Making choices about silk, silkworms, and homegrown sericulture.

A while back I made a video showing off my pretty silkmoths.  (silkworm and silkmoth are used interchangeably) 

Of course, the question is asked - that is always asked whenever we talk about raising silkworms.  A very important question and one I've done a lot of soul searching about.  I've read a lot.  I've asked a lot of questions from people on all sides of the discussion.  I've asked questions of people who at first glance have nothing to do with silk and sericulture (growing silk) but turn out to be extremely relevant to the conversation.  

Warning!  This is going to be one of those difficult conversations.  THERE IS NO RIGHT ANSWER here.  Each person is going to need to make their own choices and if somehow this blog entry gets more than four readers, I'm going to remind you that I moderate the comment box.  Comments on all sides of the discussion are encouraged.  Comments that accuse, boss, tell others how they should live their life, or are phrased in a not nice way (all subjectively judged by me), will likely vanish without further warning.  

And to make certain you really want to read this, I'm putting a "read more" button beneath this pretty picture.

an idea for Lyme

This is cross posted from my Lyme blog. Since it's fibre related and has a positive tone to it, I thought that maybe you guys would like to read it as well.

Knitting, spinning, weaving and crafting in general has done so much good for me over the years. Especially since I became really ill, it has provided me with nourishment that no medicine or food ever could.

Being a member of the yarn related community, both local and online, provided me a link to steadfast friends and wonderful support.

Yarn encourages me to accomplish something in my day. I'm not just wasting time waiting to get better, I am making socks, or a skirt, or something else. I create something tangible - and I know that's nothing to most of you who can do that any day, but to me, that's a huge accomplishment! It means the world to me to be able to pull on a warm sweater that I knit myself, or to adorn myself with vibrant socks that I not only knit myself, but I spun the yarn. It fills me with a sense of love and self worth that otherwise leeches out of someone with a long lasting illness.

But it's more than that.

When I am so ill, I'm nothing but a useless waste of space, I can still create something. I can knit a few stitches, or pull myself out of bed to lay on the couch and spin yarn. Even if my arthritis is so bad that I can only manage sparse five knitted stitches, it is still a contribution. It's marks the difference between being a worthless waste of skin to being human.

I wish I could explain it better.

Lately I've been spinning some yarns for sale. I want to make a bit of money so I can afford Christmas. One particular yarn, is rather challenging. It is involves making two yarns at once and plying them together simultaneously. I feel like an overtaxed octopus trying to do all this at once, but the results are gorgeous. And, it gave me an idea.

Now, this is just an idea at the moment. As I said yesterday, I'm not an organizer of big things. I realize that of myself. Give me grunt work, and a task I can do in the background, and I'm happy!

The idea:

It began by thinking that making yarn and other crafts to sell is one of the few things I can do to make my own income. I don't make very much - just enough to buy more supplies for my hobbies - but even that little bit says to me that I can one day become a functioning member of society again.

This got me thinking about how much better things will be when Lyme is understood. When the political controversy no longer governs treatment and an accurate diagnosis method is available. Organizations like CanLyme are working towards this, and wouldn't it be great if I could donate money to help them help people like me?

So I imagined myself spinning a special series of yarns, all different kinds and colours, all with at least a fleck of Lime Green in them to symbolize Lyme. And I take this yarn and put a little write up about Lyme in Canada and how lack of research is causing harm...stuff like that. I sell the yarn, and take a good percent of the profits and give to CanLyme (or the like) and a percent to pay for my health care. (note: most Lyme patients in Canada have to pay for their own medical expenses!)

That could be a nifty idea and a great project for 2011. It would help raise Lyme awareness, help support my health care costs, help raise money for charity, and most importantly, make me feel like I'm doing something to both help my state in the world and help the greater cause.

I think I might do this. I know I can usually get fleeces for free, and I don't mind washing and preparing the fibre for spinning. Dyeing the fibre might be an expense and it's beyond my skill set, but perhaps someone might volunteer their time and facilities? If I want a long wool like Cotswold, Romney or a Leicester, I might have to pay for that. But all in all, it's a low cost investment as all it would take is my time (something I have plenty of) and my energy (a resource that waxes and wanes) .

The more I think about it, the more I feel it's a good idea.

But, what if...

What if it went a step further?

