We have been travelling for over three months now. When we set off, I knew we'd be traversing cold mountain terrain and hot tropical territory, not to mention we'd be carrying our back packs across a continent. This required a careful selectivity, and clothes were included or discarded according to a ruthless matrix of functionality. Navy long-sleeved merino was in, block print day dress was out. One pair of small gold hoops that I could wear daily. Make up confined to a travel-sized lipstick. Skincare whittled down to a solid facial cleanser bar.
Over time, I've noticed a funny thing. "I miss choosing colours and patterns and combinations of clothes," I said to Jacob while we were in Bolivia. "I don't," he said, and truly he is happy wearing his khaki green merino top and hiking trousers for a week straight.
But I've been dreaming of pleats, block printed fabrics, peptide shampoo, soft Alpaca wool jumpers, and delicate necklaces. I've been watching videos of people sewing patchwork curtains, and craft bags, and vests. When I lay in hospital this week with a parasite in my intestines and an IV drip in my arm, I imagined my fingers were knitting needles and went through the motions of 'in-round-through-off' so achingly familiar, in my mind creating soft chains of a new striped wool jumper. Is this some latent capitalistic hunger inside me? Or a creative impulse that's hard to satisfy when travelling? Attending to this urge is not efficient - you trail yarn and scraps and receipts and bottles and pattern pieces, you're implicated in supply chains and carbon emissions, but it is so fundamentally joyful as well, in the way a child delights in paint, and dress up, and Christmas, and playdough.
The thing is, I struggle with the joy of it. A few years ago I bought a second hand jar of perfume, fifty percent off, and after I bought it I retreated into a toilet stall and felt sick at spending (what I thought of as) needless money. This isn't confined to perfume. I am an expert in craving the beauty of material things but something stops me from appreciating actually buying them. I'll look at a dress online for weeks and never buy it. I'll research all the skin benefitting properties of a serum and then tell myself it's too expensive. Or worse, I'll buy it (usually second hand) and then tell myself that I'm a miserable vain person who just wasted money that could have been spent on something far more virtuous.
After the perfume episode, I went and saw my church counsellor about this troubling feeling. We talked about my relationship with money and buying things and how it makes me feel both safe and on the verge of disaster. I've always been a saver, but instead of saving to spend wisely later, I've found that buying anything threatens that sense of self-sufficiency that saving provides. The counsellor asked me how I interpreted stewardship: if I have a heavenly Father who loves to give good gifts (and these include gifts of both the material and immaterial variety), what might it mean to respond with gratitude and not fear?
There is a biblical parallel to my perfume story so obvious it is almost laughable - the woman with the alabaster box.
"While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.
Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, “Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor.” And they rebuked her harshly.
“Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me.""
Jesus' logic defies the rigid confines of material utility or value. The beauty in the moment is the grateful joy with which the woman uses her material treasure to honour and worship Jesus. How can my material items be a conduit to worship? When I shame myself, or long for things but refuse to fulfil that desire out of fear of a bad deal, a waste of money, or even "seeming vain", I give the material thing far more power than it deserves. I cultivate in myself a false sense of prideful frugality and I feed part of me that wants control and security in what it perceives as a scarce world. Certainly, there are moments where it's not appropriate to buy yet another pot of cream or ball of yarn, but I have come to realise that it's worth looking at the heart and thinking, is this craving a seed of joy waiting to germinate? And doesn't our father in heaven find that joy beautiful?
We are now in Peru, and I've seen more alpacas than I can count. Walking down a narrow street in Cusco after we came out of hospital, I saw a man knitting with soft, stretchy yarn. In his shop, there were rows of knitted jumpers in deep rich colours and they felt cool and silky in my hands. Holding them filled me with wonder at the animal that had given its wool and the human that had coaxed it into beauty. I spent a weekend considering it, feeling the softness in my sleep, and the next time we walked past that shop I went back in and bought one which I love. So praise God for alpacas, praise God for wool, praise God for textile skills passed down for generations, praise God for twisted stitch details, ribbing and roll necks. Praise God for cobblestones and antibiotics and soft hands and soft hearts.
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