and unraveled them back to their original parts, going into the ply and even to the original fiber. In teaching about the ply and how it affects the yarn and ultimately the kitting we began to understand the effects we had experienced later in the process and where they originated from the yarn construction. She started with single ply and constructed our understanding of fiber as it is built on combining fibers together to create the art form that a knitted work is. And that let us understand how when we combine of the fiber, the spinning, the weights and the color, we can create different effects and outcomes.
3. Understand the elements of color and how they can be used to create different outcomes. Digging into the impact of hue, chroma and value – the components of color Joji explained how contrast can be used to highlight the geometry or color in a design. She explained how to combine different hues for specific types of effects, and how the value affected the expression of the color.

As Joji broke the source of the knitting process down into the component parts, all the detail pieces, she was illustrating the function of Natural Number 3 in the Human Alchemy transformation process.  Natural Number 3 is about focusing on the details at specific enough level to know what you have available to you, so that you can create from the sub-parts to build up to the purposeful vision you are wanting to create.

Joji was teaching yarn alchemy – the transformation process from fiber source to knitted object

1. Know your materials in order to find your creative inspiration,
2. Make a plan, choose your ingredients, test your plan,
3. Knit per the plan, adjust as needed, be willing to tear it out and start over if you need to, Keep going until you finish it, you will eventually come to the end of your usable yarn stash.
4. Wrap it up: sew in your ends, block it, celebrate: try it on, take a photo and show it to your admiring fans, Learn from it: what worked, what didn’t what would you do differently? Then start a new project!

This is a powerful metaphor for human alchemy. Within our bodies we have all the ingredients we need to create alchemical transformation. We have all the nine centers, the necessary muscles bones and fascia to use to adjust our perceptive abilities to enable us to transform ourselves and our world. This natural transformation process is found all around us. And like in the knitting process there might be a part of the process that comes more easily than the other parts for us – in the human alchemical process we call this our Natural Number where our body is strongest, more balanced and powerful.

We can begin to build and create consciously with the raw materials. We have all nine centers in our body. We have the ability to create with this wholeness in our bodies. Once we bring this consciousness to our body we can create human alchemy. The process of that is:

1. 9 is the container, understanding what “the force” is and how to use it to create. They hold the harmony flow and balance throughout the entire process.
2. 1/5 create the design, bring in the creative energy, the structure, the framework that we’re going to use to create within.
3. The 2/6 ask and answer the questions – Who is this for? and Why is it important? and How do we imbue it with energy and movement?
4. The 3/7 – what are all of the resources we have, every single last detail. What do we have to throw away? How do we optimize it, how do we position things so that we understand what’s available to us, and then how to bring it back together so it works toward our original purpose and greatest good.
5. The 4/8 – How are we going to get this done in a way that is aligned with the needs of each individual and the group, builds trust, has integrity and safety for all. Going back to the knitting analogy, knitting stitch by stitch, but knowing what yarns to bring in at what time and how to put them together and how to use the structure of a garter blanket to take a pile of remnants and produce a work of art.
6. Then we go back to the 9 again – what have we accomplished, learned, changed, grown, created.  And what are we going to do next!

This was an amazing alchemical experience as a knitter, but it’s also available to us as human beings when we bring all these steps together in that particular order and enables us to create art in our lives, to create with the beauty of source and the realness of our human experience in a way that’s safe and inclusive and holds us and transforms us into something greater than we could be on our own.