strands of hair
strands of yarn
strands of time
weaving all the strands together
in this pattern called life…

I wrote these words down on lined notebook paper, before noon, on a Monday. I came up with this little nugget of phrases as I was looking at myself in the mirror, catching sight of all the silver strands of hair that seem to have grown and tangled themselves amongst the brown. Strands that are unruly, that don’t like to conform to the rest, that stick out and want to be noticed.

I don’t mind my silver strands. I love them if you must know. Makes me feel as if my hair has dimension. As I look at these strands, it makes me think of all the ways in which I use the word strand in my life. It most often comes to mind when I’m knitting, or thinking about hair. A strand could be a single string, or set of strings that are twisted together to form its own strand from several other strands. It’s an individual length of any fine, string-like substance, according to the dictionary.

It’s also the word for a flat area of land bordering a body of water, such as a beach or shoreline. A strand.

Words and their meanings are quite interesting; if you think about them long enough, you can almost see them in totally different ways. I like finding ways of mingling words together from different parts of my life. Computer terminology to describe knitting, or writing, or knitting terms that correspond to words I use to describe writing, such as stitch, unravel, weave, spin.

If you open your mind to the possibility that a single word could be used in so many different ways, and in a different connotation, it’s pretty amazing.

And so that is how I started thinking about strand. But there is also a related term: stranded. To be stranded is to be abandoned, deserted. By oneself, or alone in a sea of strangers. As if you were taken away from the strand, which included others. De-stranded if you will. I wonder if stranded somehow got its meaning from the people who were deserted on islands, “strands”, beaches, because the strand they were on was on its own, by itself. It does make one wonder.

I like thinking about the different parts of my life as if they were strands that I must weave and twist together. The this and the that all combine into this intricately wonderful strand, the main strand, the strand of all strands. And we each have a main strand made up of little strands. And sometimes, we combine our main strands into an even bigger strand for someone else or for the strand that makes up the earth, or the universe. All of our strands combine to create a universal strand.

That’s enough philosophical wonderings for one day. I’d love to hear your thoughts on words, or what you consider to be your strands. Send them my way. We could form our own “strand” of comments…