Mother's Meditation

My Mother was telling me about her latest projects the other evening on the phone. She isn't piecing quilts much these days. She isn't feeling like sewing on the machine. She is working on embroidering crazy quilted items. She tells me that she enjoys the hand work.

I know just what she means. Hand work is repetitive yet progressive, limited but accumulative, mindless but meditative. When I do it, nearly always binding a quilt, it sometimes actually feels joyful in a quiet way. Part of that may be finishing the quilt (!) but I also think that hand sewing is a kind of meditation.

So picture it, generations of women, my grandmothers, their mothers and back further and further. In their little print aprons, in their dark poplin dresses with their high, black leather shoes, in their corsets, in their bonnets, in their petticoats and crinolines: a long line of women stretching back focused on their needle and thread, meditating. As surely as if they were sitting cross-legged on the floor in saris or white cotton robes.