Motifs and Meditation

You may already know that to counter my tendency towards impatience whilst sitting in traffic (and man has it been bad the past couple of weeks!) I crochet.  And so over the past 3 weeks my 'driving' time has resulted in 42 motifs which I've put together to make an afghan/blanket, I quite like the result, I'm calling it Flower Garden

I have mentioned before that my sister is an Ayurvedic practitioner and teacher.  Yesterday she encouraged me to go to a workshop with her to see a lady called Mother Maya.  And so yesterday morning saw me at a kind of commune in the North Shore of Auckland, in a room full of floor cushions with a load of people dressed like they should be in India, (picture the Beetles in their hippy stage with their guru and you wouldn't be too far off)

To say that I haven't had much success with my brief flirtation with meditation before might be a slight understatement (I tend to shuffle, jiggle, giggle, fall asleep or go deep into a fantasy world). And yet yesterday morning I not only meditated for 40 minutes, I enjoyed it and found it really peace-invoking (not sure if that's a real word!) Did the day change my life? Time will tell.  It certainly gave me another technique for inner harmony whilst in the traffic though :-)   

An amusing crocheting interlude

Auckland has those pesky motorway on ramp lights that are turned on in peak times and allow one car per green light through. My 25 minute commute to work would be 15 if it weren’t for these traffic lights.

Each night for 10mins I whip out the crochet, turn up the radio and inch along in traffic fairly happily.

Last night on my way home, the man in the ute next to me was having a great time laughing away. Then he beeped his horn and started gesturing to me and to the car in front of him.

This was kind of weird – us Aucklanders tend to sit eyes front in traffic and pretend there is no one else around. Good grief – what if we made eye contact and had to acknowledge each other?!

On a whim I threw away acceptable sitting in traffic ettiqutte, I rolled down my window and asked what was going on – he pointed at my crochet and at the sticker on the car in front of him and totally cracked up.

I inched forward, craned my neck and read the sticker. 
It read: “Stay Alive – Don’t knit and drive”

Traffic

We don’t really have much traffic apart for the holiday season.
Tauranga is a city, and to become a city in New Zealand means that 20,000 people or more live there. Which in comparison to many cities around the world we are pretty small. I usually give myself 20 minutes to get anywhere in town and 30 minutes when I think it might be busy. So I don’t have much sitting in traffic time.

On November 1st using cell phones in a car had become illegal. This has posed a wee problem for me, I’ve been used to using that 20 minutes or so to catch up with friends or check with Andrew what I might need to pick up on the way home.
We are a week into the new law and I’ve found that crochet is pretty hard to do whilst moving, however is not too bad if I get a red traffic light, I've also found that the CD’s I have popped in my stacker are okay for now and then and not quite entertaining enough for 20 minutes in a row. Last week I had an audio book in my CD stacker, I’m unsure if it was a good thing or not…. the actual story was great, I couldn’t really tell you what happened on the way to work though, and I also was late starting a couple of times because I wanted to catch the end of the chapter!

I did get to make this new addition to my ArtFire shop whilst at traffic lights over 3 days this week …..


What do you do to entertain yourself in the car if you’re the one driving and you’re not allowed to be on the phone??