Hands-On Meditation

Years ago, when I was in my 20s, I started this process that continues to this days. I've always called it thinking things through to their roots.

You see, I think our present troubles or problems or self-imposed challenges are always buried in our pasts and that until I can clearly see the beginnings of a situation, I can't see the path I need o take into the future. If I don't understand where a problem comes from, than any solution I may devise will fail or make things worse.

Actually, I love the sensation of thinking, just following the drift of synapses from one junction to the next with no preconceived destination. It's one of the reasons why I enjoy repetitive tasks such as crocheting afghans. Once you set the stitch pattern, it's just so much looping so your hands can be busy while your mind delves and devises. To me, this type of hands-on meditation is invaluable and it's one of the great losses among people who do not indulge their personal creativity.

I mean when I meet women (and it's most often women) who live to shop, to add more meaningless possessions to their piles of other meaningless possessions, I am totally perplexed. How boring can you get?

When I collected the stories for my first book, American Patchwork: True Stories from Quilters for St. Martin's Press, I found this wonderful quote in a book about quilting that a friend loaned to me. Nice thought for a Monday morning, eh?

"It took me more than twenty years, nearly twenty-five, I reckon, in the evenings after supper when the children were all put to bed. My whole life is in that quilt. It scares me sometimes when I look at it. All my joys and sorrows are stitched into those little pieces. When I was proud of the boys and when I was downright provoked and angry with them. When the girls annoyed me or when they gave me warm feelings around my heart. And John, too. He was stitched into that quilt and all the thirty years we were married. Sometimes I loved him and sometimes I sat there hating him as I pieced the patches together. So they are all in that quilt, my hopes and fears, my joys and sorrows, my loves and hates. I tremble sometimes when I remember what that quilt knows about me."

—Margarte Ickes, quoting her great-grandmother in Anonymous Was a Woman by Mirra Bank