What if several people with Lyme did something similar, all organized under one umbrella? Not just spinning, but knitting and weaving as well? Then we did as above? Sell the yarn, give a percent to a Lyme related charity and a percent towards our own treatment. Could this work? Could, given our illness, we do this? Would a project like this not only raise awareness of Lyme in Canada but also give those victims this this vicious pathogen a sense of purpose and a way to feel empowered?

It's not just the people with the illness who feel hopeless, their family, firends and support network also need a way to help. This might be the kind of thing.

I see problems with this greater idea: One thing that comes to mind is that I'm not a leader of men, woman or children. If we did this, I would need someone to take the lead, but I would still want to be consulted in it's organization and implementation. Not to mention, the leader of this movement would have to have a non-Lyme brain. There are other problems I see already, mostly where money is concerned. And who would do the write up about Lyme awareness and the project? How would it be presented to the public? Free knitting, weaving and spinning lessons would be needed for those who do not yet know how to do these things. Plus equipment: spinning and knitting are affordable, but weaving certainly isn't.

There is a lot to think about.

Thoughts anyone?

Confirmation

Maybe I was right about that time thing after all:

Picture is from Worst of the Time Lords.

work, space and time.

In many ways I miss working. Working is an excellent way to mark the passing of time. You get up, you get ready, you go to work, you watch the clock and wait until you can go home again. Work makes one acutely aware of time. The time of the day, the day of the week, the month, the year; all of these things are part of one's existence.

These days, most people think of space like a giant box that stuff exists in. But it wasn't always that way. At several times in history people thought of space as something that is relative. It didn't exist in and of itself. (to simplify,) Space was nothing more than our perception of how physical objects interacted. Object A is to the left of object B and we see this as a space between A and B. If there were no objects, then there would be no space (opposed to the Everyman idea that if there was no space, there would be no objects). If there was simply one object existing, then there would still be no space. Space, for several individuals of history, requires two or more objects interacting.

I don't know if people still think this way about space. I suspect that quantum mechanics has something to say on the subject. Something like: space is a manifestation of the observation of the collapsing of the probability of the interrelationships of physical forms. But that's what they all say.

What matters is that according to this theory of space, it is something that requires participation. It requires two objects being left and right of each other. It requires an observer to look at them and say, ah yes, they are not in the same space. It requires more than just looking, Space requires evaluation and the understanding that A is to the left of B. Without these things space is for people like Leibniz, nothing more than unexpressed possibilities. In other words, it doesn't exists (qua space).

I don't know if I agree with this. The problem is that I don't fully get it. I have a chicken that understands it better than I do. She can walk through wire fences that contain all the other hens. She is not able to do this when observed, but like the weeping angles of Doctor Who, she moves through the fence only when we are not looking.

One can think about time in similar ways. Is it, as my watch would have me believe, a constant ticking away of events? Is it a line that events cram themselves into? Is it like space, a container that events fit into? Is it somewhat dependent on how fast you are moving through the universe? Or is it like many of the above alluded to thinkers suggested, created out of our observation and understanding?

I am more and more convinced that time, as in the relationship of events to each other, is more dependent on our perception than most people realize.

I'm not talking about time in the sense that a digital watch measures. I'm thinking about time as in how our day progresses. Time as the interrelationship of events that we experience. Time in this sense is very different than time according to a clock.

We participate in our perception of time. Take that fellow from Catch 22, who tried to be board all the while because when you are board, time moves more slowly and if time moves more slowly he would live a longer life.

Without something like work (or school) to mark the time of the day, it's really difficult to see the passing of time. The day takes on a slower pace and things have less sense of urgency. It is no longer that I have to have X amount of tasks finished by 11am. It's more like I have to have all the animals fed and watered twice a day, once before breakfast whenever that is and once before dark, whenever that is. I have to spread manure on the garden before we dig it and and we need to dig it before we plant and we need to plant sometime in the spring depending on the weather. If I'm not feeling well, or if it's raining, less gets done. Sometimes more gets done. But it's more or less the same thing every day. I notice that the buds on some of the trees are swelling now so it's a different day than a few weeks ago when the buds were smaller.

Time is no longer marked by seconds or minutes. Even hours and days have very little meaning here. Weeks and seasons seem to be the units for counting time.

I like that there is less stress in this way of keeping time. But it's also difficult to interact with the rest of the world where things are so much more urgent.