cloth as container
I have this vision for a quilt I plan to make — maybe this year, maybe next. It started because I’ve been nesting, redoing my home, and I decided I didn’t like the colors anymore — the rich indigo has faded to navy, the brick red is too heavy and stolid. I found myself craving plush corals, creamy linen, warm wood. I want to surround myself with soft textures, colors that treat me gently. But then I couldn’t find The Quilt, and so, in true homosexual audacity, I thought — but I could make it.
From there, it was only a matter of time before the audacity grew. Not only could I make the quilt, but of course I could dye the softest shades of rose hip, peach, persimmon, eucalyptus. Not only could I dye the fabric, but of course I could grow the dye plants in my local community garden plot — calendula, coreopsis, rosemary, nettles.
The project has started to take shape into something I’m calling the medicine quilt. It will take the full year — sketching and designing in the winter; growing the seeds in the spring; summer for tending to the garden and sourcing fabric; fall for drying and dyeing; winter again for slow stitching. I fantasize about planting on the new moons and harvesting on the full moons, living out my little crone witch dreams in the big city.
The more I dreamt of it, the more I realized there was something nagging, and not just the enormity of the project. There is another quilt I need to make first, a little quilt, a simple quilt — and that is how I found myself in the Garment District late on Friday, just before closing, fingering bolts of linen for the grief quilt.
What I have found, in my endless quest to fix everything, is that our most common stumbling block is our inability to face our losses, to actually grieve the things that hurt us. Grief can feel all consuming, like it might swallow us whole — but of course, it would be better to avoid it altogether so we don’t slip into the whirlpool, wouldn’t it? I think the antidote is to build containers, so that we can dip in with a lifeline.
A container can be anything — a yoga practice or a hard swim, a bowl of broth or a bottle of medication, the arms of a friend or a lover, a willow by the bend of a river or a headstone in a graveyard, a therapist’s couch or a hospital bed — or, a quilt for a kiddo I won’t get to hold.
Containers give us something in which to break, something in which to put the unspeakable bruises. Breaking allows us to begin the slow and steady work of mending, stitch by stitch. They allow us to traverse through pain; they give safe passage for grief to traverse through us.
May we find our containers; may they hold us and our hurt, cleanly and messily, and change with us as we do. May the cloth surround us in soft color, a riot of sunny plants, a gentle architecture of stitches, the practice of a craft. May the grief quilt birth the medicine quilt.
a few medicines:
I teach an exploration of containers in the first module of my upcoming online class, HOW TO RECOVER. If you would like some doula-ing as you make your own containers, you can learn more and sign up for class here.
Queer audacity is everywhere, in the best way.
until next time.