Solace

Things have been humming along in the studio. I finished piecing the "tiles" top and it is ready to layer for quilting (but must wait until I free up some safety pins!). I cleaned the lint out of my machine and set it up for stitching in the ditch with walking foot. "Sea and Sand" now has all that stabilizing stitching along seam lines done, ready for addition of free motion motifs. I tried a few ideas out on paper, wanting to incorporate some swirling lines that would invoke the idea of waves. I could barely draw decent ones with pencil; I can't imagine I can do it sufficiently with the machine without some kind of guide. I've tried this sort of motif before without marking, a long time ago, and it barely passed muster. I may mark at least some of it on Golden Threads Quilter's Paper just to take away some of the stress, time well spent to avoid the anguish of seeing wobbly weird waves under the needle.

This one is going to my godson's baby boy who is named Kavi, and I want to quilt his name across some of the yellow bands. After several tries, I could see that quilting it in print rather than script would look the best. Some of those bands are quite wide though, so I may add some gently curved lines above and below the name. What to do with the vertical yellow bands? I think the same curved lines, something that I hope will read as rippled sand.

I always feel a bit of guilty after my posts in memory of my late husband. I'm not looking for sympathy when I write them but feel the need to share about him within my blog family. A bit of catharsis for me and perhaps a window to a better understanding of me for my readers. And perhaps, for those who have loved and lost as well, a bit of solace and the knowledge that you are not alone in your grief. So I thought it very timely that I ran across a little essay this week on Solace by an author I discovered not long ago, David Whyte. He has combined these essays based on words we think we understand but upon which he puts a slightly different view in his book Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning in Everyday Words. You can read the excerpt of the essay on Solace in its entirety on his Facebook page here. But it was this last bit at the end that caught my attention, here in this week when I am remembering my dear husband the most:

To look for solace is to learn to ask fiercer and more exquisitely pointed questions, questions that reshape our identities and our bodies and our relation to others. Standing in loss but not overwhelmed by it, we become useful and generous and compassionate and even more amusing companions for others.

But solace also asks us very direct and forceful questions. Firstly, how will you bear the inevitable loss that will accompany you? And how will you endure it through the years? And above all, how will you shape a life equal to and as beautiful and as astonishing as a world that can birth you, bring you into the light and then just as you were beginning to understand it, take you away?