This is the confession of a hopeless meditator, and an enthusiastic laborer. Though I long to live in “sacred space,” I am completely inept at quieting my mind. I imagine there are many people who regularly stop all activity, move into a conscious breathing pattern, retreat into an intense internal awareness and shut out “all the fret and fever of the day.” Not me. For many years, when I was studying a spiritual teaching originating in Tibet, I practiced this discipline. As I lived with my family near a well-trafficked, noisy road, I put cotton in my ears, tied a scarf around my eyes, and used the late night or early morning hours to avoid being interrupted by my children’s demands. I sat in a straight-backed chair for 30 minutes at a stretch, focusing on a point of blue light within my head, repeating the drone-like mantra “sent” to me in a vision. I was waiting for my mind to stop its rambling, watching my thoughts float by as leaves on a stream as I had been taught - honoring them and holding a knowingness that they would eventually fade and I would be bathed in the deeper reality I sought. In 12 years of this practice, I achieved only 2 consistent results – short, uncomfortable naps that might as well have been in a warm bed, and pleas from my husband to give it up, as my snoring was disturbing his proper and, of course, successful, meditations. In retrospect, if he was so successful…..why was I bothering him?

In the years since, I have been interested in achieving the advertised benefits of meditation, which - as I understand it second-hand - are an acute sense of oneness with the universe and a release of the intense longings that fuel so many of our actions. I have wanted to approximate this state without stilling my mind, as that seems to be a losing battle. And so it is that I approach it through studied and disciplined mindfulness – the exact opposite of the “empty mind.” It is perhaps the refuge of the spiritually weak, the cop-out of the non-aesthetic soul…..never having tasted the fruits of meditative labor, I couldn’t tell you. What I follow is the path of hand-work to the crafter’s ecstasy. 

The Old Order Amish believe that farming keeps them close to God. I imagine that they are talking about the act of creation itself – the way that working the soil mysteriously brings forth new life, reaffirming the notion of a supreme maker. I imagine it also refers to “God in the details” for it is when we are completely, mindfully engaged in a task, that a “hunkering down” of the spirit takes place, and a peaceful center opens out. Revealed in all the sinews of the body is a thrilling, throbbing presence – the music of the spheres played small upon this one tiny instrument. 

This is what I feel when I am about to begin a new design:

The wall – a blank
But there is something
Like water about to boil
That draws my eye back and back again
Looking sideways, obliquely
I can almost see it – please let it come, and let it be soon.

The Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki says of the initial stage of a creation: “A wonderful painting is the result of the feelings in your fingers. If you have the feeling of the thickness of the ink in your brush, the painting is already there before you paint. When you dip your brush into the ink, you already know the result of your drawing or else you cannot paint. So before you do something, ‘Being is already there’…all the activity is included within you.”

If the textile piece I am beginning is a commissioned one, I draw it out in miniature, have it enlarged, and use two copies – one for the pattern pieces and one as a template. If I am making it to please only myself, I often build it directly on my working wall. Either way, once the design takes shape, I begin to choose my fabrics.

The fabric and I
Dizzy with possibilities
This red, that purple,
Colors sizzling or soft
Like falling into a cloudbank at sunset. 

Sometimes I sit in the middle of hills of fabric covering my carpet like the workings of psychedelic gophers. I lose myself in the textures, rhythms, and nearly physical ache of so much beauty. I can feel an actual zinging when I’ve found the right combinations for my piece – colors can radiate joy, you know….

And then the work of my fingers begins in earnest, as I snip and pin to breathe life into the design. Nearly every stitch is by hand, which means it is often quite portable. I can sit on the grass and feel the wind or listen to the trees – an invitation to more “hunkering down.” 

The quilt –
It presses on me quietly,
Pushing itself under my loving fingers
Like a contented cat.

It takes many hours of stitching to complete one of my large textile pieces. There is the design on the “top” to anchor, piece by piece, and then the special stitches that join the top with the bottom, often inserting soft and fluffy batting in the middle. There are moments when the keen sense of what I am making pulls me right into the spaces between the threads, and I am connected to everyone who ever did this thing before me, but that’s not all. I am also connected to everyone who has breathed life into an idea, watched a dream become concrete, followed a stream of thought and realized it. For a moment, I am complete – part of the whole, simply being.

So, though I may never watch an empty leaf float by my inner vision with no thought left to ride upon it, nor visit that land just behind my eyes, but just before sleep… I may never go that path, but I am content to follow these hands, my hands, as they mindfully lead me into sacred space. 

Copyright (c) 2001 by Claire Favro.  All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission from Claire Favro.