Last Friday started out to be a very unproductive day. After a couple of hours of struggling to find something meaningful to do, a large tangle of yarns on the floor of a closet drew my attention. The yarns used to be in a large plastic trash bag with the top tied in a knot but someone—not me, I don’t think—had untied the bag and tangled up the contents. No one uses the closet regularly after most of our children have moved out, so the thing has probably been sitting there for months.

Aside from the yarns of all colors, a few unfinished projects, black sewing thread unwound from a spool, several embroidery threads, two gold strings and a paper bag and a plastic shopping bag constituted the giant mass, and many yarns are still connected to the balls in the bag. For a split second I thought about throwing the whole thing away. But many of the yarns came from my mother and my old friends who are no longer with us.

I sat down and just started working on it piece by piece. Some yarns turned out to be very short and came out easily. Some fooled me because they were of mixed colors. The black thread seemed to bind everything else in tight knots, but I was determined not to cut anything.

As I worked on the knots and tangles, my memories and thoughts came in and out of my consciousness, some short and some long.

I remembered how I used to help my mother ball up hanks of yarns. I was very proud whenever I unraveled tangled yarns for her. She taught me how to crochet and knit. She preferred “real” yarn—meaning 100% wool—so moths have eaten some of her old yarns and sweaters.

The purple-white-green yarn was a leftover from a hat my oldest son knit for my church’s Hat-for-Homeless project. The leader of the project gave me more yarns after my children and I had brought in many hats. A couple summers ago the leader passed away unexpectedly, and I don’t know if anyone is continuing the project.

With the light blue yarn I made a baby blanket with four big hearts for our youngest daughter. She turned 11 recently, and I wonder where the blanket is…

I put some very short fragments in a trash bag, and then took them back out. They might become part of a craft someday just like complete songs have emerged from short fragments of melody in my brain.

Numerous musical fragments—some recognizable and others of unknown origins—used to swirl around in my head. I heard them all the time but didn’t know how to get them out. After the devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in northern Japan in 2011, I flew back to Japan to volunteer. On a slow train to Fukushima I was reading a collection of poems written by Masao Tachiya, an unknown Fukushima native, and tunes started flowing out to the rhythm of his poems. They came out naturally as though I had known them forever. These poems helped untangle and pull out melody fragments in my brain into the world.

Eventually I wrote more than 20 songs to Tachiya’s poems and presented them in many different places, including disaster-stricken communities in Japan. Some songs came very easily, and others took more time. Some had great beginnings but never completed (yet). In 2013 I received a small grant from the United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County to create a charity CD, Japan, My Homeland, featuring some of the songs along with piano improvisations.

(You can read more about it here and purchase the album or tracks here)

So… even a short fragment could be a starting point for something much bigger if given a chance to grow.

Nowadays, I try to pay attention to my fleeting thoughts so that I might weave them into stories for this blog.

Life is messy and complicating like the tangled mess of yarns. But we can make meanings by pulling some fragments out of the mess and constructing them into songs and stories. They are only partial truths about me and you and the world, but recognizing unique beauties in our stories and songs deepens our relationships and accepting that we have so much more to learn about each other makes our relationships more enduring.

Now all of the yarns, strings and the thread are neatly separated and balled up in my old broken suitcase. The suitcase has seen a lot as it traveled with us all over the world. It is a perfect home for my yarns and all the projects yet to be conceived.