Here I am, in the middle of the night, after spending an entire day crawling around the floor trying to make a pile of small random colored squares of cotton into something resembling a pattern. At this point, around midnight, I am picking them up after deciding I had done what I could with what I had. I assigned each square a number and a letter, picked up each square piece by piece in the same manner so that I could reproduce it as I sewed. Justin, who lives with us here, felt so sorry for me, that he made spaghetti and then helped pick up pieces. I was so tired.
The design is called Irish Trail, and it appears that I must like blue, because I had so many scraps of blue fabric. Enough to tie everything else together into a design that works. It looks nothing like the picture of the heirloom quilt that I had looked at before trying this, but I think maybe I like it better. The blue and green forms the trail, and the warm colors are like destinations, like the waterfall at the end of park trail, or the place you wanted to be in your heart, and have arrived. They are all linked to each other, the places and the mountaintop experiences.
There is a place in British Columbia that is so beautiful that it is where I learned to pray as a child. Going there, in memory or reality, always takes me right back to that moment. Since that first prayer of the heart, I have walked a wandering path, learning bits here and there, arriving at various destinations, building a set of beliefs and a personal theology that eventually led me to Catholicism, has kept me there for many years, and then led to rich interfaith dialog with a Hindu pandit.
Each stop on the path, winding though it is, has led deeper into the mystery of who I am, and, if I walk with awareness, of God. And then, after many small destinations...AHA! there is a pattern, a whole-where there had been random bits of experience, now there is understanding where there had been confusion, order where there was chaos. My life has begun to make sense, and I find I am at the edge of knowing who I was meant to be. Maybe in some time I will know what God meant to do when Anne was created. My prayer is that as I stay on the path, I will become fully the Anne that was meant to be. I think that is what it is to be holy-to fully be what God meant us to be. Entirely ourselves, doing what we were meant to do to make the Whole strong and beautiful and complete. The Body of Christ, intact, with every ligament functioning as it should.
Today I sewed three squares of the patches. Somehow they had become mixed up, and I am having to carefully reconstruct what I had done before. But now I know the pattern, so it will be much easier. Each bit has its proper place in the Whole.
