What Iffing the Boxer

Early this winter, I created this as part of Jude's Magic Diary workshop.The story of Clutch the Boxer in the glow of Beloved Red Ball.

 

Clutch the Boxer moved to the starring role on my blog.  And the cloth itself grew new parts as I explored Jude's concept of lateral movement, AKA "banding." (The distortion is me being too lazy to take down everything on the design wall so I could photograph it properly.)

 

I was happy last night after stitching the red squares (who could not be happy stitching in scarlet?) but this morning, I felt a nagging dissatisfaction. Or more like the absence of satisfaction you get when the creation is In Its Right Place. 

Now, Jude's current workshop "The What If Diaries" has been focusing for the past month on White.  I haven't. But something valuable snuck past the Color Guard anyway.  Because I picked up the cloth and said, "What if...."  I love the banding...I love Clutch.  I don't love them together.  So what if the banding stood on its own?

 What if it stood on its own two three feet?

And what if Clutch became a new cloth? 

Or he just gets a whole fresh start in life?

Why not just jump into this "what if?" Because it means the finality of this (cue music to Jaws):

We've talked a lot over at Spirit Cloth Plus about letting ideas take their own shape, about cloth morphing from one place to the next. The stitchers over there are fearless and fierce in doing what it takes to make a piece right. But boy, is it ever scary for me. Not scary like snakes, but scary like the first minute you look down from the high diving platform. As in I really really want to do this, but I can't seem to get my toes uncurled from the edge. In the hours since I thought the first "what if, " I grow more excited with the possibility of the new cloth(s) and less attached to the present. And I am REALLY excited about just arriving at this place where I want my work to become what it wants to be. 

So, I am probably going to jump but I need to look down a bit more, ok? I think I will post over at the What If Forum and let all my coaches over there give me a pep talk.

Lettuce Rising...and Me, Too

Last evening in the garden, I scraped back the straw and found the first stirrings of the lettuce seeds I planted 10 days ago.

I felt an immediate and oh so primal rush of emotion.Two emotions, actually. And today, because I am nothing if not emotional overkill,I am thinking about how bizarre these feelings are.

First, I felt excitement.YES, YES  there WILL be wonderful salad this spring... romaine and mesclun and some weirdlings called "tennis ball lettuce" that came from a visit to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello a few years back.

That was ridiculous enough because this is 2013 in metropolitan Philadelphia.So it is not as if there will be No Salad on the Homestead This Spring if the seeds stayed below ground. Or, for that matter, if they stayed in the package or even back at Monticello.

My second feeling was pride.Yep, pride.I beamed down on their little green heads like they had just gotten the lead in the 5th grade play. But I had not taught these little seedlings to read, I had not nursed them through stomach viruses  and head lice, I had not given them years of Unconditional Love.  I ripped open a package, hurled them onto the soil, covered them with 1/4 inch of dirt/rock and then buried them beneath straw so disgusting that the farmer wondered why I would even give her money for it.  

Oh, and I forgot to water them.

Yet, somehow, I felt proud of their existence. Of their conception. Now, conception has been sort of a sore subject for me since my so-called "childbearing years" were anything but that. I've chronicled my descent into infertility elsewhere.  Even though adoption brought me into double-barrelled motherhood (see vomiting and head lice, above) I have always kept my sorrow at missing out on experiencing pregnancy, delivery, nursing buried beneath a, well, a layer of moldy straw. Last evening, in the pink of the first warm sunset in months, I pulled that straw back, too.  

And you know what? There was nothing there. I couldn't find an ache. I couldn't evoke a tear. Wow. It only took 30 years, but there was not even the slightest trace of a scar.  Or perhaps the other scars --you know, the ones you get from that tiny part of parenting that starts AFTER birth, from failing eyesight and creaky knees, from just Living in This World--those scars have left bigger marks.

Who knows.  It doesn't matter. So much of what I let define me for decades...just doesn't matter anymore. Which leaves me free to feel magic where there once was straw. I wish I could jump up and down and tell all the 20 somethings in my life to exhale, to assure them that it will all be all right in whatever form it takes. But if they were truly able to hear that, why, they wouldn't be 20 something, would they? 

I'm going back to the garden, where I can just be amazed. And excited. And proud. Because gardening is just this thing that evokes those kind of emotions, especially in an era and a place on the planet where the successes and failures are not life-threatening. Perhaps because it offers connection with forces much bigger than our own lives and the sight of a seedling is proof of connection made?

I'll keep you posted about my little darlings.