one stitch at a time
or, how to be quiet & present
goat season held this usual end-of-year hoofbeat brain of mine, the way it fills up at turning points with energy. the energy was there, but every time the energy might spill out it went somewhere quiet instead.
quiet fills up the space where the words go.
one of the only truly calming things right now is when i can hear the snow start to slide off the roof and then look up and out in time to see it fall. i know this is only joyful because snow is a fact here, not an anomaly, and because of that fact the big plow always shows up on the big roads and the little plow always texts us on its way, and then all of us who live in this chopped up old house penguin walk out to our cars to clear them and move them to the little lot across the street. it’s this thing we do together. mostly we don’t talk, maybe we nod or just make eye contact, we move carefully one by one back into the freshly cleared lot. we collectively make sure there’s something down to melt the ice on the steps. the plow is swift. the whole scene brings tears, which might freeze on my face.
one of the quiet things i’m doing more and more, a kind of rare quiet nearness i had in childhood, is stitching — specifically cross stitch — learned from two of my grandmothers not in an instructive way that i recall but in watching their hands, admiring their completed works, and so as a child i started doing this too, taking along a kit to family gatherings, a way of being quiet with others, our attention on each little x and our presence in the same bubble of calm creation. always in eyeshot of the other. around the time i got sober i started stitching again, just over a thousand days ago. to hit that thousand this week has been something powerful and oddly mudane i’m also quiet about. sobriety is still hard, and it’s also boring, the kind of boring that’s a relief.
a thousand days. probably tens of thousands of stitches.
i see where stitches might go in my other work: press a needle into paper around a cluster of words, to stitch around them or stitch them out, to fuse paper to fabric, to cause ripple or a tear. press a needle through canvas where the paint dried, ornamenting it, changing it, multiplying color.
but lately, in the quiet, i follow simple patterns, pull colors as i’m told, count and stitch until my breathing evens (another rare site of calm). most recently i chose a new fabric for a bright floral folk art pattern, a kaleidoscope of tulips repeating in a circle. the fabric reminds me of a bag green coffee comes in ready to roast, rougher than i’m used to working, less bright and more loosely fibrous. it’s a reliable grid that takes a gentler hand: it means i’m learning to coax the needle through with no pressure behind it. it mean i’m learning not to pull each stitch too taut in my own tension: this requires a kind of letting go. i follow color until the pattern starts to reveal itself in my hands. i adjust the fabric in the hoop when i change colors. i let each length of color dangle to clear its twists, separate my stands with a tender intimacy i have no occasion to visit on anyone else. having never learned to use a blunted needle, i still draw from myself a sometime drop of blood.
having started actual motion on my birthday, i consider what’s turning here each year. sometimes i’m quiet for a while. sometimes, a new structure. i’d had the biggest of goatplans this time around, and then i didn’t write: i stitched. i’m learning to stitch newly all the time. i’m learning how to be here, how to talk with you and how to be with you, all the time.
here we go.1
here we keep going.