The hope of stitching

 In an unexpected way, two strands of my creative life came together here.  I have been slowly doing my blind-basting for some textile work with pebbles, with slowly being the operative word.

I took some photos of my progress yesterday and thought there really hasn't been much. But this morning when we did our weekly ritual we call "Biblio", I pondered how two things could go together. 

But firstly - Biblio.  Each Tuesday morning we walk to town, have breakfast at a cafe and spread out books and journals and notes to do what we call Biblio. It is shorthand for the notion of "Bibliomancy" that I learned about from a course I did with Ruth Hadlow called Poetics of Place back in 2019. I have referred to it here here and here as well. It is quite influential on the way I work!

Today I was going back through a poetry journal and came across a couple of poems I had drafted about hope.  I had been following a prompt to take an abstract notion and make a concrete description of it. I had wondered and wandered, and landed on a familiar activity - a woman slow stitching. 

In the end I found I had come up with lots of thoughts and ideas and gatherings of words. None are what you would call complete, or final, but here are some of them...

HOPE

Hope is a woman slow stitching.

With no pattern or guide, 

Letting her needle weave its way.

Slowly looking ahead,

To where the needle goes next, 

Focussing on making the small stitch. 

Sometimes an error, 

Stopping to fix, 

And continuing.

She may not have a full sense of the final result, 

But she knows something awaits as she goes along, 

That each stitch is taking her closer. 

Trusting.

HOPE

 

Hope is a woman stitching slowly

Seated, eyes focussed, needle in hand

Counting threads, calculating distance, choosing the point.

Looking at the infinitesimally small distance where the next stitch manifests

Deciding where to pierce the weave

Creating a new piece of the wholeness

Taking her one stitch closer

To a beautiful becoming

HOPE

no pattern or guide,

the needle weaves its way

truth north

intermittently pausing

reviewing,

reversing.

slowly looking

invisible steps ahead,

the final form unseen

trusting quiet knowings,

hope carries her forward.

 

HOPE

Never fully knowing

What the outcome will be

Guided by the moment,

What came before

What it might become

Simply trusting she is taking

Tiny stitches towards it.

Which left me reflecting on sitting quietly yesterday.

A woman stitching...

Tiny stitches towards it...