Script for

Episode 123:

Can Spinning Heal the World? A Post-Retreat Reverie

I hosted my retreat last weekend. It was a pretty magical weekend. Spinners arrived at Shobac, the stunning seaside farm where I hold the retreat, on Thursday, we spent Friday and Saturday learning, spinning, eating delicious food, and hot-tubbing, and ended with a big breakfast together at my local general store/restaurant on Sunday.

As you might know, I'm extremely introverted, and this was a lot of people-ing for me, so I've alternated between napping and just being completely out of it for the past week. Like: don't-remember-which-day-it-is out of it.

Because I've been so out of it, I've been completely stumped on what to tell you this week, so I asked the text chain that's emerged from the retreat what I should talk about on the podcast. And one of them (Hi Susan!) responded with this:

[Talk about] how, in exhausting times (pre-election season, news about war, climate change, homelessness - tho u could just hint , not list) spinners have a nearly magical power of connecting peacefully with our inner selves & with others, of finding instant commonality, and focusing on the joy we find in working with our hands and all the color and texture of fiber - as the background's negative hum recedes

So that's what I'm going to talk about.

Hello there, dear Sheepspotter! Welcome to episode 123 of The Sheepspot Podcast. I'm Sasha, and it's my job to help you create more yarns you love.

We'll get back to the actionable spinning tips next time, but for now, 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 a lot of time thinking about, because a lot of my work is creating community for spinners, whether that's 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. In that series, I talked about how community benefits spinners. Today, though, I want to flip that and do some thinking aloud about how spinning can help community.

Spinning has connected me to homeschooling homesteaders, physicians and physicists, C-suite executives and stay-at-home moms, scientists and social workers, economists and ergonomists, liberal pastors and conservative latter-day saints. Yes, demographically speaking, most spinners are still middle- to upper-middle class white women. But we're all over the political spectrum and in these hyper-polarized times, I think that's still something to celebrate. We've 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 are so polarized is that a lot of the institutions that have traditionally provided common ground for diverse groups of people--things like labor unions, churches, service organizations, major media institutions like network television--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 living in our own algorithmically curated newsfeeds. In the age of social media, we longer share a common culture. Spinning can be something diverse folks share in common. Here's how Dianne put it in a voice note to me after the retreat:

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, different viewpoints drawn together by our shared love of hand spinning, and then discovering through that not just connection but something more friendship. And for us and for our world experiences like that aren't just good they are incredibly important and incredibly valuable

I think Susan gets at something really important in the quote I started with. She says, "spinners have a nearly magical power of connecting peacefully with our inner selves & with others." It's the "connecting peacefully with our inner selves" part that I want to underscore here: I have a hunch that the relaxing and grounding qualities of spinning are part of what makes connection possible across 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, to encountering someone on social media, where we're usually anything but calm. By connecting us first to ourselves, spinning allows us to bring our best, most grounded and centered selves to the conversation. And that's a very good place to start.

I've always felt that there was something utopian, or at least potentially-utopian, in the fiberverse. It wasn't until I read Susan's text and heard Dianne's voice mail that I connected the dots between spinning's incredible ability to soothe 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.

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! There's a link to the thread in the show notes for this episode, which you'll 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 the thread.

If you haven't joined The Flock, Sheepspot's free online community for inquisitive handspinners, you should! You'll get access to all of the freebies I've created for the podcast, as well as several self-guided spinning challenges, our weekly spinning check-ins every Friday, and lots more. Join us at theflock.sheepspot.com.

Darling Sheepspotter, that's 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 all the ways to prep fiber for worsted spinning. You don't want to miss it. Until then, spin something! I promise it will do you good.