The teacher who taught the kids when we went to the Wyckoff Farmhouse demonstrated spinning wool with a drop spindle, something I tried once before at Historic Richmond Town in Staten Island and found impossible. The teacher, I think her name was Shirley, spun about 2 feet before the strand broke, which was far better than I could have done.
I learned a lot that day on the trip to the farmhouse dating from 1652, which makes it the oldest standing structure in NYC. I was made aware that George Washington's teeth were made of horse teeth, human teeth and lead (!), that the Lenape showed the Dutch how to grind shells to make white plaster for their walls so the houses wouldn't be so dark inside, and that corn cobs were stuffed between logs to insulate houses. Also: they didn't have window glass back then, the Wyckoffs weren't called the Wyckoffs until after the British claimed the colony, and it's not clear how Pieter-not-yet-Wyckoff chose the name. Good to learn also that a Dutch Oven can be placed within a fire and not only on top of it, and that at the dawn of the 18th century those 13 Wyckoffs lived day in and day out in a space the size of my living room. From that original family of 13 the Wyckoffs are now 50,000 strong.
I've never seen such a lovely demonstration of the drop spindle, the light was gorgeous and serene, the teacher a wonder of calm and beauty, the kids enrapt and astonished. The practice seems very meditative and elemental as many gravity predicated tasks are. It became something that I can add to all the other twists that inspire me - side curls, the spent Rose of Sharon and the Moonflower blossoms, tops and wheels, dervishes and dharma wheels, Deoxyribonucleic acid, the Nataraja, spinning plates, twisters, and whirlwinds that guide tribes in the desert, the medicine wheel and the tetramorph, galaxies, solar systems, the parachuter's landing, the tendrils of sweet peas.
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And the twisting of plants towards light. (Today's NY Times.) Of course, that's against gravity, but not really. It's working with gravity.
Jesus never promised that the lame would fly. Our bodies are made for gravity.
Actually, Jesus had little to do with physical reality. Religion aside, once Einstein formulated his theory of relativity - in which he proposed so elegantly, that space is curved and that it is linked to time - it is said that he wept. Isaac Newton, you see, was his hero. And Einstein saw that his new theory would relegate Newton's views of our physical world, obsolete.
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