No Hurry in It

Looking through yesterday’s photos from Curosty, I kept noticing the same thing. Different girls, different projects, different corners of the cabin, but in picture after picture, the identical expression: head bent a bit, eyes focused, hands mid-motion, the whole face settled into a kind of calm attention you don’t see every day. Nobody was posing. Nobody even seemed aware of the camera. Whatever these girls were experiencing, it was clearly something worth paying attention to.

Curosty is our fiber arts cabin, a snug traditional log building where girls come to weave, knit, crochet, sew, and stitch. This week, the quiet stretch between our two July mini sessions when only our four-week campers are here, the pace of camp has relaxed, and Curosty may be where that slower rhythm shows itself best. Girls are working the round “nifty knitters,” looping yarn peg by peg until a long knitted cylinder grows down through the middle. Others are hemming stuffed pillows with a needle and thread, adding a decorative edge one small stitch at a time. There’s needlepoint lettering taking shape on hats and cloth, crochet hooks turning yarn into plump three-dimensional balls, potholder squares being joined into something bigger. And there’s the weaving, on the big floor looms and the table-top looms beside them, shuttles sliding back and forth as narrow straps and wide cloth slowly appear.

Notice how all of these crafts involve a form of repetition? Loop after loop, stitch after stitch, pass after pass of the shuttle. Watch the girls at work, though, and the repetition reveals itself as rhythm, the same motion returning again and again like the beat of a song, each repeated phrase carrying the piece somewhere. Every loop advances the knitted cylinder another fraction of an inch. Every pass of the shuttle lays down one more thread of cloth. There is something deeply calming about handwork like this, each small motion focusing and occupying the mind without straining it. Worries can’t get much of a foothold when your hands are building stitches. A row of knitting cannot be rushed, and the girls seem to sense that the process itself is what matters most. There’s no hurry in it.

Years ago I wrote about slowing down at camp, about camp as a haven from the hectic, a place where the whirlwind of an over-scheduled life loosens its grip and kids regain the freedom to meander, to catch beauty in a sideways glance. That’s still true, and this quieter week certainly proves it. What’s happening in Curosty, though, is slightly different. These girls are slowing down by paying closer attention: noticing the tension of the yarn, the size of a stitch, the pattern gathering row by row, all the nuance and detail you’ll miss by rushing about. The relaxed schedule lets the craft tell the time. Slowing down, it turns out, helps you bring more of yourself to the moment, to the process at hand.

This sounds an awful lot like mindfulness, something we adults might be hoping to find by taking a class or reading a book about it. The girls in Curosty at Rockbrook are getting it the old-fashioned way, through their fingers. A few summers ago, in fact, it was a camper working on an embroidery project who handed me the best description of this I’ve heard. Being at camp, she told me, made her more mindful of things. With more time to slow down and no phone in her pocket, she noticed more and appreciated more. She was describing the whole of camp life, and she was right. Needlecraft gathers that camp-wide invitation to notice and concentrates it, stitch by stitch, into hand-made colorful patterns.

Like so many things at camp, the benefit reveals itself in the doing. Nobody has to explain to a girl at a loom that this kind of attention feels good. The loom teaches her directly, in a hands-on, experiential way self-help books can’t match. She signs up for Needlecraft thinking she’s making a pillow. She leaves having practiced patience, sustained focus, and the settled feeling of being fully present with one thing. We might even call the pillow a bonus.

These are age-old crafts, after all. Girls at Rockbrook have been weaving and stitching since the camp’s earliest days, and the crafts themselves reach back generations further, to grandmothers and great-grandmothers who knew this same rhythm in their hands. When a camper threads a needle in Curosty, she joins that long line. At the same time, her own creativity guides the direction. She picks the yarn colors, chooses the pattern, decides what letters to stitch onto her hat. Each finished piece is tied to tradition yet entirely her own creation.

There’s something special about that. Unlike so many childhood activities, needlecraft doesn’t have to end when you grow up. A girl who learns to knit or crochet at camp holds a skill she can practice for the rest of her life, a way of slowing down that fits in a small bag and travels anywhere. Decades from now, some of these girls will pick up a crochet hook and find that same calm attention waiting for them, right where they left it. It will have started here, in a log cabin at Rockbrook, in the unhurried middle of a summer.